I am going to be in Singapore next week to do a number of things associated with the Singapore Human Capital Summit and something called the Distinguished Human Resource Visitors Programme. I am doing an in-depth speech on innovation and implementation, and the link between the two, as part of the visit — stuff I have been writing and thinking about for a long time. That talk is finished and I am just working on rehearsing it a bit.
I am also part of the closing panel for the Human Capital Summit (You can see the line-up here if you are interested in the schedule– senior executives from P&G and DBS, a the Minister of Trade and Industry from Singapore, and a Professor from Insead). I am developing a list of things that I might talk about, but plan to make my final decision at the last minute. There are a few reasons for this delay. My remarks are supposed to be informal, as it is a wrap-up for the conference I want to be open to learning from it rather than go in knowing what I am going say — experience be damned, and finally — to be a realist — I am going last after the first three speakers, and years of experience have taught me that, when you are in that position, you've got to be ready to cut back your remarks on the spot. It used to upset me early in my career, but now I take it as a weirdly fun challenge (indeed, I once was asked in Dubai to cut a talk from 30 minutes to 8 with about 5 minutes warning…. I was amazed how easy it was to do and how much the audience seemed to like it. Ever since then, I've kind of enjoyed when strange things happen during talks.. so long as there isn't over hostility or dysfunctional dynamics in the room.)
One thing I am thinking about emphasizing is that, despite the recent clear evidence that U.S. leaders and companies make flawed assumptions and use suspect management practices, some of the our worst ideas seem to keep spreading to the rest of the world anyway. I am brainstorming a list of dumb but widely used American management practices. Here is my initial list but I would love to hear more ideas:
1. Dangerous Complexity. The assumption that when we can't understand an expert, they must be both smart and right. This is certainly part of the Wall Street story — for years the financial wizards and economists have conveyed to the rest of us that we are far too dumb to ever understand what they are doing. An interesting contrast, by the way, is JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. If you read Gillian Tett's Fools Gold, you will see that one reason that JP Morgan avoided the worst of the collapse was that Dimon believed that, if you were investing in something you couldn't understand, you should get out. Clearly, most companies did not follow and are not following P&G 's A.G. Lafley's advice to keep things "Sesame Street Simple."
2. Dysfunctional Internal Competition. This is a big theme in The Knowing-Doing Gap and Morten's Hansen's masterpiece Collaboration. If you dig into the problems in the banks and a lot of other companies, they actually punish people who help others succeed, both via the reward systems and who gets the most prestige. This seems to persist even though the evidence against such assumptions and systems are so clear.
3. Breaking-up Teams Constantly. American companies often seem to love moving people around constantly, breaking-up teams, giving people new experiences, and so on. Certainly, there is a time for fresh blood, but if you read J. Richard Hackman's Leading Teams you will see that the weight of the evidence is that breaking up teams less often rather than more often is linked to all sorts of effectiveness indicators. Also, see this post about the Miracle on the Hudson where I discuss this literature.
So, those are just three that I am toying with. But I bet that you have a lot more ideas and a lot of good ones. What do you think… What are the dumbest practices used by U.S. companies, the practices that unwittingly drive them to ruin, or probably more often, they succeed DESPITE rather than BECAUSE they are used?
P.S. A big thank you to everyone below for your thoughtful and wide-ranging comments. I think there is enough material here for a book, not just a short speech. Also, I just found-out this post was also put on BNET and there are another 35 or so comments there, which are also — like those below — quite troubling, inspiring, and often funny in a twisted kind of way.
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