Category: Knowing-doing gap

I am a bit overwhelmed by both the quality and number of comments on the post that I put up Thursday on The Auto Industry Bailout, which focused on why I believe that GM executives are clueless and suffer from a "no we can't" mindset.  As of now, late Sunday afternoon, 37 people have written comments and about 5000 people have visited the post (about 2500 today, which is near an all-time high for Work Matters).  These comments are diverse and all are thoughtful — even they guy who took me to task for owning too many cars (I plead guilty, although I am doing my part to help the industry).  But there are a few that I would especially like to point to because they reveal the sick culture and work practices in the industry so clearly.  I will put up another two or three this week, but I wanted to start with this one from a Stanford student who had a lifelong dream of designing cars, but it was crushed when he tried to work in the industry.  I know this is obvious, but if the industry is so broken that it can't figure out how to use the talents of someone like "JLee," and instead treats people with his skills in ways that crushes his spirit and creativity, then the culture is in even deeper trouble than I thought.  Note that my remarks centered on GM as I know them best, but this was one of several comments that reveal a similar sickness at Ford.

Here is the comment, unedited:

Ever since I was a kid, my
childhood dream was to design cars. I showed a natural proficiency for
mechanics, so I majored in mechanical engineering and received
undergraduate and graduate degrees at MIT and Stanford respectively.
While at Stanford, I signed up for a summer internship with Ford at one
of their plastics plants in Ohio. The recruiter told me I would get a
full hands-on experience in manufacturing. Instead, I spent 3 months
being the group’s typist because I could type documents on a computer
at 4x the rate of the other old boys there. That’s how they used an
eager engineering grad student. Still determined to chase my childhood
dream, I decided to extend my internship another 3 months when I found
a position to work at Ford’s HQ in Dearborn in their chassis
engineering group. There, I saw the reality of the culture. White
collar workers who are there purely for a paycheck, not to make
something great. The thought of working late was inconceivable, because
work can always wait, but their need to veg out at home could not.
There was no concept of actually having better quality than the
Japanese and no emotional response to always being ranked below a
competitor. To sum it up, everyone was completely satisfied and
comfortable with mediocrity.

Union workers felt that having relatively high pay, low skill jobs
(where pay was based purely on seniority and not on ability) was a
right, not a privilege or reward. When I was testing brake rotors, I
was told I may not touch any tools or perform any work myself, as this
would threaten job security of union workers, so I ended up doing a lot
of waiting for someone to turn a few bolts.

I also quickly realized that there was no path towards promotion for me
as an American born Asian. When I was introduced to someone, I could
see the stress in their face for fear that they would not understand
how to pronounce my name or understand my thick accent. Then relief to
find out my name is “Joe” and I have no accent.

I went back to Stanford to complete my master’s degree, and have been
working for high tech companies in Silicon Valley ever since I
graduated. My original childhood dream was crushed by the reality of
Detroit, but I have since found great satisfaction working at companies
that have created technologies that are in computer and consumer
electronics products that you are probably using every day to make your
life easier, more productive and more enjoyable.

To anticipate some who may say that all big organizations do this newbies, I politely disagree. I've seen what happens at P&G, McKinsey, Google, Facebook, HP (at least in the old days), and, yes, Wal-Mart.  It odesn;t need to be like this in a healthy company. 

Thoughts? Do you really believe that the current group of executives have the will or skill — let alone the power — to build a place where an engineer like Joe can flourish?

I
am ambivalent about whether the auto industry should receive the 25 billion
dollars that they are begging and pleading for from the U.S. taxpayers.  On the one hand, I realize that millions of
jobs depend on the industry and that saving these jobs is not only a humane
thing — it also may help the country(and even the rest of the world) from
sliding into a deeper recession in the long-term.  On the other hand, I worry that it will be a
waste because the industry has lost so much money and so many jobs in recent
years that these firms are in a death
spiral that is impossible to stop (GM alone lost 39 billion last quarter). I
also believe it will be a waste because the leaders of these firms (at least
GM, which I know best) are so backward and misguided that the thought of giving
these bozos any of my tax money turns my stomach – which is pretty much the
same point made by observers ranging from ultra-capitalist Mitt Romney to near-socialist documentary
filmmaker Michael Moore.  Recall that Moore made the famous film that attacked GM, Roger and Me. 

I
don’t claim to have comprehensive information about the industry, but I have
had pretty regular interactions with GM in various capacities over the past 30
years.  I completed my Ph.D in Michigan
and had a fair amount of direct contact with GM managers as a student and a lot
of indirect contact because my dissertation was on organizational death.   GM
closed a lot plants during that time, so I talked with many GM executives, mangers,
and workers.  I also have had numerous
contacts since as a researcher and occasionally as a speaker at GM events over
the past 25 years since I moved to California – for example, Jeff Pfeffer and I
spent several days doing interviews at Saturn in Tennessee and with GM
executives in Detroit to gather material for The Knowing-Doing Gap.  I hesitate to speak out as I have contacts
there who would not be happy to know that I am speaking my mind, but I feel
compelled to do so because I feel that GM’s problems are best described as
suicide rather than homicide (despite their executives’ claims to the contrary –
they seemed to refuse to take any personal responsibility at all during the
congressional hearings).   And I feel that if we are going to give them billions
of dollars, I should do my small part to identify some problems and potential
solutions that may help a bit in this uphill struggle for survival.

I
could list hundreds of management, cultural, and operational reasons why I
believe that GM is such a flawed organization, but to me, a pair of root causes
standout:  Most of the senior executives  — and many of the managers — are (1) clueless about
what matters most and (2) suffer from  a “no
we can’t” mindset.  

The
culture and work practices at  GM almost seem designed to create executives who are
clueless about what kinds of cars people want to buy and what kind of
experiences that car owners want to have — and about a lot of other important things as well. 
The executives were criticized for being so insensitive and clueless that
they flew corporate jets to Washington to beg for money;unfortunately, that is just the tip
of a dangerous iceberg.  For starters, my
experience with GM is that – more so than any company I have dealt with – the norm
in meetings is that the highest status person in the room does all or most of
the talking.   Plus, more so than any organization
I have ever dealt with, employees are expected to express agreement with their
bosses.  Why didn’t anyone have the guts
to tell the executives that taking a private plane to beg for a bailout was a
bad idea? I suspect that it is just standard operating procedure: GM is a culture where subordinates are
expected to shut-up and kiss-up when the boss is around.  I can think of a few exceptions, one manager I’ve
met recently in particular.  But on the
whole it is as if the system is designed to prevent the upward flow of
information.  At first, when I was in
graduate school, I thought this was a personality characteristic of the first few GM executives I met.  But then I
started keeping track of what happened when managers and executives arrived and
left meetings.  To entertain myself as
the top dog droned on, I would measure talking time.  Regardless of the subject (and who had the
greatest expertise in the room), the highest status person would blab away –
and when he or she left the room, the next highest ranking person would
then demonstrate GM’s blabbermouth pattern of leadership.  Note I have been seen this pattern for almost
30 years at GM – the cars have changed but the yakking pattern has not.

Not
only are managers and executives insulated from learning what goes in their
company because they generally talk rather than listen, they are also insulated
from experiencing what it is like to buy and own a car.   GM has a perk for managers down to fairly
low levels where all are given a GM car to drive – they rotate from one car to
another.  I am not sure of the exact details,
but answers to the questions I’ve asked over the years  suggest it goes something like this: the
lowest level managers have to buy their own cars, the ones at somewhat higher
levels get a new car to drive every six months or so but have to do some
servicing, the managers who are somewhat higher-up get somewhat fancier cars and are freed from any servicing (gas
is even put in the cars of some executives so they don’t have to go to the
service station), and the highest level executives get a car and a driver.

In other words, this system effectively
insulates people in management – especially those in senior management — from
experiencing what it is like to shop for, bargain for, purchase, service, and
sell a car. They only get the driving experience. Well, except for the most
senior executives, who don’t even get that experience — they watch a person in
the front seat drive a big car.  Now, it
is true, that the most senior executives do own GM cars for personal use, but
it is my understanding that when a car is delivered to a senior executive,
special attention is devoted to the car – even during the production process –to
make sure the top brass aren’t exposed to a car with any flaws. Wouldn’t that
be nice?

So
there you have it, a system that seems designed to isolate executives from
reality.  They talk instead of listen and
are protected from the experience of owning car.   I might be exaggerating some, but not much.   Whether the current crop of GM executives are
fired or not, it seems to me that some major changes need to made, perhaps
including:

          1.  
A limit on the percentage of time that the highest status GM manager or
executive can talk during a meeting.  Perhaps
25% of the time is a realistic goal?   

          2. 
Only managers who know how to ask questions and to actually listen to
people who have less formal power will be hired and promoted.  Failure to demonstrate these skills will be
grounds for dismissal.

          3. 
GM managers – and especially top executives – will be required to buy,
service, and drive their own cars.  That
way, they will experience what it means to own a car.  Now, I feel badly for all the drivers who
will lose their jobs at GM (although I am very curious to know how many executives
have drivers – that is a place where I bet we can save a few million dollars in
bail out money – and if they sell the private jets like Sara Palin did in Alaska,
that is more millions).

          4. 
There are good things and bad things about GM cars (My family has one,
along with three others as we have two teenagers who drive) – indeed, after
years of trailing the Japanese in quality, they have nearly caught-up.  But only owning a GM car does not provide any
information about the competition.  As such, if GM does insist on still buying cars for
all those executives and managers going forward, at least 50% of those cars
should be from competitors so that decision-makers can experience what it is
like to drive – and buy and service – a wide range of cars.   I am sure that GM executives would be horrified
to have all those Toyotas and the like in their parking lot (an auto executive
once made my wife park her Nissan around the corner when we lived in Michigan,
as he was horrified when she parked it in front of his fancy house in Bloomfield Hills).  But they might actually learn something.

Do
I believe that that the current crop of executives could transform the GM culture
to include these and other practices that will increase their awareness of what
is going in their company and in the marketplace? No.  It is partly because they are so
entrenched.  But it is also because I
sometimes believe that the core competence of GM managers and executives is
explaining why they are powerless to make sensible changes.  It pains me to say this because the company
has a higher percentage of nice people than most other big organizations
(except perhaps for P&G), but the “No we can’t” mindset is something that pervades
the place.  And, unfortunately, when
people believe that organizational change is impossible, it becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy.

If
you watched the executives testify to congress the other day, their sense of
powerlessness was hinted at in their refusal to take even a token amount of
blame for their firms’ troubles – smart and empowered executives believe and
talk like there is a link between their actions and performance, even when bad
things happen and even when events are very hard to control (see this contrary example).   But this “can’t do” mentality is pervasive.  Consider the case of the free GM cars.  This isn’t a new problem.  Many other observers have commented on it
before me.  I commented about it very
forcefully about to some GM managers a few years back. I argued that they
needed to abolish the program because it caused the whole top of the company to
be out of touch with the car ownership experience. They answered that GM
couldn’t possibly get rid of the program because they had negotiated such a
great tax deal with the state of Michigan (much better than Ford, they bragged)
and because it was one of the few perks left for white collar employees.  I was not very nice, I argued that this
mentality was one of the reasons that the company was in trouble and would get
in more trouble. They treated me like I was insane. 

You
could also see the “no we can’t mentality” in the answer GM gave about why they
had to fly the private jet to Washington – “our rules require it for safety reasons.”
Huh?  I know lots of CEOs of big
companies who fly commercial.  And you may
recall that when John McCain’s campaign was in trouble, he flew commercial for
about a year – it seems to me that he was more at risk than some unrecognizable
big guy from Detroit.   Couldn’t they
change the rules?  I bet the board of
directors of GM would be convinced by the argument “we need to get rid of these
planes, we need the money and it looks terrible to congress.”   I suspect that they are working on this
change right now or at least considering it (Update: Looks like they are getting rid of them.). 
But, of course, they were so clueless and isolated that it never occurred
to them that keeping and flying the private planes were a dumb idea.  

Or
consider another example — a really big cause of their problems. GM has way
too many brands. Toyota has, I think, just Toyota and Lexus.  GM has – if I can remember them all –
Pontiac, Chevy, Hummer, Saturn, GMC, Cadillac, and Buick – and I guess now
Saab.   There are so many GM models that
buyers are bewildered by the differences and – especially among Chevy, Pontiac,
and Buick – there is little if any distinct brand identity.  I have asked multiple GM managers and
executives why they don’t just get rid of most these, trimming back to say,
Chevy, Saturn, and Cadillac.  This not
only would reduce brand confusion it would lead to many efficiencies in
advertising, manufacturing, distribution and so on.   They answer, of course, is “no we can’t.”  My answer is that, with all due respect to the
dealers, sticking to this business model has created a tragedy of the commons
that is bringing everyone down. 

In
short, my view is that if GM can’t figure out ways to get their managers and
executives to understand the experience of owning a car for the average person,
if they can’t get rid of those jets, and if they can’t reduce the number of
brands, and if they can’t make a host of other changes required to make them competitive,
than my answer is “no, you can’t have our money.”  

I
don’t usually write such long blogs and don’t usually rant so much. But GM’s predicament
just makes me sick. I saw the pain that people were experiencing in Flint in
the early 1980s, the depressed workers and former managers, the ripple effects
on businesses, and the helplessness.  It
is all much worse now.  I don’t know if
the U.S. auto industry can be saved.  I
hope it can and if we are spending 700 billion to bail out the banks, well,
then perhaps another 25 billion is worth the risk.  But I can’t see how things can change with
the current bunch of clowns in charge.  I
know that changing the leaders and the culture may not be enough to save GM,
but I also believe that without these changes, there is little if any hope at
all. Getting rid of them and instituting an intense program of cultural and
organizational change strikes me as the best way to save the company.  Mitt Romney
argued today in The New York Times that bankruptcy was the best path for GM and the others.  Perhaps he is right, that
creative destruction is only way out of this mess.

Am
I being too harsh?  Am I too biased?  Do you have more and better ideas?  Let me know. 

 

 

I thought it would be instructive to list the euphemisms
for layoffs generated by my last
post. Thanks so much for all the great — and troubling — contributions.  It is quite a testimony to the
human ability for self-deception and obfuscation.  Here they are:   

Adjusting
to shifts in demand

Corporate
outplacing

Cost
improvement plans

Fitness
plan

"He
got the box."

Made
redundant

"Non-essential"
employees

Offboarded

Rationalizing

Rebalancing  the level of human capital

Re-engineering
plan

Reduction
in force

Rightsizing

Simplified

Smartsizing

Special forces philosophy

Streamlining

"We've
decided to go in another direction"

I
especially liked this contrast between management and employee language about
how the process is carried out:

Management:

We're letting you go

We're terminating your position 

Your position is redundant

Employees:

He
was shit-canned.

He got whacked.

He
got walked to the door

I am also taken with “Special forces philosophy” because it
suggests that someone at Tesla (where this was used) is suffering from a
serious case of self-delusion. The someone, by the way, is Chairman Elon Musk.  Check out the link to his announcement.  His statement is troubling because, although the language is obfuscated, he is implying that the people he is letting go are the weaker ones, even though many of Tesla's problems clearly stem from errors made by senior management (including Musk) and from the the economic environment.  Note the statement, "One of the steps I will be taking is
raising the performance bar at Tesla to a very high level, which will
result in a modest reduction in near term headcount. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the
people that depart Tesla for this reason wouldn’t be considered good
performers at most companies – almost all would. However, I believe
Tesla must adhere more closely to a special forces philosophy at this
stage of its life if we aspire to become one of the great car companies
of the 21st century."  This reminds of a case study I did years ago of the layoffs at Atari, when after the first round of layoffs, the CEO told everyone something like, "The company is strong now, we got rid of all the bad people."

And I liked Mike’s comment that “Euphemisms aside, the
bigger issue is not how to handle layoffs, but rather how to avoid them.”
Check out his post
where he points out, and questions why, “Reducing headcount in an economic
downturn is almost a Pavlovian response for many executives.”

P.S. Sim's comment is intriguing and scary  I'm in the middle of
"synergy-related headcount restructuring" which also sounds pretty cute
– until you get hit on the head with it.

I was interviewed by Fortune for this story, Laid off? No, you've been simplified, which is about the euphemisms that executives use to describe employee layoffs.  I discuss some of the reasons that so many executives can't bring themselves to use clear language — one reason is that it allows them to create emotional distance between the rather nasty things that they are doing to people (albeit, in many cases, there are not other options) and another reason is that (although often a delusion) it conveys to themselves and others that they are rational people making proper business decisions.

What are some of your favorite euphemisms? 

Why do some many other wise reasonable leaders talk this way?

P.S. I've blogged quite a bit about layoffs and my early research was in the area of organizational decline and death — see posts here, here, and here at Harvard Online.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was lucky enough to be in the audience recently when A.G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble's CEO, gave a lovely talk to a small group of executives. We've talked here about Level 5 leaders — he qualifies, If anyone does. He is perhaps the most modest and selfless CEO of a Fortune 500 firm I have encountered.  I know A.G. slightly, as in 2000, when he first stepped in as CEO, I spent a few hours with his top team talking about The Knowing-Doing Gap. 

One of the premises of that book is that a key to turning knowledge into action is that — although executives who talk about many ideas and complex ideas will be viewed as smarter — wiser and more effective executives pick just a few simple messages and repeat them over and over again until people throughout the organization internals them and use them to guide action.  Constantly changing messages lead to the "flavor of the month problem" where people don't act on the current message because they have learned that, if they wait a few months (or days) the message will change (managers in such organizations become very skilled at talking as if they acting on the flavor of the month, but not actually doing the thing that senior executives are pushing at the moment.) And making things overly complicated may make the senior executives seem smart and feel smart , but if a message is too complicated understand, it is also means that the implications for action are impossible to understand as well.

Expressing a simple message and repeating it over and over again is especially important when an organization is large, as it isn't possible for A.G. to have a meeting with all 130,000 or so people in one room. A.G.'s motto is that the principles used to run the firm need to be "Sesame Street Simple."  I love that because it is so different than the kind of message you hear from management theorists or from CEOs who are obsessed with how smart they are — and how dumb everyone else is in compassion.

Here is a U.S. News and World Report article that describes A.G.'s style in more detail.  For this post, here is the key paragraph:

Repeat after me. If that sounds simplistic, Lafley is the first
to admit that it is. Yet in a company where more than half the
employees don't speak English as their first language, he says his Sesame Street-
simple slogans, repeated over and over, keep everyone trained on what's
important. Human beings "don't want to stay focused," he says. "So my
job is to get them to focus their creativity around the focus; focus
their productivity around the focus; focus their efficiency or
effectiveness around the focus."

As I compare A.G.'s approach to what is happening in financial meltdown, it strikes me that the crisis (and the apparent cure too) is brought to us by people who — at times — did such complicated things that no one, including themselves, understood what they were doing and what the implications might be.  I am sure that some very smart economists or finance people believe that they understand all this, and I guess we have to trust some of them now to get us out of this despite their history of greed and arrogance.   But this crisis has further convinced me that I prefer Sesame Street Simple to Wall Street Convoluted every time.

One of the arguments that is sometimes made in the literature on leadership is about whether it is a generic skill that can be applied in any setting, or if having deep past experience — and success –at doing the work of organization is required to be a successful leader.  We talk about this quite a bit in The Knowing-Doing Gap. We argue that leaders aren't as easily fooled by hollow smart talk, and are more likely to talk in ways that help their followers succeed (rather than simply sound impressive), when they have past deep experience in the industry along with years of experience doing, managing, and succeeding at the kind of work their people do. 

I talked about this in my recent post on managers vs. leaders too, and argued that the most successful leaders either understand the work they work that they are leading (think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John Lasseter of Pixar, or George Zimmer of the Men's Warehouse) or they take the time to understand the work they lead (I used the example of Bill George at Medtronic).  My arguments on this point were questioned, and rightly so, by a commenter who pointed out that I needed to be careful about just using success stories to "prove" my point  — as it is possible that just as many or more people who have little or no experience succeed at the same or higher rate.  Or it is even possible that, if I looked at the population of leaders who have experience doing the work and doing it well, that they would actually perform worse than people who simply had generic leadership skills but did not understand the work that their people do.

This "success bias" is, in fact. a big methodological problem with Good to Great.  Collins talks about 11 Level 5 leaders out of a sample of 1435 companies.  He argues that this difference in leadership is one of the main reasons that these 11 companies made the leap from good to great.  But he considers no data on Level 5 leaders who led merely good — or downright lousy — companies.  It is entirely possible that, if someone carefully examined the full population  that Level 5 leaders actually do worse on average.  I don't believe that this would happen, but I don't have the evidence to support this hunch (nor does Collins). Rather, I  see this critique (and others, see The Halo Effect) as a reason to see Good to Great as a book with some interesting but untested hypothesis rather than rigorous research. And, as this commenter pointed out after my post, I made pretty much the same error that Collins does in my earlier post — so to come clean, I think that my assertions about experience are best viewed as hunches or hypothesis that require additional research. 

I can report, however, that I ran into a story in the Atlantic last night about research on basketball teams that is consistent with this hypothesis.  You can find the story here (scroll down a bit).  In short, three researchers — Amanda Goodall, Lawrence Kahn, and Andrew Oswald — from Cornell did a study of 15,000 National Basketball Association games between 1996 and 2004. They found that coaches who had played in the NBA won a lot more games than those who hadn't played, and that teams who had former coaches who not only played, but who had also been NBA all-stars too, did even better.  As The Atlantic summarized:

 "On average, teams with former all-stars as coaches placed six spots
higher in league rankings than teams with coaches who had never played
in the NBA, a huge bump-up in a league with only 29 total teams during
the years studied."

This research is interesting for two reasons. The first is that is does bolster the hypothesis that, when people have deep understanding of the work they are managing, and have a history of success, they are more likely to be successful leaders (assuming all other things being equal.. I am not sure that Dennis Rodman has the other qualities to be a good coach). The second is that it shows the dangers of placing too much weight on a single vivid case.  Phil Jackson has the highest percentage of any NBA coach, winning multiple championships at Chicago and Los Angeles. Jackson played in the NBA, but was a bench-warmer rather than a superstar. 

If you are curious about this paper and want to dig into deeper, you can download a pdf of "Why Do Leaders Matter? The Role of Expert Knowledge."

P.S. Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame did an analysis of Collins' "Great companies" over the summer, and found that most now have ordinary or poor performance — and if you had bought a portfolio of these companies at the time the book had come out, and held it, Levitt concludes it would have performed worse than the S&P 500.  Of the "Greats," two that have fallen most include Circuit City and — I had forgot this — Fannie Mae. Check out the article. As Levitt points out, predicting the future is a tough thing to do. 

Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten, the guys who run 800CEORead, have a book coming out in about six months called The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Jack and Todd's company focuses on business books, and these two guys — especially Todd — are obsessed with them: with reading business books, understanding the differences between the good and the bad, and calling attention to books that they believe should make an impact. Their website is not only a good place to order books, it also contains all kinds of great information and opinion . 

They have brought together much of their knowledge in this forthcoming book, and as part of the fun, they are running the The Countdown Book Club.    People who pay about 100 bucks get six books, one a month as the publication of their book approaches. The first five are among Jack and Todd's favorites and the six is their "100 Best" books.  I don't know all the books they picked, but you can find a lot of them if your eyes are good enough to read print on above the cover.  I also know (because Todd interviewed me about it) that they were kind enough to choose The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action (which I co-authored with Jeff Pfeffer) as one of the 100 best books.  Thanks guys!  And I know that Todd loves Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick, and I bet that is on the list.

I am going to join the book club because it sounds fun and  I am a  big fan of Jack and Todd. If you order books from them — they are by far the best most reliable for bulk orders in particular — and get to talk with or email with their people you will find that they are some of the civilized and competent folks around.  Jack and Todd don't agree on everything, including the title of The No Asshole Rule.  Jack doesn't like it; Todd thinks it is fine.  But regardless of their view of the title, they are clearly enforcing it in their company. 

I can hardly wait to read their book, as these guys are both very smart and have strong opinions.

I give talk yesterday on The Knowing-Doing Gap to executives at BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.  They run a system that includes over 100 miles of track in the San Francisco area and that carries almost 400,000 riders a day. I was fortunate enough to get a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the operation.  I was impressed with the great job that these people do of keeping this complex system running, and was especially struck by two things. 

The first thing was their story about how they built their internal, home grown, computer system for tracking trains and communicating with each other throughout the system.  They did it for about 5 million dollars and it is mostly open-source code.  It was a classic case where necessity is the mother of invention, or if you prefer different language, where innovation happened because of a big constraint that they had to work around (See what Diego says about constraint and creativity).  They couldn’t afford a 20 million dollar proprietary system from an outside vendor, so they had to do something different.  The result is that they now have a system that does an impressive job of making information nearly all key aspects of operations easily and quickly available, that fits their needs, and that they can easily modify as they learn along the way.  I was also interested in what they had done because I know that one of the causes of Jet Blue’s infamous fiasco on February 14th, 2007, where thousands of passengers were trapped on planes, was that they were using a system from an external vendor to track planes and so on that they had outgrown. 

 The second thing that I learned was a bit of wisdom from a senior executive who had been at BART for many years.  He was describing his leadership philosophy, which emphasized an urgency to act and to make things right.  But he also emphasized that the kinds of things they do at BART — running and sustaining such a complex interdependent system — can’t happen without intense information sharing and cooperation.  As such, when we were talking about the challenges of managing performance, he commented that there are two kinds of things employees which could make that always provokes his immediate attention: 1. treating others with disrespect and 2. communicating poorly with others.  I think that is great advice for any leader.

I’ve been riding BART for over 25 years and it does work very well. It was impressive to see it from the inside. Certainly, they face all sorts of political challenges and other problems, but I think they are doing a mighty good job. Most of the trains do run on time!

Check out this list from Coding Horror. With just one or two exceptions, it could just as well be the Ten Commandments for how to be an egoless employee or boss, or even an egoless human being. Certainly, anyone who does work that requires interdependence with others would benefit from following most or all of these rules. I especially like #3:

‘No matter how much “karate” you know, someone else will always know more. Such an individual can teach you some new moves if you ask. Seek and accept input from others, especially when you think it’s not needed.’

That last sentence is really something. Think of how much human misery would have been averted if more leaders and so-called experts of all stripes had sought input especially when they thought they didn’t need it.