I managed over 12,000 people at Groupon, most under the age of 25. One thing that surprised me was that many would arrive at orientation with minimal understanding of basic business wisdom. “Haven’t you read any business books? Good to Great? Winning? The One Minute Manager?” I’d ask. “Business books? Not really our thing,” was the typical response. I came to realize that there was a real need to present business wisdom in a format that is more accessible to the younger generation. Andrew Mason

While “most under the age of 25. (…) arrive at orientation with minimal understanding of basic business wisdom”  surprised ousted Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, it probably doesn’t surprise most seasoned managers.

Managers have always assumed there was a general business learning curve when hiring new grads, but what has changed is how steep it’s become.

One exasperated manager described it as “remedial orientation”—from showing up on time every day looking presentable, being ready to work and paying attention during meetings to not wearing an iPod/checking Facebook/playing Angry Birds in front of customers—much of what used to come under the heading of ‘common courtesy’ and ‘basic living skills’.

Mason’s solution is recording a “seven-song album of motivational business music.”

Reading business books has never been high on the list of most 22-year-olds, so what has changed?

My own view is that most of the time the need for remedial orientation can be traced back to parents and how they chose to raise their kids.

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There are many ways of taking a career risk besides making over-the-top bets for a financial business or starting a company.

Risk may be easier to spot these days, because decisions are no longer personal; more often they are crowdsourced, whether that means your spouse, close friends or 500 LinkedIn/Twitter/Facebook connections.

While spotting risk may be easier, evaluating that risk is much harder, because determining whether a risk is worth taking can’t be crowdsourced.

The best way to decide whether to take a risk or not is through worst case analysis, i.e., think about the absolute worst thing that could happen if you do it. Then think through whether and how you would deal with that result. If you can handle the worst result you go forward; if it’s too much you go back to the planning board.

It used to work every time, but these days fewer and fewer people are willing to think independently, so the input you get is unconsciously based on whether that person could handle the worst case result.

But they aren’t you.

Consider Beth Comstock, currently senior vice president and chief marketing officer at General Electric, who took a major risk that put her on the path to where she is today.

“I was at CBS, and it was rocking,” she said. Then she got a call from NBC, her former boss, offering her a position that involved being responsible for media relations and marketing in the news division. “I think the job had been available for a year. News was not doing well anywhere…. People were saying, ‘Why are you doing this?’ It seemed like career suicide.”

The ability to perform worst case analysis clearly, sans rationalizations, means you need to take time to accurately know yourself—not just the self you project to others.

Only you live inside your head and only you knows what really goes on there.

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A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Wally Bock, who provides some of the best and most pragmatic content available on being a boss, shared the story of Ron.

I’ve known many Ron-s in my time, both male and female, and the managers who hired them—hired them even when they knew better.

They ignored the red flags and rationalized away any information or signals that contradicted their desire to have the Ron on their team

Often the Ron came in as a star; the person who could save the project/product or bailout the team.

But stars can turn into shooting stars, since their reputation and achievements are often a product of their skill at managing up.

How many Ron’s have you hired?

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Are you a ‘me too’ entrepreneur?

Do you dream about creating the next Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?

Throughout history there have always been too many products replicating or providing only slight improvements over what is already available.

The paraphrasing of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s comments into “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door” is probably what made it the “most frequently invented device in U.S. history,” with 4,400 patents and thousands more that weren’t approved.

Much of social media and apps are the Twenty-first Century’s version of that mousetrap.

Who should you look to for inspiration?

Maybe Steve Jobs; while he didn’t invent; he took what was there (like MP3) and added amazing design to build his better mousetraps.

Or Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors/innovators of all time, “I find out what the world needs; then I proceed to invent.”

He also provided the quintessential definition of value when he said, “The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”

So if you believe your product meets the first criteria test it on the real world to be sure it’s in sync with the second.

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The first major study of tiger moms is out. The kids have worse grades, and they are more depressed and more alienated from their parents. –Slate, May 8, 2013

Did you ever notice that most of today’s research on parenting equates closely with today’s research on managing and, given the difference in situations, results in almost identical outcomes?

When I first read about “tiger moms” I found the actions, such as shaming, very much akin to some of the worst management practices I’ve seen.

Like the negative effects of helicoptering mentioned yesterday, tiger bosses should expect the same negative results from those they manage that new research has proven results from tiger parents.

Children of parents whom Kim classified as “tiger” had lower academic achievement and attainment—and greater psychological maladjustment—and family alienation, than the kids of parents characterized as “supportive” or “easygoing.”

OF course, this comes as no surprise to anyone who works/worked for a tiger boss.

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Helicopter parents are a serious problem that cripples kids and doesn’t seem to end when they enter the workforce; plus it can have a detrimental effect on good managers.

The helicopter mindset is spreading, so that people who are inclined that way are also hovering over spouses, friends and colleagues in the name of helping.

New research shows that it isn’t a good thing.

It seems that certain forms of help can dilute recipients’ sense of accountability for their own success.

When managers helicopter most people feel it’s a form of micromanaging, but when the source is a parent, spouse, friend or colleague people are more open to it.

Unfortunately, the results are the same.

People end up with less confidence in their abilities, take less responsibility for their own actions and question their own competence more.

How do you help without either helicoptering or micromanaging?

The answer, research suggests, is that our help has to be responsive to the recipient’s circumstances: it must balance their need for support with their need for competence. We should restrain our urge to help unless the recipient truly needs it, and even then, we should calibrate it to complement rather than substitute for the recipient’s efforts.

Which, in turn, means shutting up and really listening to your child/spouse/friend/colleague to determine the minimum of what is really needed.

Finally, it takes enough self-discipline to allow them to fail and then pick themselves up.

That’s how everyone learns and grows.

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Interviewing is a lot like dating; each party provides (positive, upbeat, biased) information to the other and on the basis of that they decide to meet.

They meet, they talk and sometimes they connect.

When that happens one asks “will you…” and the other says “yes.”

And they head off to change the world—or at least their little corner of it.

They say that men fall in love with their eyes and women with their ears.

Using the term ‘love’ loosely, one might say that managers, no matter their gender, fall with both—first with their eyes and then confirmed with their ears.

Unfortunately, their divorce rate usually runs far above the 50% divorce rate for real marriages.

A study decades ago showed that positive hiring decisions were made in the first 20 seconds of meeting and rationalized over the hours spent interviewing thereafter.

That explains a lot about the high turnover that plagues many managers.

The take away here is that if you’re looking to build a winning team (or for a life partner) keep a wary eye out for chemistry and charm.

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A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Last week I wrote about the power found in vulnerability, today I have a different question for you.

What do you do when you screw up?

Do you

1. grin, bear and ignore;
2. rationalize;
3. deny; or
4. apologize.

The creed of authenticity demands you choose ‘d’, but in practice many founders are more likely to choose ‘a, ‘b’ or ‘c’.

Netflix’s Reed Hastings chose ‘d’ and did it with candor, solid information, no punches pulled or rationalizations and in a very public way.

“I messed up,” Mr. Hastings wrote in an unusually forthright September 2011 blog post. (…) In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success. (…) I wasn’t naïve enough to think most customers care if the C.E.O. apologizes, but I thought it was honest and appropriate.”

He made three other good points that are worth remembering

• “Don’t get distracted by the shiny object,” he said. And if a crisis comes, “execute on the fundamentals.”
• “…we don’t manage for the stock price.”
• “Executing better on the core mission is the way to win.”

Most importantly, he doesn’t see himself or Netflix as infallible and admits that another wrong turn could kill them.

There are a lot of founders who should take heed of his attitude and his words.

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The traditional sources of seed funding are savings, credit cards and friends/family; now crowdfunding has been added to the list.

Recently I suggested Kickstarter to a founder, but he rejected it out-of-hand.

I was surprised, because both his idea and funding requirements seemed made for that solution.

But it was his reason for dismissing it that really blew me away; he believed it wasn’t a “professional solution” and would diminish the success/value/ of his company.

His attitude was even more surprising, since he is in his mid-twenties. I asked him why he felt that way and he said he frequently turned to more experienced people when considering business decisions, especially financial.

He said there were several financial executives among this group and that is who he queried. All held or had held senior financial positions in Fortune 500 companies and they agreed that having crowdfunding in the company’s history might make it difficult to go IPO. An additional two, who are lawyers, warned him that the law hadn’t caught up with the world and that crowdfunding might blur ownership in the event of an acquisition.

Listening to him, Monday’s post about the embrace of peer pressure to the point that opinions on everything are open to review and need to match what is considered “correct” as dictated by social media took on a whole new meaning and pointed out a glaring problem.

To which crowd do you listen?

Flickr image credit: Cambodia4kids.org Beth Kanter

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Warning: today’s post probably won’t help you manage your group, work better or improve culture, but it is so darn cool I had to share.

It’s also a glimpse of the future.

It’s real innovation—the kind that actually has the potential to change the world—unlike the inane kind, such as Google Glass.

IBM research just released an adorable stop-motion movie, “A Boy And His Atom,” by moving individual atoms around and imaging them. (…)This breakthrough “has the potential to make our computers and devices smaller and more powerful, but also holds enormous implications for the way entire industries operate,”

Plus, you can see how the movie was made.

Kind of blows your mind, doesn’t it?

YouTube credit: IBM

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