Work Matters

Author: supermoxie

  • Amazing Viral Campaign Tool: Put a Friend in a News Story

    I have a longstanding interest in the challenges of creating infectious action. This is the theme of a class that I've been involved in teaching at the d.school for several years now, which Diego of Metacool fame and I started, and has included Debra Dunn, Michael Dearing, and this year, Perry Klebahn as leaders of the teaching team at various times. This is also a central theme in the piece that Huggy Rao and I recently published in the McKinsey Quarterly on the Institute for Health Improvement's 100,000 lives campaign. And I have especially learned a lot from the folks at Mozilla and their masterful attempts to spread the Firefox browser through viral campaigns (check out the latest stuff, they are taking open source marketing to the next level in their Impact Mozilla campaign).

    Just yesterday, however, I was sent an email that contains one of the most impressive viral tools I've ever seen.  It is from the people at Moveon and is campaign tool for Obama, and I realize that many readers may not support Obama. But my focus here isn't on plugging any campaign (this isn't political blog, and I stay away from political opinions here), is it is on the genius of this as a tool to send a viral message.  You can customize it to create news video that blames any person for not voting, and thus costing Obama the election.  Here is my video and you can see how I am blamed for Obama's loss. You can customize it and send to anyone (note when you get to the end there is a place to send the video to anyone you want.)

    Check it out.  I think it is brilliant as viral tool, but it is also kind of scary because it provides more evidence that you can't believe anything that you see and hear.  And it provides evidence that there are some damn smart geeks out there!

  • A Great Catch for Apple: Joel Podolny is the new Dean of Apple Univeristy

    Podolnyj

    A colleague just sent me this news story:

    Joel Podolny is the former Dean of the Yale School of Management. 
    Podolny will be joining Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) to become the dean and
    VP of Apple University.  Podolny worked at Yale for about 3.5 years
    before stepping down.

    Podolny will be officially leaving his post as dean on November
    1st.  Podolny will stick around at Yale until the end of the year to
    help transition Sharon M. Oster, a teacher that is stepping up as the
    interim Dean.

    For the rest of the story, go here.

    I was a bit shocked to see the above story about Joel, as I knew him quite well during the 15 years or so he was at Stanford (he then went on to Harvard and later to Yale as dean), and I thought he was a lifetime academic. But people change and, for most us, nothing we do is a life sentence unless we are afraid to change. I knew Joel last when he was an Associate Dean at the Stanford Business School, and he was so much better at that job than anyone I have ever seen in a similar role before or since, it was astounding. He was one of the best bosses that I have ever seen in action in any kind of organization.  He would do things like just wander around the halls and talk to faculty.  I had an office at the business school in those days where I would write and hang out with colleagues like Jeff Pfeffer, Charles O'Reilly, Maggie Neale, but I wasn't one of Joel's "direct reports." My real appointment was and is in the Engineering School, but somehow, Joel would wander in my office a few times a week, ask what I was up to, add his ideas, and always add some encouragement (by contrast, I am not sure that my current direct supervisor has ever been in my office in the engineering school, even after that person has held the job for over 10 years). The amount of affection and respect that Joel's colleagues had for him was something to behold.

    One of the main reasons that Joel was so well loved at Stanford is that he is such a great listener and his approach is to listen carefully to what a person needs. It is never about him, and he automatically makes decisions and expresses emotions that are in the best interest of the person in front of him and the institution that he is leading.   As a small anecdote about him, and one that shows his wisdom, Joel described to me how he responded when a Stanford faculty member came into his office, threatened to move to another university, and asked for a raise.  Joel told me something like, "I always get to the money eventually, but my theory is that when a faculty member is talking about leaving, a big part of it is always that they don't feel sufficiently loved and appreciated, so I start out by telling them how much I love and appreciate them and all the ways that their colleagues appreciate them and respect them.  And then after we work through that, I turn to the money.  It nearly always turns out that the love and appreciation issue is bigger than the money."  I thought that was brilliant and a lesson that bosses is hundreds of occupations can benefit from.

    Joel is also someone who is willing to do very creative things….. I won't give you a full list, but as one example, when he was an associate dean at Stanford, he was one of the executive producers of a film about Stanford's James March, a renowned organizational theorist. It is was called Passion and Discipline: Don Quixote's Lessons
    for Leadership    .  And it was Joel's idea to do the film, and he worked with Jim to come up with a concept Jim liked, and then to raise funds and make it happen.  Not your usual academic project!

    Apple is lucky to have Joel.  He is as fine a human being as I have met in academia and the rare wise, compassionate, and action-oriented leader.  I suspect that this means he will be moving back to California, which would be nice as I may get to see him now and then.

  • Gary Hamel: All Bankers Who Get Federal Funds Should Be Required To Tattoo “Stupidity is Contagious” On Their Foreheads

    I was at a workshop led by the renowned management guru Gary Hamel last week, who has written multiple bestsellers, most famously Competing for the Future with C.K. Prahalad and most recently The Future of Management. Gary briefly mentioned an editorial that he had published in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago called "Failures of Morality and Leadership."  I checked it out, and not only is it insightful, the ending is pretty funny, as he proposes that all bank CEOs who get bailout money ought to be required to tattoo four things on their foreheads.  Here is the section where Gary provides this advice (I notice that the WSJ didn't include the twist I heard Gary say, that these ought to be written backwards, so when they look in the mirror every morning, they will read it the right way!).  There hasn't been much to laugh about in the crisis, but I laughed at this:

    In the meantime, though it may be wise to add a stipulation to
    whatever bailout plan Washington's wrangling bureaucrats manage to
    concoct. Specifically, all the bankers who receive public money must
    agree to have the following eternal truths tattooed on their foreheads:

    Alchemy doesn't work. What was true for Isaac
    Newton all those centuries ago, is true today, you can't turn dross
    (garbage loans, in this case) into gold (triple A-rated securities), no
    matter how clever you are.

    Things that can't go on forever usually don't. If
    an extrapolated trend produces ludicrous results (like million-dollar
    starter homes), it will soon reverse itself—so don't keep betting it
    won't.

    There's an inescapable correlation between risk and return.
    Maybe there's someone out there who can produce a positive alpha year
    after year, but it probably isn't you, or anyone you know.

    Stupidity is contagious. As a banker, you need to
    reflect for a moment on the mad obsession you and your colleagues have
    had with leverage and complexity, and then face up to the fact that
    you're as susceptible to silly fads as Japanese schoolgirls.

    This may not cure bankers' bulimia, but it's a start.

    The last is my favorite — and empirically supported by much research on social comparison and behavioral contagion and the old Walter Lippman line, "Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."

  • Sam Culbert in the Wall Street Journal: Get Rid of the Performance Review!

    Sam Culbert is a crusty and very wise professor from UCLA and author of many books including, most recently, the charming Beyond Bullsh*t: Straight-Talk at Work.  Sam has a fantastic article in today's Wall Street Journal called "Get Rid of the Performance Review!"  I was struck by his proposal, both because it was so well reasoned and because, when I raised a similar question on this blog a few months back, in Performance Evaluations:Do They Do More Harm Than Good?, I was bowled over by both by the number and detail of the responses. In fact the responses were one of the things that led a group of us at the Stanford d.school to launch a year-long project aimed at re-inventing performance evaluations.  I urge you to read Sam's article, as his argument that most evaluations are so destructive that they are beyond repair will resonate with millions of people out there who give and get performance evaluations.

    Although an entire industry of consultants, HR professionals, and software firms seem bent on devoting more and more time and money to performance evaluations, all the energy devoted to these things over the years have done little to change Sam's observation about the difference between the promise and the problems:

    • The Promise: Performance reviews are supposed to
      provide an objective evaluation that helps determine pay and lets
      employees know where they can do better.
    • The Problems:
      That's not most people's experience with performance reviews.
      Inevitably reviews are political and subjective, and create schisms in
      boss-employee relationships. The link between pay and performance is
      tenuous at best. And the notion of objectivity is absurd; people who
      switch jobs often get much different evaluations from their new bosses      .

    Sam's article is also in the spirit of design thinking, as in many cases, after people have spent years trying to perfect some procedure, gadget, or feature that they — usually mindlessly — accept as something they cannot do without and then a breakthrough happens when some clever person (often someone who isn't an expert in the field) comes along and removes it or unwittingly goes forward and succeeds without it. Then everyone realizes that they never needed it at all. Apple is the master of this approach — you may have seen that their new laptop has no mouse button and, for many years, Apple has had just one mouse button while windows systems have had two.  One of my favorite illustrations of this phenomenon in this article on escape from a submarine, which shows that after decades of trying to develop better gadgets to help people escape from sunken submarines, researchers discovered the the best technology was no technology at all. Actually, as the article shows, they  rediscovered this insight — there was good evidence from incident over 100 years earlier!

    So, two insights here. First, I agree completely that performance evaluations are broken and need to reinvented and possibly replaced with something else.  Or, to take an extreme view, perhaps they should be discarded and replaced with nothing other than regular and informal honest feedback in the context of trusting relationships.  Second, there is a design principle here that is always worth remembering: Creative people, often unwittingly, often have a huge impact by removing things that everyone assumes are essential.  Design is as much about what you take away as what you add.

    P.S. Check out Pete's great comment, I especially love is quote, 'As George Orwell said, "To see what is in front of your nose requires a constant struggle".'  What a great a great line!

  • Can You Help This HR Manager Build a Great Culture in Her Start-up?

    I got an inspiring and fascinating email last week from an HR manager at start-up who is working like crazy to build a great culture. See below. She asked if I had any ideas about how to build and sustain a great culture, and I offered some bits of advice, emphasizing that having written values is one step (like SuccessFactors Rules of Engagement, similar to her Declaration of Commitment) but that having senior managers who live the desired values is what really counts.  I also pointed her to my "Honor Roll" of places that use The No Asshole Rule.  And I think she is perfect candidate for Guy Kawasaki's new book. But I think she could use deeper and wiser advice, so please jump in and help her, as I love both her energy and her goals!  Here is her note (with a few minor changes, to protect both the innocent and the guilty):

    Dear Bob,

    I
    have been a huge fan of the No Asshole movement since I first read about it
    over a year ago.  At the time, I was an HR Generalist at
    manufacturing company.  I passed around a few articles on the subject to
    our management team and everyone was impressed!  They all agreed, how nice
    it would be to have such a policy… they also agreed that there was no way it
    would work!  They said we would have to fire at least half of our
    employees, especially management!  Oddly, they didn’t see the problem with
    that… I did. Months later, I was given my performance review. My boss gave me
    a glowing review, he explained how I had exceeded his expectations, how he
    really appreciated me, how I had gained everyone’s trust… and how I wasn’t
    going to get the promotion to HR Manager because I was a woman in the
    industry.

    I quickly updated my resume and had an interview the next
    week.During my interview with the new company, I shared with them my desire to
    have a no jerks policy and to promote trust within the organization.  I
    knew it was risky, but I was tired of working with jerks!  To my surprise,
    they didn’t think I was crazy!  I was hired as the HR Manager,
    the first 10 employees of the company.  I was given a laptop, a phone, a pen
    and a clean slate. Unfortunately, over the past 6 months and one 12+ hour day
    after another, I haven’t had much time to work on my No Jerks policy.  We
    did come up with an initial list of 10 statements “the Declaration of
    Commitment” to help drive our culture very early in the game and have been
    sharing it with all new hires.  I can’t tell you how excited everyone is
    about the D.O.C..

    But,
    as probably typical with a startup (not that I want to be
    typical), a great deal of work must get done with limited staffing and
    tremendous growth going on… we're pulling away from our ideals.  I’m
    worried that our core values are getting lost in the chaos and I want to get us
    back on the right track.  I need to write out a strategy for supporting
    these values throughout the organization and I'm looking for a good place to
    start.

    We
    hand-picked an incredible workforce and I don’t want to let them down.  Do
    you have any suggestions or advice for me?  I would appreciate any
    input you are willing to share!

    Please help this HR manager. The early days of a start-up are a crazy time, but it is also the critical period when an organization's culture is born, and for better worse, expectations and traditions that are set at the outset are very difficult to change later.


  • Layoffs and Creativity: Are You Expelling the Innovators?

    Unfortunately, the downturn is placing pressure on a lot of organizations to do layoffs.  In recent days we have read about them at GM, eBay, and Tesla (the electric car company).  And there are going to be a lot more.  I have written quite a bit about downsizing, as much of my earlier research focused on organizational decline and death.  You can see some of my major arguments summarized here, here, and here at Harvard Online.  One big lesson from research on downsizing is that when organizations hold-off on layoffs as long as possible and do less deep cuts, they tend to bounce back faster (compared to similar organizations that rely more heavily on layoffs) when the upturn hits (especially organizations with skilled workers).  This happens, in part, because they save recruiting and training costs when the demand for their people returns, and by keeping their experienced workforce around, they can move more effectively than competitors who are scrambling to hire and train new employees with the right skills.  I noticed, for example, that Toyota is using the downturn to train employees — to increase the skills of their existing workforce so that, when demand increases again, they can come back even stronger.

    The other lesson I take away from the research on downsizing is that, if you must do layoffs, do it in a manner that gives people as much predictability about how and when it will be done, as much understanding about why it is necessary for business reasons, and as much control over their lives in the process. Finally, expressing human compassion to those who lose jobs, those who stay (who are losing friends, may feel guilty for not being cut, and also often fear the next round of cuts) , and the surrounding community also helps everyone get through tough times, and increases productivity and loyalty among those employees who survive layoffs.

    I was also reminded of another lesson about layoffs  from an email exchange I've been having with Bill Burnett, over at Superinnovator. A downturn can be an opportunity to get rid of incompetent people and, of course, destructive assholes.  But beware of the evils of using layoffs as a reason to expel everyone in your organization who does not act, think, and look like everyone else — beware that most of us are prone to hold an overly narrow image of a "good employee."  As I show in Weird Ideas that Work, since we human-beings have powerful and positive emotional reactions to people who are "just like us," and equally powerful negative reactions to people who are "different," the hiring process in most organizations acts to "bring in the clones." Or as Harvard's Rosabeth Moss Kanter famously put it her classic Men and Women of the Corporation, organizations engage in "homosocial reproduction." 

    Layoff Planning

    As this Dilbert cartoon suggests, the same psychological forces that cause leaders to bring in the clones during the hiring process can also cause them to (unwittingly)get rid of the people who think differently than everyone else and perhaps are prone to constructive argument.  So a risk of the layoff process in many organizations is that it drives out the variation and diversity  so essential to innovation in every organization.  Take a close look at the people you are keeping versus those you are cutting. Are you unwittingly protecting the clones, those people just like your favorite person — yourself?  And are you consistently expelling able people who make you squirm, who give you the creeps at Scott Adams put it, but who will assure that your organization won't be condemned to be stuck in the past?

  • French Hard Facts Takes the Biscuit!

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    This was the headline on an email
    that I got from Geoff Staines last week. 
    Geoff works for Vuibert, the publisher of our French translation of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total
    Nonsense     (And the French translation of The
    No Asshole Rule     too, Objectif
    Zéro-sale-con    ). He wrote Jeff Pfeffer and me last week to report that “Faits
    et Foutaises dans le management    ” had won an award last week in Paris called
    called “Prix du livre Ressources Humaines.” Apparently, this is an award for
    the best business book published in France during the past year.
     

    Geoff (who is British, but has lived in France for many years) wrote:

     
    “This is the eighth year the
    prize has been awarded; the three sponsors are the HR Chair of "Sciences
    Po", France's prestigious political science school, Le Monde, the national daily newspaper of reference, and a feisty
    headhunter called Syntec. The jury of twelve good men and women was made up of
    HR Directors from the private and public sector, professors from Sciences Po,
    and journalists from the Le Monde
    business and economics section. Sixty titles were originally selected and
    whittled down to three finalists. Main criteria were originality and relevance
    of the subject-matter, research-based propositions, quality of writing and
    pedagogy, and applicability    .

            

    About three hundred people attended the ceremony in Le Monde's offices.The jury loved the breath of coverage of your
    book, the fact-based examples and what they called your unassuming,
    non-dogmatic style, and chose it as a fine instance of university-based writing
    for the general reader. The president of the jury read out a couple of juicy
    bits, and all the copies that were discreetly on sale afterwards went quite
    fast. Champagne flowed, as it always does at the drop of a hat, the munchies
    were so good people stayed late, and there was a very good overall atmosphere.
    I have been doing these things for yonks, and this event stood out.    ”

    I love his description –
    especially that word “yonks.”
            

    Jeff Pfeffer and I are delighted with the news and even more delighted that the
    notion of evidence-based management continues to spread and have impact.  If you are interested in learning more about
    evidence-based management, Jeff Pfeffer and I maintain a website, www.evidence-basedmanagement.com.
    And we thank the panel of judges, Le Monde and Syntec for the award. We are
    honored and would like to thank everyone at Vuibert for their good work.

  • The Arrogant and The Assholes: Both Are Incompetent

    Dave Livingston sent me a snippet of a press report, which I paste in below. 

    Lehman,
    AIG Chiefs Should `Man Up,' Stop `Kissing the Mirror,' Peers Say     Executives
    passing the buck for failures that sank their companies or pushed them to the
    brink win no sympathy from business leaders and management experts. “They need
    to man up and take responsibility,'' said Warren
    Bennis    , founder of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern
    California and author of books including “Leaders'' and “On Becoming a
    Leader.'' “They kept winning, believing in their own omniscience and thinking
    they can get away with anything.'' Chief executive officers summoned to Capitol
    Hill this week by the U.S.
    House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform     didn't point fingers at
    themselves, drawing criticism from fellow chiefs. “There are three reasons why
    companies go out of business and individuals go out of business: No. 1 is
    arrogance, No. 2 is arrogance and No. 3 is arrogance,'' said Harvey
    Mackay    , chairman and CEO of Minneapolis-based MackayMitchell Envelope Co.
    and author of “Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive'' and “Beware
    the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt.'' “They all have chapped lips from
    kissing the mirror too much

    As I read this story and thought about what I learned from the recent financial crisis and from the last year or so from writing and talking about The No Asshole Rule with so many people, I realized that I've learned an important lesson about competence.  People who are certified assholes and those who are relentlessly arrogant often justify their behavior — and are forgiven by others — when they are seen as winners.I believe — and the evidence is pretty clear for both assholes and arrogance (e.g., see this and this research CEO hubris) — that although some leaders succeed (at least for awhile) despite these flaws, they are indeed dangerous flaws.  Just like missing other more tangible targets such as making money or winning games, being arrogant or leaving a trail of demeaned and de-energized people ought to be treated as a sign of incompetence. 

    In fact, arrogance and acting like an asshole are especially great risks among people who are "winning" for the moment.   Although some people are more prone to such forms of incompetence regardless of performance levels, it is clear that any leader of a high-performing organization (regardless of past modesty and civility) is at great risk of turning into an arrogant and insensitive jerk because these are well-documented side effects of success. Just as patients who take a lot of aspirin need to be closely watched for signs abdominal bleeding, the more successful the company, the more likely that arrogance and asshole poisoning will spread, and these should be treated as known and highly dangerous risks.   Contrary to standard practice, top-performing leaders should be treated as at especially high risk of developing mindsets that will later cause them to run their organizations into the ground. At the first hint a leader has turned arrogant or is acting like a nasty, self-centered jerk, rehabilitation should commence, and if that fails, he or she should quickly be shown the door.

    That's my view, as Dave suggested, perhaps my next book should be The No Arrogance Rule.  We would all be better off if those self-proclaimed geniuses on Wall Street had applied the rule a few years back. I guess the Master of the Universe mindset was still seen as a wonderful thing there until very recently.

    P.S. I love that line from  "They all have chapped lips from
    kissing the mirror too much.''

  • “Touch People With The Better Angels of Your Nature”

    Abraham_lincoln_1
    I am continuing to read about leadership, and as I think happens to everyone who goes on this journey, I am reading stuff on Abraham Lincoln. I enjoyed Lincoln on Leadership by Donald T. Phillips (although I am always wary when people are presented as too perfect, as this book does).  I was especially struck with Lincoln's perspective, quoted above, that we all would be better-off if we each worked to "Touch people with the better angels of your nature."  Between the financial meltdowns and being in the final month of heated election, there is a lot nastiness out there, and it seems like an especially good time to heed Abe's advice.

    P.S. I looked around, and the phrase "the better angels of our nature" are the closing words of Lincoln's first inaugural address. You can read the full text here, and as you can see, this was meant as a part of an attempt to avert Southern succession and the civil war.  But regardless of context, I think it is excellent advice. Nastiness sometimes leads to short-term wins, but the long-term costs are usually horrible.

  • Management By Getting Out of the Way

    EXCOMM_meeting,_Cuban_Missile_Crisis,_29_October_1962

    The first of my "15 beliefs Things I Believe" listed to the left of this post is "Sometimes The Best Management is No Management at All." I was reminded of it by Sandy's comment on my last post.  Sandy asked "I wonder what we can tell to
    leaders about how to be less intimidating, even when their influence on
    subordinates is unintentional?"  A damn good question, and one answer — and I would love to hear others — is that sometimes the best thing a person that high status leaders can do is to physically remove themselves from the setting so that their mere presence doesn't stifle the thinking and suggestions in a group of otherwise similar-status peers. 

    Two examples come to mind quickly.  First, and most famously, was what happened in October of 1962 when President John F. Kennedy's advisers were debating about what to do about the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet Union was taking steps to place missiles topped with nuclear weapons just 90 miles from Florida.  Kennedy not only gathered experts with diverse opinions and knowledge and encouraged them to express their opinion. As Irving Janis reports in his writings on Groupthink, at one point, Kennedy divided the larger group (pictured above) into multiple sub-groups and asked each to develop solutions — in order to avoid excessive and premature consensus. Kennedy also reduced the potentially stifling effects of his status as president by being deliberately absent from
    these subgroup meetings,  Although historians and psychologists continue to debate how important such measures to avoid groupthink were for producing the decisions that ultimately defused the crisis, I think that the more general lesson holds: sometimes the best way for a leader to reduce undue influence is to leave the room or avoid going to meetings where his or her presence will dampen frank discussion and deep examination of facts.

    David Kelley, (see the TED talk on the link)founder and chairman of IDEO (where I am a fellow) has impressed me with his ability to get "lead by getting out of the way" for years.  I have been to many meetings were David was careful to avoid saying too much or expressing a strong opinion in the meeting.  And he has this habit that, when he thinks things in a meeting at IDEO are really starting to go well, he kind of gently slinks to the back of the room to reduce his impact.  And he often quietly leaves the scene.  When his opinion and authority is required, David doesn't hesitate to interject.  But I've always been impressed with how sensitive David is to the power of his position (and reputation as one of the most creative people on the U.S. business science), and like Kennedy did so brilliantly, understands the power of leading by getting out of the way.

    Again, this is just one perspective on how people with high status can take actions to avoid stifling the ideas and suggesions generated by those who don't have as much power and prestige.  I would love to hear others.