Three slightly odd, but very valuable, views of the business world today.
For a lot of managers it’s that time of year again, the time of mid-year reviews. A lots been written on reviews, but I found the interview with Will Wright, developer of The Sims, Spore, etc., brought out a very new point. Wright says, “The really important motivational stuff is more in their [employees] secret identity.” This isn’t just true about ‘creatives’, but about every employee.
I have a stack of books to read, many of them the result of a review I read. I usually hold off recommending them, but this one looks too good to put on hold. It’s Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and it looks like a great read—even vacation fare.
Quick. What sort of business would the entrepreneurial daughter of Ralph Lauren start? Something in fashion? A new publication? How about a candy company? Yup. Dylan Lauren sees “…a row of Polo Ralph Lauren cashmere sweaters or colored shirts…as food or candy.” Sweet.
I have only one item for you today, but it’s a real goody.
Meet Robert L. Joss, Business School Dean at Stanford University.
On his first day he saw his position as Dean was in the bottom position of the unofficial org chart and a legend underneath that said, “And everything runs downhill.”
Over nearly an hour, Joss discusses Leadership Is Responsibility, Not Power.
It’s well worth your time. And if you want great take-away quotes, click here.
I have a great idea to make the world a better place.
Everybody who aspires to the cult of all-knowing leader stops.
Everybody who longs for an all-knowing leader embraces the reality that no such thing exists. (Jim Stroup has an excellent discussion on this that started June 8 at Managing Leadership. I highly recommend it.)
Replacing these, everybody would
learn leadership skills;
apply them constantly to themselves; and
occasionally in the outside world as circumstances dictated;
take responsibility for their own actions and decisions; and
partner with others as equals, whether one was in front or behind at any given time.
Not that I think there’s a chance in hell that this will happen, but it’s a nice thought on a beautiful summer Friday.
You will recall that the shifty moneylender had put two black pebbles in the bag.
The girl put her hand into the moneybag and drew out a pebble. Without looking at it, she fumbled and let it fall onto the pebble-strewn path where it immediately became lost among all the other pebbles.
‘Oh, how clumsy of me,’ she said. ‘But never mind, if you look into the bag for the one that is left, you will be able to tell which pebble I picked.’
Since the remaining pebble is black, it must be assumed that she had picked the white one. And since the money-lender dared not admit his dishonesty out of fear, the girl changed what seemed an impossible situation into an extremely advantageous one.
I like this story because it is a simple illustration of the difficulty of so-called thinking outside the box, but why is that?
Starting as young children we are praised for coloring inside the lines and praise for coloring inside the lines continues as we grow.
The lines we stay inside my not be apparent to an onlooker, but they are obvious to our chosen world. Fashion is a great example, the Goth look that is seen as so outside-the-box by many is framed with as many rules and lines as is any mainstream look.
Fred H Schlegel had a nice suggestion, but it depended on changing the basic nature of the villain and when looking for out-of-the-box solutions we rarely can change people’s basic nature.
Becky Robinson came closest; she was honest and said that she had seen a similar problem previously. But in her synthesizing Becky allowed the crook to take the active role, assuming he would act ethically to maintain his honor, but if he had honor he wouldn’t have cheated in the first place.
Did Becky win? You decide in comments.
Creativity requires us to step away from many of our own basic assumptions as well as going outside the lines dictated by our world.
Doing this is how we enlarge our box to encompass the universe. (My apologies, I just found that this link didn’t work last week.)
It takes effort and lots of practice, but the rewards more than justify the work.
I’m old enough to remember when maturity was something to strive for; when living with your parents post 18 made you a loser; when being cool also meant being independent and paying for your own place was a badge of honor.
In other words, people are “coming of age” far later in life than ever before.
Maybe this isn’t surprising, since people aren’t aging the way they did.
In books and films from the forties and before, even into the fifties, people in their fifties and sixties were described or portrayed as elderly, while those in their seventies and up were considered ancient—tell that to a Boomer if you want to die young.
But is it really necessary to delay growing up just because people are staying young longer?
Does staying young really require immaturity?
Has ‘adult’ become a dirty word synonymous with out-of-date, out-of-touch, unable to grow and change?
If so, we are in deep doo-doo.
Obviously, there are millions of responsible twenty and thirty-year-olds who are building careers and relationships and families.
But there are millions more who are still living at home; hanging out and who have no real concept of responsibility.
Then there are those who look great on the surface, but thwart them, throw a few obstacles their way, or scratch them with a real conversation and the immaturity oozes out.
If this keeps up the 2025 remake of “The 40 Year Old Virgin” will be “The 50Year Old Virgin” or maybe 55.
Yes, it’s another post about my favorite company. Why do I write so much about Zappos?
Because, according to CEO Tony Hsieh, “Our No. 1 priority is the company culture. Our whole belief is that if we get the culture right, then everything else, including the customer service, will fall into place.”
Zappos embodies everything I believe about culture being the bedrock of corporate success.
Not bad for a dot com startup that was given exactly one week’s worth of additional funds in which to turn itself around or be shut down.
But heaping more kudos on CEO Tony Hsieh isn’t the purpose of this post. Rather, I’d like your opinion of why cultures such as this are so rare.
Hsieh is a Gen Xer running a truly multi-generational company (I confirmed this by calling and chatting with a customre support person, not HR or an official source, just a worker) that hires based on cultural fit and skills—they carry equal weight.
The focus on culture is one reason that Zappos doesn’t have the generational management problems besetting so many companies.
The Zappos culture is a long way from rocket science and Hsieh isn’t shy about explaining how to duplicate it, so you tell me.
In response—mostly—to the financial crisis, the US government has taken so many actions that the list is almost too long to chronicle here. To pick a few…
The government has picked survivors in the banking industry.
The government has picked survivors in the auto industry.
The government has picked executives in many companies.
The government has set compensation levels in many industries.
And the government’s intrusion into previously private enterprise sectors has only just begun.
Of course private enterprise has never been a model of virtue and discretion. But, just because private enterprise has executed a series of excesses, is it reasonable to assume that federal regulation will produce unalloyed goodness?
If executives in private enterprise cannot foretell catastrophes ahead, is it reasonable to assume that those same executives, when working on behalf of the federal government, will have better foresight?
Massive Actions, Unintended Consequences
The economy is in uncharted territory. This is the first major crisis of the integrated, global economy. It simply has too many moving parts for any individual or organization to identify all the inter-relationships, much less to forecast the results of all those interconnections. The chart below makes the point exquisitely.
Historically the money supply has grown by 2-7% annually, with spikes prior to Y2K and following 9/11. In the past nine months, the Fed has increased the money supply by over 100%, almost ten times greater than the largest previous increase, during Y2K. The Fed might argue that this increase was needed to offset the loss of a comparable amount of bank lending, when credit dried up in the past year.
But how and when does the Fed unwind this massive increase? What are the long-range consequences of this action?
At the moment, no one can guess. However, we can be certain that many of the consequences will be significant, unforeseen, and unintended.
Transparency – The Only Cure for Unintended Consequences.
The Federal government now controls almost 25% of all domestic economic activity, not to mention 100% of the money supply. We need much more transparency, particularly with government sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Recently our culture has cheapened transparency to the cliché “full disclosure…” after which the author lists some relationship, often trivial.
The US government pumped over $170 billion into AIG late last year, to prevent its collapse. This expense received very little exposure, either from the press or by the Treasury Dept. execs who made the “investment.” Where did this $170 billion go? Why was this expense necessary?
Neither elected congress people nor Presidential staff exhibited any curiosity or outrage over this “investment.” However, when AIG paid out $165 million in bonuses—only 1/1000 of the amount the Treasury Dept. had spent a few months earlier—elected officials went into hysterics. Selective transparency is no transparency at all.
“Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant.” –Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
Meaningful transparency can have considerable impact. Witness the recent publishing of the expense accounts of British Members of Parliament.
In the US, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulates campaign contributions. Of course every politician running for office has thoroughly computerized records of donors and amounts and the FEC requires that every candidate report all donations to the FEC. That information might be interesting to voters making voting decisions. But candidates provide those reports to the FEC in thick, printed volumes, specifically to delay the FEC in compiling the results. As a result the FEC finally publishes the donation reports months after the elections are done.
Follow the Money—Post Everything on the Internet
With the expansion of the government into finance, autos, energy, and insurance, as well as health care, public disclosure is critical if our economy is to respond positively. Encourage your elected representatives to post budgets, and expenses on the internet.
Are you looking for a good way to make your company or group more innovative? To move it from where it is to where you want it to be?
A good place to start is by encouraging your people to question the fundamentals (QF) of the company.
QF is one of the best ways to overcome the “…but we’ve always done it that way” school of thought and foes a long way to overturning “not invented here” syndrome; both are major stumbling blocks to innovation, productivity, retention and a host of other positives moves.
QF also goes a long way to attracting Millennials and other creative types, because there are no sacred cows—everything is open to improvement and change.
However, making an announcement isn’t going to do it.
Start by identifying your company’s fundamentals, not so much the official ones (although they can also be problematic) as the unwritten/unspoken ones your employees deal with every day.
It’s easy to find them, just ask—but ask knowing that you may not like the answers. (One client found that, contrary to its stated policy, their people believed that quality wasn’t as important as shoving the product out the door.)
Depending on your current culture the identification process can be anything from a public brainstorming session with a whiteboard to some kind of “suggestion box” that’s truly anonymous.
You may be very surprised at some of the perceptions that turn up.
Once you start on a list of fundamentals you want to open them up to debate—the more passionate the better—using a combination of technology (forum, wiki, etc.) and in person discussions. The object being to decide whether to modify/jettison/keep each one, as well as what to add.
Unless your MAP dictates a company that functions in Dilbertland, this is an ongoing, proactive management task to encourage employees to question, rethink, revamp or even dump the company’s fundamentals.
Even when QF is deeply embedded in your culture you can’t assume your people will keep doing it and new people coming from other cultures will need assurance that QF is indeed part of your company’s DNA.
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,
For a lot of managers it’s that time of year again, the time of mid-year reviews. A lots been written on reviews, but I found the interview with Will Wright, developer of The Sims, Spore, etc., brought out a very new point. Wright says, “The really important motivational stuff is more in their [employees] secret identity.” This isn’t just true about ‘creatives’, but about every employee.
Meet Robert L. Joss, Business School Dean at Stanford University.
Without looking at it, she fumbled and let it fall onto the pebble-strewn path where it immediately became lost among all the other pebbles.
A good place to start is by encouraging your people to question the fundamentals (QF) of the company.
