One of the world's most dangerous jobs: change agent

This article (registration required, sorry) from Booz & Co's "Strategy and Business" will send a chill up your spine. The article, "Stand by Your Change Agent," by Stratford Sherman and Marisa Faccio, describes the results of a survey of 84 change initiatives between 1995 and 2005.

The initiatives themselves were successful, in the main: 85% met or exceeded the goals set out for them.

The leaders, though, didn't fare as well. Sherman and Faccio write: "Some 70% of the executives who led these major transformations went unrewarded, or were sidelined, fired, or spurred to leave."

The authors go on to describe types of companies at different levels of performance and how the change agent role is very risky in all but the very strongest companies. My take: large-scale changes disrupt the organization, stir up resistance, much of which gets focused on the change leader. If the change fails, the consequences are self-evident. If it succeeds, however, the pain endured in achieving it takes a toll on the person running the initiative.

If you're considering taking this role on, do it for the experience, the resume fodder, and the feeling of accomplishment if you're successful. Don't do it, however, for the recognition of your peers and leaders. Chances are, that won't be coming your way.

Business Book Hall of Fame: "War & Peace"

Heard of it?

Read it? Probably not. It's the dictionary example of a long book. And it is long. Based on some indirect prodding from Dave Snowden and Jochum Stienstra, I finally picked it up, determined to read the whole thing, in November 2008. It is now the end of January 2009, and that'll tell you what a commitment is required to finish it. (The pile of unread books by my desk is now immense.) I can also heartily recommend the new English translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky; the writing was easy to understand and felt modern and fresh.

Was it worth nearly three months of effort? Hell, yes. "War & Peace" is an amazing work for our time (or any time). There are great love stories and domestic dramas in the book as well, but for the purposes of this post I'm going to focus on how the book tackles leadership, strategy, complexity and chance.

Perhaps most amazing is how Tolstoy shoots down the historian's view of the power of individuals to shape history. Here he is explaining Napoleon's rise to power:

Chance, millions of chances, give him power, and all people, as if by arrangement, contribute to the strengthening of that power. Chance makes the characters of the then rulers of France submissive to him; chance makes the character of Paul I, who recognizes his power; chance makes a conspiracy against him which not only does not harm him, but strengthens his power. Chance sends d'Enghien into his hands and accidentally forces him to kill him, thereby convincing the mob more forcefully than by any other means that he has the right, because he has the power. Chance makes it so that he strains all his forces towards an expedition to England, which obviously would have destroyed him, and never carries out his intention, but instead unexpectedly runs into Mack and his Austrians, who surrender without a battle. Chance and genius give him the victory at Austerlitz, and by chance all people, not only the French, but all of Europe as well, with the exception of England, which does not participate in the events about to take place, all people, despite their former horror and loathing for his crimes, now recognize his power, the title he has given himself, and his ideal of greatness and glory, which to all of them seems something beautiful and reasonable. (pp 1134-1135)

Of course, when the chances turn against him, starting with the invasion of Russia, he quickly becomes a fool and a failure. Was he a genius, or an idiot? Neither, of course. He was participant in a sequence of events over which he had little control, according to Tolstoy. This is a humbling lesson for leaders of all types, who operate in the complex domain--whether that be warfare, business or politics. Events will define you far more than you define yourself. Your actions, to a large extent, will be overwhelmed by forces outside of your control.

Does this then mean that generalship doesn't matter? Tolstoy would say yes. Throughout the book he writes that the most carefully-created war plans go off the rails immediately after the battle begins, while a single junior officer, deciding on his own to attack the French flank, can have an immense impact on winning or losing. And that the passions of the soldiers have much more effect on the outcome than the best leadership and training.

In my times working at very large companies, this seemed true to me. The accomplishments of the company were the agglomeration of thousands of small efforts on behalf of the rank and file. [You could argue that company failures--Enron, AIG, for example--also work this way.] First-line managers had a big impact. Directors, somewhat. But the plans and strategies of the C-level executives, sitting in the God Pod, at the end of the day, didn't mean much at all.

Getting out the stories of Burmese prisoners--an heroic feat

George Packer's Interesting Times blog from The New Yorker yesterday discussed Human Rights Watch's honoring of a Burmese hero, Bo Kyi. Mr. Kyi had been held as a prisoner by the Burmese government, enduring the brutalities of that unique brand of confinement. Upon his release, Mr. Kyi moved across the border to Thailand and founded an organization, Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma, the mission of which includes "report[ing] on the military regime’s oppression of political prisoners who are presently detained in various prisons."

My Kyi's remarks on accepting his award were powerful, and are excerpted in Packer's post. I found this passage particularly striking:

We have a way to communicate with the prisoners and get their stories out. I cannot tell you how we do this. I do not want the Burmese regime to find out. But I can tell you that these stories fill the pages of our reports and those of Human Rights Watch.

The media use these stories. So do political leaders around the world. Over time, the stories of these prisoners generate pressure on the international community to take a stand.

Burmese dissidents are outgunned and outmanned. But they have ideas and stories on their side. Who doubts they will win someday?

Tags:
change, dissent, leadership, protest, communication, storytelling

"Sesame Street simple" communication with a story

My first reaction to this Bob Sutton post--"Sesame Street Simple: A.G. Lafley's Leadership Philosophy"--was a slight recoil. Perhaps because I thought we had tapped out on learning from A.G. Lafley (can't we let the man run his company in peace?). But also because my natural communication style is not "Sesame Street simple." Unsure of that? Read this blog for a while.

But, after letting it sit a few weeks, I'm starting to get what Sutton is saying. He's onto something important about communicating with and influencing large numbers of people:

...although executives who talk about many ideas and complex ideas will be viewed as smarter -- wiser and more effective executives pick just a few simple messages and repeat them over and over again until people throughout the organization internalize them and use them to guide action. Constantly changing messages lead to the "flavor of the month problem" where people don't act on the current message because they have learned that, if they wait a few months (or days) the message will change (managers in such organizations become very skilled at talking as if they are acting on the flavor of the month, but not actually doing the thing that senior executives are pushing at the moment.) And making things overly complicated may make the senior executives seem smart and feel smart , but if a message is too complicated to understand, it is also means that the implications for action are impossible to understand as well.

Managers "talking as if they are acting...but not actually doing" recalls the damaging "false urgency" that inflicts many companies, as John Kotter discusses in his new book.

There's a way to do "Sesame Street simple" in a way that provides powerful insight and direction. Telling a story. Stories can be understood by everyone. They can be retold and honed for a particular group ("what's our 'the consumer is boss' story?"). They can convey complex lessons and spawn deep discussions about meaning.

That's a "Sesame Street simple" approach even I can understand.

(Photo: Hokey Pokey Elmo from Toys R Us)

Related Posts:
On John Kotter's "A Sense of Urgency"
More on "A Sense of Urgency"
A.G. Lafley: "The Consumer Is Boss"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication, storytelling

"Blocking and tackling"--the mother of all sports metaphors

From Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary:

block verb - 1e: to interfere usually legitimately with (as an opponent) in various games or sports

tackle verb - 2 a: to seize, take hold of, or grapple with especially with the intention of stopping or subduing b: to seize and throw down or stop (an opposing player with the ball) in football.

Long-time readers of this blog will recognize my affinity with sports analogies and metaphors. So, recently, during the summer lull, I embarked upon a non-scientific study of the frequency of certain sports metaphors in business writing. And one popped up far more often than any other: "blocking and tackling."

For those unacquainted with American football, blocking and tackling are two of the most basic skills of the game--necessary (but not sufficient) ingredients for winning. Teams that can't block or tackle are doomed. For executives, blocking and tackling represent work that's not glamorous but is important.

Here are some examples:

WSJ.com Marketbeat What’ll it take to fix Yahoo isn’t a mystery, and isn’t a magic bullet, Henry Blodget writes at Silicon Alley Insider. “It’s just blocking and tackling. And it will take time.”

Innosight blog Burberry has spent more than $100 million to improve its ability to ensure that the right products get to the right stores at the right time. These challenges of course require a fair amount of blocking and tackling, but there's also ample room for fresh, innovative thinking.

NeuStar Q2 2008 Earnings conference call (COO Lisa Hook speaking): However, I asked to be on this call as a six month check-in, to assure that I am focused on delivering the basic, blocking and tackling necessary to meet our targets for growth and profitability.

This phrase was a recurring theme in executives' earnings calls (here, here and here, for example). Of course, given the recent news in the financial markets, perhaps there was better blocking and tackling they could have done.

Other metaphors I looked for that were much rarer: "home run," "unforced error" (which was popular in political writing), "icing the puck," "letting off the hook."

Did I miss any? What favorite sports metaphors do you have?

Related post:
Welcome to Sports Analogy week

Tags:
finance, sports, metaphor, management, leadership

Corporate change #5 - role of consultants in "bringing the outside in"

In earlier segments of this thread, we discussed how "bringing the outside in" is imperative for companies to keep aware and humble enough to avoid complacency and drive their organizations forward successfully. By contrast, companies in which the context inside the company drowns out voices from the outside tend to attribute their successes to their internal competencies, blame their failures on outside entities, and stagnate their way to failure.

I was talking to an old customer earlier in the month about working to help companies learn about the world outside. "Exactly!" he said. "Companies need people like you to come in and help them learn about what customers think."

To a point, yes. Having an outside perspective that is less invested in the company's culture or politics is valuable. But not at the expense of a broad, internal effort to understand and make sense of the outside world.

Referring to the business complexity literature we've touched on a few times in this blog, the world outside is a complex, messy place. It's constantly changing. So old information, and limited sources, are not very useful. To gain the best, most supple understanding of the outside, a company needs lots of eyes and ears, a diverse group gathering and interpreting information, and creating stories about it. Consultants should be among that group, but not the only or the most credible source for outside information.

Management's job is to enable that story-creation, create systems for capturing and making sense of it, and above all to honor and use it to create strategy, spur innovation, and otherwise enable Kotter's "sense of urgency."

That's a job that even McKinsey might hesitate to take on.

Prior posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Reading list:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"
Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff, "Groundswell"
Dave Snowden & Mary Boone, "A Leader's Guide to Decisionmaking," Harvard Business Review, November 2007.

Related post:
Complex business problems need diagnosis

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Corporate Change #4 - don't leave engaging with the outside to marketing/PR

In the prior post in this series, I talked about galvanizing the will to change through "bringing the outside in"--learning what customers, the press, influencers--really anyone--thinks about the company, its products, its marketplace, industry, etc.

To which a reasonable person might ask: "Isn't that my marketing department's job?" Especially with newer tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc., marketing is taking the lead in engaging with the "groundswell."


While marketing has a significant role to play, they cannot own this function, any more than finance can own any decision that has to do with dollars and cents--it's too big, too comprehensive and too important to be limited to one group. Here are several reasons why:


Marketing is obsessed with brands & messages. Brands and messages are relentlessly positive--who buys a negative message? But learning comes from both positive and negative stories. There are threats as well as opportunities. Marketing is asked to convey messages, not to understand the world in all its messiness and complexity.

PR is asked to get positive stories out there, and to counter negative perceptions--not to learn or to inform the company. True dialogue involves listening--even when the conversation is negative or you don't agree with it--and trying to find lessons in that. Perception is reality, and PR tries to change perception--what we're talking about here is, by contrast, understanding reality.


The view of both is too limited. Different parts of the organization have different things to learn from the outside. Operations needs to learn new ways of working. Product management needs to understand how customers actually use products. HR needs to know how the workforce is evolving. Groupthink is also less likely when a diverse group of people is examining the world--with more likelihood that sound actions, and commitment to achieve them, will result.

Comcast's experiment with Twitter-based customer service (see example here of "Groundswell" co-author Charlene Li Tweeting for help and Comcast responding) works because the Comcast guy is trying to solve a customer problem, not deliver a message. If Charlene ends up feeling better about Comcast, it is a side effect, not the intent, of the action. The tech is also in a position to learn deeply about this customer situation and, I'm certain, to disseminate the learning to colleagues.

Imagine this fictional Twitter dialogue if Charlene had to engage with marketing instead of with a real tech (I've reversed it for readability. In real Twitter, the newest message is on top):

charleneli: @comcastmktg My connection keeps going in and out, happens every few months. Comcast Cust service has no idea why. Any way to escalate?

comcastmktg: @charleneli That's hard to believe. Comcast has the highest network reliability in the industry.

charleneli: @comcastmktg Yeah, fine. Can you help me with my question?

comcastmktg @charleneli Of course. One more thing. Did you know we have twice as many HD channels as DirecTV?

charleneli: @comcastmktg What? Who are you? Can you get me to someone who can help me?

comcastmktg @charleneli Right away. Please email help@comcast.com and you'll get a response within 24-48 hours. Have you heard about our community service initiatives?

charleneli: @comcastmktg Aaargh!

Coming next: what is the role of consultants (written by an actual consultant!) in bringing the outside in?

Prior posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 5
Reading list:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"
Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff, "Groundswell"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication, social media

Corporate Change #3 - Bringing the outside in, for real

OK, so you've read my prior two posts on the subject of corporate change, and recognized your need to greatly enhance the information you get from the outside world. Now what?

You'll need to embrace a few basic principles (it won't be easy!):

Enable employees:

1. Reward curiosity and information sharing
   
2. Make time and space for employees to engage with the outside world--wall-to-wall meetings are a no-no
3. Tap existing conduits to the outside (sales force, retail clerks, customer service reps, marketing, investor relations)
   
4. Ensure your information systems and policies don't get in the way

Listen hard:

1. Don't tune out bad news
2. Try to assemble information from many constituencies (customers, competitors, employees)
3. Embrace raw/inarticulate/emotional input
   
4. Honor dissent
   

Create systems and methods to gather and utilize information:

1. Deploy information "commons" where information can be posted, commented on, and passed across and up to aid in decisionmaking
2. Systematically gather information relevant to your business and add it to the commons
   
3. Regularly gather and sensemake commons-generated information
4. Use the information to inform strategy, planning, organization, etc.
   
5. Demonstrate to the employees that the information is used, to encourage ongoing contributions
   

Most companies are not ready for this. Some are. Those that aren't: start getting ready. If you think implementing the above is a lot of work, think how hard it is to navigate out of a crisis--an avoidable crisis, if only you paid attention to and utilized what was going on all around you.

In the next few posts, we'll dig into some specific high-value areas of bringing the outside in.

Prior posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 4 Part 5

Reading List:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Corporate Change #2 - Why are companies so inwardly focused?

In part 1 of this series, we discussed one key reason companies fail to change even though it's vital: the inability to, using John Kotter's term, "bring the outside in." In other words, companies don't choose to look outside their walls to see what's happening around them, assess the implications, and absorb that into their strategies, products and operations.

Why is this so?

Reason #1 - The Community Effect
A company, as it expands from one person, to ten, to one hundred, to a thousand and beyond, takes on the identity of a community. The employees usually work in an office or plant together. They get information from the same sources--the company newsletter, intranet, staff meetings (more on that later). They spend more time with other employees than with anyone else other than family. A culture develops that inspires curiosity about what's happening inside and reduces it about what's happening outside.

Reason #2 - Leadership Arrogance
I talked to a former client last week and told him about some work I'm doing mining insights from customer-service calls. He told me, "Our CEO thinks he's just like our customers." Since this CEO sees himself as a perfect proxy, there's no reason to dig deeply into customers' feelings.

Reason #3 - Information Flows Top-Down
Leadership serves on outside boards, goes to conferences, talks with consultants. They are tasked with creating strategy, which requires some curiosity and information about the world outside the corporate walls. They process that information into strategy documents, brand images, mission statements, etc., and send it down the line.

Leadership likes orderly information, not the messiness that real engagement with the outside world creates. Most leaders believe that employees don't want that much engagement (in some cases they may be right). Employees realize that the highly-packaged, spun information that they receive is bland and biased. I recently re-encountered a saying familiar from my early working days: "We workers are like mushrooms. Leadership keeps us in the dark and feeds us s--t." I heard that expression countless times till I became a senior leader--interestingly, I never heard it after that.

Combine reasons 1, 2 & 3 and you have an inwardly-focused, uncurious company. Information is either packaged pablum from above, or internal gossip. Conduits to the outside--front-line customer service reps, retail clerks, B2B sales people--are drowned out by the inside talk. Marketing communications staffs engage with the external but are dedicated to sending out messages or countering negative news.

What we've created here is company-as-fortress. Suspicious of the outside, comfortable with colleagues, uncurious. Information is routinized and bleached of content and contrast. Clearly, there's a lot to be done to realize Kotter's prescription to bring the outside in. We'll begin discussing how in the next post.

Other posts in this series:
Part 1 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Related posts:
A competitive advantage: employees who spend their day talking to people
Time to start listening to front-line employees

Reading List:
Gary Hamel, "The Future of Management"
John Kotter, "A Sense of Urgency"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Time to rescue "corporate change" from cliché bucket

Every company recognizes the need to change, correct? There are so many failure stories describing the terrible consequences of companies standing still that no executive in her right mind would ignore the need to reinvent the business on a continuous basis. We hear this all the time:

"The only constant in our business is change."

Yeah, right. Even if the idea is understood on its surface, companies worldwide are doing a terrible job of implementing it. If you read the newspaper, outside of mergers and acquisitions, change occurs only when companies are in crisis.

In other words, only when the situation is so bad that it can no longer be ignored or rationalized away do companies take on the hard work of reinventing themselves. What does this mean? As Gary Hamel wrote in 2007's best business book:

...In recent years, entire industries have been caught behind the change curve. Television broadcasters and newspaper publishers, record companies and French vintners, traditional airlines and giant drug companies, American carmakers and European purveyors of haute couture--all have been struggling to rejuvenate seriously out-of-date business models. Sure, many of the companies in these industries will regain their footing--eventually. But in the meantime, billions of dollars and millions of customers will be lost. Such is the price of maladaptation. (p.42)

No CEO wants to squander billions of dollars of lost opportunity--not least because of the primordial urge to save one's own skin. Yet it doesn't happen. This week's series of posts takes on one large reason why change rarely happens without crisis, and a way to start a fundamental culture change that can help instill the ability to recognize opportunities and threats and move more quickly to address them.

The root of this thinking is John Kotter's great new book, "A Sense of Urgency." Kotter takes his lifetime of study of organizations and wonders why so many organizations are so complacent, or worse, running around frantically accomplishing nothing. I'd like to focus on one reason why:

...Organizations of any size or age tend to be too internally oriented. Even people who know this fact often underestimate the size of the problem and its consequences. The disconnect between what insiders see, fee, and think, on the one hand, and external opportunities and hazards, on the other, can be astonishing at times--even in organizations that are producing very good short-term results. (p.67)

Kotter's prescription for companies is to "bring the outside in." To inform their people and thinking with a knowledge of the environment outside the company's walls. That's what we'll elaborate on in our next post.

Other posts in this series:
Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

Related posts:
Best business books of 2007
On "A Sense of Urgency"

Tags:
change, innovation, leadership, management, communication

Why don't businesses change and adapt? No "Sense of Urgency"

John Kotter is the change guru. His article "Leading Change" from Harvard Business Review is a classic I've recommended to a number of people. His newest book, "A Sense of Urgency," focuses on the one area where companies most often fail the change test--establishing an organization-wide priority to, using Kotter's words, "move, and win, now."

It's a terrifically-written book, with lots of stories of organizations succeeding at or failing the urgency test. Kotter points out (as I've experienced) that many organizations in trouble foster a sense of "false urgency"--an inwardly-focused, fearful level of intense activity (wall-to-wall meetings; sound familiar?) that harms the organization, perhaps as much, or more than, old-fashioned complacency.

By contrast, "true urgency" engages employees' hearts; focuses outwardly on customers, competitors and the industry environment; and is practiced by everyone in the organization, most especially the leaders. It also requires understanding the true priorities of the company and purging activities that are not connected with those priorities, thereby opening up time for reflection, experimentation, and immersion in the world outside the company walls.

Here's my favorite snippet from "A Sense of Urgency":

imagine

We call this a thought experiment. Imagine, if you will, an organization where people up and down the hierarchy, and systems throughout the organization, help pull the outside in through

• Sending out people
• Bringing in people
• Bringing in relevant data in an eye-catching manner
• Listening to customer-interface employees
• Creating video about the outside
• Widely sharing what is learned instead of shielding others from possibly troubling news
• Changing the visuals

Nearly everyone in an organization can use these tactics to create more urgency among peers or their bosses. Imagine what would happen to complacency if many people at many levels did so. (p.100)

I can't think of a better book for today's business environment, when so many companies are struggling to reinvent themselves, while companies clearly in deep trouble continue to be surprised by the outside reality (example). " A Sense of Urgency" is a must-read.

Related post:
Time to start listening to front-line employees

Don't try to fail, just try

It's been worrying me a bit, with all my emphasis on learning from mistakes and removing the stigma from making mistakes, that I might be encouraging people to try to make mistakes.

Although making a deliberate mistake can be a very useful exercise and lead a company to discover insights it couldn't find out otherwise, it shouldn't be the focus of your approach.

The point is to try to succeed lots of different ways, make small bets, try "safe-fail" experiments. Follow those that appear to lead somewhere. Ditch the remainder quickly.

More and more people are thinking this way. My evidence? Today's Wall Street Journal Business Insight section, which talks about experimentation and learning from failure throughout. One example is "In Search of Growth Leaders," by Sean Carr, Jeanne Liedtka and others which asserts that managers who can foster growth have different mindsets than those who can't. [A nice graphic in the article compares people who see life as a journey of learning--i.e., potential growth leaders--to those who see it as a test--similar to the work of Carol Dweck referenced by Amy Edmondson in HBR, and discussed in a recent Mistake Bank post.]

There's also "Oops! Accidents lead to more innovations. So how do you create more accidents?" by Robert Austin, Lee Devin and Erin Sullivan--which says to "explore lots of approaches" and "make accidents cheaper" which is safe-fail by other words.

And "Follow the Leaders," by Craig Pearce, which encourages allowing team leadership to shift from member to member based on the needs of a particular part of a project, echoing ideas from the recent HBR article on management lessons from multiplayer online games.

If you do make a mistake, don't throw it away. Learn from it, and put it in the Mistake Bank. The public one, or one of your own.

Related posts:
Multiplayer games demonstrate a new model for leadership
Amy Edmondson in July/Aug HBR
To progress in complex environments, experiment
Make some mistakes, and profit from it

Tags:

Mistake Bank, experimentation, learning, errors, failure, mistakes, innovation, leadership, Wall Street Journal

Improving the opportunities for women to lead

My recent post on overlooked female business gurus attracted some attention, not least from the gurus themselves. The nature of the emails we exchanged was around when women's representation in business leadership would start to resemble their representation in society. One dialogue went like this:

Me: In the long run, demographics are telling us there are more women college graduates than men and that trend appears to be continuing. So we'll see more women thinkers acknowledged by the establishment, partially because the establishment will be more female. It won't happen fast enough, but it'll happen.

Overlooked guru: I’m not sure how much I think that things will change. If you look at all the people quoted in teams and leadership articles most are male. It is not clear what will make things change—will the establishment really become female with demographic change? I do hope so.

Some more insight on the general issue of driving more female leadership into the workforce appears in this month's Harvard Business Review. In two Foresight articles ("Stopping the Exodus of Women in Science" and "One Reason Women Don't Make It to the C-Suite"), the authors point out conflicts between long-standing business cultures and traditions and demands on women's time, priorities and mental energy.

"Stopping the Exodus" blames a macho science and technology culture, "extreme jobs," and other factors for driving qualified women out of the industry. The authors (Sylvia Ann Hewlett--who should have been on the overlooked gurus list--Carolyn Buck Luce, and Lisa Servon) illustrate steps some companies are taking to improve the situation, including connecting women technologists to each other and to mentors to create a stronger support community. Starkly, there's no mention of trying to change the hero culture or redesigning tech jobs to make them less extreme.

"One Reason Women Don't" discusses career paths that have evolved in companies over decades, which place future C-levels into the most demanding and draining jobs in their forties. This rite of passage comes at the worst possible time for women, who are typically dealing with intense demands at home from pre-teen and adolescent children (and from husbands on the same track). The author, Dr. Louann Brizendine, recommends breaking this pattern and creating a new path, on which women leaders can defer that rite of passage to a time, say in their fifties, when they are able and eager to take it on.

Tags:
gurus, women, Harvard Business Review, leadership, demographics, career, technology

"Senior Leadership Teams" is essential reading for executives

I recently related a story for the Mistake Bank about my experience as a senior leader with a medium-sized IT company. It involved a particularly difficult senior team meeting and my nasty reaction to a colleague's questioning a decision I'd made regarding a member of my team.

I recalled the story because I was reading "Senior Leadership Teams" by Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss and Richard Hackman, which discusses that peculiar species--the team of leaders. One of the themes of the book is that senior leaders, left to their own devices, will prioritize their individual work and give little to the team. Another is that senior leaders rise to prominence based on their talents to achieve results with teams that work at their direction, meaning their teamwork skills are rusty at best. A third is that CEOs don't take many of the basic actions required to form a cohesive and productive team--things like explicitly choosing team members, setting explicit standards and norms for behavior, or providing adequate information for teams to act effectively.

My senior team experience bears this out. I focused on my team and my results, and preferred to leave my colleagues to clean up their own sandboxes. And when a colleague got too involved in "my" area, I didn't take kindly to it. I didn't know what the senior team was for, nor what was expected of me and how I should behave. In retrospect, I didn't behave well some of the time--even if I felt I was doing what was best for the company.

Perhaps you see why a book is needed to instruct people in this area. And, thankfully, "Senior Leadership Teams" is an excellent effort. The authors, affiliated with the Hay Group and with Harvard University, studied more than 100 senior teams and tried to understand why many performed poorly, while others--a smaller number--worked well. They found six conditions--three "essentials" and three "enablers"--that excellent teams had in common:

The essentials:

1. A real team
2. The right people
3. A compelling direction

The enablers:

1. A solid structure
2. A supportive context
3. Team coaching
   

The six conditions might sound simple, but the book is filled with insight as to why these simple things are hard to do, and what's necessary to make them real. As an example of the commonsense yet counterintuitive advice throughout "Senior Leadership Teams," read this section regarding selecting the right people to be on the team:

An executive suite is not a schoolyard. Just because someone wants to play on your team, has always been on the team, or was considered the heavy hitter of a past team does not mean that you are obligated to have him on your team. What's more, just because you have been chosen to lead an established team does not mean you must keep all the players when you take it over. (p.79)

There is wisdom like the above all over the book--on reward systems, team purpose & objectives, and prioritization. And interesting stories of real CEOs and how they made their teams effective.

One minor complaint--the book is addressed to a CEO, and as such gives lots of advice about selecting, coaching and enabling the team, and less advice about being an effective member of the team. Perhaps this is a topic the authors can explore in a future book.

But this is no reason to avoid "Senior Leadership Teams," no matter what your role. If you are an executive, or want to be an executive, read this book--before your next senior team meeting.

Related posts:
The Mistake Bank Manifesto
"Stay the f--- out of my department":

Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank


Tags:
management, leadership, teamwork, reading list

To progress in complex environments, experiment

I was talking to my wife tonight about a discovery I'll call the "Mistake Bank Manifesto" which I'll post about later. The upshot of what I was saying is that the folks who wrote the Mistake Bank Manifesto (I named it, others created it) asserted that learning from mistakes, while exceptionally useful to senior leadership teams, is often highly unnatural for very successful leaders.

I disagree, said my wife. Most of the successful people I know are very good students of failure.

So I faced a conundrum. The experts from Harvard and the Hay Group said one thing, my wife (the Vice President of Common Sense) said the opposite. So I thought on it a moment. Then: aha!

I said, successful entrepreneurs tend to be students of failure. But those who rise through a corporate hierarchy don't confront failures often (usually the results of corporate initiatives are ambiguous at best, and invariably termed successes of some sort), so for them learning from failure is unnatural. That's what the book was saying.

OK, I'll agree with that, said the VP of Common Sense.

This is an exceptionally long prelude to a post today from Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge (Shawn Callahan at Anecdote has already posted a thoughtful reaction to this post) on "Coherence and Uncertainty" or, as I interpreted it, when the outcome is uncertain, try something to aim you toward your objective--in other words, experiment. (Dave calls these safe-fail probes.)

Experiments are probably worthwhile, according to Dave, when they are "coherent" (or consistent with what has happened or could happen), relatively cheap, and will provide useful learning even if they don't succeed.

Which brings me back to the entrepreneur/corporate question. Entrepreneurs tend to have an objective, may be willing to use many different ways to reach it--but in the service of some coherent vision. Experimentation is natural for them. They usually don't have much money. They are resilient. And they hunger to learn. Safe-fail for them is a way of life.

Corporate types? Well, no. The whole safe-fail approach is alien to the corporate environment. Heard the phrase "paralysis by analysis"? If you work in a large company you'll hear it weekly. Creating the environment for creative experimentation will require a cultural shift in how companies view their workers and vice versa.

Who's ready to get started?

complexity, experimentation, decisionmaking, leadership, management, organizational behavior

Multiplayer games demonstrate a new model for leadership

For many people engaged in knowledge work (a larger and larger percentage of the workforce), the biggest hassles are the noise and overhead of keeping track of their time, following procedures, reporting status, getting direction.

In other words, being "managed."

And managing is no fun either. Imagine days of back-to-back meetings, with little or no time to think, create or strategize. Imagine gathering your team's reports and consolidating them for the next link up the chain, then taking context-free task assignments from up the chain and distributing them to your team.

Ugh. I'm not missing that work at all.

I was thinking of this while reading the article, "Leadership's Online Labs," in the May Harvard Business Review. The authors--Byron Reeves, Thomas Malone and Tony O'Driscoll--examine successful and experienced players of massively multiplayer on-line computer games (like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, and the like) for lessons on how to lead groups and companies in the future.

There are lots of important observations in the article, including this one on leadership:

Perhaps the most striking aspect of leadership in online games is the way in which leaders naturally switch roles, directing others one minute and taking orders the next. Put another way, leadership in games is a task, not an identity—a state that a player enters and exits rather than a personal trait that emerges and thereafter defines the individual.

...[G]ames do not foster the expectation that leadership roles last forever. Someone leading a guild today may grow weary of the stress and hand over the reins after a month or two. The leader of a raid knows that someone else’s skills and experience may be better suited to commanding the next effort. Even during the frenzied activity of a raid, the leadership role can be transferred as conditions change or because the person in charge doesn’t happen to be around when the need for a decision arises. Notably, choices about who will lead and who will follow are often made organically by the group—frequently because someone volunteers to take over—not by some higher authority....

The idea of temporary leadership is alien to most business organizations. Companies usually identify people as leaders early in their careers. The selected few carry that designation with them through different jobs, each typically lasting several years, as they move up the corporate hierarchy. That model may not work well in the future. The growing complexity of the business environment means that no single leader will be an expert in every area. Beyond the obvious benefit of matching an individual’s expertise to a challenge, treating leadership as a temporary state can empower employees to volunteer to lead and, thereby, can unearth previously overlooked talent among the ranks.

In the above paragraphs is a challenge to the heart of the business status quo. Business schools churn out thousands of graduates aspiring to management roles. Is it possible that companies will increasingly not need managers but instead flexible contributors who can adopt and shed "leader" and "follower" roles as needed?

This sounds more like the way things work at Google and W.L. Gore, as profiled in Hamel's "The Future of Management." If it is to happen, it will require wholesale reinvention of compensation, incentive systems, personnel development and recruiting. In brief, a tall order.

One thing is for certain, though. The companies who pioneer and master this new model will not be the behemoths of today. Twisting some recent words of Doc Searls, it "will come from the edge. It’ll happen under the feet of clashing giants."

management, leadership, followership, Harvard Business Review

WorldBlu 2008 List of Democratic Workplaces released

WorldBlu, the organization headed by friend of this blog Traci Fenton, has unveiled its second annual list of democratic workplaces.

Workplace democracy is still a rare concept, but a growing number of companies are allowing workers a voice in their company, encouraging dissent, and otherwise involving the entire employee base in shaping and running the organization. WorldBlu evaluates companies on these factors:

1. PURPOSE AND VISION
A democratic organization is clear about why it exists (its purpose) and where it is headed and what it hopes to achieve (its vision). These act as its true North, offering guidance and discipline to the organization's direction.

2. TRANSPARENCY
Say goodbye to the "secret society" mentality. Democratic organizations are transparent and open with employees about the financial health, strategy, and agenda of the organization.

3. DIALOGUE + LISTENING
Instead of the top-down monologue or dysfunctional silence that characterizes most workplaces, democratic organizations are committed to having conversations that bring out new levels of meaning and connection.

4. FAIRNESS + DIGNITY
Democratic organizations are committed to fairness and dignity, not treating some people like "somebodies" and other people like "nobodies."

5. ACCOUNTABILITY
Democratic organizations point fingers, not in a blaming way but in a liberating way! Democratic organizations are crystal clear about who is accountable and responsible for what.

6. INDIVIDUAL + COLLECTIVE
In democratic organizations, the individual is just as important as the whole, meaning employees are valued for their individual contribution as well as for what they do to help achieve the collective goals of the organization.

7. CHOICE
Democratic organizations thrive on giving employees meaningful choices.

8. INTEGRITY
Integrity is the name of the game, and democratic companies have a lot of it. They understand that freedom takes discipline and also doing whatÕs morally and ethically right.

9. DECENTRALIZATION
Democratic organizations distribute leadership and power across their enterprise.

10. REFLECTION + EVALUATION
Democratic organizations are committed to looking in the mirror and asking, "How can we be better?" -- not just quarterly or annually, but daily.

Notable new names on the list this year include Pandora, the personalized internet radio site; BzzAgent, which creates viral marketing programs; and DaVita--the first Fortune 500 corporation that's made the list. Holdovers include 1-800-GOT-JUNK and Linden Lab (with a brand-new CEO, will they be able to maintain their democratic principles?).

You can check out the whole list here.

Related:
Shop Talk Podcast #3 - Traci Fenton on democratic workplaces
Free information -> lateral networks -> less authoritarianism
The Utopian Company

Tags:
democracy, leadership, management, organization, organizational behavior

Yoda as a business role model

I've written before about my young kids' obsession with "Star Wars." But now that I've watched all six episodes multiple times, I'm finally getting a grip on the story and how it fits together.

The most interesting character to me is Yoda. Through nearly all the episodes he sits placidly, strokes his chin, and speaks wisdom in his inverted grammar. He thinks, he meditates, he guides. He is the Jedi-est of the Jedis, winning through not fighting.

But at the end of Episode Two: Attack of the Clones, Yoda gets moving. He flies to Geonosis and commands the Clone Army in its battle against Count Dooku's troops. And, finally, with Obi-Wan and Anakin injured and at risk of dying at Dooku's hands, he uses the Force to prevent them being crushed by falling debris and whips out the light saber to battle Dooku, eventually forcing his retreat.

A Jedi needs to think, to prepare. But eventually he has to fight. So it is with leaders of businesses here on Earth. Strategizing, planning, directing are all important. But eventually you've got to roll up the sleeves and get to work side-by-side with your team, whether that's making an important sale, managing a crisis or closing that round of funding.

leadership, strategy, management

"The Breakthrough Company"--wise advice for the emerging entity

I was prepared to dislike "The Breakthrough Company." The dust jacket is a garish silver. The author photograph reminded me of Svengali, and the first line of his bio read, "At the age of twenty-six, Keith R. McFarland was named associate dean of one of the nation's leading business schools." And continued, "He and his family live just downhill from the ski lifts at Snowbird, Utah."

This was a cover that screamed at you: THIS IS IMPORTANT, VITAL, DON'T MISS IT. (I mean, how could you not listen to someone who lives just downhill from the ski lifts at Snowbird?)

But you can't judge a book by its cover, nor its author bio, and "The Breakthrough Company" is a serious, substantial and useful effort. McFarland and his colleagues at McFarland Strategy Partners set out to give the "Good to Great" treatment to a different segment of companies--those that graduated from entrepreneurial status (around $10 million in revenue) to substantial size ($250 million to upwards of $1 billion).

They surveyed 1500 companies and from those picked the nine best performers, then reverse-engineered these companies to settle on six characteristics that stood out. And while I've posted before on the limitations of this type of "best practice" approach, it's to McFarland's credit that he also plays down the value of copying the template: "This is not intended to be a recipe book."

Also, the companies he is aiming at helping are still in their formative stages. A company with 250 people can still be shaped. One with 5,000 is much harder to reorient.

And with that, the characteristics McFarland highlights--e.g., "crowning the company," or putting the company's needs and priorities above the founder's--are important, and rare in companies big and small.

My favorite chapter is titled, "Enlisting Insultants," in which McFarland discusses how vital it is for growing companies to have people who can give voice to the minority opinion--either critiquing the conventional wisdom or championing an unpopular initiative. This view echoes those of Gary Hamel in "The Future of Management" as well as Traci Fenton's efforts to promote organizational democracy.

As might be apparent, McFarland can also turn a phrase. The book is well-written, with lots of great stories from the companies' leaders. And from its prominent position in my local Barnes & Noble's business section, it's probably selling a few copies.

In sum, there's a lot to learn from on an important subject. And don't let the cover bug you--the dust jacket is easily removed.

Related:
On Gary Hamel's "The Future of Management"
Shop Talk Podcast #3 - Traci Fenton on democratic workplaces

democracy, leadership, management, entrepreneurism, growth, reading list

Bosses, choose your words carefully

From The Mistake Bank.

[The Mistake Bank has received permission to publish excerpts from the Harvard Business School Press/50Lessons series "Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World's Top Business Leaders," The books are full of great stories, including some very useful mistake stories. Our first is from Paul Anderson, Chairman of Spectra Energy]

As I progressed in my career and got into increasingly more responsible or powerful roles, …it was almost like my words took on the power of the position, and things that were casual before were no longer casual. I had my first example of this when I was a manager. It was fairly early in my career, and a woman named Sarah had come in. I was running a planning organization, and Sarah came in to me and said, “Look, I don’t have any background in planning—I’m from the IT group—but I would love to join your organization. I’ll work hard to learn what I need to learn to do a good job. I will strive to do anything you need done. Just give me a chance.”

I said, “Well, that sounds fair to me. Why don’t you join the organization? I’ll give you a year. At the end of the year you will either be a planner and contributing; or, if it’s not working out, you can go back to the IT group, and we’ll assume that it was a nice try but it didn’t work out.”

So she joined the organization and she was outstanding; she was the best new employee we had that year. She took on everything; she learned. She became the “go-to” person—everybody came to her with their issues. She was a star, there was just no question; she was doing an outstanding job.

And I thought, “Well, this has to be one of the best moves that I’ve ever participated in,” and I was quite comfortable that things were working out nicely. But at the end of a year, she came into my office, and she was in tears. I said, “Sarah, what’s wrong?” And she said, “Well, I don’t understand why it’s not working out. At the end of a year, you said you’d tell me if it was working out and you haven’t told me that, so I must assume that it’s not working out and I’m going to have to go back to IT.” I was flabbergasted, and of course I told her, “Hey, you’re doing a great job!”

But it struck me that I’d made a casual comment: “…in a year we’ll know.” She had gone back to her office and marked her calendar, and, by God, at the end of a year she expected me to walk into her office with a decision. That casual comment was very powerful to her, and so insignificant to me, that it really struck me that I had to be very careful in making comments as I went along.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders--Managing Your Career. Copyright (c) 2007 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.

For more information about the "Lessons Learned" series, including a showcase of 50 Lessons video stories, please follow this link.


management, narrative, leadership, communications, oral communications, organizational behavior, Mistake Bank