Work Matters

Author: supermoxie

  • You Better Start Treating Your People Right, Or The Best Will Be Leaving Soon

    This week's Economist has a story called Hating What You Do, which presents a rather discouraging but well-documented argument that, since the downturn began, a lot more people are a lot more unhappy with their jobs.  For example, to quote the story, "A survey by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy,
    found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of
    employees who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to
    39%; the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%." Ouch.

    Certainly, some of this unhappiness is due to the fear, bad news, pay cuts, loss of benefits, objective loss of job security, job overload (an effect of layoffs on survivors), and other bad experiences provoked by these hard times.  But there is huge variation in how well or badly different organizations have treated their people during the past couple years.  The Economist article refers indirectly to my HBR article on being a Good Boss in a Bad Economy (see the McKinsey interview for free). If you recall from my prior posts, my basic argument was that there is a big difference between what organizations and bosses must do to survive during tough times and how they do it — and the keys to doing dirty work (like pay cuts and layoffs) well include providing people as much prediction, understanding, control, and compassion as possible in the process.

    Well, now that we seem to be seeing early signs that, within a year or perhaps less, many companies will be hiring again (in fact, I notice that Google is back to hiring already, and they did some layoffs earlier in the year), your chickens will be coming home to roost soon. If you are a boss or organization that has treated your people well despite the challenges, the return of the so-called "war for talent" will be great for you because your best people won't run for the door when the job market starts heating-up again and you will have an easy time recruiting great people because, after all, the good word spreads. 

    But if you have treated people like dirt during the tough times (for a horror story, see here), have been inept about how you have implemented tough decisions (see here) or have simply been clueless about your people's perspective during these tough times (see here), you may have been able to keep great people working for you during these tough times and to hire some of the best. You can be sure, however, that they have told their friends about how much your company or you suck.  They are waiting for things to get better, and perhaps encouraged by the signs the labor market is coming back, are probably doing their jobs extra well these days to enhance their reputation for that coming job search.  So you may be fooling yourself into believing all is well when it is not.

    In my view, if you have been nasty, inept, or greedy about how you've treated people during the downturn, you will deserve everything you get when, as things start getting better, your best people start leaving in droves and the best candidates not only turn down your job offers, they don't even bother to apply because your reputation stinks.  Looking at it from your perspective, however, you've might have just enough time to salvage your reputation if you begin reversing your vile ways right now.  And, if you've treated your people well during these tough times, cranking up the respect, attention, and — if you can afford it (I know it is tough) — your pay and benefits right now just a bit could pay huge dividends down the road.

  • Squeaky Wheels, The Health Care Debate, and Student Complaints About Grades

    The academic year at Stanford has started and, although my main teaching isn't until next quarter, I am starting to review my courses and think about what changes I am going to make this year.  After thinking about last year, and some of the complaints I had about grades, I am thinking that I need to spell-out my policy more strongly and clearly than before: If you complain about your grade on an assignment, I regrade the whole assignment and your grade can go up and down.  This kind of policy is necessary in my classes as — especially for the engineering students I teach — doing well requires strong writing and creative skills, and is more objective than the problem sets and other objective tests that students often get in other classes.  My final exam question, for example, is "Design the ideal organization. Use course concepts to defend your answers."  I have learned over the years that there seems to be little relationship between how much students complain and the quality of their work.  I sometimes think it is a personality characteristic.  More likely, however, there are a subset of students who have learned that the more they complain about grades, the better grades they get. 

    Although I don't like student complaints,some compelling research shows there are considerable rewards for people who complain. This brings us to the health care debate because there is good reason to believe that whatever system  we end-up in the U.S., that we ought to take the squeaky wheel problem into account — both to protect patients and insurance companies.   There was fascinating 2004 study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine by Carole Roan Gresenz and David M. Studdert on the outcomes of approximately 3500 disputes filed by patients over insurance payments they received for emergency room visits (here is the abstract).   These data were provided by two of the largest Health Maintenance Organizations in the United States.  The researchers found patients who filed formal complaints through the appeals process won more than 90% of the time — and the average size of the bill disputed was $1,107, so not exactly chicken feed.  The other lesson from this research is that people who did not appeal never got a penny — so squeaking definitely paid-off. The policy questions are complex and I lack the knowledge to untangle them here. Many people do not appeal, so the lesson might be that it is cheaper from HMOs and other health insurance operations to underpay consistently and just cave in quickly when people do complain.  The result may be that a lot of people are unwittingly getting worse coverage than they deserve because they don't have the time, motivation, or information about the odds of success. And a related result might be that insurance providers have a system (not entirely of their own design… they are constrained by laws and rules) that is producing a massive number of complaints.

    The broader lesson, to go back my grading and the squeaky wheel problem, is that there are probably too many incentives out there for all of us to complain… and if you are running organization or system that you believe uses fair standards to judge people's merit, performance, or whatever — but people seem to be complaining constantly anyway — take a good look at how you respond to complaints. Do the squeaky wheels get the grease, whether they deserve it or not?

  • Work Matters Hits One Million Lifetime Page Views

    I started writing Work Matters in June 2006.  Diego Rodriguez (of Metacool fame) and I were teaching a class called Creating Infectious Action, and Diego convinced me that — if I was interested in infectious action — I ought to start blogging.  Diego also correctly pointed out that I liked to write and seemed to have a short attention span, and thus was well-suited to blogging (an accurate observation).  I also got great early encouragement from Guy Kawasaki,  Todd Sattersten, Kent Blumberg, and Gretchen Rubin.   My first post (more accurately my second post, I think I deleted the very first one, which was just a short welcome) was called Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal and was a response to an article that questioned the value of brainstorming — I was motivated to write it because academic researchers have taken such a narrow view of what "brainstorming effectiveness" means that it reflects severe ignorance of how and why brainstorming is used by real experts in real organizations.

    I knew that Work Matters was getting close to a million page views, but didn't expect it to happen so fast as this blog averages about 800 page views a day, but yesterday's post on my trip to Singapore and suspect HR assumptions apparently struck a nerve aa almost 5000 people visited yesterday (the most ever, I think). To be precise, Typepad statistics indicate that Work Matters has as of this moment 768 posts, 2863 comments (thank you!), an average of 822.60 page views per day (thank you), and a total of 1002748 lifetime page views. 

    I would like to thank everyone who has visited and commented on this blog and helped me in hundreds of other ways.  But I would especially like to thank a few readers out there — especially Rick — who have figured out that I am prone to producing typos and often unable to see them, and for taking the time to point them out. 

    I am not completely sure why I keep doing
    this, but it is fun, I have learned an enormous amount from the
    comments that people post and email me, and as 55 year-old guy with an
    increasingly bad memory, it is a great place to store all sorts of
    stuff that many readers aren't interested in but help me (like the list
    of 150 or so books that I like).      Who knows how long I will keep doing this, but for now, I am still enjoying it a lot. 

  • “William Safire is on Hiatus,” New York Times, October 4, 2009

    Alas, the hiatus is permanent. I guess they missed their own obituary for
    him on September 27, 2009. I just read this is in The Sunday New York Times
    Magazine     on page 14 at the bottom of the "On Language" column,
    which he wrote for years.  The best part is the title of the article that
    appears above, called "Error-Proof." 
    Apparently, the Times caught their error, or just have such a long
    production lead time that it was too late, as the online version indicates:

    Postscript: October 3, 2009
    MAGAZINE

    A note with the “On Language” column on Page 14
    this weekend refers to the absence of the regular columnist, William Safire.
    Mr. Safire died last Sunday, after some copies had gone to press.

    I know that print
    journalism is a tough business, but I did note that the new Economist,
    which I got in the mail Friday, also had an obituary for Mr. Safire. 
    Mistakes in life are unavoidable and there is     no doing anything without making them, but this one cracked me up
    because of the name of the article that it appeared under (which is a very nice
    essay, by the way, on how the obsession with grammatical correctness is a
    "schoolmarm's hallucination"). I suspect the author, Ammon Shea is a
    bit horrified by all this, but I hope he also sees the humor and takes heart in
    that more people will likely read his column as a result.

  • Challenging Ingrained Assumptions in HR: My Remarks at the Singapore Human Capital Summit

    As I reported in my post on the "Dumbest Practices Used By U.S. Companies," I was fortunate to be part of the closing panel at the Singapore Human Capital Summit last week.  I had a delightful time in Singapore, as my hosts did a wonderful job of organizing the conference and making sure that those of us involved in the conference never stopped exchanging ideas with others — in talks to large groups, meetings with small groups of business leaders and government employees, and one-on-one meetings of all kinds.  My liaison for the conference, Noelle Yee, somehow scheduled things so I was busy almost every minute but somehow never seemed rushed. 

    I met all kinds of interesting people at the conference, but several stand-out. The first was Yuzaburo Mogi, CEO of the Kikkoman Corporation, which I believe is the leading producer of soy sauce in the world. Mr Mogi's ancestors started the company over 300 years ago and he has worked there for 51 years.  Mr. Mogi was fun and had a great zest for life. I loved hearing his stories. Among other things, he described his firm's ventures into the wine business and how, although it isn't as profitable as soy sauce, the wines made by his company (which are not available in the U.S.) have been winning awards in Europe.

    The second was Dr. Robert Care, CEO of Arup Australasia. I have blogged about Dr. Care before, as Arup is renowned for doing the toughest structural engineering work in the world, from the Sydney Opera House to the stunning "water cube" in 2008 Peking Olympics.  I confess, however, I was especially keen to meet Dr. Care to talk with him about the "no dickhead rule" that he had instituted and that I had blogged about here before.  Dr. Care, a charming and tall man, explained how they were using the rule to encourage civility and cooperation, which was essential to both the kind of work they do and — as it is a firm wholly owned by an employee trust — essential given the kind of culture they have and want to perpetuate.

    Third, and although I have known him for about 30 years, I was especially impressed with an exchange that HR guru Dave Ulrich had with an audience member, who was lamenting about the lack of power that HR had and who wondered if people from HR could ever be CEO's. Dave, quite wisely I thought, gently responded that it wasn't constructive to focus on that question, as if you were in HR the kind of work you do is remarkably valuable to your company and it is your job to do it as well as possible — and it is just isn't very constructive for your colleagues or yourself to obsess over issues like whether HR has enough power.  I am not even sure I entirely agreed with Dave's answer, but he stated it more elegantly than I did here, and — as he told me in private conversation shortly thereafter — people who focus too much on becoming top dog in the future and not enough on the quality of the work they do right now are the wrong people to take leadership positions. 

     I could go on and on about other people and things I learned.  But because so many readers here and at BNET wrote so many great comments (about 75 total at the moment) about "the dumbest practices used by U.S. companies," I thought I had better tell you how those ideas shaped my comments.  I did not directly label my closing remarks as "dumb practices."Rather as I hung out at the conference, and thought of the comments you made and the topics we were discussing at the conference, I decided that — in the short 10 minutes I had (I confess that I ended-up going 12 minutes… my apologies to master of ceremonies Professor Narayan Pant), that I would use the time to question some deeply held and often suspect HR assumptions and practices.  The ultimate aim of the conference, and a host of other other efforts by Singapore's Ministry of Manpower and other agencies is to develop and spread the very best "people management" practices throughout Singapore and the rest of the region.  Although many executives and academics at the conference were mindful of these challenge, it still felt like they (and me too…. it is an automatic response) often mindlessly slipped into doing what had always been because, well, it had always been done that way.

    As such, about four hours before my talk, I slipped away for a couple hours and pounded out the list below of 10 "Flawed, Suspect, and Incomplete Assumptions About Managing People."  The conference organizers, bless their hearts, were nonplussed by my absurd request to produce and pass out 800 copies to audience with a couple hours notice.  I thanked and apologized to Low Peck Kem (who has a great job title "Director of People Matters" at the Ministry of Manpower), and she gave an answer that I've never heard before "Anything is possible" and added "this is easy." 

    The handout is reprinted below, and although it was impossible to include everything in this 12 minute talk (indeed, I only made it to point 8), I think you can see the influence of your comments as well as many other themes I have talked about on this blog.  The point I emphasized to the audience was that I am not even sure that I believe everything on the list:  My goal was to jolt them into thinking about and to challenge their assumptions.  Also, to add some background, I have provided links to past posts and other sources that expand on the points below.  I would love your comments and especially your disagreements because, as I said, this list is meant to provoke rather then persuade. 

    Bob Sutton’s Top 10 List

    Flawed, Suspect, and Incomplete Assumptions
    about Managing People

    1.  HR ought to be all about spotting, hiring,
    and breeding individual talent     (HR could pack a bigger wallop by focusing
    on teams and networks more).

    2.  HR should focus on finding, hiring, and
    developing the very best people     (Bad is stronger than good – about 5 times
    stronger  — so screening-out, reforming,
    expelling the very worst people is more crucial to collective performance).

    3. Find some great
    superstars and pay them whatever is necessary to keep them happy… and certainly
    a lot more than everyone else     (The best organizations pay higher than
    competitors, but have more compressed pay).

    4. Competition
    makes people, teams, and companies stronger      (Unless people and teams are rewarded for
    undermining one another rather than helping each other… dysfunctional internal
    competition     is one of the most pervasive problems in American firms).

    5. Harmony and
    having a shared vision are crucial to success     (Perhaps for routine work;
    but creativity depends on battling over ideas. Part of HR’s job should be to
    teach people how to “fight as if they are right, and listen as if they are
    wrong”    ).

    6.  The key to success is copying practices used
    by the best companies.      (The best
    companies may be succeeding despite rather than because of their HR practices).

    7.  Every company needs a great performance
    review system.      (Are they really
    worth the time and effort? Do they do more harm than good?).

    8. Taking a leadership
    position brings out the best in people.     (This is a dangerous
    half-truth.  Giving people power over
    others turns them into self-centered jerks).

    9.  The most important thing HR can do is to find
    and develop great senior leaders     (Having an organization with a high
    proportion of good bosses     is probably more important).

    10.  The best organizations have the best people,
    “the people make the place.”      (There
    are huge differences in talent, but the best organizations typically have the
    best systems     and not necessarily the best raw talent).

    Robert Sutton, Stanford University (www.bobsutton.net)

    Singapore Human Capital Summit

    30 September 2009

  • Art Imitates Life: The Muffin Incident on Entourage

    Entourage-muffin-425x238
    Last night, I was watching my favorite fictional asshole in action, Jeremy Piven, who plays a big-shot Hollywood agent on the HBO show Entourage.  Ari pretty much has all the asshole moves mastered, from threats, to insults, to backstabbing, to a perfect hostile glare and shit-eating grin, to shameless lust for power and money, to little moves like the time he grabbed a candy bar from a staff member, took a bite, and threw it in trash, while shouting at her that she was fat.

    There was a scene in the episode I saw last night (called "Scared Straight") where — after Ari had been very unhappy with the assistants brought to him by people in HR and had fired one after another. A guy from HR tried, apparently, to calm Ari down by bringing him his favorite breakfast muffin. Ari got pissed-off because it was the wrong flavor and, as pictured above, shoved it in the poor guy's face and fired him on the spot. 

    This fictional incident was no doubt inspired by a (apparently) real one reported in the Wall Street Journal in an astounding 2005 article called "Bosszilla" about Academy Award winning producer Scott Rudin (Sorry, but WSJ only makes the full article available to subscribers).  The incident (and Rudin's legendary firing of assistants)  is described in The No Asshole Rule as follows:

     The Wall
    Street Journal     estimated that he went through 250 personal assistants
    between 2000 and 2005; Rudin claimed his records show only 119 (but admitted
    this estimate excluded assistants who lasted less then two weeks).  His ex-assistants told the Journal
    that Rudin routinely swore and hollered at them – one said he was fired for
    bringing Rudin the wrong breakfast muffin, which Mr. Rudin didn’t recall but
    admitted was “entirely possible.”  

    I love this story because of the description of the fact checking in particular.  In The No Asshole Rule, I used the Bosszilla story to argue that, if the reports about Rudin are true, he appears to qualify as as certified asshole.

  • A Rock Concert With The No Asshole Rule For Performers

    The New Yorker, as with every other publication, wrote about Kanye West's rude intrusion and insults aimed at Taylor Swift during the Video Music Awards, or VMAs. The thing that intrigued me in this article was The New Yorker described another rock concert that seems to be operated much differently, known as the ATP or "All Tomorrow's Parties," which uses the the no asshole rule and is damn serious about it. I quote author Sasha Frere-Jones:

    ATP Director Barry Hogan maintains a “no assholes” policy for all the performers who appear at his festival. If you read this oral history of ATP in the Village Voice,
    you will see exactly who has violated that policy and how Hogan feels
    about them. It seems unlikely that Kanye would ever make it past one
    appearance at ATP, and less likely that he would want to be invited in
    the first place.

    Button

    And if you click to this link to the Village Voice, you will see that Hogan and his co-organizers Deborah Kee Higgins name the bands that banned under the no asshole rule… looks like this guy has pushed the eject button! (I couldn't resist putting it here). And please note from this little excerpt that, most wondrously, one of these asshole bands is called Butthole Surfers (I couldn't make-up anything nearly as good). To quote the Voice article:

    Higgins: We have a "No Assholes" policy. You can play once because we don't know you're an asshole, but you can't play twice.

    Hogan: Killing Joke and the Butthole Surfers
    will never play ATP again, and they can both suck my balls. And you can
    put that in print. The Black Lips will never play again—they're
    assholes. They broke into a chalet and started stealing stuff.

    I have some odds and ends to wrap up over the next few weeks, but I clearly need to update my list of places that don't tolerate assholes.  I have had some great examples lately, like the one at Shakespeare Miami.  Plus one of the great things about visiting Singapore was that I had a nice long chat with CEO Robert Care from ARUP about why and how he implemented the No Dickhead Rule — so I can update that example too. Robert was about as charming a guy as I ever met and was most serious about the eliminating the financial and human damage done by jerks.

    This post almost feels like I am writing fiction or a parody of organizational life, but I am not making this stuff-up, I am just reporting it, and I confess, smiling a lot as I type.

    P.S. A big thank you to John for pointing me to this article.

  • Derek Dean on Dealing With Fear and Denial in Senior Teams: A Thoughtful McKinsey Quarterly Article

    Last week, as I was preparing to get ready to go to Singapore (more on that in another post), McKinsey Quarterly editor Allen Webb asked me if I might be interested in writing a comment on Derek Dean's article "A CEOs Guide to Reenergizing the Senior Team."  I said I would take quick look but was busy getting ready…. well, when I did, I extremely impressed with tone, insights, and balancing act between compassion and the need to get stuff done that Dean described and recommended in the article. The article is short and packed with all kinds gems, but I especially liked the detailed description of how Harrah's Gary Loveman (who may win the award from the best CEO who started as management professor — most of us talk about leading but can't do it) guided his team through the recent tough times.  You can read the article and my comment by going to the above link.  The Quarterly does require you to register, but us free.

     In my comment, CEOs, Tough Times, and Emotions, I made several points,  but perhaps the most important was "to underscore a point that’s implicit but unstated in his essay:
    CEOs must work just as doggedly to confront and deal with their own
    demons and foibles as they do to help their charges come to grips with
    theirs."  CEOs, like other human beings, are often not aware of how their emotions are leaking or spilling out (especially when they are under stress) and how strongly the little things they do affect their teams — especially when members are afraid that something bad is going to happen to them.  I also had a lot of fun using the "interesting shoes" example that originally appeared here.

    As a final comment about where life is heading. I am an old guy who has spent much of his career writing stuff and then waiting months and months before it appears.  Indeed, in graduate school, a colleague and I wrote a chapter for an academic book that appeared some seven or eight years later.  Although it is short, the immediate jolt of writing something less than a week ago and then seeing it distributed for all to see is both delightful and disconcerting.  And all for free…. good thing McKinsey charges money for its other work.

    I hope you enjoy Derek Dean's article; I found it it very thoughtful and his advice can help CEOs in these tough times, or anyone else who leads a team. 

  • Rave Review for Change By Design in New York Times

    9780061766084

    The Sunday New
    York Times     had a rave review for Tim Brown’s new book on design thinking,
    Change By Design.  I best start by saying
    that I am not an objective critic of Tim or the company where he is CEO,
    IDEO.  I did an 18 month ethnography of
    IDEO in 1990s, I have been an IDEO Fellow for about 15 years (which is
    something they sometimes pay me for but usually not, it is sort of like being
    an honorary first cousin), and I am friend and admirer of Tim’s along with
    IDEO’s founder and now Chairman, the rather magical David Kelley (a word I
    would apply to no one else I know personally). 
    I also wrote a blurb for the book because, as the Times review indicates, it shows so many of the best qualities of
    IDEO’s culture and Tim’s modesty, skill, and courage – and his deep and
    sensible understanding of what it means to be a “design thinker. “

    The review, called “Redefining a Profession,”
    concludes that Tim has successfully avoided one of the biggest risks in a book
    like this one – coming across as too much of a commercial for the firm he leads.  Tim accomplishes this by simply being
    himself, and indeed, when I read the galleys, that was my comment…”This is 100%
    Tim Brow.,”  In any conversation you have
    with Tim, he will do things that many CEOs do not, he will give others lots of
    credit, he will tell wonderful stories, talk honestly about what works and what
    doesn’t, and about the limits of the methods used by his company, not just the
    strengths.  Indeed, for me, as much as I
    am a big believer in the power of design thinking, after hanging around the
    Stanford d school for five years or so, although I believe we teach our
    students well, I am often disturbed because “design thinking” is treated as the
    answer to every problem and also as more like a religion than a set of
    practices for sparking creativity.  Tim and
    his many colleagues at IDEO have had the courage to apply design thinking to
    almost any problem – from designing better websites, to changing how
    programmers work together, designing a couple thousand products, revamping
    operations, and changing customers experiences. 
     In doing so they have
    simultaneously pushed the limits of design thinking beyond what others thought
    possible (hence the title “Redefining a  Profession”) while always acknowledging the
    limits of the approach.

    I also want to make sure to mention that Tom Kelley
    – who has played may key roles in the firm and is perhaps the best speaker I
    have ever seen on any topic – has also written two early books that are about
    and inspired by IDEO: The Art of
    Innovation     and The Ten Faces of
    Innovation    , both are also wonderful books, but they are much different than
    Tim’s as they reflect Tom’s personality and experiences.  So if you have read these two books, there is
    still plenty to glean from Change By
    Desig    n.  Although Tim Brown, Tom
    Kelley, and David Kelley all are similar in that (reflecting the IDEO culture) all
    are people who can actually listen, have the courage to try weird stuff and
    learn no matter the outcome, treat others with respect and dignity, are deeply
    curious about everything, and believe that work isn’t just about making as much
    money as possible.  All three talk and
    act  like if you aren’t having fun and
    doing work that matters to you and others, something is wrong, no matter how much
    money you are making. 

    In short, I can’t be unbiased about Change By Design, but The New York Times has a reputation for
    pulling     no punches, so I am glad to see that they loved the book.  I have had the privilege of hanging out with
    a lot of people from IDEO over the past 15 years or so, and it has made my life
    much richer.  So I am pleased to see that
    more objective observers than me see the value of their work and wisdom as
    well    . 

  • What are the Dumbest Practices Used By U.S. Companies?

    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.