“Unmentionables” has a whole new meaning and it can damage or even destroy your organization; once again, the problem and the solution are found in your culture.
Now for the fun stuff.
Millions of people base their buying decisions on peer reviews, AKA, the “wisdom of crowds,” but how wise is it when the “wisdom” is for sale?
Heads up! This is a rant. In today’s world of ‘citizen journalists’ I may wince at the misused words, but given our educational system I’m not surprised. However, when I see them in major online media sites such as Vator.tv I get really annoyed, as I did yesterday at this sentence, “Zynga is not loosing steam when it comes to entering 2012 with a whole new lineup of games for its users to get addicted to.’ I’m not referring to the fact that the sentence ends in a preposition, that’s way too common to cause a reaction. But if Zynga does start ‘loosing steam’ I at least hope the water isn’t too polluted.
This final entry should probably be called something like ‘when disparate things converge’. If you happen to have abundant disposable income and require a hospital stay shop around; you may be surprised at what’s available.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
I seem to write too many stories about bosses who don’t walk their talk, which, I realize, is an overused, hackneyed expression.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not an accurate one.
Here’s the background and I have to admit it really floored me.
“Mark” is a thirty-something engineer and was the third person to join 23 year old “Jim’s” startup early in 2011.
Out of several offers he chose Jim’s. He’d read and heard a lot about the values that Millennials demanded and Jim’s description of his values and the culture he was building based on them closely matched Marks own.
Things were going well and they had grown to 6 people when they landed on the radar of a major corporation.
Near the end of the year Mark heard a rumor that the company was being acquired.
When he asked Jim if it was true he said it was and that they hoped to keep the staff.
Mark was flabbergasted; not because Jim was selling, but because the acquiring company’s culture was known to be diametrically opposed to almost all of Mark’s stated values.
When Mark said as much Jim said that it was an amazing offer and that he would be a fool to turn it down. Although they could easily raise an investment round, his holdings were far more valuable with the acquisition than if they were diluted by new investors.
Mark asked Jim if he had meant anything he said during the interview or if it was all just BS.
Jim’s response really blew me away.
Mark said he shrugged and said “that was then and this is now.”
What do you think? Was Jim justified? What would you do?
Several people I’ve talked with recently have quoted from Eric Ries’s The Lean Start Up with almost the same religious fervor people espouse Guy Kawasaki or Steve Jobs.
I haven’t read it yet, but after reading a brief column in WSJ’s About Tech Europe and watching the video I realized that Ries probably doesn’t appreciate that kind of blind devotion any more than Kawasaki or Jobs and is quick to say so.
Much of what he says is common sense,
“If 10 people in a row hate my product is that statistically significant? It is not conclusive evidence, but it is certainly telling you something.”
If you have 100 customers you can already say what percentage are paying. If it is zero then I can already start to be a bit worried about the model.”
which is often the easiest to rationalize or ignore.
Of course, you ignore it at your peril.
If you have read The Lean Startup please share your thoughts below; I’ll share mine after I’ve read it.
I’ve read a lot about Sam Palmisano and previously written about him.
That said, I still found Wharton management professor Michael Useem’s interview with Palmisano covering his 40 years at IBM, including the last decade as CEO, interesting and informative.
It’s a long interview and, if you prefer, you can use the link to read it or download an audio version.
Most importantly, be sure to read the comments, most by IBMers, which, by and large, are anything but flattering.
Do you agree that his focus on the company screwed the employees or did he get it right?
How does a CEO balance the legacy needs of employees against the needs of the company to survive in a different world?
What would you have done differently to achieve the same success?
A McKinsey study on the value of corporate social responsibility found “…highly innovative Fortune 1000 companies derive greater financial returns from their corporate-responsibility activities than their less innovative counterparts do,” and suggested three actions to improve CSR ROI,
“Upwards of 40 percent of industry’s energy efficiency improvement opportunities can be realized through low or no-cost projects rooted in corporate culture change”
They must know something since dollar savings to date are not millions, or even hundreds of millions, but billions.
“The key to this model is the formation of multi-disciplinary, cross-functional site teams, with insight from operators, maintenance, mechanics, core process experts, energy experts, engineers and management.”
Two of the biggest stumbling blocks on this path are Wall Street, with its short-term, i.e., quarterly, focus and the current definition of “stakeholder.”
Typically, stakeholders are viewed as investors, management, customers and workers; progressive companies have added the local communities where they do business and a few have tiptoed further.
Whereas Richard Branson points out in Screw Business As Usual every living thing and the planet itself are stakeholders.
Sadly, rather than being in the lead, the majority of US corporations are staying focused on short-term results and narrow definition of stakeholder.
But the winners in the future will be those companies, large or small, whose thinking is longest and definition is broadest.
I hope you are one of them.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kung Hei Fat Choy (Wishing you an abundance of wealth and prosperity!) Happy Year of the Dragon
An engineer friend sent the following story because he knows I’m an evangelist for KISS** and this is such a great example of it.
A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up. Small variations in the environment (which can’t be controlled in a cost-effective fashion) mean you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line; otherwise you will have disgruntled customers at all points.
Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem, as their engineering department was already too stretched to take on any extra effort.
The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution – on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box would weigh less than it should. The line would stop; someone would walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done to re-start the line.
A few weeks later the CEO checked the ROI of the project: amazing results! No empty boxes shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in place. Very few customer complaints and they were gaining market share. “That’s some money well spent!” he thought, but before closely checking other statistics.
To his consternation, the number of defects picked up by the scales after the first three weeks of production use was zero, where as it should have been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report.
He filed a bug report and after investigating the engineers came back saying the report was correct; the scales really weren’t picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were filled.
Puzzled, the CEO traveled down to the factory to see for himself the part of the line where the precision scales were installed.
A few feet before the scale there was a $20 desk fan blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.
When the CEO asked a production worker about it he got this response, “One of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang.”
While I agree that this is a great example of KISS it also highlights another piece of management idiocy.
How many times have you seen a similar story play out not only in manufacturing, but also in development, marketing, finance, sales and especially administrative areas?
How much money is spent every year on expensive consultants and external specialists while the actual workers are never asked for solutions?
Why haven’t more bosses learned that solutions can come from anywhere and listen to all their people?
Of course, workers’ solutions wouldn’t be described in multisyllabic words in bound in custom folders on heavy bond and presented in a darkened room using impressive power point slides by ego-stroking consultants.
It is always useful to have a pithy way to get a point across, but how many of us can think that fast? So in the interest of making my readers sound both brilliant and cool here are four “pithyisms” to use at your discretion—with attribution, one would hope.
Oscar Wilde said, “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” Try that on your boss the next time you turn left when he says go right.
Have you wondered why VCs and pundits of all stripes keep telling entrepreneurs and managers that attitude is more important than skills? Ralph Marston has the answer, “Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude.”
It is said that once the genie is out of the bottle he can not be put back; this is especially true of personal growth, or, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
Personal growth is a wonderful thing, but it does require taking risks. However, risks can be mitigated, even when following Mark Twain’s recommendation, “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
The media loves to focus on young entrepreneurs and Internet startups, most of which offer little real value and solve few problems—other than how to acquire more stuff or a greater online reputation. (Sarcasm intended.)
However, there are exciting things happening that look to solve real problems using real science in totally innovative ways.
One is an effort, driven by scientists, that is pushing to end the scientific elitism fostered by exclusive periodicals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine. It is a movement towards a kind of “open source” science that is gaining traction within the scientific community itself. There’s been an explosion of open access archives on which a scientist can not only share research results, but also find research connections and collaborators they would normally never meet.
Dr. Michael Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet.
The DIY movement has made itself felt in many areas of life, but I find none more fascinating than its application to biological research and is another push towards more open scientific endeavor.
“I want to generate the sort of tools that make it easy to do DIYbio at home.” –Cathal Garvey, Cork, Ireland, inventor of the DremelFuge, a small centrifuge that can be fabricated by a 3-D printer, who offers the plans free of charge via the Net.
But the pièce de résistance comes from the National Science Foundation, which announced last summer the founding of the Innovation Corps, a program to turn the scientists of academia into entrepreneurs. This is not a fluff piece or election year propaganda, nor are they twenty-somethings locked in their dorm rooms coding all night. NSF recruited serial entrepreneur and now professor Steve Blank to teach the program—and a very tough program it is.
These weren’t 22-year olds who wanted to build a social shopping web site. Each of the teams selected by the NSF had a Principal Investigator – a research scientist who was a University professor; an Entrepreneurial Lead – a graduate student working in the Investigator’s lab; and a mentor from their local area who had business and/or domain expertise. And they were hard at work at some real science.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Last summer I wrote about the damage done by misrepresenting the real facts of your company culture.
Today I want you to think about the damage that can be done by misrepresenting your past—as was done by Yale football coach Tom Williams.
Williams said he had chosen to pursue a career in professional football at the expense of a possible Rhodes scholarship — and never regretted the decision. Witt leaned on his coach for advice, and eventually decided to play in the game. Yale was crushed, 45-7.
But Williams’s story was a lie.
Bottom line, Yale lost the game, Witt lost the scholarship, and Williams lost his job.
It doesn’t matter if the lie is large, like Williams’ was, or a minor tweaking of the facts; these are personal lies and they go beyond damaging cultural touchstones, they damage lives.
Too many entrepreneurs believe there is wiggle room as long as the words or actions further company goals or land rare and needed talent.
These entrepreneurs are willing to sacrifice not only everything, but everybody, to their vision.
Are you one of them?
Option Sanity™ isn’t for liars
Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock process. So easy a CEO can do it.
Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.”
Option Sanity™ is not recommended for micromanagers, manipulators, or politicos. Founders and CEOs with large egos, or a sense of entitlement, should avoid prolonged exposure to Option Sanity™.
Use only as directed.
Excitement and a strong feeling of virtue are expected; contact your Option Sanity™ rep at the first sign of smugness or if you experience any difficulty explaining Option Sanity™ to others.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.
The belief that one is special and therefore is entitled to special treatment is rampant these days from those who feel they deserve more to join—more stock, more money, more title—to the frequent epidemics of founder ego that sweep across startup land.
But what about the not so obvious, such as a lack of accountability and favoritism?
Both are forms of entitlement that kill initiative, which, in turn, kills innovation right along with productivity, engagement, loyalty and a host of other desirable attitudes and actions.
Many younger employees are entering the workplace with no real understanding of accountability and many older employees have worked for managers who don’t enforce viable accountability in their organizations.
Accountability requires consequences and consequences need to be implemented evenly across the entire organization, with the only exceptions being made publicly and whose basis is obvious and acceptable to the rest of the team, e.g., serious illness, death, etc.
Founders and managers who claim to have no time to spare for accountability and use termination as a solution exacerbate the problem.
Bosses, whether entrepreneurs or not, have a responsibility to both their company and their people—enforcing accountability while stamping out entitlement is a big piece of it.
Today is a varied bag of stuff you should know—or at least know about.
I seem to write too many stories about bosses who don’t walk their talk, which, I realize, is an overused, hackneyed expression.
A McKinsey study on the 
How many times have you seen a similar story play out not only in manufacturing, but also in development, marketing, finance, sales and especially administrative areas?
Entitlement is a hallmark of many Millennials, but if you have a startup entitlement can literally kill it, as it has done many times.
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