Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Focus on culture isn’t new, but it used to be a lot more positive. These days I see more about toxic cultures than about good ones, but what hasn’t changed is culture’s effect on performance, productivity and staffing. For better or worse, culture is still the most potent factor for any company.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Shawn Parr, whose company works with large corporations, such as Starbucks and MTV, on innovation wrote a meaty post called Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch.

It reminded me of something I wrote back in 2008, because the title is from a quote by Dick Clark, CEO of Merk and after rereading it I decided it’s worth reposting, so here it is.

Culture Trumps All

A post on Dave Brock’s blog led me to an article at IMD’s site called “An Unpopular Corporate Culture” and, as Dave said, it’s a must read for anyone who still thinks that corporate culture is some ephemeral concept with no real impact that consultants use to sell their services.

And a double-must for those who talk about culture’s importance, but don’t walk very well when it comes to creating a great corporate culture.

For those who prefer to put their faith in plans and strategy, hear the words of Dick Clark when he took over as CEO of Merck in 2005 and was asked about his strategy for restoring the pharmaceutical company to its former glory. “His strategy, he said, was to put strategy second and focus on changing the company’s insular, academic culture.” The fact is, culture eats strategy for lunch,” Clark explained. “You can have a good strategy in place, but if you don’t have the culture and the enabling systems that allow you to successfully implement it… the culture of the organization will defeat the strategy.””

If you’re looking for a best practice corporate culture silver bullet forget it—one size doesn’t fit all.

Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, describes that company’s top-down command and control culture of consistency and discipline as “the source of our competitive advantage,” and has made it a priority to reinforce it.

Meanwhile, Robert Iger and Steve Jobs, in their discussions about the acquisition of Pixar by Disney, have been concerned with avoiding an Exxon style command and control culture. Jobs says that, “Most of the time that Bob and I have spent talking about this hasn’t been about economics, it’s been about preserving the Pixar culture because we all know that’s the thing that’s going to determine the success here in the long run.””

It took Lou Gerstner a decade to remake IBM.

The key lesson Gerstner learned in his time with IBM, as he later reflected, was the importance of culture.”Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success—along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like… I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.”

The article is more than just additional proof for my favorite hobby horse.

The analysis of the role of employee complaints/negativity play in culture and the importance of what to keep when setting out to change a culture as opposed to what to jettison will give you new insight on your own company’s culture.

In case you still doubt the power and value of culture I hope that Dick Clark, Rex Tillerson, Robert Iger, Steve Jobs and Lou Gerstner combined with the articles in Fast Company and IMD have finally changed your mind.

Flickr image credit: Bengt Nyman

Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

I wrote this in 2015, but when it comes to company culture five years is a blink of the eye. The boss’ MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that drives the actions that create culture, whether the result is good or bad, has been developing since they were born, although it’s not set in concrete and can change — but only if they choose to.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Steve Blank wrote a great post about changing culture in larger organizations. It’s a must-read for anyone in business, government or non-profit who is looking to juice innovation in their organization.

Blank agrees that there are four components to culture.

Two McKinsey consultants, Terry Deal and Arthur Kennedy wrote a book called Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life.  In it they pointed that every company has a culture – and that culture was shorthand for “the way we do things at our company.” Company culture has four essential ingredients:

• • Values/beliefs – set the philosophy for everything a company does, essentially what it stands for
  • Stories/myths – stories are about how founders/employees get over obstacles, win new orders…
  • Heroes – what gets rewarded and celebrated, how do you become a hero in the organization?
  • Rituals – what and how does a company celebrate?

He goes on to explain what needs to be done for “innovation to happen by design not by exception.”

While I agree with everything he says, I believe he left out a most critical component.

In reality it should be a subset of values/beliefs, but it is rarely thought about by bosses — they either do it or do the opposite automatically.

It can be summed up in four words, don’t kill the messenger—Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks, is a master of this mindset.

To be truly innovative means trying new stuff and a part of trying new stuff is accepting that it won’t always work.

Corporate culture in general and many bosses individually can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that some things will fail — it’s the dark side of the ‘but me mindset’ at work.

What they, and anybody setting out to change culture and encourage innovation, need to understand is that it only takes killing the messenger, i.e., responding negatively to the person who brings bad news, once to negate whatever progress had been made and put the effort back to square one.

Flickr image credit: Eirik Newth

Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

KG wrote this five years ago and, sadly, many of the concerns he mentioned are happening. AI bias is rampant and, as usual with emerging tech, most people don’t know/understand/care about the danger that represents.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

A few months ago I read the book, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat.  It was a tremendously interesting book and confirmed many of the concerns I’ve been having about my own industry for some time.  Subsequently there have been a slate of articles wondering about AI and how the industry is progressing.

One of the book’s premises was that we need to take a step back and think about the moral and ethical basis of what we’re doing and how and what we’re imparting to these machines.

I believe that it will be difficult, or impossible, for the AI industry to change direction mid-streams and start being concerned about morality and ethics.  Most of the funding for AI comes from DARPA and other such institutions that are part of the military and affiliated organizations.  Finance is second largest funding source.

Most of the people who are concerned about AI (including James Barrat) worry about when machines gain human level intelligence.  I am much more concerned about what happens before that.  Today it is said that the most sophisticated AI has the intelligence of a cockroach.  This is no small feat, but it also brings with it some clear implications – cockroaches have important drives and instincts that guide their behavior.  Survival, resource acquisition, reproduction, etc. are all things that cockroaches do.  How far away are we from when our AI exhibit these characteristics?  What about when we get to rat-level intelligence?

At that point machines will be very powerful and control many of the essential functions of society.  Imagine a frightened rat (or 6 month old toddler) with infinite power – what actions would they take to protect themselves or get what they perceive they want or need?  How would they react if we stood in their way?  How concerned would they be with the consequences of their actions?  Most adults don’t do this today.

Before we achieve human level intelligence in machines, we’ll have to deal with less intelligent and probably more dangerous and powerful entities.  More dangerous because they will not have the knowledge or processing power to think of consequences, and also because they will be controlling our cars, airplanes, electricity grids, public transportation and many other systems.

Most AI optimists ignore the dangerous “lower mammal, toddler and childhood” stages of AI development and only see the potential benefits at the end.  But we need to think about the path there and what we can do to prepare as individuals and as a society.

Not to speak about the fact that once we reach human level intelligence in AI, we’ll be dealing with an intelligence that is so alien to anything we know (after all, we have lots of experience with cockroaches, rats and toddlers), and no way of knowing what its motives are.  But that will be left for another discussion.

Do you care about the appalling conditions of many workplaces? Not overseas, but here, in the US?

Do you care about the impact enterprise has on the environment?

On people?

Do you fret, because you can’t DO anything?

Or can you?

Fashion has a terrible environmental report card, especially so-called “fast fashion.”

Change happens when we consumers vote with our feet and take our money elsewhere.

Fast fashion may be on its last legs. Take it from H&M, which was forced to admit in its March financial report that it had $4.3 billion of unsold inventory left hanging on its racks, along with a massive drop in sales. In fact, the Swedish company has started incinerating clothes in power plants to generate energy. When you consider all of the raw materials, chemical pollution, human labor, and transportation costs required to make just a single shirt, the scale of the waste is astounding.

Brands may seem impervious to complaints, negative press and exposés, but the operative word is ‘seems’, as Ivanka Trump learned when she was forced to shut down her fashion line.

The business seemed to be floundering: One source found that online sales of Ivanka Trump products sold on Amazon, Macy’s, Bloomingdales, and Zappos fell nearly 55% over the last year. (…) The brand was the target of a massive boycott, spearheaded by Grab Your Wallet, a movement urging people to protest the Trump family’s ethical violations by refusing to shop with retailers selling their brands.

The article made me wonder if the same approach could affect Amazon, the 8 thousand pound gorilla of ecommerce

Wait a minute, didn’t Amazon just agree to pay minimum wages to all workers?

Today (Oct. 2), he announced that he will be raising the minimum wages for his e-commerce company’s US workers to $15 an hour, a move that will affect 250,000 full-time employees and 100,000 seasonal workers.

Yes, and while it looks like a big deal, it was more in the line of self-preservation.

Earning $15 an hour isn’t likely to impress Amazon’s Prime customers, who mostly earn far more (it takes 8 hours of very hard work to pay for Prime).

But just as fashion takes a huge toll from the environment and labor, the people who deliver your packages pay an exorbitantly high price for the privilege.

For Amazon, paying third-party companies to deliver packages is a cost-effective alternative to providing full employment. And the speed of two-day shipping is great for consumers. But delivering that many packages isn’t easy, and the job is riddled with problems, (…)  Others, including several labor experts, said they felt blame should be placed with Amazon, adding that the company was pressuring courier companies to deliver more, faster. They said Amazon was profiting off cheap labor that it doesn’t have to protect because it’s outsourcing the job to companies that it doesn’t adequately supervise.

Read the article and you’ll see conditions similar, maybe worse, to those that have led to protests, boycotts and change when they’ve happen on production lines overseas.

Amazon’s response is typical.

“We have worked with our partners, listened to their needs, and have implemented new programs to ensure small delivery businesses serving Amazon customers have the tools they need to deliver a great customer and employee experience.”

Nothing about driver experience.

The problem has nothing to do with Bezos’ wealth, he earned that, and everything to do with Amazon using it’s savvy, backed by it’s power, to change the game.

So how do you get the attention of an 8 thousand pound gorilla?

The same way consumers moved the fashion industry — money.

Think of the effect if just 20% (or more) of the 100 million paying Prime members bought just two items a month from a different merchant.

There’s no question that would get Amazon’s attention.

Image credit: Drew Stephens

Empowering people is something every good boss, from CEO to team leader, wants to do.

Sometimes that can be accomplished by making a small change that turns out to have a giant impact, as GM Chairman/CEO Mary Barra found when she became vice president of global human resources in 2009.

Barra wanted to change GM’s 10-page dress code to a simple, two-word one, ‘dress appropriately.’

Her staff didn’t agree.

But the HR department ironically posed my first hurdle. They started arguing with me, saying, it can be ‘dress appropriately’ on the surface, but in the employee manual it needs to be a lot more detailed. They put in specifics, like, ‘Don’t wear T-shirts that say inappropriate things, or statements that could be misinterpreted.’”

The kind of detailed instructions the hr staff wanted to add may not seem like that big a deal, but the underlying implication is that the company didn’t trust them. Remove the details and you have a radically different result.

“But if you let people own policies themselves—especially at the first level of people supervision—it helps develop them. It was an eye-opening experience, but I now know that these small little things changed our culture powerfully. They weren’t the only factor, but they contributed significantly.” (…)  By simply stating “dress appropriately,” Barra does exactly what she asks of other leaders: She avoids assumptions, instead choosing to trust her employees’ judgment—and has found the experience remarkably liberating.

Not to mention successful.

If that attitude works in a company with 180,000 employees it will probably work for you.

Image credit: Wikipedia

What does a company like PwC do when it faces “crisis-level attrition” combined with little-to-no interest from new grads — their workforce lifeblood?

Run a study, of course. What else would a consultant do first?

Millennials, they found, did not object to long hours outright. They were as committed to their work as older colleagues. But they were also more willing to question long-held assumptions about how that work should be done. Given the abundance of connectivity, why was it necessary to be in the same physical building for 15 hours (on a good day) to get a job done? Why couldn’t they work from home when a project allowed?

No surprise there; the surprise came from a different segment of the 44,000 strong global workforce.

But here was the real surprise: Non-millennial employees wanted exactly the same thing. Virtually identical percentages of millennial employees and non-millennial workers said they would prefer to be able to shift their work hours to schedules that could accommodate both their personal and professional obligations—heading home early for family dinner, for example, in exchange for an early start or signing back on once the kids were in bed.

The only difference was that millennials were willing to speak up about their dissatisfaction, and to opt out when problems couldn’t be resolved. Over and over again, the results of the survey made clear: work was important, but a personal life was, too.

Duh. That “surprise” isn’t exactly rocket science.

For a company that makes its living from its intelligent counsel and problem solving skills, they really blew it. Beyond that, they seemed to ignore others’ research.

Research has found that productivity drops significantly after about 50 hours per week of work. Long hours come at a cost to employee health (paywall), which in turn leads to absenteeism, loss of productivity, and higher insurance costs for employers. It’s a game no one wins.

Every list I’ve seen, since millennials started working, describing what they wanted in the workplace more or less duplicated what I’d heard from other candidates for more than 30 years.

Millennial workers were just the first generation to call the game out as bullshit, in numbers large enough to force the rules to change.

Big mouths and a willingness to walk got McKenzie management’s attention, but the difference between McKenzie and other companies with similar cultures is that McKenzie admitted the problem, found the cause, crafted solutions and followed-through implementing them.

There are plenty of others still in denial.

A recent Vanity Fair profile of Goldman Sachs’s president and probable next CEO David Solomon praised his commitment to “healthy work-life balance.” At Goldman this means working no more than 70 hours per week—so long as no pressing deals are in the works.

And forget law firms.

Industries that bill by the hour have no financial interest in adopting a leaner workweek. “Many people will say, ‘Diminished returns are better than no returns’.”

I think that, too, will change as Generation Z follows the Millennials with even more willingness to walk — if they even choose that path in the first place.

Image credit: PwC

Valeria Chuba is an intimacy coach (clinical sexologist) and has found three main responses by her male clients to the recent bevy of harassment complaints.

• Defensiveness
• Disbelief at the enormity and pervasiveness of sexual violence and misconduct
• Difficulty with empathizing

No surprises, but her commentary is interesting and useful.

In trying to figuring out how to interact with women many men are choosing the easy route.

… men who want to enact the “Pence rule” (avoiding socializing alone with any woman who is not one’s wife) do so at a potentially enormous cost to their female colleagues, their organizations, and themselves. In fact, the notion that some men are confused as to how to “mentor young women without harassing them” is a troubling comment on masculinity.

Easy, because it takes little effort from them, while further screwing (pun intended) women and “keeping them in their place” — which is below and away from men.

There’s a better way to monitor your words and actions.

Best, it’s a simple yardstick with which to measure them.

Ask yourself if you would say the words, use the tone, or perform the action on your mother, sister or any female relative.
Measure other men’s comments/tones/actions the same way.

Think about how you would feel if they were speaking to your mother/sister/grandma/etc. If it was your mom/etc. would you let it go or would you call them on it?

That simple mental test is an excellent guide for men who are worried about whether they or someone else is crossing the line.

That said, men also need to understand that women may still make the wrong assumption and take it the wrong way based on her previous experience with other men.

Not because it’s a bad yardstick, but because trust takes time — especially when dealing with systemic social problems.

So keep using the yardstick; share it with your team; embed it in your culture, be an active part of the (eventual) change.

Flickr image credit: Bill Smith

Last February I wondered if the iconic 1984 Apple Super bowl ad would still feature a woman if it were made today.

There’s been a lot of change since that ad, but for women and people of color much of the pre-2000 progress has regressed.

Fixing that means transforming what-is to what-should-be and management professor and guru Henry Mintzberg offers some of the wisest thoughts I’ve seen on the subject (‘wise’ being very different than ‘smart’).

Transformation requires change — the organization and its culture must transform itself based on a new vision and different core values.

But where to begin? That’s easy: at the “top”. Where else when there’s such pressure. Besides, any chief who has been to a business school or reads the business press knows that it’s all about leadership: the boss who does the thinking that drives everyone else. Louis XIV said “L’état, c’est moi!” Today’s corporate CEO says “The enterprise, that’s me!”

I’m sure we can all think of numerous CEOs who model Louis’ mindset and dozens of them have gone down in the conflagrations they started at the top.

Yesterday’s Golden Oldie revisited Steve Ballmer’s effort to transform Microsoft’s culture by edict. It didn’t work.

Ballmer seemed to channel John Kotter’s eight point approach:

1. Establish a sense of urgency.
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition.
3. Create a vision.
4. Communicate the vision.
5. Empower others to act on the vision.
6. Plan for and create short-term wins.
7. Consolidate improvements and produce still more change.
8. Institutionalize new approaches.

As Mintzberg points out, this is a top-down, command/control approach that certainly won’t fly well with today’s workforce in spite of being taught at Harvard Business School by a “transformation guru.”

Mintzberg demolishes each point (read his post) and is backed by solid brain science.

…to achieve this result, people throughout the company need to change their behavior and practices, and that can’t happen by simple decree. (…) New behaviors can be put in place, but only by reframing attitudes that are so entrenched that they are almost literally embedded in the physical pathways of employees’ neurons. These beliefs have been reinforced over the years through everyday routines and hundreds of workplace conversations. They all have the same underlying theme: “That’s the way we do things around here.”

The most dynamic, ongoing case study of transformation is being played out publicly at Uber.

It will be interesting to see which approach Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi uses.

Image credit: Howard Hecht

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Everybody pretty much agrees that the culture of tech companies need to change. (The focus used to be on Wall Street. It never changed, but the focus did and tech is the new, very visible poster boy of bad culture.) It’s also agreed that changing a company’s culture isn’t simple — and it certainly isn’t done by proclamation.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

I think the best commentary on this post comes from a comment on the original that validates it.

You just nailed the main issue with failed change efforts. Change starts in the head (pun intended. . .). Many times when I’m brought into a company, bosses want me to help change everybody else but them. Doesn’t work!

It always amazes me how bosses are more willing to waste money than to change their thinking and behavior. The trick is how to find a way to help bosses see the ROI of changing the way they think and behave before trying to embed those changes throughout their organization.

Great post! – Dr. Ada Gonzalez

No one ever said change is easy and it’s still harder when it is your MAP that needs to change, but it is possible. More on change during the week.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

The thing she [behavioral psychologist] taught me—and this sounds obvious—is that behavior is a function of consequence.  We had to change the behavior in the organization so that people felt safe to bring bad news. And I looked in the mirror, and I realized I was part of the problem.  I didn’t want to hear the bad news, either. So I had to change how I behaved, and start to thank people for bringing me bad news. —Joseph Jimenez, chief executive of Novartis

The behavioral psychologist was brought in after a consulting group was paid to provide “better, more robust process, with more analytics,” which changed nothing.

When we started RampUp Solutions in 1999, we spent a good deal of effort coming up with a tag line that easily explained the services we provide.

After several iterations we finally settled on “To change what they do change how you think”

Over the years, I’ve heard and read story after story of how all kinds of changes—from turnarounds to improved productivity to retention — all started with a change in the way the boss thought.

And that applied whether the boss was CEO, team leader or somewhere in-between.

Stories and discussions about change tend to focus on the actions that bring about the changes, instead of starting at the beginning with the hardest work.

Work that requires the boss, at whatever level, changing the way they thinks and then dispersing and embedding those changes throughout their organization.

So before you hire expensive consultants or seek help from advisors look in the mirror to determine how much of the problem is you.

Image credit: manymeez