Work Matters

Category: Innovation

  • Creativity,Inc. by Pixar’s Ed Catmull: One of the Best Business Books of All Time

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    Ed Catmull has been one of my favorite senior executives for a long time.  I admired him from afar after reading about him in David Price's excellent The Pixar Touch.  I admired him even more after talking to people at Pixar about what it was like to work with him (see this story). And then I got to him a little through several interactions I had with him as part of authors' group here in the San Francisco area and also, when Huggy Rao and I interviewed him for Scaling Up Excellence.  

    The most interesting, and I think revealing, interactions I have had with Ed, however, have not been in person — they have come from the process of reading and commenting on an earlier draft of his book, and exchanging emails with him.  And, most recently, reading the finished product.  I won't go through all the twists and turns of the process, but Ed (and obviously his co-writer Amy Wallace, who I did not interact with directly) clearly were dedicated to getting it right,  Even in that early draft, the astounding and intertwined stories of Ed's life and Pixar's development into one of greatest companies on the planet were riveting, as were his insights about building a creative company that run throughout the book. But, as Ed and his Pixar colleagues do, he wasn't just satisfied with just a good book, he took the time and effort, and went through one difficult iteration after another, to make a book that just sings.  You will have trouble putting it down once you pick it up.  And while it may seem like it just rolled out with ease, as with most great things, Ed and Amy wouldn't let it go until it was right. 

    It was privilege to get a few glimpses of how Ed's mind works during the process, especially over the Christmas-New Years break last year when I read the book closely and gave Ed several rounds of comments (I would read a few chapters, and then send him another note). My favorite exchange came at one juncture, after reading the section where Ed describes the sequence of events where he, Steve Jobs, and others were involved in selling Pixar to Disney and announcing it to his people in Emeryville, where Pixar is located and those wonderful movies are made.

     It was pretty deep into the book.  And I finally realized that it had a problem I had never seen in any book written by a successful executive, as I put it to Ed "not enough narcissism."  There wasn't ENOUGH information about the influence he was having, the words he was saying, or about how he turned his considerable wisdom into action. There was plenty about other people, folks like Steve Jobs and John Lasseter that reflected his keep empathy and observational powers.  As I read the final version, I saw that Ed perspective and influence is emphasized just enough for my tastes now — although his trademark modesty persists.

    The book isn't out to until April.  But you should pre-order it now, you will want to read it right away. Here is my blurb — I hope you love this book (and admire Ed's smarts, values, and accomplishments) as much as I did:

    “This is the best book ever written on what it takes to build a creative organization. It is the best because Catmull’s wisdom, modesty, and self-awareness fill every page. He shows how Pixar’s greatness results from connecting the specific little things they do (mostly things that anyone can do in any organization) to the big goal that drives everyone in the company: making films that make them feel proud of one another."

    P.S. Note that I have revised my list of books that every leader should read to include Creativity, Inc.

    P.P.S. When I wrote to Ed how much  I liked the cover, he said something like "well, we have some pretty good artists here." No kidding. Isn't it beautiful? 

  • James G. March: Organizations aren’t Rigid, They are Impressively Imaginative

    Stanford's James G. March is arguably the most prestigious living organizational theorist.  We are reading his 1981 classic paper "Footnotes to Organizational Change" for my scaling up excellence doctoral class. There is one paragraph in this paper that is especially inspired, in the beautiful style of his, March is explaining (among other things) that what many people (including senior management) see as resistance and rigidity is actually proof of great flexibility and innovation — but the resulting changes are often what any one group actors don't want or expect: 

    What most reports on implementation indicate, however, is not that organizations are rigid and inflexible, but that they are impressively imaginative (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973; Bardach, 1977). Organizations change in response to their
    environments, but they rarely change in a way that fulfills the intentions of a
    particular group of actors (Attewell and Gerstein,1979; Crozier, 1979). Sometimes
    organizations ignore clear instructions; sometimes they pursue them more
    forcefully than was intended; sometimes they protect policymakers from folly;
    sometimes they do not. The ability to frustrate arbitrary intention, however,
    should not be confused with rigidity; nor should flexibility be confused with
    organizational effectiveness…There is considerable stability in organizations,
    but the changes we observe are substantial enough to suggest that organizations
    are remarkably adaptive, enduring institutions, responding to volatile
    environments routinely and easily, though not always optimally.

    There is so much wisdom — and also so much underlying evidence packed into this statement — that I am going to devote a long time to discussing it with my students later today!  My favorite line is "sometimes they pursue them more forcefully then intended." I once studied a large convenience store chain that spent millions of dollars trying to increase courtesy after the CEO had a temper tantrum about bad service her received in a store — he was pretty shocked when he learned how strongly the company responded, as they rolled out a far larger a program than he expected, wanted, or believed would be useful!

    I've always been interested in situations like this where small signals from powerful people result in much stronger reactions than they intend — the opposite of resistance to change, if you will.   And in this case it led them to scale up a program that was much bigger, expensive, and time-consuming than he ever intended. 

  • Too Big to Fail, Economies of Scale, Cities, and Companies

    I've been reading research on organizational size and performance as it is pertinent to the book that Huggy Rao and I are writing on scaling-up excellence.  In doing so, I also have been following the debate about banks and whether the assertion that both a cause of the meltdown and a risk for future fiascoes is that banks are "too big to fail."   Of course, the debate is hard to sift through because there is so much ideology and so many perverse incentives (example: the bigger the bank, the more the CEO, top team, and board will — in general — be compensated). 

    Although bankers have been generally silent on this, some have started speaking-up since former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weil — the creator of that huge bank (which lives on courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers) — joined the chorus and argued that big banks ought to be broken-up.   Simon Johnson — an MIT professor — had an interesting editorial in the New York Times yesterday where he reviews some of the recent arguments by bankers and lobbying groups that very big banks are still a good idea — and refutes their arguments (and points out that both Democrats and more recently Republicans are starting to challenge the wisdom of mega-banks). 

    I especially want to focus on the "economies of scale argument," that there are more efficiencies and other advantages enjoyed by larger systems in comparison to smaller ones. This appears to be the crux of an editorial in defense of large banks published in the NYT on August 22nd by former banking executive William B. Harrison Jr.   I was struck by one of Johnson's retorts:

    As I made clear in a point-by-point rebuttal
    of Mr. Harrison’s Op-Ed commentary, his defense of the big banks is not
    based on any evidence. He primarily makes assertions about economies of
    scale in banking, but no one can find such efficiency enhancements for
    banks with more than $100 billion in total assets – and our largest
    banks have balance sheets, properly measured, that approach $4 trillion.

    Although I am interested in — and an advocate — of the power of growing bigger and better organizations at times, doing so is only justifiable in my view if excellence can at least be sustained and preferably enhanced, and the side-effects and risks to do not overwhelm the benefits.  Unfortunately, the optimism among the bigger is better crowd often outruns the facts.  For starters, I would love to see sound evidence that really really big organizations enjoy economies of scale and other performance advantages — Wal-Mart might be such a case, they certainly have market power, the ability to bring down prices, and brand recognition  — but I can't find much systematic evidence for economies of scale across really big organizations.  If Mr. Harrison is correct, for example, there isn't any evidence of increased efficiencies for banks over 100 billion in assets.

    This debate reminds me of some fascinating research on the differences between cities and companies. Luis Bettencourt and Geoffery West of the Santa Fe Institute present fascinating evidence that larger cities are more efficient and effective than smaller ones.  As they conclude in this article in Nature:

    Three main characteristics vary systematically with population. One, the space required per capita shrinks, thanks to denser settlement and a more intense use of infrastructure. Two, the pace of all socioeconomic activity accelerates, leading to higher productivity. And three, economic and social activities diversify and become more interdependent, resulting in new forms of economic specialization and cultural expression. We have recently shown that these general trends can be expressed as simple mathematical ‘laws’. For example, doubling the population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure, whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes or number of petrol stations.

    OK, so it seems that economies of scale do exist for at least one kind of social system, cities.  Does this provide hope for those bankers?  Apparently not. Check out West's Ted Talk on "The Surprising Math Cities and Corporations."  He concludes several interesting things about scaling. First, the bigger the biological system, the more efficient it becomes. Second, following the above quote and the logic that follows from organisms, cities become more efficient (and creative and financially successful too) as they become larger.  Third, that cities rarely die, but organizations almost always do (he claims always).  Fourth, he shows that companies do scale — in fact he talks about Wal-Mart, shows their economies of scale,  and describes his dataset of 23,000 companies. But the twist is that as companies become larger and older they become weighted down with bureaucracy and — unlike cities — the resulting internal friction both outweighs the benefits of economies of scale and renders them unable to to pull-off the radical innovations required to stay alive. 

    Here is this conclusion in more detail, from an article in The New York Times:

    This raises the obvious question: Why are corporations so fleeting?
    After buying data on more than 23,000 publicly traded companies,
    Bettencourt and West discovered that corporate productivity, unlike
    urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As the number of employees
    grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks. West gets giddy when
    he shows me the linear regression charts. “Look at this bloody plot,” he
    says. “It’s ridiculous how well the points line up.” The graph reflects
    the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale
    are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a
    company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then,
    if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and
    rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so
    all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the
    beginning of the end.”

    The danger, West says, is that the inevitable decline in profit per
    employee makes large companies increasingly vulnerable to market
    volatility. Since the company now has to support an expensive staff —
    overhead costs increase with size — even a minor disturbance can lead to
    significant losses. As West puts it, “Companies are killed by their
    need to keep on getting bigger.”

    There are still advantages to size despite these rather discouraging data: market power, legitimacy, the ability to do complex things that require multiple disciplines, and brand recognition come to mind.   And there are studies by economists that show economies of scale help under some conditions.  Some organizations are also better than others at limiting the burdens of bureaucracy as they grow– Wal-Mart is one of them. 

    As a practical matter, when I think of Bettencourt and West's data and combine it with Ben Horowitz's amazing post on scaling, it appears his advice to "give ground grudgingly," to add as little structure and process as you can get away with given your organization's size and complexity, is even more sound than I originally thought.

    As with many researchers, West has a healthy ego and states his findings with more certainty than is probably warranted.  But these are — unlike the bankers — evidence-based statements, and when I combine them with what Huggy and I are learning about how hard scaling is to do well (there are big differences between companies that do it well versus badly), the lack of evidence for economies of scale in really big banks, and a system where the primary defenders of really big banks have strong incentives and weak evidence to support their positions, I am hoping that in a political season where my country seems hopelessly split on so many issues, perhaps this is one where both sides can come together and hold an evidence-based position.

  • Can You Handle the Mess?

    Proto messy

    Remember that speech from a  Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson famously ranted at Tom Cruise "You can't handle the truth?" I was vaguely reminded of it when I saw this picture. It reminded me that, when it comes to creativity and innovation, if you want the innovations, money, and prestige it sometimes produces, you've get to be ready to handle the mess. 

    I love this picture because it is such a great demonstration that prototyping — like so many other parts of creative process — is so messy that it can be distressing to people with orderly minds.  This picture comes from a presentation I heard at an executive program last week called Design Thinking Bootcamp. 

    It was by the amazing Claudia Kotchka, who did great things at VP of Design Innovation and Strategy at P&G — see this video and article.  She built a 300 person organization to spread innovation methods across the company. She retired from P&G a few years back and now helps all sorts of organizations (including the the Stanford d school) imagine and implement design thinking and related insights.  As part of her presentation, she put up this picture from a project P&G did with IDEO  (they did many). We always love having Claudia at the d.school because she spreads so much wisdom and confidence to people who are dealing with such messes.

    That is what prototyping looks like… it even can look this messy when people are developing ideas about HR issues like training and leadership development and organizational strategy issues such as analyses of competitors.

  • Final Exam: Design the Ideal Organization. Use Course Concepts to Defend Your Answer

    That is the final exam question that I've been using for about a decade in my graduate class "Organizational Behavior:An Evidence-Based Approach" in our Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford.  Students get 3000 words to answer the question.  I put in on the course outline so they can see it the first day of class.  I do so because I want propsective students to decide if they can deal with a class with so much ambiguity and pressure to write well and because I want students to start thinking about their paper from the first day of class.  I encourage and reward them for being as creative as possible, while at the same time, weaving together concepts related to major themes in the class such as leadership, employee selection and socialization, motivation and rewards, interpersonal influence, group dynamics, organizational change, innovation, and organizational culture. 

    As I tell the students, this is a really hard question.  In fact, so hard, it is difficult for me to answer even after studying the topic for over 30 years. I guess I did answer it in at least one of my books, The No Asshole Rule, although that was a lot longer than 3000 words.  After a decade or so, I have read about 1000 answers to this question.  Every year, I go through the same process with it.  About a week before the papers are due, I start having second thoughts about it as I talk to the students about their struggles with answering such an open-ended question. After all, this is the Stanford Engineering School, and while some our students write beautifully, for many others, this is the first time they have faced such an open-ended writing assignment.  Then, the same thing happens every year.  The pile of papers come in, I start reading them, and I am delighted with the overall quality and dazzled by the best papers — and pleased by the creativity and even joy the students so many students convey. 

    The range and quality of the papers was especially striking this year.  I believe it was largely because my two course assistants, Belinda Chiang and Isaac Waisberg , did such a great job of giving students feedback during the five writing assignments that led up to the final.  I won't list all the titles and themes of the 84 papers we received.  Quite a few were variations of web-based start-ups, as there is a lot of that at Stanford, especially in the School of Engineering.  

    But here are some of the most intriguing ones:

    A nationwide professional wrestling company that "empowers its wrestlers to create quality shows and programming."

    "The Ministry of Love," a government agency on the imaginary planet of "Natan" that has a population of 3 million people and a declining fertility rate.  The mission of the ministry to increase the birth rate via love.  The key roles are "Venuses" who develop ideas and "Cupids" who implement those ideas.

    An ideal organization for a high school "Queen Bee" who "rules the hallways with a fist full of Prada and enough hairspray to glue flies to the walls."

    A non-profit hospice, that nurtures employees "while they deal with the emotions of death on a daily basis."

    Heaven.  Yes, that heaven — where management has two goals 1. provide people with an afterlife fair to their conduct before death and 2. Encourage people to do good on earth.

    "The Ideal NBA Franchise: Transforming the Golden State Warriors into Champions."  This is a tough job as our local basketball team is a perennial loser.

    Revamping the The National Kidney Foundation of Singapore

    "Mystical Weddings," a wedding planning agency located in India.

    The ideal organization for a family.  This was written by a student who had been a dad for just two weeks.  He was suffering sleep deprivation and other stresses and decided to imagine a better solution.  It was touching and made lovely use of course concepts — incentives, influence, and group norms, for example.

    Finally, the most outrageous and one of the best papers in terms of writing and application of course concepts (written by a female student) was: "Living the dream — would you like to to be the third wife of Tom Brady?  A blueprint for the polygynous family."  I never heard of the word "polygynous."  It means polygamous — one husband, multiple wives, the Big Love thing.

    As I said, although I was tempted to abandon this assignment yet again this year, when I read the papers, I was — as usual — struck by how well the best students apply the theory, evidence, and cases from the course in brilliant ways that I could never possibly imagine.  Also, the assignment reveals students who can define but not really apply concepts, as well as those rare students who haven't learned much course content. 

    I am wondering however, if I should open it up next year so that students can produce something other than a paper that uses course concepts to design the ideal organization.  Perhaps they could do a film, a presentation, or design a game that answers the question in some compelling way.  For the most ambitious students, given the entrepreneurial frenzy at Stanford, perhaps taking steps to start your own ideal organization (and telling me what you've learned) might satisfy the requirement as well. I am not sure if this is a good idea as it is hard to beat good old fashioned writing. But I am toying with it.

  • Book Excerpt: Why What You “Learn” From Steve Jobs May Reveal More About Yourself Than Him!

    Tomorrow morning, Fortune's Adam Lashinsky and I are going to spend an hour at The Churchill Club talking about Apple and what other organizations and leaders can (and cannot) learn from the world's most (economically) valuable company.  If you want to attend, I think you can tickets here still available and I understand they are filming our discussion (I will let you know how to see the video when I find out).

    Adam is the author of Inside Apple (see my detailed review and discussion here).   I don't know nearly as much about Apple as Adam does, but like virtually every other management writer, I've produced various pieces on Apple and Steve Jobs because they are irresistible subjects (such as this piece on 5 Warning Signs to Watch for at Apple). 

    Part of me believes that Apple and Jobs have much to teach other companies and leaders.  But, as I wrote in the new chapter in the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback, part of me is starting to wonder if what each of us "learns" from Steve Jobs amazing life reveals more about our inner selves — our personalities, preferences, and personal experiences — than anything else.  Below is the excerpt from Good Boss, Bad Boss where I toy with this argument (I edited it slightly because one sentence doesn't make sense unless you read the whole chapter).

    I am writing this epilogue in December 2011, two months after the death of Steve Jobs, the most talked-about boss and innovator of our time. Like many others, I found Jobs’s great strengths, startling weaknesses, and bizarre quirks to be fascinating.  For example, I wrote about him in The No Asshole Rule (in the chapter on “The Virtues of Assholes”). Even though Jobs’s nastiness was well documented before Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography was published, I was a bit shocked by tidbits in the book. As his death loomed, Jobs ran through sixty-seven nurses before finding three he liked. Still, there is no denying Jobs’s genius. Even though I would not have wanted to work for him, his design sensibilities, his ability to build great teams, and (in his later years) the way he structured a large organization that moved at the speed of a small one are admirable.

    Recently, however, I had two experiences that led me to believe it is difficult for bosses who want to improve
    their craft to learn from Steve Jobs. The first came after I had taught a two-hour session on innovation to forty CEOs of midsized Chinese companies. None spoke English and I don’t speak Mandarin, so there was a translator to enable communication. I put up a few Steve Job quotes and had fun figuring out that thirty-eight of the forty CEOs had iPhones. During the question-and-answer period, they seemed obsessed with Jobs.

    The most interesting thing happened, however, after I ended the session. As I left, one CEO grabbed the microphone and started hollering into it, and as I walked outside for another meeting, they were yelling at each other. The translator told me they were arguing over whether Jobs was an asshole and whether they should emulate such behavior to be better bosses. When I came back thirty minutes later, the translators ran up to me— laughing—because those CEOs were still arguing over the same thing.

    As I was driving home, I started thinking that Steve Jobs (or at least the idea of Steve Jobs) was so vivid, so
    complicated, and so idolized that for those CEOs, he was like an inkblot test: they projected their inner beliefs, values, desires, and justifications for their behavior onto him. The conversation was sparked by Jobs, but the content had little or nothing to do with what Jobs was like in life or in the lessons he could teach those CEOs.

    Then, a couple weeks later, I went to a party and talked with two people who worked closely with Jobs for years.
    They started pretty much the same argument that those Chinese executives had. Although one asserted the good
    deeds Jobs had done weren’t emphasized enough in media reports or the Isaacson biography, they nonetheless started arguing (and people who hadn’t worked for Jobs jumped in) about whether Jobs’s success meant it was wise or acceptable to be a jerk and when it was worth tolerating an asshole boss. As I listened, I believed once again that the idea of Steve Jobs was prompting people to make sense of and justify their behavior, personal values, and pet theories.

    So I raised my hypothesis: that people couldn’t learn much from Jobs. That he was so hyped, so complex, and
    apparently inconsistent that the “lessons” they derived from him where really more about who they were and hoped to be than about Jobs himself. The two people who worked closely with him agreed. And one added another reason why Jobs was and is a bad role model for bosses: Steve had such a weird and rare brain that it simply isn’t possible for another human being to copy him anyway!

    I am curious, what do you think?  As I re-read this, part of me still believes the argument above and part of me still believes that, well, every boss and innovator can learn something from him (despite the biases we all bring to the table).  I also find it easier to think about Apple and its organization and management in a detached way than about Jobs — perhaps because an organization, even Apple, could never have a personality and presence as vivid and intriguing as Mr. Jobs had. 

    P.S. The event at the Churchill Club was really fun, in part, because Adam and I didn't fully agree with each other.  I especially disagreed with his arguments that Apple was unique in terms of its structure (especially how centralized it is for its size).  We agreed on most things. But we had more fun and learned more — and I think the audience did too — because we pushed each other to refine or logic and examples.  He is a smart and charming guy.

  • The Virtues of Standing-Up: In Meetings and Elsewhere

    I was thinking back to some of the experiences I had over the last few weeks teaching classes to both Stanford students and executives, and watching some of my fellow teachers and colleagues in action.  I realized that one of the hallmarks, one of the little signs I have learned to look for, is whether people are standing-up or sitting down.  We all learn in school that being a "good student" means that we ought to stay in our seats and be good listeners.  But I kept seeing situations where standing-up was a sign of active learning and leadership.  To give you a a few examples, I noticed that when my course assistants stood up and walked around the classroom, they were more likely to be engaged by students and to create enthusiasm and energy. I noticed that student teams in my classes that stood-up when brainstorming, prototyping, or arguing over ideas seemed more energetic and engaged. 

    Perry and David KelleyAnd I noticed when watching master innovation teacher and coach Perry Klebahn in action at the Stanford d. School that he hardly ever sits down for long, he is always on the prowl, walking over to members of his team to ask how things are going, to give a bit of advice, and to find out what needs to be fixed — and is constantly walking over to to watch teams of students or executives who are working on creative tasks to see if they need a bit advice, coaching, or a gentle kick in the ass to get unstuck. (In fact, that is Perry listening to David Kelley while they were coaching teams — David is the d schools main founder).

    Of course, there are times when sitting down is best: During long meetings, when you want to unwind, when relaxed contemplation is in order.  But these thoughts inspired a couple questions that many of us — including me — need to ask ourselves about the groups we work in and lead: Would it help if I stood up?  Would it help if we all stood up?

    This all reminded me of this passage from Good Boss, Bad Boss (from the chapter on how the best bosses "Serve as a Human Shield"):

    In Praise of Stand-Up Meetings

    I’ve been fascinated by stand-up meetings for years.  It started when Jeff Pfeffer and I were writing Hard Facts, our book on evidence-based management.  We often met in Jeff’s lovely house, typically starting-out in his kitchen.  But we usually ended-up in Jeff’s spacious study — where we both stood, or more often, Jeff sat on the lone chair, and I stood.  Meetings in his study were productive but rarely lasted long.  There was no place for me sit and the discomfort soon drove me out the door (or at least back to the kitchen).  We wondered if there was research on stand-up meetings, and to our delight, we found an experiment comparing decisions made by 56 groups where people stood-up during meetings to 55 groups where people sat down.  These were short meetings, in the 10 to 20 minute range, but the researchers found big differences.  Groups that stood-up took 34% less time to make the assigned decision, and there were no significant differences in decision quality between stand-up and sit-down groups.

    Stand-up meetings aren’t just praised in cute academic studies.  Robert Townsend advised in Up the Organization, “Some meetings should be mercifully brief. A good way to handle the latter is to hold the meeting with everyone standing-up. The meetees won’t believe you at first. Then they get very uncomfortable and can hardly wait to get the meeting over with.”

    I keep finding good bosses who use stand-up meetings to speed things along.  One is David Darragh, CEO of Reily, a New Orleans-based company that specializes in southern foods and drinks.  They produce and market dozens of products such as Wick Fowler’s 2-Alarm Chili, CDM Coffee and Chicory, No Pudge Fat Free Brownie Mix, and Luzianne Tea.  David and I were having a rollicking conversation about how he works with his team. I started interrogating closely after he mentioned the 15 minute stand-up meeting held in his office four mornings a week. We since exchanged a series of emails about these meetings.  As David explains:

    “The importance of the stand-up meeting is that it can be accomplished efficiently and, therefore, with greater frequency.  Like many areas of discipline, repetition begets improved results.  The same is true with meetings.  The rhythm that frequency generates allows relationships to develop, personal ticks to be understood, stressors to be identified, personal strengths and weaknesses to be put out in the light of day, etc.  The role of stand-up meetings is not to work on strategic issues or even to resolve an immediate issue.  The role is to bubble up the issues of the day and to identify the ones that need to be worked outside the meeting and agree on a steward to be responsible for it.   With frequent, crisp stand up meetings, there can never be the excuse that the opportunity to communicate was not there.  We insist that bad news travels just as fast as good news”

    The team also has a 90 minute sit-down meeting each week, where they dig into more strategic issues.  But the quick daily meetings keep the team connected, allow them to spot small problems before they become big ones, and facilitate quick and effective action.  

    Stand-up meetings aren’t right for every meeting or boss.  As we saw in the last chapter in the broken Timbuk2 all-hands meeting, part of the problem with that 45 or so minute gathering was there was no place for most people to sit, which fueled the group’s grumpiness and impatience.  The key lesson is that the best bosses constantly look for little ways to use everyone’s time and energy more efficiently and respectfully.  They keep unearthing traditions, procedures, or other things that needlessly slow people down.  In many cases, these speed bumps have been around so long that people don’t even realize they exist or that they do more harm than good.   Try to look at what you and your people do through fresh eyes.  Bring in someone who “doesn’t know any better,” and ask them: What can I do to help my people travel through the day with fewer hassles? 

    What do you think?  How does standing-up help in what you do?  When is it a bad idea?

    P.S. Check out this Wall Street Journal article on stand-up meetings as part of the "Agile" software development process, particularly the "daily scrum."

    P.P.S. Don't miss Jason Yip's article on how to run a stand-up meeting and how to tell when it isn't going well.

     

  • Creativity: Another Reason that Having a Drink — or Two — at Work Isn’t All Bad

    Last April, I had fun writing a guest column for Cnn.Com arguing that having an occasional drink with your colleagues while you are at work isn't all bad:

    In addition to its objective physiological effects, anthropologists have long noted that its presence serves as a signal in many societies that a "time-out" has begun, that people are released, at least to a degree, from their usual responsibilities and roles. Its mere presence in our cups signals we have permission to be our "authentic selves" and we are allowed — at least to a degree — to reveal personal information about ourselves and gossip about others — because, after all, the booze loosened our tongues. When used in moderate doses and with proper precautions, participating in a collective round of drinking or two has a professional upside that ought to be acknowledged.

    Now there is a new study that adds to the symbolic (and I suppose objective) power of alcohol to bring about positive effects. The folks over at BPS Research Digest offer a lovely summary of an experiment called "Uncorking the Muse"  that shows "mild intoxication aids creative problem solving."   The researchers had male subjects between the ages of 21 and 30 consume enough vodka to get their blood alcohol concentration to .07, which is about equal to consuming two pints of beer for an average sized man.  Then they gave them a standard creativity task 'the "Remote Associates Test", a popular test of insightful thinking in which three words are presented on each round (e.g. coin, quick, spoon) and the aim is to identify the one word that best fits these three (e.g. silver).'

    The tipsy respondents performed better on the test than subjects in a sober control group:

    1. "they solved 58 per cent of 15 items on average vs. 42 per cent average success achieved by controls"

    2. "they tended to solve the items more quickly (11.54 seconds per item vs. 15.24 seconds)"

    The reasons they did better and moved faster appear to be lack of inhibition ("intoxicated participants tended to rate their experience of problem solving as more insightful, like an Aha! moment, and less analytic") and, following past research, people with superior memories tend to do worse on this task — because drinking dulls memory, it may help on the Remote Associates Test.  The researchers also speculate that "being mildly drunk facilitates a divergent, diffuse mode of thought, which is useful for such tasks where the answer requires thinking on a tangent."

    I am not arguing that people who do creative work ought to drink all day — there are two many dangers.  As I warned in the CNN piece, booze is best consumed in small doses and with proper precautions.  And of course people who don't or should not drink for health, religious, or other reasons ought not to be pressured to join in the drinking.

    Yet,  this study, when combined when with other work suggesting that drinking can serve as a useful social lubricant, suggest that having a drink or two with your colleagues at the end of the day now and then, and kicking around a few crazy ideas, might both enhance social bonds and generate some great new ideas.  The payoff might include innovative products, services, experiences and the like — if you can remember those sparkling insights after you sober up!

    P.S. The citation is Jarosz, A., Colflesh, G., and Wiley, J. (2012). Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving. Consciousness and Cognition, 21 (1), 487-493

  • FUBAR, SNAFU, Fast Company, and Good Bosses

    My late father, Lewis Sutton, was a World II veteran.  Like many of his generation, the things he learned and experiences he had — from the terrors of the Battle of the Bulge to the joys of chasing French women — profoundly shaped the course of his life.  Part of what he learned was the language, funny and accurate expressions that — although now falling out of use — still provide lovely compact summaries of life's complexities. 

    I was reminded of two of my favorite sayings today by this excerpt from the  new chapter in the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback posted today at Fast Company: "When There Is No Simple Solution at Work, Learn to Embrace the Mess."

    Here is part of the piece:

    Good Boss, Bad Boss shows the value of checklists, of instilling predictability during scary times, and offers A.G. Lafley’s philosophy that the best managers make things “Sesame Street simple.” These and other examples demonstrate that simplicity, clarity, and repeatable steps can reduce the burdens on people, promote performance, and save money. We human beings especially love simple stories that communicate clear solutions and actions; when Conrad Hilton was on the Johnny Carson show, he pleaded with millions of Americans, “Please remember to put the shower curtain inside the tub.”

    Yet there is there is a hazard to this quest: People start believing that every challenge has a clear and simple solution. Stories about past triumphs fuel this predilection. They can make life sound orderly and predictable, even though when the events unfolded, people were probably bewildered and overwhelmed much of the time. As singer Jimmy Buffett put it in his song Migration: “Some things are still a mystery to me/While others are much too clear.”

    Bosses have to be prepared to deal with both circumstances. They need to search for clear solutions and simplify things when possible. But it is impossible to be a leader without facing stretches where you and your followers are overwhelmed with the complexity and uncertainty of it all. When this happens, to maintain everyone’s spirits keep them moving forward, and to sustain collective stamina, sometimes it is best to embrace the mess–at least for a while.

    This challenge reminded me of two of the most famous and fun World War II expressions:

    Snafu — situation normal, all fucked-up

    fubar — fucked-up beyond all recognition

    One CEO I know, also the son of a World War II veteran, uses the distinction between the two to help decide whether a "mess" requires intervention, or it is best to leave people alone for awhile to let them work through it. 

    He asks his team, or the group  muddling through mess: "Is it a snafu or fubar situation? " He finds this to be a useful diagnostic question because, if it is just usual normal level confusion, error, and angst that is endemic to uncertain and creative work, then it is best to leave people alone and let hem muddle forward.  But if it is fubar, so fucked-up that real incompetence is doing real damage, the group is completely frozen by fear, good people are leaving or suffering deeply, customers are fleeing, or enduring damage is being done to a company or brand — then it is time to intervene. 

    Its not a bad diagnostic, and dovetails well with another theme from Good Boss, Bad Boss — that the best bosses are "perfectly assertive," they know how to diagnose situations to determine when to watch, evaluate, coach or criticize their followers — versus when it is best to just get out of the way.  

    I would love to hear other ideas about how a boss knows when it is time to intervene versus time to "manage by getting out of the way."

  • Standing on the Sun: Chris Meyer’s and Julia’s Kirby’s Imaginative Masterpiece

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    About a decade ago, I was talking with Jeff Pfeffer as he raved about Competing for the Future, the 1996 strategy classic written by Gary Hamel and the late C.K. Prahalad.  Jeff drives me crazy sometimes — he  is never wishy-washy anything. But I always listen closely to him because, after all, he is one of the most productive organizational researchers on the planet and one of the three or four most influential organizational theorists of all time.  Jeff argued that the book was so important because it not only contained new and emotionally compelling ideas — some backed by strong data, others that were important to test with good data in the future — it contained more intriguing ideas per page than any popular and well-written business book he had ever read.

    Well, there is a new book that qualifies for the same praise: Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Will Change Business Everywhere.  The ideas here come rapidly but it is so well-written that you don't realize how thoroughly and intensely you are learning new things and the rate at which your assumptions are being challenged.  I am biased, but I credit Julia Kirby for this rare magic. Chris is a smart guy, but he has never edited me so perhaps I am not giving him enough credit. Julia — an "Editor at Large" at HBR –  is the best and smartest business writer I have ever worked with.  There are a lot of good editors out there who make your prose and flow better, but Julia is the only one I know who not only makes your ideas better, she relentlessly adds new ones and challenges you with logic and data when she thinks you are wrong or your logic is sloppy. 

    Chapter 5 on "Pseudocompetition," for example, unmasks and brings down much of the current hype about size, scale, and competition.  At one point, we hear about a Harvard Business Review author who claimed that "industries were in flux, with many becoming more disaggregated and competitive as many others become more concentrated."  Well, Julia checked the facts, and as the book says "No dice." This guy was largely wrong, something called the Hirschmann-Herfindahl indexes (the gold standard for measuring market power) showed that — except for a couple "small potatoes" industries — every other industry is becoming more concentrated.

    To get out of the weeds, this is the most complete and creative book I know on how the world economy is changing and what it means for the strategies and tactics that leaders all over the world need to implement.   Reading the book is a compelling journey, as Meyer and Kirby first explain the key features of the new capitalism that is emerging around the world and then provide advice for businesses and leaders in this new world.

    I found the "operating principles" developed in Chapter 9 to be especially especially interesting . These include:

    Rule One: Learn to See Results in Color

    Old formulation: Measure financial returns to shareholders.

    New formulation: Measure the real value sought by stakeholders.

    Rule Two: Internalize Externalities

    Old formulation: Externalize every cost you can.

    New formulation: Own your impact, negative and positive.

    Rule Four: Give it Away Until You Charge for It

    Old formulation: Focus on your particular value-adding capability and outsource all the rest (except where transaction costs are prohibitive).

    New formulation: Pursue collaborative gains through invisible handshakes.

    The surrounding discussion around these and the other operating rules are wonderful, and each helped me think of the capitalist world we now live in through a new perspective.  Indeed, Rule Four challenges some of the ideas — or at least translations –  about "core competence" that emerged from Competing for the Future.  And I find Rule Two quite interesting in light of what Apple is learning about the responsibility it needs to take for the alleged mistreatment of employees at supplier Foxconn where wages just went up 25% as well as the environmental impact of suppliers who build their products — in fact, they just announced environmental audits.   These recent moves by Apple suggest they are stepping up to "own" both their positive and negative impact — and as Chris and Julia suggest, they aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, they are doing it because it is necessary for protecting Apple's reputation and legitimacy.

    Standing on the Sun is not a quick and mindless read.  But if you want an unusually well-written book that is chock-full of new insights about the capitalist world we now live in and about what leaders and businesses can do to survive and thrive in these deeply weird and disconcerting times, this is the book for you.