Work Matters

Category: Knowing-doing gap

  • Three Hallmarks of Good Performance Evaluations

    Phyllis Korkki of the New York Times wrote a piece this Sunday for her Workstation column called Invasion of the Annual Reviews.  It emphasizes the risks and downsides of annual reviews, and she quotes me quite a bit — I didn't realize how much until the piece came out.  But she got it right, as she always does (I have worked with her before, she is very professional and very careful).  As Phyllis had only so many words to work with, and she weaves in the perspectives of others including an interesting clarifying statement from a Yahoo! spokesperson asserting they are not doing forced ranking, but rather "“Our system lets employees understand how they are performing relative to expectations (exceeding, achieving or missing), and there are no hard and fast rules.” 

    I got a couple emails from friends — one congratulatory and the other that disagreed with me — suggesting that the piece meant I was opposed to all annual performance reviews, not just bad performance reviews.  I confess that I have raised the question of if they should be abolished before and two parts of the piece may have helped to fuel this impression:

    This paraphrase from Phyllis:

    Professor Sutton is wary of rankings and yearly evaluations in general. Many organizations, he said, would be better off if they provided continuous feedback, with formal evaluations coming into play mainly if a worker is being eyed for promotion or has shown substandard performance.

    And the closing paragraph:

    “If performance evaluations were a drug, they would not receive F.D.A. approval,” he said, because “they have so many side effects, and so often they fail.”

    These are accurate representations of my perspective.  But I think it is important to make clear that I am not opposed to all performance evaluations, only bad ones. — and unfortunately, they are done badly more often then they are done well.  So, what are the hallmarks of good performance evaluations?  Consider three:

    1. Is what happens during that annual conversation and evaluation woven into the fabric of every day life, or as I was quoted in the piece "“this weird form you fill out every year that has nothing to do with everyday life.”  So if your boss gives you positive feedback all year, or doesn't give you feedback at all over the course of the year, and then you get bad review, the boss isn't doing his or her job.  In organizations that generally do evaluations well, I think of McKinsey and GE, although they do yearly evaluations, there is also an emphasis on teaching and nudging leaders to constantly give their direct reports regular coaching and feedback.  There are two tests here.

    If you are a boss, do people often seem surprised by the feedback you give them during annual reviews?

    Does the review conversation seem uncomfortable and unnatural, something that bears no relationship between the feedback and coaching (or lack of it) that happens throughout the year. 

    2. How is excellent performance defined and measured?  In some firms, even though the goal is to create collaboration and information sharing, "stars" are nonetheless anointed solely on the basis of individual achievements (and for more senior folks, on the basis of their team of department's contribution, not on their contribution to the overall success of the organization).  In too many companies, although leaders hope for cooperation, they reward backstabbing, stomping on others on the way to the top, and other flavors of dysfunctional internal competition.  So the question of "who is a superstar here" is the one I ask leaders all the time, I want to know "are they the people who are great individual performers AND who help others succeed — or are the people that ignore and even undermine their colleagues?"  This is a theme that Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote about in our books on The Knowing-Doing Gap and Hard Facts, and I revisit in Good Boss, Bad Boss. Note also that both GE and McKinsey are usually very careful to anoint the right kind of stars — and so are a lot of other organizations I admire including IDEO, P&G, and the Cleveland Clinic. 

    3. Finally, while I believe strongly in weeding out bad apples and rewarding good behavior, what are the assumptions about the nature of a human organization?  Do leaders believe that there will always be a certain percentage of losers who will need to be weeded out and a certain percentage of amazing performers who deserve the lion's share of rewards.  This is the assumption that drives many stack ranking and one I don't like and that is contrary to the evidence.  It is also contrary to the logic of the quality movement (which weirdly, GE who at least had this system in the past embraced as well).  Imagine a manufacturing system or worse yet a hospital where you assumed that year over that there would be a 10% defect rate, 70% of the work would only be OK, and only 20% would be great.  Unfortunately, that is the implication of how stack ranking is done in some places, even other wise very well managed places.  

    Here is how things can play out when this assumption is implemented in a misguided way.  One senior executive I know had spent years building a great 12 person team.  He hired carefully, he weeded out a few rotten apples, and has the team humming.  Then, the company hired a head of HR who had unwavering faith in firing the bottom 10% each year — he was required to fire one of his people.  In essence, following the logic of Deming and other quality gurus, he had built a system with no defective parts — but was required to throw one away.  He refused to do it and quit — which, as he told them, solved their problem, because now they didn't have to fire a member of his team (which they did anyway, as he "didn't count.") 

    I hope this clarifies my views.  Note that the NYT's piece also talks a bit about Adobe's recent efforts to abolish annual reviews and replace them with frequent check-ins.  Huggy Rao and had in-depth conversations with Donna Morris, the brave executive who led this change, and we talk about the details in our forthcoming book Scaling Up Excellence.  The upshot is that Donna and her colleagues worked on shifting the focus from the mechanics of annual reviews to the nuances of daily interactions between leaders and their teams.

    I am quite interested in the path that Adobe is taking because the result may be that, indeed, there is a better alternative to yearly performance evaluations.  Indeed, note that, in the places that do them well, they are woven into the fabric of everyday life — so perhaps an interesting test of how bad  AND how good your annual performance evaluation is "what would happen if we didn't do them?"  Oddly, if you are doing them really badly, then I would argue that doing nothing might be better.  Just give employees an envelope with their yearly raise and skip that stilted dysfunctional disingenuous yearly conversation.  And if you are doing things really well, then perhaps you will find out that you don't need them after all because people are getting such regular feedback and coaching that the formalities are a waster of time in most cases– think of all the time and money you would save! 

  • The Marketoonist on Attila the Manager

    121119.attila marketoonist

    I got a note from a manager about this cartoon and story at the Marketoonist, which is drawn and written by Tim Fishburne — he talks about The No Asshole Rule and the problem of brillant jerks. Check out his site, it is filled with great stuff — like this cartoon and story about my least-favorite U.S. company, United Airlines.

    P.S. I am sorry I have not been blogging much, I am hoping to turn up the volume and have a lot of things to write about, especially Matt May's new book The Laws of Subtraction.  But life keeps getting in the way!

  • John Gardner on What a University Ought to Stand For

    I spent the morning trying to catch-up on all the emails that have been piling-up and the stuff I have been collecting to read for the book we are are writing on scaling-up excellence. Huggy Rao and I spent the week as co-directors of an executive program called Customer-Focused Innovation. We had great fun and learned an enormous amount from the 65 executives who participated in blend of traditional classroom education (we call it the "clean models" part) and d.school experiential education — project with JetBlue aimed at bringing more "humanity" to air travel for their customers (we call this the "dirty hands" part).

    The program appears to be a big success (participants rated it 4.87 on a 5-point "willingness to recommend" scale). But after all those logistics and all that social ramble, I am delighted to have a quiet day.
    I wasn't planning on doing a post, but I couldn't resist sharing the opening of an article by the amazing Karl Weick, one of the most imaginative people in my field.

    Karl started out his 2002 British Journal of Management on "Puzzles in Organizational Learning: An Exercise in Disciplined Imagination" this way:

    It is sometimes possible to explore basic questions in the university that are tough to raise in other settings. John Gardner (1968, p. 90) put it well when he said that the university stands for:

    • things that are forgotten in the heat of battle

    •values that get pushed aside in the rough and tumble of everyday living

    • the goals we ought to be thinking about and never do

    • the facts we don’t like to face

    • the questions we lack the courage to ask

    I read that list over and over. As you may know, the late John Gardner was one of the most thoughtful leadership "gurus" who ever lived and so much more. As a university professor, this reminded me of why my colleagues and I — at our best, we all screw-up at times — do certain things that annoy, surprise, and — now and then — actually help people. We feel obligated to take years trying to figure out the answers to questions that seem pretty simple on the surface. We study obscure things that seem trivial or at least not very important right now. We feel obligated to go with the best evidence even when we don't like answer (e.g., the recent Stanford study that shows there is little or no documented health advantage to organic food isn't something I want to hear, but it is so carefully done that I accept it as the provisionally true). We also feel obligated to ask questions of ourselves at others that can be quite unpleasant for everyone.

    I think of my colleague Jeff Pfeffer in particular here, who throughout his whole career, has raised questions about everything from the overblown effects of leadership, to the ways that focusing on money turns us greedy and selfish, to his current work on how organizations and workplaces can make us ill and cause us to die premature deaths. Jeff has made a lot of people squirm people over the years, including me, but he is doing exactly what John Gardner asserted that  a good professor ought to do — seek and tell the truth, even when it is hard to take.

    As has happened so many times throughout the nearly 30 years I have been a university professor, Karl Weick (with a big assist from John Gardner this time) has reminded me yet again of what is important in my line of work and the standards I should try to follow. 

  • Brandi Chastain’s Advice on Incentives and Cooperation

    As regular readers of this blog may recall, my wife — Marina Park — is the CEO of the Girl Scouts of Northern California.  It has been a busy year from Marina and her staff because it is the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the Girl Scouts and there have been many celebrations.  There was an especially wild one called 100 Hundred, Fun Hundred where some 24,000 girls gathered at the Alameda County Fair Grounds to camp and engage in activities ranging from rock climbing, to scuba diving, to dancing to roakc bands.  You can read about the various celebrations here on their website.  

    Today, I am focusing on the Forever Green Awards — a series of dinners that have been held throughout Northern California to honor women who "have made a significant impact to sustaining the environment, economy, or community."  I have been three of the eight award dinners now and have been inspired by many of these women (here is the complete list), from opera soprano Katherine Jolly, to Jane Shaw the Chairman of the Board at Intel, to Amelia Ceja — the Owner & President Ceja Vineyards. 

    I  heard something last week at the dinner in Menlo Park that especially caught my ear — from none other than Brandi Chastain, the Olympic Women's Soccer gold medal winner and world champion, who still plays soccer seriously and now often works as a sports broadcaster for ABC and ESPN.  Of course, Chastain we always be remembered for throwing off her jersey after scoring the winning goal at the Women's World Championships in 1999 — in 2004 she wrote a book called "Its Not About the Bra."

    The award winners at Menlo Park were each asked to describe the best advice they ever received.  Brandi began by talking about her grandfather and how crucial he was to her development as a soccer player and a person.  Brandi said that he had a little reward system where she was paid $1.00 for scoring a goal but $1.50 for an assist — because, as she put it, "it is better to give than receive."

    I love that on so many levels.  I helped coach girls soccer teams for some years, and getting the star players to pass was often tough.  And moving into the world of organizations, as Jeff Pfeffer and I have been arguing for years, too many organizations create dysfunctional internal competition by saying they want cooperation but behaving in ways that promote selfish behavior.  Chastain's grandfather applied a simple principle that can be used in even the most sophisticated reward systems — one that I have seen used to good effect in places ranging from General Electric, to IDEO, to McKinsey. 

    P.S. The last Forever Green Awards will be in Santa Rosa at the Paradise Ridge Winery.  Click here if you want to learn more.

  • A Call for Change at United: A Statement from Annie and Perry Klebahn

    My last post was about how United Airlines lost Phoebe, my friend’s 10-year old daughter.  All of us involved in this story – especially parents Annie and Perry, NBC’s Diane Dwyer (the only media person that interviewed Annie and Phoebe), and me – were stunned to see how viral it went.  A Google search last night revealed it was reported in at least 160 outlets – including England, France, and Germany with the facts based only on the post written here, Annie and Perry’s complaint letter, and United’s tepid apology.  This blog received over 200,000 hits in the last two days; 2000 is typical.  Annie and Perry have resisted the intrusive onslaught of media people (most were polite, several incredibly rude) and elected to do a single interview with Diane Dwyer.  It appeared locally in the San Francisco Bay Area as well is in a shorter (but I think still excellent) form this morning on The Today Show. Here is the link to The Today Show video and to Diane’s written story on the local NBC site.

    I also want to reprint United's statement because it lacks even a hint of empathy or compassion.  Note that it does not question any of the facts put forth by Annie and Perry and also note that no attempt was made to reach out to Annie and Perry until United was contacted by NBC reporter Diane Dwyer. As one executive I know explained — he is in what they call Global Services, the top 1% of United customers — even the statement is a symptom of how deep the denial is and how shallow the humanity is in the company:

    “We reached out directly to the Klebahns to apologize and we are reviewing this matter. What the Klebahns describe is not the service we aim to deliver to our customers. We are redepositing the miles used to purchase the ticket back into Mr. Klebahn’s account in addition to refunding the unaccompanied minor charge.  We certainly appreciate their business and would like the opportunity to provide them a better travel experience in the future.“

     Charles Hobart/United Airlines Spokesman

    Annie and Perry have written a statement below and as you can see, they aren’t going to be doing any additional media and their focus is on persuading United to change its policies and procedures for handling unaccompanied minors.  They ask the media and anyone else out there to please respect their privacy from now onward.

    As they request, I will also shift my efforts here and elsewhere  to trying to understand how United reached the point where they are so broken, developing ideas about what can be done to save them from themselves, and to press United to break out of its current denial and start down the road to redemption. 

    Here is the statement from Annie and Perry, again, please respect their privacy.

    On behalf of the Klebahn family we appreciate your interest in our story.  We feel strongly that United's program for handling unaccompanied minors is deeply flawed and that they need to seriously overhaul this program and their entire approach to customer service.  

    Hundreds of thousands of families send their kids on United each year as unaccompanied minors. We sent our daughter away to summer camp, but many families are separated for a variety of reasons and sending their kids on planes alone is part of their required routine. United offers this service, and families like us trust and rely on them to provide safe, secure passage for children. The age of the children United takes into their care is 5-11 years old and not all of them carry cell phones, nor have the maturity to know what to do in an emergency. It's astounding how many flaws there are in United's program but at a bare minimum we think they need to change the following:

    • United does not disclose that their unaccompanied minor service is outsourced to a third party vendor–this needs to change so parents can make an informed choice about who they are entrusting their children to when they travel alone 
    • If United is going to continue offering this service to families they need to offer a dedicated 24/7 phone line that is staffed with a live human being in the U.S. so that parents have an active and real resource to use during their travel experience
    • United should also be required to alert parents immediately of travel delays and alternative plans for the minors in their care

    It is still startling to us that after our unbelievable experience it took six weeks, and a press story by NBC, to have United even consider responding to our concerns and complaints. Our only goal in all of this is to have United acknowledge that their program is flawed, and to consider an immediate overhaul before another child gets lost or hurt. Getting our $99 back with a veiled apology means nothing given what we've been through. 

    As an organization United is broken. They have the worst customer rating of all airlines, they have the highest number of official complaints on the US Department of Transportation's website, and the largest number of negative comments on the Internet, Facebook and Twitter. How can they not notice that they are doing it wrong?

    At this point the important thing for us is that our daughter is safe. We can only hope that making our story public will in some way make an impact by adding another voice to the many out there asking United to change. If you would like to add your voice too, please join our petition to change United's Unaccompanied Minor Program by signing your name to the petition we started on Change.org. 

    We would like to thank Diane Dwyer at NBC and Dr. Robert Sutton for their help telling this story.  There will be no further comments or interviews.

    Annie and Perry Klebahn

  • United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn’t Care

    My colleague Huggy Rao and I have been reading and writing about something called "felt accountability" in our scaling book. We are arguing that a key difference between good and bad organizations is that, in the good ones, most everyone feels obligated and presses everyone else to do what is in their customer's and organization's best interests.  I feel it as a customer at my local Trader Joe's, on JetBlue and Virgin America, and In-N-Out Burger, to give a few diverse examples. 

    Unfortunately, one place I have not felt it for years — and where it is has become even worse lately — is United Airlines.  I will forgo some recent incidents my family has been subjected to that reflect the depth at which indifference, powerlessness, and incompetence pervades the system. An experience that two of my friends — Annie and Perry Klebahn — had in late June and early July with their 10 year-old daughter Phoebe sums it all-up.  I will just hit on some highlights here, but for full effect, please read the entire letter  here  to the CEO of United, as it has all the details. 

    Here is the headline: United was flying Phoebe as an unaccompanied minor on June 30th, from San Francisco to Chicago, with a transfer to Grand Rapids.  No one showed-up in Chicago to help her transfer, so although her plane made it, she missed the connection. Most crucially, United employees consistently refused to take action to help assist or comfort Phoebe or to help her parents locate her despite their cries for help to numerous United employees.

    A few key details.

    1. After Phoebe landed in Chicago and no one from (the outsourced firm) that was supposed to take her to her next flight showed up. Numerous United employees declined to help her, even though she asked them over and over.  I quote from the complaint letter:

     The attendants where busy and could not help her she told us.  She told them she had a flight to catch to camp and they told her to wait.  She asked three times to use a phone to call us and they told her to wait.  When she missed the flight she asked if someone had called camp to make sure they knew and they told her “yes—we will take care of it”.  No one did. She was sad and scared and no one helped.

    2. Annie and Perry only discovered that something was wrong a few hours later when the camp called to say that Phoebe was not on the expected plane in Grand Rapids. At the point, both Annie and Perry got on the phone.  Annie got someone in India who wouldn't help beyond telling her:

    'When I asked how she could have missed it given everything was 100% on time she said, “it does not matter” she is still in Chicago and “I am sure she is fine”. '

    Annie was then put on hold for 40 minutes when she asked to speak to the supervisor.

    3. Meanwhile, Perry was also calling. He is a "Premier" member in the United caste system so he got to speak to a person in the U.S. who worked in Chicago at the airport:

    "When he asked why she could not say but put him on hold.  When she came back she told him that in fact the unaccompanied minor service in Chicago simply “forgot to show up” to transfer her to the next flight.  He was dumbfounded as neither of us had been told in writing or in person that United outsourced the unaccompanied minor services to a third party vendor."

    4. Now comes the most disturbing part, the part that reveals how sick the system is.  This United employee knew how upset the parents were and how badly United had screwed-up. Perry asked if the employee could go see if Phoebe was OK:

    "When she came back she said should was going off her shift and could not help.  My husband then asked her if she was a mother herself and she said “yes”—he then asked her if she was missing her child for 45 minutes what would she do?  She kindly told him she understood and would do her best to help.  15 minutes later she found Phoebe in Chicago and found someone to let us talk to her and be sure she was okay."

    This is the key moment in the story, note that in her role as a United employee, this woman would not help Perry and Annie. It was only when Perry asked her if she was a mother and how she would feel that she was able to shed her deeply ingrained United indifference — the lack of felt accountability that pervades the system. Yes, there are design problems, there are operations problems, but the to me the core lesson is this is a system packed with people who don't feel responsible for doing the right thing.  We can argue over who is to blame and how much — management is at the top of the list in my book, but I won't let any of individual employees off the hook.

    5. There are other bad parts to the story you can see in the letter. Of course, they lost Phoebe's luggage and in that part you can see all sorts of evidence of incompetence and misleading statements, again lack of accountability.

    6. When Anne and Perry tried to file a complaint, note the system is so bad that they wouldn't let them write it themselves and the United employee refused their request to have it read back to be fact-checked, plus there are other twists worth repeating:

    We asked to have them read it back to us to verify the facts, we also asked to read it ourselves and both requests were denied.  We asked for them to focus on the fact that they “forgot” a 10-year old in the airport and never called camp or us to let us know.  We also asked that they focus on the fact that we were not informed in any way that United uses a third party service for this. They said they would “do their best” to file the complaint per our situation.  We asked if we would be credited the $99 unaccompanied minor fee (given she was clearly not accompanied).  They said they weren’t sure.

    We asked if the bags being lost for three days and camp having to make 5 trips to the airport vs. one was something we would be compensated for (given we pay camp $25 every time they go to the airport).  They said that we would have to follow up with that separately with United baggage as a separate complaint. They also said that process was the same—United files what they hear from you but you do not get to file the complaint yourselves.

    7.  The story isn't over and the way it is currently unfolding makes United looks worse still in my eyes.  United had continued to be completely unresponsive, so Annie and Perry got their story to a local NBC TV reporter, a smart one who does investigations named Diane Dwyer.  Diane started making calls to United as she may do a story.  Well, United doesn't care about Phoebe, they don't care about Annie and Perry, but they do care about getting an ugly story on TV.  So some United executive called Annie and Perry at home yesterday to try to cool them out. 

    That story was what finally drove me to write this because, well, if bad PR is what it takes to get them to pretend to care, then it is a further reflection of how horrible they have become. I figured that regardless of whether Diane does the story or not, I wanted to make sure they got at least a little bad PR.

    I know the airline industry is tough, I know there are employees at United who work their hearts out every day despite the horrible system they are in, and I also know how tough cultural change is when something is this broken. But perhaps United senior executives ought to at least take a look at what happens at JetBlue, Virgin America, and Southwest.  They make mistakes too, it happens, but when they do, I nearly always feel empathy for my situation and that the people are trying to make the situation right.

  • Dysfunctional Internal Competition at Microsoft: We’ve seen the enemy, and it is us!

    My colleague Jeff Pfeffer and I have been writing about the dysfunctional internal competition at Microsoft for a long time, going back to the chapter in The Knowing-Doing Gap (published in 2000) on "When Internal Competition Turns Friends Into Enemies."  We quoted a Microsoft engineer who complained there were incentives NOT to cooperate:

    "There are instances where a single individual may really be cranking and doing some excellent work, but not communicating…and working within the team toward implementation.  These folks may be viewed as high rated by top management… As long as the individual is bonused highly for their innovation and gutsy risk-taking only, and not on how well the team accomplishes the goal, there can be a real disconnect and the individual never really gets the message that you should keep doing great things but share them with the team so you don’t surprise them."

    And we quoted another insider who complained about the forced curve, or "stacking system:"

    This caused people to resist helping one another.  It wasn’t just that helping a colleague took time away from someone’s own work.  The forced curve meant that “Helping your fellow worker become more productive can actually hurt your chances of getting a higher bonus.”

    This downside of forced-rankings is supported by a pretty big pile of research we review in both both The Knowing-Doing Gap and in Hard Facts, and I return to a bit in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The upshot is that when people are put in a position where they are rewarded for treating their co-worker as their enemy, all sorts of dysfunctions follow.  Forced rankings are probably OK when there is never reason to cooperate — think of competitors in a golf tournament — or perhaps when sales territories or (for truck drivers and such) routes can be designed so that people don't need to cooperate.  And there is one trick I've seen used (at GE for example) where people are ranked, but part of the ranking is based on how much they help others succeed — but people at GE have told me that forcing the firing of the bottom 10% can still create lots of problems (in fact, my understanding is that GE has softened this policy). 

      As my colleagues Jeff Pfeffer loves to say, the assumption that the bottom 10% have to go every year is really suspect — it assumes a 10% defect rate!  Imagine a manufacturing system where that was expected and acceptable:

    Well, the Microsoft stacking system is in the news again. A story by Kurt Eichenwald in coming out in Vanity Fair that bashes Microsoft in various ways, especially the "stacking system."  It is consistent with past research and reports that have been coming out of Microsoft for decades — I bet I have had a good 50 Microsoft employees complain about the stacking the system to me over the years, including one of their former heads of HR.

    The story isn't out yet, but according to Computerworld and other sources, this is among the damning quotes:

    Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed — every one — cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. 'If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,' says a former software developer. It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.

    To be clear, I am not opposed to pay for performance. But when unnecessary status are created, when small quantitative differences that don't matter are used to decide who is fired, anointed as a star, or treated as mediocre, and when  friends are paid to treat each others as enemies, creating the unity of effort required to run an effective organization gets mighty tough — some organizations find clever ways to get around the downsides of stacking, but some succeed despite rather than because of how they do it. 

    The late quality guru W. Edwards Deming despised force rankings.  Let's give him the last word here. Here is another little excerpt from The Knowing-Doing Gap:

    He argued that these systems require leaders to label many people as poor performers even though their work is well within the range of high quality.  Deming maintained that when people get these unfair negative evaluations, it can leave them "bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent, dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed, unfit for work for weeks after receipt of the rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior.”

  • Total Institutions, Productivity, and Unemployment

    This isn't an original idea, but it has been gnawing at me lately.  As we all know, unemployment in the U.S. remains frighteningly high — and is  worse in many parts of Europe.  We still haven't really dug our way out of the meltdown.  At the same time, the hours worked by Americans remain incredibly high.  See this 2011 infographic on The Overworked American.  About a third of Americans feel chronically overworked.  And some 39% of us work more than 44 hours a week.

    I was thinking of this because I did an interview for BBC about Google — you can see the piece here.  I think it is done well and quite balanced.  It shows all those lovely things they do at Google to try to make it so good that you never want to go home — the classes, the great food, the laundry service, the massages and so on.   And I do believe from many conversations with senior Google executives over the years that they care deeply about their people's happiness and well-being and seem — somehow — to have sustained a no asshole culture even at 32,000 people strong.  That "don't be evil" motto isn't bullshit, they still mean it and still try to live it.

    But as I said in the BBC piece, although they are more caring than many of their competitors, the result is that many great tech firms including Google border on what sociologist Erving Goffman called "total institutions."  Examples of total institutions are prisons, mental institutions, the military (at least the boot camp part) — places where members spend 100% of the time.  The result is that, especially here in Silicon Valley, the notion of work-life balance is pure fiction most of the time (Sheryl Sandberg may go home at 530 every day, but the folks at Facebook did an all-night hack-a-thon right before the IPO.  I love the folks at Facebook, especially their curious and deeply skilled engineers, but think of the message it sends about the definition of a good citizen in that culture). 

    To return to Google, about five years ago, one of the smartest and most charming students I ever worked with had job offers from two very demanding places: Google and McKinsey.  Now, as most of you know, people work like dogs at McKinsey too.  But this student decided to take the job at McKinsey because "My girlfriend doesn't work at Google, so if I take that job, I will never see her."  He took the McKinsey job because at least that way he would see her on weekends.  I am pleased to report that I recently learned that they are engaged, so I guess it was the right choice.

    Note I am not blaming the leaders at Google, Facebook, or the other firms that expect very long hours out of their people.  It is a sick norm that seems to keep getting stronger and seems to be shared by everyone around here — indeed, my students tell me that they wouldn't want to work at a big tech firm or a start-up where people worked 40 hours a week because it would mean they were a bunch of lazy losers!  I also know plenty of hardcore programmers who love nothing more than spending one long late night after another cranking out beautiful code.  

    Yet, I do wonder if, as a society, given the blend of the damage done by overwork to mental and physical health and to families, and given that so many people need work, if something can be done to cut back on the hours and to create more jobs.  There are few companies that are trying programs (Check out the "lattice" approach at Deloitte).  But it seems to me that we would all be better off if those of us with jobs cut back on our hours, took a bit less pay, and the slack could be used to provide the dignity and income that comes with work to all those people who need it so badly. 

    I know my dream is somewhat naive, and that adding more people creates a host of problems ranging from higher health care costs to the challenges of coordinating bigger groups.   But in the coming decades, it strikes me as something we might work together to achieve.  There are so many workplaces that have become just awful places because of such pressures to work longer and longer hours:  large law firms are perfect example, they have become horrible places to work for lawyers at all levels.  There is lots of talk of reform, but they seem to be getting worse and worse as the race for ever increasing billed hours and profits-per-partner gets worse every year.  And frankly when I see what it takes to get tenure for an assistant professor at a place like Stanford, we are essentially expecting our junior faculty to work Google-like hours for at least seven years if they wish to be promoted, I realize I too am helping to perpetuate a similar system. 

    I would also note this is not just a "woman's issue."  Or even a matter of structuring work so that both men and women can be around to raise their kids, as it sometimes is described.  Sure, that is part of it.  But I think that everyone could benefit from a change in such norms. Indeed, about five years ago, a managing partner of a large local law firm did a survey of attitudes toward part-time work and was surprised to learn that male associates who didn't have children were among the most enthusiastic supporters of part-time schedules.  Interestingly, they were supportive partly because they couldn't use the "kid excuse" to cut back their hours and resented covering for colleagues who could and did leave work earlier and take days off to be with their children — they resented having less socially acceptable reasons for cutting back days and hours. 

    What do you think?  Is there any hope for change here?  Or am I living in a fool's paradise?

  • 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.

  • Hollow Visions, Bullshit, Lies and Leadership Vs. Management

    Fast Company has been reprinting excerpts from the new chapter in the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback.  The fifth  and current piece 'Why "Big Picture Only" Bosses Are The Worst' deals with a theme I have raised both here and at HBR before: My argument is that, although the distinction between "management" and  "leadership" is probably accurate, the implicit or explicit status differences attached to these terms are destructive. 

    One of the worst effects is that too many "leaders" fancy themselves as grand strategists and visionaries and who are above the "little people" that are charged with refining and implementing those big and bold ideas.  These exalted captains of industry develop the grand vision for the product, the film, the merger, or whatever — and leave the implementation to others.  This was one of Carly Fiorina's fatal flaws at HP: she loved speeches and grand gestures like the Compaq merger, but didn't have much patience for doing what was required for making things work.  By contrast, this is the strength of Pixar leaders like Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, and Brad Bird.  Yes, they have grand visions about the story and market for every film, but they sweat every detail of every frame and worry constantly about linking their big ideas to every little detail of their films.

    As Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer show in their masterpiece The Progress Principle, the best creative work depends on getting the little things right.  James March, perhaps the most prestigious living organizational theorist, frames all this in an interesting way, arguing that the effectiveness of organizations depends at least as much on the competent performance of ordinary bureaucrats and technicians who do their jobs well (or badly) day in and day out as on the bold moves and grand rhetoric of people at the top of the pecking order.  To paraphrase March, organizations need both poets and plumbers, and the plumbing is always crucial to organizational performance.  (See this long interview for a nice summary of March's views).

    To be clear, I am not rejecting the value of leadership, grand visions, and superstars.  But just as our country and the rest of the world is suffering from the huge gaps between the haves and have nots, too many organizations are doing damage by giving excessive credit, stature, and dollars to people with the big ideas and giving insufficient kudos, prestige, and pay to people who put their heads down and make sure that all the little things get done right.

    Our exaggerated faith in heroes and the instant cures they so often promise has done a lot of damage to our society too — not just to organizations.  In this vein, I wrote a piece in BusinessWeek a few years back after re-reading The Peter Principle.  I argued that the emphasis on dramatic and bold moves and superstars, and our loss of respect for the crucial role of ordinary competence, was likely an underlying cause of the 2008-2009 financial meltdown:

    If Dr. Peter were alive today, he'd find that a new lust for superhuman accomplishments has helped create an almost unprecedented level of incompetence. The message has been this: Perform extraordinary feats, or consider yourself a loser.

    We are now struggling to stay afloat in a river of snake oil created by this way of thinking. Many of us didn't want to see the lies, exaggerations, and arrogance that pumped up our portfolios. Instead we showered huge rewards on the false financial heroes who fed our delusions. This is the Bernie Madoff story, too. People may have suspected that something wasn't quite right about the huge returns on their investments with Madoff. But few wanted to look closely enough to see the Ponzi scheme.

    I am not saying that we don't need heroes and visionaries.  Rather, we need leaders who help us link big ideas to the little day to day accomplishments that turn dreams into realities.   To paraphrase my friend Peter Sims, author of Little Bets, we need leaders who can weave together the "birds eye view," the big picture, with "the worm's eye view," the nuances and tiny little actions required to make bold ideas come to life.