Friday I quoted Henry Mintzberg, the man Tom Peters called the world’s premier management thinker. I hope you clicked and read the short opinion piece in Business Week.
Here is a link to an interview in the Wall Street Journal that will give you more substance on his new book, Managing.
Mintzberg says that, “Basically, managing is about influencing action. … One step removed, they manage people. Managers deal with people who take the action… And two steps removed from that, managers manage information to drive people to take action… too much managing through information—what I call “deeming,” and says his four year old daughter can do that.
“The alternative is to give more attention to the people plane and the action plane. Even when you’re managing information, you can manage in a much more nuanced way than just shooting a bunch of figures around.”
You can check out more about Managing at Amazon. I just ordered my copy (it’s available now, not September) and I recommend that you do the same.
I honestly believe that this will be one of the most valuable business books to be published in a long time.
I read a great description of politics in You Run, a short story by Sarah Shankman, “politics is one long power plan; an exercise in ego”. That seems to be a good description of what leadership is to many people.
It certainly describes the MAP so prevalent in the business scandals of the last two decades, as well as that of the titans of Wall Street who contributed so heavily to the current economic mess.
It’s also a major characteristic of the more mundane populace in general, as witnessed on social media platforms.
The foremost cyber-goal is to be on the first page of Google search results based on designated criteria.
The more friends you have on Facebook the more desirable you appear.
Garner enough followers on Twitter and you are suddenly a leader.
Every social media rates its members and people work mightily to improve their ratings.
For those who aren’t celebrities of one kind or another or are verifiable in the real world, this is done based on the ancient principle of “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine.” (As you might guess, this isn’t my forte.)
That means the ratings can be manipulated—and they are.
There are dozens of classes, webinars, coaches and businesses, along with hundreds of books, all focused on ‘managing your online persona’. They teach all the tricks to raising your authority level, acquiring more friends and followers, and the achieving first page status on Google.
But there are no classes, webinars, coaches or books that explain how to tell the wheat from the chaff, i.e., sort through these impressive exercises in ego to find real value.
What do you do? Please share your approach to finding and validating the authenticity and value of your cyber-connections.
Is your company fair? Are you fair to your people? Is fairness part of your MAP?
How often have you heard (or said), “That’s not fair!”
People more or less accept that life isn’t fair, but are more than likely to walk from a company or manager they perceive as being unfair.
What do people expect within the business world in terms of fairness?
The obvious is that they don’t want to be shafted a la Enron. But fairness refers to more than the obvious, most often to the company/manager doing what they said they would do, i.e., walking their talk.
Fairness is what people want and companies/managers promise, but frequently don’t provide. For example:
Fairness excludes politics
Official – people will be promoted based on what they do
De facto – people are promoted based on who they know
Fairness is egalitarian
Official – everybody will fly economy class when traveling
De facto – senior managers fly first or business class
Fairness includes parity
Official – similar skills are compensated similarly with any differences the result of merit
De facto – compensation differences result from expediency, prejudice, or favoritism
All that’s fine and sounds wonderful if, in fact, fairness is part of your MAP.
Why be fair? If ‘doing the right thing’ doesn’t come all that naturally to you, is there a reason to embrace it anyway?
In other words, what’s in it for you?
Quite a lot, actually.
Fairness reduces turnover (and its associated costs), increases productivity, and fuels innovation.
These, in turn, make you look good as a manager, help your company’s street rep, which has a major impact on the caliber of the people applying for positions, making it easier to higher great people.
Bottom line: better reviews and increased compensation for you.
You may be a tweeting guru, but can you sum up your life, career or tell a story in just six (real) words?
When challenged to tell a story in six words, Ernest Hemingway came up with “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”
Starting in 2006, Smith Magazine challenged readers to write their memoirs in six words and the effort is still going strong. Here are three examples from the Smith site,
Dreams diverted; life proceeds. Embracing detours.
Lesser people would’ve given up already.
I wrote Birth, death, fun and happiness in-between because that’s always what I wanted and got from life—including obstacles and detours.
The great advantage six words have is to force clarity of thought upon the subject.
It’s easy to set up a place on your intranet for people to post their six-word thoughts—not once, but many times.
You can use it to explore your group and company culture, clarify projects and goals and for individual team members.
Invite everybody to post their six word description of the culture.
A biographical section gives people a place to document their growth professionally and personally along with specific struggles and triumphs.
Boil down the essence of each project to six words. You may be surprised at how different the descriptions are reflecting the different visions of the project team—six words helps to get everybody on the same page.
Provide a truly anonymous section for complaints. The six word limit forces clarity on descriptions of problems and can often give you a heads up before the molehill becomes a mountain.
Please take a moment to add your six word memoir, thought or description of Leadership Turn here!
Innovation is crucial to success, especially in today’s economy, and diversity is crucial to innovation.
But diversity refers to much more than race, creed, or gender.
Juicing creativity and innovation requires a strong diversity of both thought and skills within your organization—homogenizing your workforce dilutes the juice.
Thought Diversity
True mental diversity is about MAP and mental function, not just a race and gender. I’ve known managers whose organizations were mini-UNs with equal numbers of males and females, but they might as well have been cloned from the boss, their thinking was so identical.
scorn/belittle/reject anything that doesn’t conform with your own MAP/ideas/approach; or
allow others in your organization to do the first two.
As your organization grows more diverse you want to celebrate controversy, encourage disagreement, and enable discussions—all within a civilized framework that debates the merits of ideas, not individuals.
Skills Diversity
Skills homogeny is just as detrimental to innovation. As with MAP, people tend to gravitate towards people whose skills are within their or their group’s comfort zone; worse, managers may be unaware of the full range of skills available within the group.
The fix for skills homogeny is far simpler, since it requires awareness and mechanical action, rather than changes in MAP.
Use this three-step process to better identify and access your group’s skills
Skills survey: Have each person in your group create a complete list of all their skills, not just the ones they’re using in their current job, but also those from previous positions and companies, as well as skills they’ve developed outside of work. Have them rate each skill 1-5 (five being the strongest) based on their expertise. (I’ve yet to see a manager do this who wasn’t surprised at the results.)
Skills set matrix: Using a spreadsheet, create a matrix of the information.
Repeat and update: go through the entire process and update the matrix twice a year; add every new hire’s info immediately.
Be sure to consult the matrix every time you develop a new position or replace someone, whether through promotion or attrition.
Knowing all this gives you tremendous staffing flexibility. For example, you may have someone in your group who’s developed the needed skills on a new project and would be thrilled to move to the it. Then, using the matrix, you can design the new position to fill other skill gaps, both current and future.
The end result is a well-rounded organization of people inspired to learn new skills, because they know that they won’t be relegated to a rut just because “that’s what they’ve always done.”
Viva La Difference is the rallying cry for the anti-homogenizing movement.
(For more on how to diversify click here, here and here.)
“I would be interested to hear your thoughts on differences between personal ownership and group ownership. From first glance those differences seem subtle, but I have a feeling that they are far reaching.”
I thought about that, not just in the context that Mary Jo wrote it, but in the larger one of companies and individuals with whom I’ve worked over the years and here is what strikes me.
I think the difference isn’t just far reaching, but of critical importance because they can be dangerous to the organization.
How so?
Think of group ownership as a form of nationalism with the company in place of the country.
Now think of personal ownership as an ideology.
As long as the nationalism and individual ideologies are aligned or, at the very least, synergistic, then the organization benefits.
But when they are in conflict disagreements become wars, whether overt or covert, energy is wasted, productivity lost and progress comes to a grinding halt.
You have only to look around the world to see how inflexible ideologies tear countries apart and set one part against the other.
The solution to this starts by hiring people that are good fits with the company’s culture. That doesn’t mean they always agree—the last thing you want is a homogenized team—but it does mean that they are flexible enough to put the company first, and their personal ideology second.
Another critical factor in keeping the various ownerships aligned is communication.
By providing complete understanding of the company’s goals, how each person can best contribute to their accomplishment and how those contributions will help achieve the individual’s own goals unites the team and helps it achieve more than any member thought possible.
What else would you do to increase ownership convergence?
I became a thinking adult watching him deliver the news starting in 1962 and when he stepped down in 1981 I stopped watching TV news—I wanted intelligence and objectivity, not image and opinions.
How can those of us who are familiar with Cronkite convey what he did for us? How do we explain to a generation that thinks bloggers, Howard Stern and morning TV are viable news sources what Walter Cronkite gave us?
Walter Cronkite understood the meaning behind Lao Tzu’s words, “To lead the people, walk behind them.”
Here are a few of his comments that I especially like…
“I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.”
“In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.”
“I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that.”
“We are not educated well enough to perform the necessary act of intelligently selecting our leaders.”
“America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”
“I want to say that probably 24 hours after I told CBS that I was stepping down at my 65th birthday, I was already regretting it. And I regretted it every day since.”
I hope all of you will click the link and read more about this truly unique man; our country would be different without him.
I know of no better words with which to end today then as Cronkite ended each of his news shows—
What do you do with a slightly-below-mediocre company that keeps its business going by staying in small markets where its dominance is assured by an almost total lack of competition; a company with little regard for its employees and less for the communities in which it operates?
You bring in a CEO who has a passionate belief that the interaction between customers and frontline associates has the greatest influence on success and that the greatest impact on that is the way their leaders/managers treat them.
In other words, employees at every level do unto customers as their bosses do unto them.
Jack Rooney is as far from a rock star CEO as you can get, but he understands that real leadership must permeate the entire company and knows that while true cultural change is neither fast nor cheap it works and therefore is worth the effort.
Rooney calls his approach the Dynamic Organization; he developed it under challenging conditions at Ameritech and brought it to full fruition at US Cellular, which he joined in 1999.
The Pursuit of Something Better tells both stories, Rooney’s and US Cellular’s; they are told by Dave Esler and Myra Kruger, the culture consultants who worked with him at USC and his previous company.
Both stories are the culmination of a man who believed in doing the right thing and a company that was changed accordingly.
“Jack Rooney and his slowly-expanding team of believers challenged the long-prevailing assumptions that business is a blood sport, that the advantage inevitably goes to the ruthless and the greed, that the only way to win is to hold your nose and leave your values at the door. He has proved beyond question, once and for all, regardless of what happens from her on, that a values-based model works, that it can raids both a company and the individuals who are part of it to undreamed-of-heights, to peak experiences that will last a lifetime and change the way those lives are lived.”
And while the authors do a great job of telling the story, the real leadership that Rooney provided, along with his concept of the Dynamic Organization, aren’t broken down or spelled out as a set of lessons and how-to’s separated for you to memorize.
It’s your responsibility to learn from what was done, drawing out those lessons that are most in synch with your MAP, because if they aren’t in synch there’s no way you’ll be able to implement them.
And in case you’re tempted to shrug it off as a fluke, I suggest that you give some long hard thought to Zappos and its ilk.
I highly recommend The Pursuit of Something Better. It’s fun, it’s fascinating. You might even start to believe that you don’t have to leave your ethics at the door; at the very least you’ll know what to look for in your next interview.
Think of all the times you’ve used it as your argument of choice—or had it used on you.
The problem, Gloria Steinem tells us, is that “Logic is in the eye of the logician.”
That makes logic a moving target and subject to the whims of MAP, which means that “Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence,” according to Joseph Wood Krutch
Ambrose Bierce offers a wonderful definition, “Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”
Boy is that true.
John Locke tells us that “Logic is the anatomy of thought,” while Leonard Nimoy believes that “Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”
But it was Dale Carnegie hit the nail on the head when he said, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice, and motivated by pride and vanity.”
And Tryon Edwards warns us that “Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic,” because, as Anon tells us, “The best defense against logic is ignorance.”
Which goes a long way to explaining why no one on Wall Street or the SEC listened to Warren Buffet or Harry Markopolos respectively.
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,
Here is a link to an interview in the Wall Street Journal that will give you more substance on his new book, Managing.
It certainly describes the 
What do people expect within the business world in terms of fairness?
Starting in 2006, Smith Magazine challenged readers to
The solution to this starts by hiring people that are good fits with the company’s culture. That doesn’t mean they always agree—the last thing you want is a homogenized team—but it does mean that they are flexible enough to put the company first, and their personal ideology second.
What do you do with a slightly-below-mediocre company that keeps its business going by staying in small markets where its dominance is assured by an almost total lack of competition; a company with little regard for its employees and less for the communities in which it operates?
Think of all the times you’ve used it as your argument of choice—or had it used on you.
