Work Matters

Category: Leadership

  • My Organizational Behavior Class: The Current Iteration

    The first time I taught an introductory organizational behavior class was in 1980 or 1981. I was a second-year doctoral student in organizational psychology at The University of Michigan.  I had no teaching experience (except for one guest lecture I had given to a large undergrad class — it was terrible; harried and dull). Yet that didn't stop the the Michigan Business School from giving me the chance to teach the class to some 60 students. I sure learned a lot that year… I still remember the strapping 250 pound football player who broke down in tears after he failed a test (to his credit, he passed the class once he started studying harder).  

    I have taught various versions of the class perhaps 35 times by now, and in some ways it remains the same.  There are certain topics that, at least in my view, always ought to be included such as motivation, employee selection and socialization, influence, leadership, and teams.  Over the years, I have started emphasizing innovation and organizational culture a bit more, and I do focus more explicitly on evidence-based management and the challenges of weaving academic research with real managerial decisions and actions.  

    And perhaps the main change is that I do straight lecture less and introduce more interaction.  Although I still present material, I press students more to comment, to do lots of short writing assignments, to work in teams, to do short presentations, and to do in-class interactive exercises. I also bring in more people from the "real world" who can bring the lessons from the class alive. Every year, I add another small element or two to make the class a bit more interactive and realistic. And now, I put most of the materials on an online platform called NovoEd, which makes things a lot easier.  But the heart of the class happens live — the platform just makes things easier.  It still is a different animal than the leadership class that I help to teach at the Stanford d.school, as there is still a lot of discussion, reading, and writing, while the "d.leadership" class entails embedding duos in organizations with the aim of making them more creative. 

    My favorite part of the organizational behavior class is the final exam. Students learn the question on the very first day of class: "Design the ideal organization: Use course concepts to defend your answer."  It is VERY difficult, it forces students to think all term about which lessons matter most and how they fit together, and the best exams are astoundingly good.  And when students try to write it the night before (despite all sorts of measures to stop them, including a draft due about 10 days before the deadline), it shows.  I wrote a post here on the final a few years back, and as I said, I guess my answer to the question is The No Asshole Rule! although I didn't restrict myself to 2000 or 3000 words! 

    I start teaching it again in a few days, and I am, as usual, quite excited to do so.   Here is the outline if you are interested (note that about 80% of the links are live and most of the readings are free to anyone): 280_Syllabus_2015Winter_In_Class_JAN3rdRIS. 

    This class is taught in the the Stanford Engineering School, as is our d.school class (the d.school is also part of the Engineering School, although a lot of MBAs do take our classes), but I do think that, despite all the hand wringing about how irrelevant traditional management education is becoming and how the MBA education is going to become "disrupted" is overblown.  Yes, we are moving things onto the web for efficiency reasons, and a lot of the stuff on the web is becoming more social, interactive, and realistic.

    But there is still no substitute for a live class discussion, having an in person interaction with someone like IDEO's marketing head  Whitney Mortimer or earlier stage venture capitalist Michael Dearing, or sitting down, face to face, and going through line after line of a draft with a student.  In fact,my view is that what we've been learning from online education is teaching us to make in-class education better (to focus on what works best live and in-person) and what we learn in-class makes online education better (e.g., an online "lecture" is a lot better after you have given it live to 10 or 15 groups).  In addition, it many cases, the dividing line between "online" and "off" is blurring, as we might give students an assignment online, then have them do it live in-class or in a company, and then perhaps post it on an online platform.  

    So while there always be bumps along the way, I am optimistic that "traditional" business education is changing for the better as a result of all the online stuff, and the online stuff will keep getting better too, but it won't go away anytime soon. 

  • Essentialism; It Will Make You Think and Might Even Make You Less Crazy

    Greg's Cover
    Greg McKeown's publisher sent me an advanced copy of his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.  I said I would look at for a possible blurb (I don't do advanced praise for a lot of books, in part, because I now insist on reading the whole thing before I do — and it takes time).  I was ready to NOT be impressed, as there are frankly lots of books out there about the power of simplicity.  But Greg goes beyond what I have seen from any other book with a similar message (although I am a big fan of Matt May's The Laws of Subtraction as well, but that is a different book as it has many short essays, but still has a unified writing and great writing and editing — in fact Matt's book and Greg's would be a good pair to read together).  

    Through Greg's great message, his lovely spare writing style, and by gently leading the reader through his philosophy he shows you what it "disciplined" approach means, looks like, and how to "be it" not just know how to define it  (I loved "the perks of being unavailable," "win big by cutting your losses," and " "select: the power of extreme criteria" in particular).

     

    I was especially interested once I got into the book because one of the major themes of Scaling Up Excellence is that, as although much research shows that we we human beings get dumber, loss will powers, and do each task less well as cognitive load increases, the necessary practices, structures, and rituals that organizations use often make it difficult or impossible for people to perform well (especially as organizations and programs expand).  We do touch on some simlar themes to Greg (we are both big advocates of sleep and taking  breaks!), but we focus more on approaches for redesigning jobs, teams, and organizations, and our focus zeros in on scaling.  

    Essentialism is a quick and efficient read, as you would expect given the title, but you learn a lot, and there is something about the book that led me to believe that, despite my general inability to use the word "no" more often than I should for my own good, that this book will help.  Although I couldn't quite resist reading the book, doing the blurb, and writing this little post! 

    My blurb:

    “Essentialism is a powerful antidote to the current craziness that plagues our organizations and our lives.  Read Greg McKeown’s words slowly, stop and think about how to apply them to your life – you will do less, do it better, and begin to feel the insanity start to slip away.” 

  • 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! 

  • 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. 

  • Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants: Funny Title, Silly Cover, Seriously Well-Crafted Book

    YWP-COVER-FINAL

    Several months back, Scott Berkun's publisher sent me an advanced  copy of "The Year Without Pants" to read; it is a pretty silly title and as you can see, the cover is pretty wild too (I love it).  Scott's last book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, was just splendid, so I thought I would take a look.  I was hooked immediately, as Scott offers a compelling story of the year he spent at WordPress.com, a fast growing and wildly unconventional company where employees work from wherever they wish, there are few meetings and rules, and many of the conventional trappings are removed.  At the same time, because Scott is such a compelling writer and so honest about things, he doesn't whitewash things, he describes the ups and downs and the tensions. 

    And if you read this book, you will also learn that some of the beliefs that people have about the future of work likely won't come true.  Yes, people had enormous freedom and were massively creative — but at the same time — they couldn't escape the constraints of being in an organization.They still needed some hierarchy (Scott was a team leader and he had some bosses too), there were agreements about standard ways to do — and not do — things, and everyone wasn't always delighted with how things unfolded.  His team was unusually functional and creative, the descriptions are wonderful, and the book also is filled with great pictures and other graphics that show the real people and the places they worked, and the kind of work they produced.

    I read, or more accurately, start to read, several business books each week.  Most aren't very good, to tell you the truth.  This is the best book I have read since Adam Grant's Give and Take. If you read this book and Tracy Kidder's classic Soul of a New Machine, you can learn a lot about how work is changing (at least in some places), but also, about how it is still the same too. The technology certainly changes how and where we work, but we are still humans, we are social creatures, we strive for meaning and creativity, and we are all limited (and propelled) by our personal quirks and the attribuites of our species.

    P.S. The Year Without Pants comes out in a few weeks, but I suggest that you preorder it, both because you will want it and because preorders will help this book get the attention it deserves. I am going to preorder my copy right now.

  • 12 Books Every Leader Should Read:Updated

    I first posted this in 2011, but I update it now and then.  Note I have removed two from the list: Men and Women of the Corporation and Who Says that Elephants Can't Dance?  They are both great books, but I am trying to stick to 12 books and the two new ones below edge them out. Here goes:

    I was looking through the books on Amazon to find something that struck my fancy, and instead, I started thinking about the books that have taught me much about people, teams, and organizations — while at the same time — provide useful guidance (if sometimes only indirectly) about what it takes to lead well versus badly.  The 12 books below are the result. 

    Most are research based, and none are a quick read (except for Orbiting the Giant Hairball). I guess this reflects my bias.  I like books that have real substance beneath them.  This runs counter the belief in the business book world at the moment that all books have to be both short and simple.  So, if your kind of business book is The One Minute Manager (which frankly, I like too… but you can read the whole thing in 20 or 30 minutes), then you probably won't like most of these books at all.

    1. The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer.  A masterpiece of evidence-based management — the strongest argument I know that "the big things are the little things." 

    2. Influence by Robert Cialdini the now classic book about how to persuade people to do things, how to defend against persuasion attempts, and the underlying evidence.  I have been using this in class at Stanford for over 20 years, and I have had dozens of students say to me years later "I don't remember much else about the class, but I still use and think about that Cialdini book."

    3.Made to Stick Chip and Dan Heath.  A modern masterpiece, the definition of an instant classic.  How to design ideas that people will remember and act on.   I still look at it a couple times a month and I buy two or three copies at a time because people are always borrowing it from me.  I often tell them to keep it because they rarely give it back anyway. 

    4. Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman.  Even though the guy won the Nobel Prize, this book is surprisingly readable.  A book about how we humans really think, and although it isn't designed to do this, Kahneman also shows how much of the stuff you read in the business press is crap.

    5. Collaboration by Morten Hansen.  He has that hot bestseller now with Jim Collins called Great By Choice, which I need to read. This is a book I have read three times and is — by far — the best book ever written about what it takes to build an organization where people share information, cooperate, and help each other succeed.

    6. Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie.  It is hard to explain, sort of like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll as the old song goes.  But it is the best creativity book ever written, possibly the business book related to business ever written.  Gordon's voice and love creativity and self-expression — and how to make it happen despite the obstacles that unwittingly heartless organizations put in the way — make this book a joy.

    7. The Pixar Touch by David Price.  After reading this book, my main conclusion was that it seems impossible that Pixar exists. Read how Ed Catmull along with other amazing characters– after amazing setbacks, weird moments, and one strange twist after another — realized Ed's dream after working on it for decades.  Ed is working on his own book right now, I can hardly wait to see that.  When I think of Ed and so many others I have met at Pixar like Brad Bird, I know it is possible to be a creative person without being an asshole.  In fact, at least if the gossip I keep hearing from Pixar people is true, Jobs was rarely rude or obnoxious in his dealings with people at Pixar because he knew they knew more than him — and even he was infected by Pixar's norm of civility.

    8. Creativity,Inc. by Ed Catmull. Price's book is fantastic, but this is one of the best business/leadership/organization design books ever written.  As I wrote in my blurb — and this is no B.S.- "“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.”  Note also that Catmull has a chapter on Steve Jobs that offers a different perspective than anyone else I have seen –and they worked together for decades.

    9. The Laws of Subtraction by Matthew May.   This 2012 book has more great ideas about how to get rid of what you don't need and how to keep — and add — what you do need than any book ever written.  Matt has as engaging a writing style as I have ever encountered and he uses it to teach one great principle after another, from "what isn't there can trump what is" to "doing something isn't always better than doing nothing."  Then each principle is followed with five or six very short — and well-edited pieces — from renowned and interesting people of all kinds ranging from executives, to researchers, to artists.  It is as fun and useful as non-fiction book can be and is useful for designing every part of your life, not just workplaces.

    10. Leading Teams by J. Richard Hackman.  When it comes to the topic of groups or teams, there is Hackman and there is everyone else.   If you want a light feel good romp that isn't very evidence-based, read The Wisdom of Teams.  If want to know how teams really work and what it really takes to build, sustain, and lead them from a man who has been immersed in the problem as a researcher, coach, consultant, and designer for over 40 years, this is the book for you.

    11. Give and Take by Adam Grant. Adam is the hottest organizational researcher of his generation.  When I read the pre-publication version, I was so blown away by how useful, important, and interesting that Give and Take was that I gave it the most enthusiastic blurb of my life: “Give and Take just might be the most important book of this young century. As insightful and entertaining as Malcolm Gladwell at his best, this book has profound implications for how we manage our careers, deal with our friends and relatives, raise our children, and design our institutions. This gem is a joy to read, and it shatters the myth that greed is the path to success."  In other words, Adam shows how and why you don't need to be a selfish asshole to succeed in this life. America — and the world — would be a better place if all of memorized and applied Adam's worldview.

    12. The Path Between the Seas by historian David McCullough. On building the Panama Canal.  This is a great story of how creativity happens at a really big scale. It is messy. Things go wrong. People get hurt. But they also triumph and do astounding things.  I also like this book because it is the antidote to those who believe that great innovations all come from start-ups and little companies (although there are some wild examples of entrepreneurship in the story — especially the French guy who designs Panama's revolution — including a new flag and declaration of independence as I recall — from his suite in the Waldorf Astoria in New York, and successfully sells the idea to Teddy Roosevelt ).  As my Stanford colleague Jim Adams points out, the Panama Canal, the Pyramids, and putting a man on moon are just a few examples of great human innovations that were led by governments.  

    I would love to know of your favorites — and if want a systematic approach to this question, don't forget The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

    P.S. Also, for self-defense, I recommend that we all read Isaacson's Steve Jobs — I still keep going places — cocktail parties, family gatherings, talks I give and attend, and even the grocery store where people start talking about Jobs and especially arguing about him.  As I explained in Wired and Good Boss, Bad Boss I have come to believe that whatever Jobs was in life, in death he has become a Rorschach test — we all just project our beliefs and values on him.

  • 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.

  • Rare Wisdom from Citrix CEO Mark Templeton about Hiearchy and Respect

    I confess that as an avid reader of The New York Times, I have been disappointed in recent years because they devote too much space to interviews with CEOs and other bosses. Notably, it seems to me that they run the same column twice every Sunday: Adam Bryant's "The Corner Office" and another interview column called "The Boss."  I do love many of these interviews anyway, as The Times gets interesting people and their editing makes things better.  And I am a big fan of Adam Bryant's book, The Corner Office, as it did a great job of transcending the column.   What bugs me, however, is that The Times devotes so much of the paper to interviews now, I suspect, because it is simply cheaper than producing hard-hitting investigative journalism.  They do an occasional amazing in-depth story, but there is too much fluff and not enough tough for my tastes.  

    That said, some of the interviews are still striking.  One of the best I have ever read appeared a couple years back, with Citrix CEO Mark Templeton. The whole interview is unusually thoughtful and reminds me that people who don't see themselves as CEOs and don't lust after the position often turn out to be the best candidate for the job (related point: see this study that shows groups tend to pick people with big mouths to lead but that less pushy and extroverted leaders tend to lead more effective teams — at least when the teams were composed of proactive members).   In particular, however, I was taken with this quote from Templeton:

    You have to make sure you never confuse the hierarchy that you need for managing complexity with the respect that people deserve. Because that’s where a lot of organizations go off track, confusing respect and hierarchy, and thinking that low on hierarchy means low respect; high on the hierarchy means high respect. So hierarchy is a necessary evil of managing complexity, but it in no way has anything to do with respect that is owed an individual.

    If you say that to everyone over and over and over, it allows people in the company to send me an e-mail no matter what their title might be or to come up to me at any time and point out something — a great idea or a great problem or to seek advice or whatever.

    There is so much wisdom here, including:

    1. While there are researchers and other idealists running around and urging companies to rip down their hierarchies and to give everyone equal power and decision rights, and this notion that we are all equal in every way may sound like a lovely thought, the fact is that people prefer and need pecking orders and other trappings of constraint such as rules and procedures. As Templeton points out so wisely, organizations need hierarchies to deal with complexity.  Yes, some hierarchies are better than others — some are too flat, some have to many layers, some have bad communication flows, and organizational designers should err on making them as "light" and "simple" as possible — but as he says, they are a necessary evil.

    2.  His second point really hits home and is something that all too many leaders — infected with power poisoning — seem to forget as they sit at the top of the local pecking order "thinking that low on hierarchy means low respect; high on the hierarchy means high respect."  When leaders believe and especially act on this belief, all sorts of good things happen, including your best people stay (even if you can't pay them as much as competitors), they feel obligated to return the respect by giving their all to the organization (and feel obligated to press their colleagues to do as well), and a norm of treating people with dignity and respect emerges and is sustained.  Plus, as Templeton points out, because fear is low and respect is high, people at the top tend to get more truth — and less CYA and ass-kissing behavior.

    No organization is perfect.  But a note for all the bosses out there.  If you read Templeton's quote a few times and think about what it means for running your organization, it can help you take a big step toward excellence in terms of both the performance and well-being among the people you lead.