"What Was Privacy?" Indeed!

Compare these two quotes:

I have a date there with Samer Takriti, a Syrian-born mathematician. He heads up a team that's piecing together mathematical models of 50,000 of IBM's tech consultants. The idea is to pile up inventories of all of their skills and then to calculate, mathematically, how best to deploy them....

Takriti, a slim 40-year-old with wide, languid eyes, opens the door of his small office. He wears a rugby shirt tucked tightly into blue jeans. I tell him that being modeled doesn't sound like much fun. I picture an all-knowing boss anticipating my every move, perhaps sending me an e-mail with the simple message, "No!" before I even get up my nerve to ask for a raise. But Takriti focuses on the positive. Imagine that your boss finally recognizes your strengths, he says—maybe ones that are hidden even to you. Then he "puts you into situations where you will thrive."

Still, Takriti confesses that he's nervous.... With time, he and his team hope to build detailed models for each worker, each one complete with a person's quirks, daily commute, and allies, perhaps even enemies. These models might one day include whether the workers eat beef or pork, how seriously they take the Sabbath, whether a bee sting or a peanut sauce could lay them low.
(from "The Numerati," by Stephen Baker, excerpted in Business Week, 28 Aug 2008)

-and this-

Harriet Pearson is IBM’s chief privacy officer, a role she assumed in 2000, when Lou Gerstner was CEO. Gerstner was “convinced that as the Web emerged as a business platform, companies—particularly one such as IBM—had to lead on privacy,” Pearson says. “We were at an inflection point with respect to the pervasiveness of technology in business processes, and he correctly judged that IBM needed to use its leadership on that issue to support our initiatives on e-commerce.”... In 2005, under Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano’s leadership, IBM adopted a forward-looking global policy that forswore the use of employees’ genetic profiles in making decisions about hiring or access to health insurance and other benefits. Pearson credits IBM’s own “DNA” in issues of employee privacy and nondiscrimination for the logic behind its policy on genetic profiling. “There’s a direct line that I can draw back to our history in the 1950s and 1960s that is consistent with who we are as a company,” she says. (In May 2008 George Bush signed into law the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. IBM’s early support facilitated its passage.) IBM’s manifold adventures in new technology—including systems for accelerating genomic research and pharmacological innovation—enable it to foresee developments that have implications for privacy. Pearson says it’s part of her job to scan company and industry horizons for potentially gnarly situations: “My business needs make me as likely, in one day, to be looking at genetics and RFID, and what they mean for privacy issues, as at data privacy and security issues associated with global business processes and the emergence of what’s being called ‘cloud computing.’” (from "What Was Privacy?" by Lew McCreary, Harvard Business Review, October 2008)

Both quotes concern IBM. And so, are you as confused as I am?

A company that characterizes itself as a privacy pioneer is mathematically modeling its consultants? This is what happens when cognitive bias embeds itself in a bureaucracy. IBM's people consider themselves privacy pioneers, yet at the same time they install procedures that to an outside observer are clear invasions of their employees' privacy.

Let me relate a little privacy story. A few years ago, I was involved in a dispute with my employer over an employment contract. While this dispute was ongoing, I still worked at the company. One day, I looked at my laptop, and thought of the servers and networks that carried my emails, web searches, etc., to the internet. The company could have been capturing all this information, scrutinizing it, and twisting it into evidence to support their case.

I felt a chill. What had I searched for? What emails had I sent? What personal information would they have access to? At that moment, I didn't have trust in the company's good will. Quite the opposite.

God forbid they would have had a "mathematical model" of me.

It's clear that people ascribe good motives to their own actions, while in others those same actions would seem questionable or downright wrong (see "I'm OK, You're Biased" by Dan Gilbert). The question is, who can blow the whistle at a large corporation? Who, at IBM, could say, "This is just wrong. We shouldn't be doing it," and be listened to?

UPDATE: Please read Harriet Pearson's comment below. She points to this blog post as an elaboration of IBM's views.

(Thanks to Cognitive Edge for the pointer to the Business Week excerpt.)

(Photo from bretwalda via stock.xchng)

Tags:
privacy, information technology, organizational behavior

"What if your whole company acts like an a--hole?"

I was talking to my friend this morning about Bob Sutton's "The No Asshole Rule" and its corollary, "if you can't escape working for an asshole, you need to learn how to be indifferent, now not to care too much."

My friend's question: "What if your whole company acts like an asshole?"

He elaborated. "I went to a retirement party for a friend of mine who worked for the phone company. They've been downsizing forever. There are guys who have been there 25-30 years, and they're trapped. They hate it there, but they have nowhere else to go. So they go through the motions. It's filled with people like that."

Me: "Economists keep telling us that economies of scale mean big companies have advantages."

Him: "Scale economies must mean a lot if those companies still make money, while they're full of people who don't care anymore."

Disclosure: I've worked for very large companies and very small companies in my career. As you can probably guess, I liked working at the smaller companies better.

Related posts:
The Value of Not Caring in the Workplace

Tags:
indifference, equanimity, narrative, organizational behavior

The Mistake Bank manifesto

I've been reading the new book "Senior Leadership Teams: How to Make Them Great," by Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss and Richard Hackman. Very close to the end of the book I found a passage that is a better explanation of what's behind the Mistake Bank than anything I could write myself. While it's focused on senior leaders, I think the ideas work for anyone who has a job or owns a business. [I'll do a full review of the book next week. Sneak preview: it's very good.]

To learn continuously... requires that senior leaders move beyond well-practiced leadership habits and well-learned personal models of what makes for a great leadership team. What's needed is active experimentation with new and unfamiliar leadership strategies, and whenever there is experimentation expect that there will also be failure.. More often than not, trying out a new grip or swing in golf or tennis results in worsened performance for a while. But these experiments also generate learnings that cannot be had otherwise. The same is true for experimentation with leadership strategies and skills.

In fact, error and failure always provide more opportunities for learning than do success and achievement, because failures generate data that you can mine for insight into how you might improve your assumptions or your mental model of team leadership. Indeed, the bigger the failure, the greater the learning opportunity. To learn from failure requires that you ask questions that arouse anxiety (for example, about the validity of your deeply-held assumptions or about personal flaws in your diagnosis or execution abilities). Learning from failure also requires that you gather data that can help answer those questions and then adapt your mental models and your behavior. These activities are not natural or comfortable acts, and they are especially unnatural for successful people who have limited experience in learning how to learn from error and failure. (p. 204)

Copyright 2008 Harvard Business Press

Mistake Bank, experimentation, learning, errors, failure, habits, mental models, organizational behavior

The value of not caring in the workplace

I was with a company that went through lots of changes through its early history--many of them good changes. High growth, successful IPO, ultimately getting acquired for a huge sum. And of course some bad changes too--good people leaving, lots of interpersonal conflict. Early in 2000, when it looked like another tumultuous year upcoming, a senior manager that I respected a lot asked me my goals for the year. I thought for a while and then said "equanimity."

The shock and confusion registered on his face immediately. He expected me to say "sell lots of products" or "sign up lots of new partners" or whatever, but instead I said "equanimity." In that moment of thought I had decided I was not going to let changes and turmoil get to me, but that I would ride them out as unemotionally as I could.

And it worked. I had a really good year. Lots of changes happened, virtually all out of my control, and I dealt with them.

I was reminded of this story when viewing this video of Bob Sutton from the 50 Lessons people (I've been raiding their material for mistake stories recently). In the video, he talks about the genesis of "The No Asshole Rule," his acclaimed book, but also tosses in a provocative idea at the end. When discussing advice of how someone should deal with assholes, he said: "Very often in life, there's times when learning not to care, to be indifferent is incredibly important, and it's something we don't teach people enough.... If you're in a situation where there's nothing you can do about changing it, you might as well just ignore it and do what is best for you.... One of my goals as an adult is to get better and better at figuring out what doesn't matter to me, and ignoring it."

Tags:
indifference, equanimity, narrative, organizational behavior

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

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

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

A new mistake story video from The Mistake Bank

When I got overloaded at one job and was allowed to hire an assistant, I thought my troubles were over. But I had just pushed them onto my new hire, and they came back to me pretty soon.


Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank


management, leadership, tasking, organizational behavior, Mistake Bank

Witnessing the "gamer disposition"

One of Harvard Business Review's 2008 breakthrough ideas identified "The Gamer Disposition" as a hallmark of high-impact business performers of the future. Gamers had certain attributes (bottom-line orientation, comfort with change, etc.) that would help make them successful in business.

"The Gamer Disposition" was notable because it played against the stereotypes most businesspeople have of gamers: slackers and loners who would make low-value employees. Also, the authors, John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, made the point (indirectly) that the gamer qualities were not found in many current employees.

As I've observed my two young gamers battle "LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga" these last two months, I've seen some of the gamer disposition in action. Here's what I've seen:

1. Unafraid to fail - getting terminated by Count Dooku a hundred times didn't dissuade my guys from trying again.
   
   
2. Do rather than research - there is no user's manual for the game, and the kids didn't want one. They preferred to learn by doing again and again. (Me: "How did you learn you had to drop the gate on the Rancor to kill him?" My five-year-old: shoulder shrug, "We just tried it and it worked!")
   
   
3. Resourceful - they'll ask their friends how they overcome certain obstacles, and share their learnings with pride.
   
   
4. Ever-learning - the biggest prize they get from playing the game is the ability to open up new parts of the game; to become a beginner again. Expertise isn't that interesting to them. "What's next?" is.
   

The above practices seem useful to me in navigating any complex business context. It will be interesting to see how business has changed twenty years hence, when "the gamer disposition" is no longer the exception, but the rule among employees.

videogames, gaming, learning, organizational behavior, Harvard Business Review

The Forgetting Organization

Many years ago, I took a series of courses adapted from Peter Senge's book "The Fifth Discipline." The hallmark of that book was a concept called "the learning organization," which posited that to be adaptable in an environment of constant change, companies had to nurture and support the learning impulses in all their employees.

While I really enjoyed the courses (and over the past decade have grown to appreciate them more), I grew frustrated by our company's inability to learn from our experiences. We made the same mistakes again and again.

With the gallows humor familiar to anyone who works for a very large, slowly-changing company, I started calling us "The Forgetting Organization."

Twelve years on, not much has changed. January's Harvard Business Review features "The Experience Trap" (link - $$) by Kishore Sengupta, Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove. In simulations performed with software project managers, the authors discovered that even experienced project managers made similar mistakes--for example, bringing on staff too late in the project--again and again, in different projects. Rather than learning from what had gone wrong in Project 1, the PMs did much the same in Project 2, and 3, and so on.

Sengupta et. al. attribute this forgetting to several factors: (1) the disjoint and time-lagged relationship between cause and effect, (2) conflict between initial plan and long-term goal when conditions change and (3) the fallibility of initial estimates (and people's tendency to hang onto those far past their useful lives).

In other words, software projects, like so much of the high-value work in business today, operates in the complex domain. The authors prescribe a set of practices to help companies suffering from "the experience trap," but a simple recognition of the environment that people are working in, and training and reinforcing awareness of that fact, could help workers learn more.

Or, in other words, to forget less.

(Note: I also mentioned the above story in a previous post.)


complexity, learning, organizational behavior, project management, Harvard Business Review

Top 5 Harvard Business Review breakthrough ideas

In which we select the best of the annual Harvard Business Review list of twenty breakthrough ideas (free link) for the benefit of time-constrained executives everywhere. This service is provided at no extra charge.

1. "Here Comes the P2P Economy," by Stan Stalnaker. Web 2.0 is accelerating a shift to an economy with many, many small sellers.

2. "Task, not time: Profile of a Gen Y Job," by Tamara Erickson. Young workers are not tied to the clock, or the office. Give them specific tasks and let them do them when, and where, they see fit.

3. "A Doctor's Rx for CEO Decision Makers," by Jerome Groopman. A relatively new technique--intensive peer review of failures--allows physicians to detect and understand decision biases that contribute to misdiagnoses. Such a process can help business decisionmakers as well.

4. "The Gamer Disposition," by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas. People adept at multiplayer computer games have qualities (such as desire to improve, appreciation of diversity, and results-orientation) that businesses should be seeking in their employees.

5. "What Good Are Experts?" by Michael Mauboussin. Research and experience with decisionmaking tools such as prediction markets is showing that expertise has a more narrow application than previously thought. Good businesses will assess which tool works better for the problem at hand--prediction markets for probabilistic problems, computers for rules-based problems, and experts for the remainder--and act accordingly.

Bonus "I really didn't know that" item: "Islamic Finance: the New Global Player," by Aamir Rehman and Nazim Ali. Despite the seemingly-restrictive rules of Sharia, Muslim law, on investing and charging interest, a vibrant and growing Sharia-compliant financial marketplace has emerged in the Islamic world.

strategy, decisionmaking, finance, learning, mistakes, organizational behavior, Harvard Business Review

Collaboration or individual leadership? Which is it?

Collaboration is in. The WSJ Business Insight article "Leading From Below" states, "at most companies, senior managers are increasingly hamstrung by the demand from investors and analysts for immediate results"--requiring middle managers to provide leadership at the company level. Other scholars say dissent in the workplace is to be encouraged. The democratic organization is gaining traction.

You would think that we've passed into a new phase of corporate management--leadership by collective. Yet a couple of authors have recently reasserted the importance of individual vision and leadership in business.
In "The Opposable Mind," Roger Martin celebrates the unique capability of individual innovators. Martin writes, "the most common failing of conventional thinking is the tendency to lose sight of the whole decision. It may be easier to dole out pieces of a decision to various corporate functions, but that ensures that no one will take a holistic view of a particular problem." (p.46)

And, in the January Harvard Business Review, Cynthia Montgomery of Harvard Business School states that we should be "Putting Leadership Back Into Strategy" (link - $$). Writes Montgomery:

The need to create and recreate reasons for a company's continued existence sets the strategist apart from every other individual in the company.

Throughout her paper, Montgomery underlines the need not to delegate strategy, but to make it the most important task of the CEO. Strategy-making by committee? Not in Montgomery's view.

So which approach is correct? I'm stumped. Perhaps the artful company balances a strong, visionary leader with the tools and techniques of collaboration, somehow combining the coherence of a single vision and the power of the masses and the "wisdom of crowds."

No wonder there are so few brilliant companies out there.

organizational behavior, strategy, leadership, Harvard Business Review

Sales has its own culture--is this a bad thing?

I was recently part of a sales meeting where the salespeople from each region of the company descended onto headquarters, gave presentations to the senior management team, got direction, feedback, etc., then went back home to continue selling.

It struck me while I was there that I have seen this very same meeting in each company where I've had close contact, or been part of, the sales team.

And one observation I'd make is that quarterly sales meetings show how the culture of the sales team significantly differs from that of the company at large. Another way of saying this is that the sales team is not very well integrated with the company as a whole.

For example, when the salespeople emerged from the meeting and went onto the floor where everyone else works, they were clearly visitors. There was loud talking, laughter, as people came up and greeted them. Small meetings broke out, at which they discussed proposals, customer meetings, the state of the product collateral.

And then they were gone, and the office returned to its quiet buzz of activity.

That evening, the sales team went out to dinner. Just them, without other team members. And they talked about their concerns about the product, the level of support they got from marketing, operations, etc. Their feeling of being separate, on the margins.

The scene was eerily consistent with what I'd seen at several other companies, which makes me wonder if it's something that could be changed if a company wanted to.

But to me it meant that the sales team wasn't part of the overall team. And that has all sorts of negative ramifications. Thinking of it from a social networking perspective, these salespeople have strong external networks and weak internal networks--which reduces their ability to get things done in the company and therefore makes it more difficult to create strong solutions for customers. Which reduces sales. And contributes to sales turnover.

Or perhaps it would be just as bad if they had strong internal networks. Their external networks would suffer, they would have less distance from their colleagues, which would reduce their ability to lobby on the customer's behalf and demand more from their company.

What do you think?

culture, organizational behavior, social networking, sales

Listening to dissent stops automatic thinking

Recently, I was working with a colleague on an order we were about to place with a supplier. We had had some issues with this supplier's performance, but they had been resolved. Anyway, that had been weeks earlier and I was looking ahead to what we needed next. One morning I got an email from my colleague answering some questions I had about the order.

But at the end of this email, he wrote something that really stopped me in my tracks. He wrote: should we continue using this supplier?

Despite the troubles, I hadn't even considered replacing them. As I spent the next few hours thinking about my colleague's question, it occurred to me that this is one of the values of dissent: it helps stop automatic thinking.

I was ready to go ahead and place the order and the response from my colleague made me stop and think. We talked, my colleague and I, and decided the order should go ahead, but in addition, we put together a list of the concerns we had, and asked the supplier to respond to them before the next order shipped. Looking back, I was glad my colleague raised his voice. And I was glad I listened.

spoken through SpinVox

spoken post candor organizational behavior disagreement leadership

Top 5 Best Business Books of 2007

(If you'd rather see the 2008 list, you can find it here.)

It's December, and "best of" lists are appearing everywhere. Here, too. So, if you are still searching for great gifts for the business-book reader in your family, you can't go wrong with any of these titles:

5. "Reinventing Project Management," Aaron Shenhar and Dov Dvir. A look at project management that goes way deeper, and is far more useful, than "on time, on budget, to requirements." Here's what I wrote about "RPM" earlier this year: 1, 2.





4. "Smart World," Richard Ogle. Innovative breakthroughs are not created by solitary thinkers toiling in the lab, but by people or groups interacting with their networks and environments. Prior posts on "Smart World": 1, 2.






3. "X-Teams," Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman. How great teams orient themselves externally and encourage dissent. Here's what I wrote about it back in May and June: 1, 2, 3, 4.






2. "Negotiation Genius," Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman. The best one-volume negotiation book you can buy at any price. Read a fuller review here.






1. "The Future of Management," Gary Hamel. (It's in stock at Amazon.) How to build a change-adaptable business in the 21st century. I did five posts on this book last year: start here.






negotiation, innovation, creativity, project management, organizational behavior, reading list

Making and keeping commitments: a must for success in business

In a brief but potent post, professional-services expert David Maister points out the importance of keeping commitments. (I touched on this topic in an earlier post.) Writes Maister,

It is OK to need more time as long as you ask for it ahead of time. It is OK to struggle and ask for help.

It is not OK to break your commitments. The fastest and surest way to fail is to break your word.

It's a concept so basic as to seem trivial--yet the inability to create and honor commitments between co-workers, between managers and workers, and between workers and clients destroys value every single day, in every company, all over the world.

Maister focuses on one side--the responsibility of the assigned party to honor commitments. The other side also has responsibilities. Often people ask for commitments in a wishy-washy manner, which at minimum creates confusion and ambiguity, or at worst enables commitment-phobes to feign performance by using ambiguity as a rationale for non-action. Here are some examples:

1. Manager A sends out a note to entire team asking for something to be done.
2. Worker B sends email to co-worker, stating, "It would be great if you could do task X by next Friday. If I don't hear from you by tomorrow I'll assume that's OK."
3. Client C makes the same demand several times, ignoring any counter-proposals made in the meantime, hoping to wear down the vendor until they simply agree out of fatigue.

In these cases, the ultimate responsbility, unfortunately, reverts back to the assignee. You frankly can't allow people to get you to do things without creating the environment for a strong commitment. You need to probe and negotiate: "Which of us do you want to take this on, boss?" "I just got your note and I'm afraid I can't meet your desired date. Can we discuss and come up with an alternative?" "Help me understand why you want it done this particular way." etc. And then work to shape the request into a proper commitment that you can perform.

The environment that W. L. Gore Industries created (profiled in the new Gary Hamel book), is ideal for commitments. Any staffer asked to do something can accept or refuse the commitment. Once accepted, the commitment is expected to be completed. And a rigorous 360° review process incents people not to refuse every commitment (Bartleby the Scrivener wouldn't last long at Gore).

management, organizational behavior, commitments, collaboration, customer+management, consulting

More on using the Cynefin framework

If you found value in Dave Snowden's and Mary Boone's recent Harvard Business Review article (discussed in an earlier post), you should read Dave's post on "safe-fail probes"--it's sort of a second chapter to that article focusing on applying the Cynefin framework.

business development, complexity, decisionmaking, leadership, management, organizational behavior, sales process, sales, Harvard Business Review

HBR article demonstrates that leaders need to manage complexity

"We need to document our processes!"

I heard this again and again at various companies I worked at over the years. And that's a fine goal, to document processes. But the thinking--that if processes are documented then we will be able to perform high-quality work and be successful--is flat-out wrong in many circumstances.

Why? Because many (and many of the most important) business problems can't be reduced to a repeatable process. This view is described in an article in the November Harvard Business Review, "A Leader's Framework for Decision-Making," by Dave Snowden and Mary Boone (link - $$). (Prior references to Dave Snowden's work can be found here: 1, 2, 3.)

In it, Snowden and Boone describe the Cynefin framework, a model that helps put business situations into a context that guides how they should be addressed. The framework has four primary segments:

Simple - repeatable processes that can be described by best practices (e.g., how to determine whether a mortgage applicant is qualified)

Complicated - "the domain of experts," according to Snowden and Boone; where complete data is available, and issues can be solved with analysis (e.g., finding underground oil deposits)

Complex - where multiple variables interact unpredictably - "the realm of 'unknown unknowns,' ...the domain to which much of contemporary business has shifted."

Chaotic - where no manageable patterns exist, "the realm of unknowables" --e.g., September 11, 2001. In this case, the best response is to do something and assess what happens.

So, back to documenting processes. Simple processes and their best practice should be documented and followed. Complicated processes, too, can benefit from discipline, though there is value in dissent and dialogue. Documenting complex processes doesn't do much of value--repeatability is impossible and in fact counterproductive to attempt.

Here are some business processes that would fall into the complex domain:

• new product development (how people learn about and use products can have a significant effect on how the product evolves)
• entering a new market or geography
• making an organizational change
  
• a B2B sales pursuit

So how to manage these if they can't be boiled down to a cookbook? Boone and Snowden recommend involving more people in decisionmaking (sounds a bit democratic); setting some rules or guidelines to channel behavior (i.e., in a sales pursuit, we will never respond to a tender that we didn't know was coming); encouraging dissent; creating an environment where good things can emerge, and nurturing those things.

In my experience, managers are still trying to shoehorn all their business problems into the simple or complicated domains. The more quickly they accept the complexity of many critical areas, and manage them appropriately, the sooner we'll stop wasting human resources and start achieving better business results.

And that'll be something worth documenting.

(graphic: the Cynefin framework from Cognitive Edge via Wikipedia)

business development, complexity, decisionmaking, leadership, management, organizational behavior, sales process, sales, Harvard Business Review

A look back at this week--value of dissent, getting value from mistakes

Further to the post about the value of dissent, Max Boisot wrote a riotously funny post on how rows (pronounced the British way, raows, and meaning fights) between him and a collaborator improved the quality of their work together.

And on the idea of publicizing and learning from mistakes, the Wall Street Journal Informed Reader pointed out an article in Wired Magazine by deputy editor Thomas Goetz advocating that data from failed or abandoned studies be made available to researchers. One repository of this type of information, Mr. Goetz points out, is the lusciously named Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine.

(The above also reminded me of the HBR article stating that finding uses for output of terminated R&D projects is one way to improve R&D cost-benefit.)

organizational behavior learning mistakes teamwork product development

The dissent-free organization: a worst practice

There's an excellent item by Garry Emmons in Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge site this week on candor--or more accurately, a lack of it, and what damage it can do to organizations. Here's a quote:

Consider the costs to organizations, large and small, when dissent does not or cannot surface: Abjuring rigorous debate about its merits, a youthful president John F. Kennedy essentially rubber-stamped a 1961 plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, resulting in one of the biggest U.S. foreign policy fiascoes in decades. During a 1996 commercial expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest, several climbers, including two of the world's most experienced professionals, died in part because junior team members didn't speak up when their expert leaders ignored their own core operating principles surrounding safety. In 2003, NASA engineers were reluctant to challenge long-held beliefs that foam strikes incurred during the launch of the space shuttle Columbia posed no risk to its fuselage.

I can't count how many times in my career I have swallowed what I should have said--and I was always considered a loudmouth. How many mistakes could have been avoided? Lack of dissent is terribly frequent within senior management teams, where respect for (or fear of) the CEO, or an unwillingness to step into colleagues' sandboxes, results in meetings full of good feelings and no debates. (We know that X-Teams don't do this.)

Why do people shut down when they should pipe up? It's entirely rational. Writes Emmons:

[HBS Professor Amy] Edmondson says this reluctance to speak up stems variously from fears that superiors will not like the idea or that it may appear to criticize the status quo, which most people find reassuringly familiar or dangerous to challenge. Edmondson sums up the mental calculation this way: "The potential costs to me for speaking out seem reasonably certain and somewhat immediate; the potential benefit to me for speaking out seems rather uncertain and definitely long-range."

I've also been responsible for quashing dissent. Whether due to wishing to move faster, or to protect my turf, I didn't create a very good environment for those who disagreed with my ideas. It's appalling, in retrospect. It should be somewhat comforting that I've got a lot of company in this. But it's not.

So, to improve your business, get your team debating, disagreeing, even arguing. Here's former Medtronic CEO Bill George quoted in the Working Knowledge article:

During the decision-making process, George explains, this means asking probing questions and insisting that managers present each situation in objective terms, rather than with a positive spin.

"You must acknowledge and thank those who disagree by telling them that they made the discussion, and hence the ultimate decision, much better," George says. "You need to reward and promote the mavericks or else the organization will lose its creative edge. You try to create tension inside because the outside challenge is so great."

management candor organizational behavior disagreement leadership HBS Working Knowledge