If you read any of the hundreds of how-to books written about good people management and leadership, you’ll find great similarities among them. So, what happens during implementation? Why can the de facto difference between managers be so enormous?
The answer goes back to one of two basic beliefs that are formed and held long before a person becomes a manager.
People are intelligent, motivated, and really care about helping their company achieve its objectives.
People are stupid, don’t care, and will screw up if you don’t watch them every minute. Variations of A are discussed, lauded, and underlay most “good” management practices. Variations of B are rarely admitted, infrequently discussed, and can be largely unconscious.
Think of it as a scale
A
B
10_____________________0_____________________ 10
Do managers on the B side of the scale always fail while those on the A side are guaranteed success? Unfortunately no.
What does this mean to you? If you’re a current or future manager, you need to be aware of where you are on the scale and then decide if that’s where you want to be—information that is nobody elses business.
If you like where you are, do nothing, you’re all set.
But if you decide to alter your location on the scale, remember that change rarely happens when undertaken as a result of what “they” say, so be sure that it’s you who wants to change.
One item today, because it has several parts, all revolving around a new, way outside-the-box book.
I’m referring to Jeff Jarvis’ just-released What Would Google Do?, exploring how to apply the lessons of Google to other industries and companies.
Jarvis teaches at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism; his blog is BuzzMachine.
Business Week published an excerpt describing how a car company run by Google might function and why the auto industry would be resistant to the approach. Be sure to read through the comments, they’re as interesting as the article.
I like the Management Tip Sheet; here are the headings, but the real value is in the details, so be sure to click the link.
Manage Abundance, Not Scarcity
Make Mistakes Well
Give Up Control
Get Out Of The Way
Low Prices Are Good (Free Is Better)
Don’t Be Evil (Contrary to popular opinion the phrase has an internal focus, not external.)
Finally, here’s a video of Jarvis talking about his ideas; there are several other interviews that offer different slants and information.
Just to be clear, this isn’t a book recommendation. I think there are good lessons to learn from Google, but there are good lessons to learn from most truly innovative companies.
I know of none that can be applied straight across the board or are one-size-fits-all.
But all the companies that still believe “if we make it they will buy” are in for a very rude awakening when the economy turns around—as it will.
I have very smart readers from all over the world. That means a variety of cultures, experiences, politics, attitudes and ages that provide a wide range of MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).
I’d like to take advantage of that diversity to ask some questions.
I ask them because either I haven’t heard ideas that strike me as solving anything or because I haven’t seen them directly addressed. I honestly want a range of answers, not necessarily ones with which I agree, but a stimulating conversation! To that end I’m offering only the questions, no commentary or opinion.
I hope you’ll treat this post as a conversation among friends, perhaps over a good bottle of wine on a Friday afternoon.
Please add your own queries, whether you want to respond to mine or not.
If it turns out you like this feature we can do others in the future.
Relatively speaking, how global is the sense of entitlement so visible in certain areas today?
Can people at any level in an organization drive real cultural change if it goes against the “leader’s” MAP?
How large a role does ideology play in the business world?
There’s nothing like something free to add an incentive, beyond the bottle of cyber wine, to a good conversation, so I’m going to give away a copy of Divide or Conquer: How Great Teams Turn Conflict Into Strength by Diana McLain Smith to one lucky participant—no matter where you live.
Conversations involve lots of give and take, back and forth, therefore every comment posted will be assigned a number. At midnight February 28, I’ll enter the total numbers into Random.org and announce the winner on this post. So the more you add to the conversation the more chances you have to win. How cool is that?
Would you like to work for a company where the 401K matching on 5% of salary is as much as 11%? Where you can become a manager earning $62,000 plus bonus and company car with no college degree, no Union, no trade—nothing but hard work.
Of course, you’ll have to put up with snickers and even scorn if you mention your job in public.
All of that is what’s available to the 6,700 managers at company-owned McDonald’s restaurants.
“While an average McDonald’s grosses $2.2 million a year, seasoned managers who motivate employees and keep customers coming back can add more than $200,000 to that total.“Restaurant managers are in the most important position in our company,” says Richard Floersch, McDonald’s chief human resources officer.”
Moreover, with corporate culture being recognized as the moving force behind corporate performance, why is it that articles about changing culture in major corporations employing mostly skilled, well-paid workers, such as IBM, are met with serious discussion, while changing it in major corporations with mostly minimum wage earners, such as McDonalds, is marked down as hype?
Why was a cultural change at IBM seen as key to the company’s survival, but instilling pride in the workers at McDonalds, Taco Bell and KFC is viewed as hype, “Raising spirits is cheaper than raising salaries.”
Why do we expect young people to take pride in their first ‘real’ job, or care about the customer, when they were laughed at for the same attitudes/actions in their minimum wage job?
Why does our society denigrate those who work low-paying jobs, when they are honest, hardworking, raise families and even pay taxes, which is more than you can say for their wealthier counterparts?
In the same vein, why is the four-year grad, with a degree paid for by mom and dad, considered a better candidate than the one who took longer working ‘non-professional’ jobs to pay for the same degree from the same school?
Maybe companies need to wake up. No matter what their family’s economic status, I haven’t seen the same high sense of entitlement in kids who spent their summers working in average and minimum wage jobs as I have in the ones who worked frequently overpaid jobs for their parents or didn’t work at all.
In 1979, the first spreadsheet software was introduced, Sony rolled out the Walkman, ESPN began broadcasting sporting events to cable TV companies, and on public television, Nightly Business Report made its debut. To celebrate their three decades on the air, PBS’ Nightly Business Report has teamed up with Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, to select the 30 most important innovations from the last 30 years.
The full list will be announced on Nightly Business Report, in a special half hour program, next Monday, February 16, 2009.
The criteria upon which the innovations were judged:
1. Did it have a direct and/or material effect on quality of life?
2. Did it address a compelling need? Did it solve a compelling problem?
3. Was it a fresh, new breakthrough? Was there a “WOW” factor?
4. Did it change the way business is conducted?
5. Did it increase the efficiency of how resources are used?
6. Did it spark an ongoing stream of new innovations on top of the original innovation?
7. Did it lead to the creation of a vast, new industry?
For more information, or to speak with a Nightly Business Report representative, please contact Mark Ballard at 212-255-8455 or mark@rosengrouppr.com.
Last week I wrote about both the need and approaches for management to communicate bad news openly and honestly. Wes Ball commented on the need to keep employees involved, which is what I was planning to talk about today.
The language of employee involvement keeps changing, so if you want to do more research, “engage,” in its many forms, seems to be the term of choice for now.
There are five basic rules that must be followed when your focus is to create, enhance or increase engagement.
Rule One: Engagement is based on trust. If employees don’t trust their management then management can forget about engaging its employees.
Rule Two: Engagement requires involvement. Asking for employee input after the decision(s) are already made is a con and breaks trust.
Rule Three: Engagement is based on fairness. Treating a select minority as royalty and the rest like replaceable dirt disengages everyone (including the royalty) and breaks trust.
Rule Four: Engagement requires management to make its decisions first for the sake of the company, second for the sake of the group and third for the sake of themselves. Done in any other order break trust.
Rule Five: Engagement requires courage, authenticity and genuineness (see Notes). Any form of lie/cheat/steal/trash breaks trust.
And while Rule One is the primary rule it is also the corollary of the other four.
No matter how well taught, implementing the mechanics of engagement can proceed no further than your belief in, and adherence to, the five rules.
If your MAP acknowledges a need to break the rules don’t waste your time on engagement efforts, because they are doomed to fail. That energy would be better used on recruitment, since your attrition rate will be far higher than any layoff could account for.
How much longer do you think it will take corporate Earth to get off their terrified, or comfortable, collective asses and embrace a real, live, authentic, proven solution to most of their problems?
“But businesses bold enough to develop a forward-looking, risk-taking corporate culture and brave enough to cannibalise existing successful products, in order to commercialise radically new ones, are more likely to dominate world markets and increase the competitiveness of their national economies.”
Bold and forward-looking, aren’t those the traits that every over-paid CEO on the planet claims to be their expertise along with how they will ‘lead’ their company into a bright new world…blah, blah, blah.
Are you as tired of hearing them as I am? They talk and talk…and talk.
Or they’re replaced by an impatient Board running from Wall Street’s demand for short-term profits.
Prabhu, along with a host of other experts, says his research shows that “Innovative companies appear to have a similar corporate culture, wherever they may be located in the world.”
“We have identified three specific attitudes and three practices within innovative firms that make them special and drive radical innovation. These are
risk tolerance,
a willingness to cannibalise existing products,
future market orientation,
empowering product champions,
fostering internal competition and
providing incentives for enterprise.”
Attention Wall Street, this stuff is not implemented overnight—or in a quarter.
Whoa. Do you think it’s possible that the silver lining in the current mess that was started and facilitated by Wall Street denizens might be a return to long(er) term thinking?
That CEOs will get canned for embracing quarterly numbers a la Jack Welch in place of radical innovation.
That investors will actually take Warren Buffet’s philosophy to heart and quit putting their faith in hedge funds, day trading and fast profits?
The list of basic cultural IBBs prompted a phone call from a reader asking for more information on the dual career ladder. When we were done, he suggested that I put that information on the blog this week. Who am I to argue with a reader?
I’m not an historian, but I think that the need for the ladder was seen first in the technical world at least 40 years ago and although they may not have been the first, IBM and the original Bell Labs were two of the highest profile early adopters.
People work to improve their situation, but companies need only so many managers and only so many people want to manage. This is especially true in tech companies where many people are ill-suited to management roles, yet that was the only road to a raise.
So the two driving facts behind the dual ladder were
a limited number of management positions—the number is still shrinking as corporate structures keep flattening; and
recognition that not everyone is suited to management.
Enter the Dual Career Ladder; it’s simple, logical and most easily explained with this graphic
IBM Called their highest level Sr. Fellow, Bell Labs used Principal Engineer. Both positions were more than just an honor for which people strove, since they carried with them the same compensation and status as a director or vice president.
My caller asked why the model wasn’t in wider use if it was so effective.
That’s easy, ego and culture.
Accepting, for example, that a software architect is of equal value to the company as a vice president and should be compensated accordingly is hard to swallow. Few executives are comfortable with the idea that people who do hands-on work are as valuable to the organization as they are. This plays out at every level of management from team leader up.
And it’s not just in tech that this happens. I still remember when the top salesman in a certain industry had his commissioned cut because he had sold so much product that his earnings were more than the company president’s salary. That was deemed “unseemly” and so the decision to cut his commission. His reaction was what you would expect and he gave his notice less than a week later.
Because of that ego, the ladder needs to be deeply embedded in the company’s culture so it can be implemented fairly and evenly throughout the organization.
Another day, another leadership book. I sometimes wonder how far around the earth they would stretch if laid end to end. Most have viable lessons, useable by everyone, not just the person running the show.
Many of the attitudes, actions and lessons learned and offered are similar, but each seeks a teaching mechanism that will catch and hold your interest.
Not an easy task in a time of information abundance.
Chris Warner and Don Schmincke manage to do it in High Altitude Leadership.
It’s not that their leadership guidance is new, but the presentation is riveting.
I like it because it directly addresses MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and offers examples from a world where screwing up easily results in death—real death as in gone from the world, not the company.
Amazing how different the advice feels when viewed through the lens of the “death zone,” i.e., the top altitude of the planet’s tallest mountains where mistakes are usually fatal.
“In achieving peak performance as a high-altitude leader, you also risk death. It could be the death of a career, project, team or company, or in extreme situations, someone’s physical death. Learning the best way to succeed comes from studying the death zone.”
Chris Warner is founder of Earth Treks (indoor climbing centers) and has led more than 150 international expeditions.
Don Schmincke started as a scientist and engineer who became a management consultant after realizing that most management theories fail to work.
There are eight dangers in the death zone and, although the authors stress that it’s the high altitude leaders that face the same eight dangers, I think that everybody faces them every day and in all facets of their lives.
The dangers are
Fear of Death
Selfishness
Tool Seduction
Arrogance
Lone Heroism
Cowardice
Comfort
Gravity
Not really new information, but when seen in the light of the death zone they have a very different impact.
High Altitude Leadership is an exciting, sometimes hair-raising read (even when the transference to business doesn’t work well) that will get you thinking whether you’re heading a Fortune 50 or trying to raise your kids. It’s a book that helps you see the problems in your own MAP.
What the book doesn’t offer are easy, paste on solutions—changing how you think means changing your MAP which is doable, but not easy.
When you build an edifice that you want to withstand the stresses of everyday living as well as crisis and catastrophe it’s important to include structural supports in the design.
The same is true for corporate culture and I call them “infrastructure building blocks” or IBBs.
There are three categories of IBBs—philosophy, attitude/style, and policy. There are many things that can be included, but here is a list of the most basic ones, some are fairly self-explanatory, others include commentary and links where possible.
The policy category is the concrete expression of the Philosophy and Attitude/Style IBBs. Just as the Preamble to the Constitution delineates the doctrines underlying it, each Policy IBB supports one or more of the IBBs described above.
Policy IBBs should be reasonably broad—macro rather than micro—since they support a flexible process, not ossified bureaucracy. They are your most potent infrastructure—the most tangible and, therefore, the hardest to corrupt or ignore, but also the most dangerous, because they can turn into bureaucracy in the blink of an eye if you’re not careful.
Management by Box: actually a way to set your people free
Dual Ladder Career Path: a series of hands-on positions that equate straight across the board with management positions.
Hiring process: transparent and painless and easy to use for both candidates and hiring managers.
Stock bonus plan (or similar)
Sales incentives
Reviews: Done correctly, they encourage personal growth, make negative behavior much harder to conceal and can even act as a screening tool during interviews.
Surveys: useful for discovering problems, attitudes, product directions, company standing, etc. as perceived by employees and selected outsiders.
One caveat when implementing these and other approaches: lead by example; both managers and workers will do as you do, not as you say.
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,
One item today, because it has several parts, all revolving around a new, way outside-the-box book.
I hope you’ll treat this post as a conversation among friends, perhaps over a good bottle of wine on a Friday afternoon.
conversation, so I’m going to give away a copy of 
All of that is what’s available to the 6,700 managers at company-owned McDonald’s restaurants.
Media Alert: PBS’ Nightly Business Report
Rule One: Engagement is based on trust. If employees don’t trust their management then management can forget about engaging its employees.
How much longer do you think it will take corporate Earth to get off their terrified, or comfortable, collective asses and embrace a real, live, authentic, proven solution to most of their problems?
The list of 
When you build an edifice that you want to withstand the stresses of everyday living as well as crisis and catastrophe it’s important to include structural supports in the design.
