Both Jim Stroup, at Managing Leadership, and Richard Barrett here at MAPping Company Success are discussing the need to avoid wasting resources on projects going nowhere.
Richard calls those projects that won’t die vampires and after reading Jim’s post, he and said, “Yeah, killing vampires is hard. The challenge is not the rational analysis, which that blog describes. It is the emotional act of letting go that causes the difficulty.”
It seems as if I’m always the one that ends up tackling the emotional stuff, so here are some thoughts on letting go.
The unwillingness to let go is anchored in your MAP (the link goes to a blueprint of how to change it).
Letting go is very similar to those team building exercises, variations of which have been around for decades, such as the one where you fall backwards from a height trusting your team to catch you.
It’s scary, not because you’re up that high, but because it requires real trust and the result is outside of your control.
Killing a vampire project is like that.
First, you need to trust that the people around you are giving you straight information with no hidden agendas.
Second, you need to accept that the failure of that version or even the entire project is outside of your control.
Finally, you need to accept that no matter how good you are you won’t always be right.—even Steve Jobs had Lisa and Newton.
On a post over at Managing Leadership, Wally Bock left a great comment that’s germane to my recent posts and to the notion that the idea of ‘leadership’ has been corrupted by the leadership business and the media.
“…people prefer magical thinking to accountability.”
They sure do. That magical thinking is just great for all those who don’t want the responsibility of making their own decisions. It’s wonderful to have a ‘leader’ tell you what to think and how to act. That way, when things get screwed up, it isn’t your fault; it’s the leader’s fault. You get to say, ‘S/he told me to…’ and poof—instant absolution with no strings attached.
“There’s a joke about a professor who says that a certain idea is “fine in practice but may not work in theory. We didn’t have a problem identifying who was the leader before we had leadership theory. Nobody worried about whether that Caesar fellow was a true or real or authentic leader. They just followed him.”
Caesar didn’t worry about it, either. He just did [whatever] and assumed that everyone would follow along. And follow they did, at least until he decided to make his leadership official. At that point their response was direct and very final.
We followers need to do something similar to the leadership movement; not necessarily as final, because it does have its uses.
We need to reform its thinking; recognize that leadership skills are for everyone—not just a select few—and stop it from appointing/anointing those selective few as ‘leaders’.
So, new mantra—everybody is a leader; lead yourself first and don’t worry abut the rest.
You’re probably too young to have seen Groucho Marx on a TV game show called You Bet Your Life, but maybe you’ve rented some of his movies after hearing about him. If you haven’t, then I hope today’s post motivates to do so.
Marx was a brilliant comedian and offered great commentary on his times; as funny today as he was then.
“Humor is reason gone mad.” (An insight that give us a perfect reason to laugh as much and as often as possible.)
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” (If anything, TV has gone downhill since this comment.)
“Oh, I know it’s a penny here and a penny there, but look at me. I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.” (Just think what he could have done with a credit card!)
“Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.” (As has been proved over and over throughout history—and especially during the last eight years.)
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.” (Sounds like the honchos on Wall Street.)
Now go rent a Marx Brothers movie and laugh you’re a** off.
Bloggers know that coming up with interesting topics and original content every day, as opposed to big blocks of quotes from articles and other blogs, is difficult. Writing for Saturday is especially challenging because you never really know who is cruising around or what the mood is.
Additionally, I’m always finding interesting articles I want to share, but they don’t really “fit,” so I’ve decided to offer up those odd thoughts and links on Saturday; hopefully finding at least one thing to pique your interest.
In my (probably) final comment on this subject I’d like to offer up my congratulations to all those Alaskans who put ethics in front of tradition and ousted Ted Stevens from his Senate seat. The Senate thanks them, too, since now they don’t have to choose between honoring ethics or doing business as usual.
An interesting post on the problems for women in IT with links to several additional articles and posts. The problems for women in technical fields such as IT are myriad. Few women ever have to worry about the glass ceiling, since they rarely rise that far. Rather think about the glass floor and non-existent elevator; the former prevents entry for most and the latter sees to it that the ceiling remains out of reach to the few who pass the first barrier.
From the NY Times an advisory on avoiding the ads that inundate you at every turn and every milieu. Lots of useful links to help you and some great final advice that I live by.
New software from MIT’s Dr. Alex Pentland offers a future promise of a way to analyze your everyday chat to determine the unspoken thoughts that lurk behind the words. The potential improvement in interpersonal communication could be enormous.
That’s it for this Saturday. Please let me know if you like this feature or it should be sent back from whence it came.
Yesterday I mentioned four basic traits of good culture. Today I want to talk about another one that many people, especially those running startups and small companies, often don’t like and don’t implement.
Process.
The problem is that people frequently confuse process and bureaucracy.
Process is good—it helps to get things done smoothly and efficiently.
Bureaucracy is bad—it’s process calcified, convoluted, politically corrupted, or just plain unnecessary.
The hallmarks of good process are
easy-to-use and flexible method of accomplishing various business functions; and
informal without being haphazard, and neither ambiguous or confusing.
Occasional surveys (internally asking staff and externally asking vendors and customers how things are working) alert you to when processes start to mutate. By creating a skeletal process and a corresponding graphic in areas where it is needed (financial controls, hiring, purchasing, etc.), you lay the framework for your growth in the future, no matter how hectic.
Bureaucracy stems from people, be it a CEO or first level supervisor, who believes that her staff is so incompetent that it is necessary to spell out exactly how every individual action, no matter how small, needs to be done.
To correct this, the manager responsible must
must recognize and take responsibility;
reduce his own insecurity;
increase his belief in his current staff; and whenever possible
hire people he thinks are smarter than himself!
Bureaucracy is also fed by people’s fear of change, “We’ve always done it like that.” and similar comments are dead giveaways.
Another significant factor that contributes to unnecessary bureaucracy is the failure to align responsibility and authority.
If a person has the responsibility to get something done (design a product, create a Human Resources department, meet a sales quota), she should have enough authority (spend money, hire people, negotiate with outside vendors) to get the job done.
Giving people responsibility without concomitant authority forces them to constantly ask their superiors for permission, thus reducing productivity, and lowering moral.
The final, and most important difference between process and bureaucracy is that people like working for companies with good process in place, and hate working for those mired in bureaucracy.
But not for long—they leave—making bureaucracy-eradication a major tool in the culture and retention game.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions; it’s paved with ”leaders with intentions”—good, bad or indifferent.
I figured this out based on media coverage of leaders. After all, have you ever seen a media treatment of a follower?
Media co-opted ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ decades ago and increasingly diluted the meaning until it disappeared.
Along with dilution, the media gave those they termed leaders the same treatment that was previously reserved for extraordinary athletes, celebrities and rock stars.
In doing so they created the monstrous, indestructible, uncontrollable ego found in every leader who bought into their hype; and reflected in compensation packages more fit for royalty than for business people.
And in case you haven’t noticed, you can find many of those massive egos in (surprise, surprise) investment banking, hedge funds, insurance and other sectors of financial services. But you knew that.
In fact, ego-mania has percolated throughout all industries, with little consideration for the size of the organization or its mission.
Further, in throwing the leader term around so loosely the media helped enlarge politicians’ already super-sized egos still more and extended the ego franchise to religious heads.
Not only are those egos super-sized, they also seem to be bulletproof.
How many of these ‘leaders’ have actually taken responsibility for what they’ve caused?
Have you seen them apologizing for their share of bringing down the global economy? Did I miss it? Boy, I hope you Tivoed it for posterity.
But the media’s gone pretty silent on the subject; lauding corporate heads seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. But dodos aren’t the only extinct bird, the phoenix is, too. And like the phoenix, media leadership hype will rise again just as soon as we all forget—which, unfortunately, we will and that’s a historically proven fact.
By the way, I’m not the only one; Jim Stroup noticed the silence, too, only from a different perspective.
A lot has changed since I started RampUp Solutions a decade ago. Back then, getting a CEO to discuss corporate culture ranged from difficult to impossible in direct proportion to the size of the company.
Bosses often viewed culture as an abstract concept, a creation of consultants to increase billable hours, but not something that would/could impact on the bottom line.
“82 per cent of [Canadian] executives surveyed said culture has a strong, or very strong, impact on their company’s performance.”
Meanwhile, in the lower 48, from a new study on innovation, “Corporate culture is, above all, the most important factor in driving innovation,” said Rajesh Chandy, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and a charter member of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Advisory Committee on Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economy”
Innovation and healthy bottom lines go hand in hand. While innovation may not be the quick bottom line fix that layoffs and other cost cutting actions are, it is the preferred choice of CEOs who understand that surviving isn’t enough.
What weight do other factors have in driving innovation?
“…among traditional drivers of innovation such as government policy, labor, capital and culture at the country level, the strongest driver of radical innovation across nations is corporate culture.”
Chandy goes on to say, “It is important to realize that all innovative companies look alike. They share a common culture no matter where they are located.”
Nearly three years ago I wrote about what people want and don’t want and it hasn’t changed much, if at all.
There are many cultural traits to consider, but here are the four basics that are required, although the words used to describe them keep changing, if you want to foster a culture of innovation.
Open, honest, constant communications
Never kill the messenger
Accept and act on input from all levels
Walk your talk
And the next time someone tells you that corporate culture is a myth composed of smoke and mirrors, remind them that there are still people out there who believe the Earth is flat.
For a long time now I’ve believed that the L word in all its forms has been abused and corrupted and I’ve haven’t been shy about saying so. Further, I hate words that are defined using variations of themselves. When that happens there is nothing concrete against which to check the meaning of the word or its usage.
I’m also not a lover of people who rant and whine about what’s wrong, but offer no ideas to fix the problem/situation.
So it’s time to start working on solutions.
Perhaps a new acronym would jump-start changing the career slant of ‘leader’.
That way we can offer leadership skills to all, so that they can indeed lead whenever it’s appropriate to the situation—leaders in the instance—instead of anointing a chosen few.
How about POF (person-out-front) to refer to someone at the front of the organization.
Or perhaps it would be better to use upper and lower case for the person in front who may or may not be a Leader, but is a leader.
For example, Richard Fuld is a leader, whereas Lou Gerstner is a Leader.
Of course, that may be worse, since people in those roles already consider themselves ‘special’ and might start thinking of the likeness between god and God.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten, but I’m hoping that y’all, AKA, my brilliant readers, will add your ideas and suggestions.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Both Jim Stroup, at Managing Leadership, and Richard Barrett here at MAPping Company Success are discussing the need to avoid wasting resources on projects going nowhere.
On a post over at 
You’re probably too young to have seen Groucho Marx on a TV game show called You Bet Your Life, but maybe you’ve rented some of his movies after hearing about him. If you haven’t, then I hope today’s post motivates to do so.
I figured this out based on media coverage of leaders. After all, have you ever seen a media treatment of a follower?
For a long time now I’ve believed that the L word in all its forms has been abused and corrupted and I’ve haven’t been shy about 
