There’s good news evolution-wise for emerging companies.

When the environment is stable, evolutionary selection rewards small, incremental changes that optimize survival within that stable environment.

But in times of rapid environmental change, evolutionary selection rewards large, swift changes that track the environmental shifts.

If you work in a small or emerging company, your timing is excellent.

Change is global; it’s accelerating; and it is disrupting every aspect of business. Change is creating opportunities everywhere, from finance to automobiles, from communication to housing.

You are witnessing the greatest opportunities in a generation. Evolution points the way to success, and the playing field is tilted in favor of small, nimble players.

Smaller Species Learn Faster

Evolutionary history demonstrates that change favors the small and nimble species. Times of climatic stability have seen the growth and dominance of a few species. Dinosaurs, those staples of evolutionary discussions, grew and thrived during the Paleozoic era. Few new species emerged, and successful species changed little.

But when the climate changed suddenly around 251 million years BC, probably due to a huge meteor that impacted the earth in the area of the Yucatan peninsula, the dust cloud from the impact rapidly cooled the earth and the dinosaurs could not adapt quickly.

A new type of animal, one with the ability to control its body temperature, emerged. This animal, the ancestor of all mammals, exploded into many rapidly environmental niches. Very quickly many new species of mammals evolved to fill a wide range of ecological niches.

Evolution favoritism stems from one fundamental reason: they adapt faster to new conditions. Evolution gives smaller, species powerful competitive advantages in changing environments:

• Better Focus: Smaller species have fewer contact points with the environment. Therefore they can adapt faster. (Click here for more in-depth information.)
• Faster Testing (Fail fast): With fewer organisms in the species and a smaller overall environmental footprint, each individual organism tests a larger area of the environment. Each test covers more ground.  (Click here for more)
• Faster Learning: Smaller species learn faster because the adaptations (knowledge of the environment) travel faster through the species. Communication lines are shorter.

These three advantages combine to give smaller species one single overwhelming advantage:

They have no choice. The structure of evolution is rigged in their favor in times of significant change.

Axiom of Evolution: Smaller species learn faster.

Do Emerging Companies Learn Faster?

Emerging companies can learn faster than larger companies, but there is one big caveat here.

Smaller species have no central planning, no hierarchical structure of managers, and no CEO to direct their evolution—whereas emerging companies have all three of these handicaps. This is of critical import and worth repeating, the potential major roadblocks to success for emerging companies are:

• Central planning
• Hierarchical structure
• CEO

These three factors do not exist in evolution; however, it is likely that your emerging company has all three. Moreover, you cannot imagine how your company, or any company, can operate without any of them.

Given humanities addiction to these structural handicaps, how can you and your emerging company apply the lessons of evolution to learn faster?

Better Focus: this simply means that there are fewer contact points with the environment. Each contact point creates a little drag, or inertia. Each contact point is one more interest group or constituency that must be considered and consulted before moving forward. Create enough contact points and the drag can stop your company cold.

Witness most governmental organizations, especially the US Congress and state legislatures, which have so many constituencies that they no longer make any progress at all. Loss of focus is such a common problem that it has earned many nicknames – scope creep, bells and whistles, death by committee, Christmas tree.

To help your organization focus, consider following another evolutionary axiom:

Evolutionary Axiom of Survival: A variation must survive immediately, in the next generation.

Use this approach to tighten your focus: Ask this single question of every extra feature or function: Does it improve survival immediately, for the next generation? Evolution does not keep a detailed priority list of ideas for future exploration. It has a brutally simple priority ranking—now or not now.

Test Fast, Fail Fast

As a business manager, your role here is simply to drive rapid generational testing, not to pick winners among the variations proposed. Let your customers do the selection. Your role is to run generations as quickly as possible.

Driving rapid generations in your service development process:

• Software projects: compile a functional module every day. Each compilation must show something functional and something improved over yesterday.
• Other products: drive for some measurable result and some tangible demonstration every day. Use the failures to map the environment.

Build on these failures to point the direction of possible success.

Evolutionary Axioms of Failure: Fail fast. Fail forward.

Learn Fast

Disseminate failures rapidly throughout your organization. Post them on a blog, a wiki, even on the office walls. Drive your teams to learn fast.

Next time we will discuss the other two facets of this issue: How to overcome the human organizational handicap vs. evolution’s attitude of “It’s not personal, it’s just survival.”

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According to Warren Bennis there are 13 differences between leaders and managers. We previously discussed whether the modern workforce can actually be managed without doing both.

Last week we talked about being an original; now let’s look at something that underlies several of the items on Bennis’ list.

Among the 13 things that leaders do are investigate reality, ask what and why, and challenge the status quo. They may sound different, but the same action underlies each one.

The ability to do all three of these means that you do not make assumptions (the ‘A’ in AMS).

What will you find if you start your investigation from the viewpoint that certain parts have more validity than others?

How can you hear all the input when questioning the premise of an action if you are predisposed to hear one thing (or person) above another?

How can you challenge, let alone upset, what currently is if you blindly accept any of its underlying premises?

Typically, assumptions are buried in your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and require a heightened level of self-awareness to recognize them. With effort, it’s possible to build an automatic MAP monitoring system that sends a warning when assumptions start creeping into your actions. Remember, assumptions are insidious, sneaky and often masquerade as common sense/logical thinking.

For instance, you are assuming if you

• evaluate/judge a speaker based on looks, clothes, position, cohorts, even reputation;
• request information, but already have your position roughed out; or
• consider your ideology inviolate and not open to question.

Ridding yourself of assumptions is difficult; in fact, it’s one of the most difficult skills you’ll ever develop, but you can develop it by staying aware of your own thoughts and being brutally honest with yourself.

Assumptions blind you so you cannot see and deafen you so you cannot hear.

Now, repeat after me: “Assumptions are bad!”

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A provocative conversation this weekend on LinkedInBloggers focused on the value of ‘lurkers’ in an online community. Des Walsh discussed it here.

Des cites research by usability guru Jakob Nielsen about a phenomenon he dubbed “participation inequality“.

Essentially it comes down to this

• 90% of users are lurkers
• 9% of users contribute from time to time
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions

I believe this rule translates closely in the real world.

Teams in the workplace, volunteer organizations, classrooms, politics, even families demonstrate similar participation rates.

The question for you as a manager is whether this natural breakdown is detrimental to the creativity and productivity of your group and, if so, what can you do about it.

I hope you’ll leave your thoughts on this and I’ll share mine on Thursday.

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It seems that every time the leader of a corporation-in-trouble replies to the question, “What happened…?” the answer is that a ‘perfect storm’ of factors caused the problems.

Steven Pearlstein offers some great comments on this attitude, but it was what he said near the end that really resonated with me.

“What capsized the economy was not a perfect storm but a widespread failure of business leadership — a failure that is only compounded when executives refuse to take responsibility for their misjudgments and apologize.”

Accountability and remorse.

We demand these from our kids when they screw up and our mates if they cheat, but we seem willing to accept “reasons” from our corporate leaders.

Over the years we watched corporate leaders in Japan and Korea apologize publicly, heads bowed, for their actions and then resign in shame. Many of us considered it a quaint action stemming from a culture far different than ours. Some found it amusing and a few thought it was faked.

But think about it, how many of the executives you saw apologizing for the problems they caused have surfaced as head of another major corporation or in other leadership roles. In the US they land on their feet before the dust settles.

In the startup world failure is considered a badge of success, but only if the person has learned from it.

You can’t learn from something if you don’t recognize and admit your responsibility and feel remorse for mistakes that were avoidable.

A truly perfect storm would come without any warning and that probably doesn’t happen even once a century.

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See all mY generation posts here.

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Change is a fact of life—and of death; it’s also evident in non-living objects. You might say that change is the only true constant (I’m pretty sure that’s not original.)

Globally, we are in a time of change. As an individual you have a choice.

You can change to meet the situation head-on or you can pussyfoot around hoping things will improve before you’re forced to change.

Hopefully these quotes will help you make up your mind—correctly.

“When you are through changing, you are through.” –Percy Barnevik (That’s why I said ‘correctly’.)

“Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.” –James Baldwin (Hot drinks are good for shock.)

“When the wind of change blows, some build walls, others build windmills.” –Anonymous (I much prefer windmills, what about you?)

And one more…

“It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel, but it makes perfect sense to keep reinventing yourself.” –Miki Saxon (Not bad, sometimes I surprise even myself.)

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Year’s end is drawing closer, southeast Washington State is facing its first Artic storm in several years, it’s late and I’m feeling silly.

So I dug into my digital clippings and found some fun stuff that made me smile and thought it would be good to share it with you.

• OK, OK, I’ll include one that has corporate culture relevance—at least to those bosses who can see past their short-term nose and embrace productivity-raisers that aren’t mainstream—such as napping.

• Hmm, I suppose I can actually justify including this one in the name of innovation. Anyone who has watched Unwrapped on the Food Channel knows how fascinating it is to see how different foods are made. But did you ever stop to wonder how many of the foods you love were invented accidentally as opposed to on purpose?

But the next two are strictly in the name of whimsy, silliness, and off the wall weirdness.

• From my old stamping grounds comes weird news at SFGate.com, the website of the San Francisco Chronicle. It offers up links to all kinds of strange, often funny, news items. The original post I read was dated February 16, 2007, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to access, so enjoy the current ones.

• Finally, a link to The Darwin Awards, one of my all time favorite sites, along with information on it from About.com. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the awards, here’s a brief overview (paraphrased).

“A chronicle dedicated to individuals who have given their all in an effort to improve our gene pool by making the ultimate sacrifice of killing themselves by the most extraordinarily stupid means.”

Great for a laugh and especially great for the ego when you think that you’ve done something stupid; read a few of the posted winners and no matter what you’ve done it will shrink to manageable levels.

That’s it for another Saturday. There’s enough here to keep you warm with laughter no matter what your weather is today.

Image credit: flickr

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There’s a ton of stuff on the Net about leadership, not to mention miles of books, hours of podcasts and days of videos. And a lot of it is very good stuff, even when its focus is on the people out front—or those who want to be.

So how does that fit in with my constant harping that leadership isn’t positional and the skills are for everybody?

Simple; just sort through the skills and intelligence offered, tweak it as needed and apply it to all parts of your life.

With all that’s available, where do you start?

I thought today I’d offer up links to new, or slightly off the typical search path, material. These links take you to massive learning resources. I hope you’ll come back and let me know if you find them useful.

Have you ever wished that you could go back to school? Have the luxury to take course with professors at a top university?

Few working people can do that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from the best. Check out these links; find more at almost every university’s site.

• Harvard Business School Leadership Initiative offering various books and case studies (affordably priced), videos and links to faculty blogs and articles;
• Business Week’s Small Business Leadership with articles about and interviews with people in the trenches;
• MIT Leadership Center and the Sloan Management Review, with videos by both faculty and business leaders; and most amazing of al
• MIT Open Courseware that offers lecture notes, exams, and videos of all MIT courses totally free. It may not count for credit, but you certainly can improve your skills and knowledge in countless ways!

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Few managers procrastinate or they wouldn’t get where they are, but there is one area where many break this cardinal rule.

I’m talking about managers’ propensity for not paying attention when they should.

You know, those little, odd bits in the workplace that go unnoticed or ignored.

If you continue to ignore them they’ll grow until you’re forced to notice them, but by that time you’re usually facing at least a small hill.

Ignoring the hill, as I’ve known managers to do, will encourage it to grow, sometimes exponentially, until it’s the metaphoric size of Mt. St. Helen, with the same potential to blow its top.

Besides giving you a giant headache, those oversized odd bits will assure you of low productivity, high turnover and abysmal annual reviews, which practically guarantee you lower income and diminished prospects.

One of the best ways to avoid odd bit growth is by practicing management by walking around with your eyes and ears wide open and your mind in sponge mode absorbing everything.

Deal with things as they come up and the results will be the opposite of the list above.

As always, it’s your choice.

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When Idris Jala was hired as CEO of a failing state-owned airline he had exactly three and-a-half months operating cash in which to turn it around—no bail out, no other options.

He succeeded well beyond expectations with a combination of laser focus on the P&L statement and his own view of leadership. Here are some of the more intriguing thoughts from a McKinsey interview with him.

Jala is one of the most pragmatic CEOs in action today.

“At a board meeting on my first day, I announced our business-turnaround blueprint. I’d never worked a single day at an airline before, but looking at the P&L it didn’t take more than an hour to figure out the solution. If you have to control costs, you just go and cut the costs. If your network’s inefficient, get rid of the routes that are bleeding cash. And if you have a problem with low yield, fix the yield. What else are you going to say?”

What else, indeed? But in an era of exotic plans and visions, focus on something as basic as P&L is as refreshing as it is unusual.

Jala also had an interesting view of leadership.

“If the leader doesn’t believe in the journey, then it cannot begin.”

I find that profound because so often I hear corporate leaders add a multitude of caveats to what they plan; explaining ahead of time all the reasons why success may not happen and if they don’t truly believe why should anyone else?

“The single biggest thing a leader brings to a turnaround is hope.”

Not fear and trepidation, but a real belief that the company can be saved through hard work. One of the ways that Jala accomplished this was through his total transparency.

“Publishing helped us build a winning coalition not only with the government but also with other stakeholders, like the unions, the staff, and the public. Being upfront about the P&L and making it all transparent were very important to bringing the coalition together.”

I know this sounds cynical, but not in my wildest dreams can I picture your typical corporate chieftain doing this. Maybe I’m naïve, but this kind of transparency requires the guy-in-charge to open himself to all kinds of input and criticism. The mind boggles at the thought of Robert Nardelli (Chrysler) or Rick Waggoner (GM) doing anything similar.

“But once results begin to appear and new leaders begin to learn, you must be ready to let go and empower them…The corporate graveyard is full of people who thought they were indispensable.”

Jala has a good handle on this powerful leadership attitude that too often does not see the light of day.

Idris Jala’s 5 + 1 Embedded Principles of Change

1. The game of the impossible;
2. anchoring everything on the P&L;
3. building a winning coalition;
4. discipline of action; and
5. situational leadership.

And the additional one…

“The final principle is a subject people don’t talk about in the corporate world: divine intervention. More than 50 percent of what happens to you in life, and in my case probably more than 60 percent, is outside your control. It is important for everyone in an organization, particularly the top leaders, to understand that. I can’t, for example, control oil prices, SARS, or other things like that.”

Rigorous practice of the first five balance the last one.

Join me tomorrow and explore a new Saturday feature here at Leadership Turn.

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