Work Matters

Category: Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

    In Praise of Stand-Up Meetings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

  • A Method For Determining If A Boss Is Self-Aware (And Listens Well)

    I was talking with a journalist from Men's Health today about how bosses can become more aware of how they act and are seen by the people they lead, and how so many bosses (like most human-beings) can be clueless of how they come across to others.  This reminded of a method I used some years back with one boss that proved pretty effective for helping him come to grips with his overbearing and "all transmission, no reception" style; here is how it is described in Good Boss, Bad Boss:

    A few years ago, I did a workshop with a management team that was suffering from “group dynamics problems.” In particular, team members felt their boss, a senior vice-president, was overbearing, listened poorly, and routinely “ran over” others.  The VP denied all this and called his people “thin-skinned wimps.”

    I asked the team – the boss and five direct reports — to do a variation of an exercise I’ve used in the classroom for years.  They spent about 20 minutes brainstorming ideas about products their business might bring to market; they then spent 10 minutes narrowing their choices to just three:  The most feasible, wildest, and most likely to fail.   But as the group brainstormed and made these decisions, I didn’t pay attention to the content of their ideas.  Instead, I worked with a couple others from the company to make rough counts of the number of comments made by each member, the number of times each interrupted other members, and the number of times each was interrupted.  During this short exercise, the VP made about 65% of the comments, interrupted others at least 20 times, and was never interrupted once.  I then had the VP leave the room after the exercise and asked his five underlings to estimate the results; their recollections were quite accurate, especially about their boss’s stifling actions.  When we brought the VP back in, he recalled making about 25% of the comments, interrupting others two or three times, and being interrupted three or four times.  When we gave the boss the results, and told him that his direct reports made far more accurate estimates, he was flabbergasted and a bit pissed-off at everyone in the room.

    As this VP discovered, being a boss is much like being a high status primate in any group:  The creatures beneath you in the pecking order watch every move you make – and so they know a lot more about you than you know about them. 

    My colleague Huggy Rao has a related test he uses to determine if a boss is leading in ways that enables him or her to stay in tune with others.  In addition to how much the boss talks, Huggy counts the proportion of statements the boss makes versus the number of questions asked.  "Transmit only bosses" make lots of statements and assertions and ask few questions. 

    What do you think of these assessment methods?  What other methods have you used to determine how self-aware and sensitive you are other bosses are — and to makes things better?

  • 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.

  • Diego Rodriguez: This is What Leadership Should Look Like at IDEO

    As long-time readers of this blog know, I am a big admirer (and long time friend) of Diego Rodriguez.  Diego is a partner at IDEO and runs the flagship Palo Alto office, and he writes the always provocative blog Metacool.   Diego's IDEO colleague, Tatyana Mamut, stopped by Stanford last week to serve as judge for the final project in our course on scaling-up excellence (they were wonderful, but that is another story). 

    Somehow, we got to talking about leadership and she told me about a video that Diego had shown people and told them "This is what leadership should look like at IDEO."  Watch it here.  You have to see it, I won't tell you anything else.

    I will offer an opinion, however, after years of hanging around IDEO: This is how leadership usually looks there and has since the earliest days when founder David Kelley started a company (with Dean Hovey) in 1978 so he could have a place to hang out with his friends.  But it is always good to remind people of what is sacred (and profane) in any culture, and this little video does it well.

    P.S. As a bonus, if you click on the link for Tatyana, you get a great short talk on how tools, rules, and norms and how they explain the spread of deodorant use in Russia.  It reminds of when my dissertation adviser — Bob Kahn, half jokingly — defined organizations as "rules, tools, and fools." 

  • Are Incompetent and Nice Bosses Even Worse The Competent Assholes? An Excerpt from My New Chapter

    Tomorrow is the official publication day for the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback.  It contains a new chapter called "What Great Bosses Do," which digs into some of the lessons I learned about leadership since publishing the hardback in September 2010.  I have already published excerpts from the new chapter  on power poisoning,  bad apples, and embracing the mess at Fast Company.

    As I am teaching all day tomorrow, I am publishing another here today excerpt here to mark the occasion.  It considers one of the most personally troubling lessons I've learned (or at least am on the verge of believing).  I am starting to wonder, as the headline says, if nice but incompetent bosses are even worse (at least in some ways and at certain times) than competent assholes. 

    Now, to be clear, they both suck and having to choose between the two is sort of like deciding whether to be kicked in the stomach or kicked in the head.  And I have even suggested here that there might be certain advantages to having a lousy boss (and readers came up with numerous other great reasons).  But I have seen so much damage done by lousy bosses who are really nice people in recent years that I am starting to wonder…

    Here is the excerpt from the new chapter (the 4th of 9 lessons):

    4. Bosses who are civilized and caring, but incompetent, can be really horrible.

    Perhaps because I am the author of The No Asshole Rule, I kept running into people—journalists, employees,project managers, even a few CEOs—who picked a fight with me. They would argue that good bosses are more than caring human beings; they make sure the job gets done. I responded by expressing agreement and pointing out this book defines a good boss as one who drives performance and treats people humanely. Yet, as I started digging into the experiences that drove my critics to raise this point— and thought about some lousy bosses—I realized I hadn’t placed enough emphasis on the damage done, as one put it, by “a really incompetent, but really nice, boss.”

    As The No Asshole Rule shows, if you are a boss who is a certified jerk, you may be able to maintain your position so long as your charges keep performing at impressive levels. I warned, however, that your enemies are lying in wait, and once you slip up you are likely to be pushed aside with stunning speed. In contrast, one reason that baseball coach Leo Durocher’s famous saying “Nice guys finish last” is sometimes right is that when a boss is adored by followers (and peers and superiors, too) they often can’t bring themselves to bad-mouth, let alone fire or demote, that lovely person.

    People may love that crummy boss so much they constantly excuse, or don’t even notice, clear signs of incompetence. For example, there is one senior executive I know who is utterly lacking in the necessary skills or thirst for excellence his job requires. He communicates poorly (he rarely returns even important e-mails and devotes little attention to developing the network of partners his organization needs), lacks the courage to confront—let alone fire—destructive employees, and there are multiple signs his organization’s reputation is slipping. But he is such a lovely person, so caring and so empathetic, that his superiors can’t bring themselves to fire him.

    There are two lessons here. The first is for bosses. If you are well-liked, civilized, and caring, your charms provide
    protective armor when things go wrong. Your superiors are likely to give you the benefit of the doubt as well
    as second and third chances—sometimes even if you are incompetent. I would add, however, that if you are a truly crummy boss—but care as much for others as they do for you—stepping aside is the noble thing to do. The second lesson is for those who oversee lovable losers. Doing the dirty work with such bosses is distasteful. But if rehabilitation has failed—or things are falling apart too fast to risk it—the time has come to hit the delete button.

    Thoughts?

  • Great Piece on Narcissistic CEOs in The New York Times

    Steve Davidoff has a well-researched piece on the antics and impact of narcissistic CEOs in The New York Times.  The allegations of deeply selfish and unlawful actions by chief executive of Delphi Financial, Robert Rosenkranz, appear to have motivated the piece. Here is just one of the vile acts listed by Davidoff:

    Despite restrictions in Delphi Financial’s charter, Mr. Rosenkranz demanded in negotiations that he be paid over $110 million more than other shareholders, a number that a special committee of Delphi Financial’s board negotiated down by about $50 million.

    To me, the piece really gets interesting when Mr. Davidof digs into the research, including:

    1. Henrik Cronqvis and his colleagues found that the more deeply a company was in debt, the more its chief executive was willing to borrow to buy a house!

    2. In another study: "Flying small planes is viewed as thrill-seeking behavior. Professors Cain and McKeon found that chief executives with pilot licenses were more prone to engage in acquisitions, with the theory that takeovers are risky, yet exciting ventures."

    This second study reminds me of a hypothesis that Huggy Rao (my co-author of the scaling project) has proposed:  Male CEOs who have "trophy wives" are more likely to lead companies that make risky investments, as having a trophy wife is indicative that the boss had been fooling around at some point (also a risky behavior).

    The question that always nags at me when it comes to narcissism and related bad behavior displayed by powerful people is how much of it is provoked in a once decent person who is infected with power poisoning (there is plenty of evidence that this happens, much of which I review in my bossholes chapter in Good Boss, Bad Boss) versus the explanation that giving a selfish and narcissistic jerk a powerful position gives them greater opportunity to reveal their greed and self-absorption. In real life, it is probably some of both.  And the way the organization is structured makes a difference too — this is one reason why people who study corporate governance often advocate having "checks" on CEO power.

    In any case, I thought it was a nice article and it raises all osrts of issues about CEO selection and the structure of executive roles.

  • The Rise of a Culture of Contempt and the Demise of UCLA Men’s Basketball

    Work Matters reader and fellow blogger, Chris Yeh, sent me a link to a Sport's Illustrated story about the discouraging downfall of the UCLA basketball program.  And I don't mean the drop off in performance at UCLA in the past few years, I mean the loss of its soul and the rise of a culture of contempt — with rampant lousy leadership, bad role models, asshole poisoning.  Chris summed it all up well:

    It’s terrible.  Thank goodness John Wooden isn’t alive, or this would have killed him.  To trample on his legacy like this is atrocious.

    UCLA's John Wooden, the "Wizard of Westwood" not only won more national championships than any coach of a male college basketball team, he fostered a culture of mutual respect and individual development that turned his players — whether they were superstars like Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Bill Walton or bench-warmers — into more confident, cooperative, and compassionate human beings.

    It appears coach Ben Howland has had the opposite effect.  As you can see in this excerpt from the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback over at Fast Company on the power of subtraction, there is plenty of evidence that when leaders and peers display bad behavior and don't act swiftly and firmly to stop, the vile actions and attitudes spread like wildfire — and the result isn't just bad performance, it is a culture of contempt that damages everyone involved.

    Here is the upshot of the SI story about what happened the last few years under coach Ben Howland:

    "Over the last two months SI spoke with more than a dozen players and staff members from the past four Bruins teams. They portrayed the program as having drifted from the UCLA way as Howland allowed an influx of talented but immature recruits to undermine team discipline and morale. Fistfights broke out among teammates. Several players routinely used alcohol and drugs, sometimes before practice. One player intentionally injured teammates but received no punishment."

    The story offers many twists and turns, it is long and well-researched.  It provides many old but true lessons about how a bad boss can ruin a good team. If you are a leader of a group or organization of any size, it is worth studying and then taking a long hard look in the mirror and asking yourself — am I doing that too?  Here are a few questions you might ask yourself:

    1.  Are you focusing on strategy, but ignoring your team?

    Strategy matters, but it is not enough.  According to the story this was Howland's general management style. He acted as if the human part of his job was a nuisance. As the article explains:

    Other than during practices and games, he had little contact with his athletes, according to players. He showed up moments before a workout began and was gone before players paired off to shoot free throws at the end. Several team members say that his approach was how they imagined an NBA coach would run a team.

    2. What behavior do you model? 

    The SI story reports numerous examples of abusive and disrespectful behavior on his part:

    Each of the players who spoke to SI said they found Howland socially awkward and disapproved of the verbal abuse they say he directed at his staff, the student managers and the weakest players. One player said if he saw Howland waiting for the elevator he would take the stairs.

    3. Are you so focused on your own needs and wants that you insist that others indulge your little quirks? 

    The inner focus that comes with power poisoning can cause leaders to indulge and bizarre and petty behavior that — even if they are not aware of it — conveys that they are focused on their own self importance and don't give a hoot about others.  For example, SI reports:
    The players were puzzled by some of their coach's idiosyncrasies. Howland seemed obsessed with the temperature in the film room. If it was not exactly 76º a student manager was certain to feel Howland's wrath. The water bottles handed to him had to be just cold enough and not too large.
    4. Do you apply different rules to "stars" than to other team members even when they take reprehensible actions? 

    The story describes how star freshman Reeves Nelson was repeatedly physically abusive to fellow players in practice. Here is one of a string of such incidents:

    Walk-on Tyler Trapani was another Nelson victim. After Trapani took a charge that negated a Nelson dunk, Nelson went out of his way to step on Trapani's chest as he lay on the ground. Trapani is John Wooden's great-grandson.

    There are many other examples, but this one is symbolic as Nelson was literally trampling on a body that contained some of Wooden's DNA.  Here is how Howland was reported to have responded to such bad behavior:

    After each of the incidents, Howland looked the other way. One team member says he asked Howland after a practice why he wasn't punishing Nelson, to which he said Howland responded, "He's producing."

    5. Are you succeeding because the peer culture among your followers is hiding or offsetting your deep flaws? 

    This is one of the interesting parts of the story, and something every leader should think about.  In many cases, teams and organizations succeed DESPITE rather than BECAUSE of their leaders flaws.  In Howland's early years at UCLA, when the team was winning and morale among the players was good despite Howland's quirks and flaws, it was apparently due in large part to the tight bonds among the team members, an unusually mature and low ego group (which began unraveling in about 2008):

     It was a team of prefects, the protectors of the UCLA dynamic, who looked out for each other, making sure that no one got into trouble, that no one threatened what they were trying to accomplish or what UCLA has always been about. They were a tight group. If they went out, to the movies or a party, they were 15 strong. That kind of camaraderie is not unusual on good teams, but Howland's former players say he had very little to do with instilling it.

    6. Is your boss letting YOU get away with toxic and incompetent leadership?

    I was pretty stunned to read this:

    UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero, who through a spokesperson declined SI's interview request, told ESPN.com in January, "I need Ben Howland. Why would I even think about looking at someone else?" He added, "By his own admission, [Howland] made some mistakes. But I'm going to work with him. I'm not going to crucify him for those mistakes. Because Ben Howland is a hell of a coach, and anyone who understands basketball, anyone that's been around him, that knows the game, has the utmost respect for what he does as a coach. … We need to turn it around, and we all get that. But we will."

    The above quote is quite discouraging as it suggests that, well, so long as he goes back to winning, all is forgiven. As far as I am concerned, if the SI story is accurate, Howland suffers too deeply from power poisoning, committed too many selfish sins, and has demonstrated so much incompetence in dealing with people he is hired to look after and motivate to be allowed to continue in any leadership position. 
    The problems I've listed only begin to scratch the surface of the damage done under Howland's apparently flawed leadership. I haven't even got into the partying, the players who came to practice still stoned from the night before, and the bench-warmer who couldn't enter a game during "garbage time" because he didn't bother wearing his jersey under his warm-up jacket (the same player now says he can't believe, in retrospect, that he did it — but bad leadership and bad team dynamics cause people to do weird and dysfunctional things).
    Apparently, there are signs that Howland is doing a bit better this year and is taking steps to deal with bad behavior.  Last year, Howland finally stopped putting up with Reeves Nelson's awful behavior — for example, last season, he finally showed the courage to call fouls on Nelson in practice (in the past, "[Howland] always gave Reeves the benefit of the doubt on foul calls in practice so Reeves wouldn't lose it and be even more disruptive").  Nelson finally was kicked-off the team last November.   And now even Nelson and mother believe Howland should have been nipped the bad behavior in the bud.  As Nelson told SI:
    "I'm not trying to make excuses for what I did, but I got into some weird behavior patterns, and I think my mom was saying that if instead of one big punishment at the end, what if there had been smaller punishments along the way."
    Perhaps Howland will change his ways.  People do get better and perhaps he will learn to be less of a jerk, be in tune with the people he leads, to avoid letting superstar run roughshod over others, and to do the little bits dirty work when necessary.  I am not especially optimistic, especially after smelling the "winning is the only thing" attitude from Howland's boss.  Regardless, I believe this is a useful cautionary tale for any boss, and in particular, I  think of this guideline in Chapter 1 of The No Asshole Rule:
    The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know. 
    P.S. Note that Reeves Nelson did an interview where he disputes many of the bad things said about him in the article and his law firm is demanding that SI retract the article.

  • Good Boss, Bad Boss is Shipping in Paperback: A Look Back

     

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    Good Boss, Bad Boss is already shipping in paperback at Amazon, today is the official publication date.  It has a new red cover (which I like, I hope it isn't too intense for you) and a new chapter, an Epilogue called "What Great Bosses Do: Lessons I've l Learned Since Writing Good Boss, Bad Boss."  Fast Company already published an excerpt from the new chapter on power poisoning and will be publishing more snippets in the coming weeks. 

    This all got me thinking about Good Boss, Bad Boss, about all the fun I had fretting over and talking with people about ideas in the book, and about lots of others ideas about bosses too, since the book was first published in September, 2010.  In doing so, I looked back on some of the most popular posts and related stories on bosses.  These include:

    1. Being a Good Boss is Pretty Damn Hard — Reflections on Publication Day

    2. Lessons from Nightmare (and Dream) Bosses — INC Interview

    3. How to Be a Good Boss — by Matt May

    4. When the Shit Hits the Fan, Women are Seen as Better Bosses than Men

    5. Drinking at Work — It's not all bad — a piece for Cnn.Com

    6. Is it Sometimes Rationally to Select Leaders Randomly?

    7. Clueless and Comical Bosses: Please Help Me With Examples

    8. A Cool Neurological Explanation for the Power of Small Wins

    9. How a Few Bad Apples Can Ruin Everything — a Wall Street Journal piece I wrote

    10. What are Good Things About Having a Lousy Boss?

    11. Pixar Lore: The Day Our Bossses Saved Our Jobs — at HBR.org

    12. David Kelley on Love and Money

    I could have added a lot more — let me know which ones you like, which ones you don't form the above list, and which ones I should have added from the past six years or so I've been writing Work Matters. Thanks so much for everything

  • Greetings and Bathrooms: One CEO’s Metrics for Retail Stores

    Yesterday, we had the CEO of a large retail chain as a visitor in the Stanford class we Huggy Rao and I are teaching on scaling-up excellence.  I will refrain from using his name as this a class, not a speech to the public.  But he said something  interesting in response to a question about the challenge of "descaling bad behavior."  When I asked what the "warning signs" he looked for during store visits, signs that management was slipping, he offered two metrics (which he said could be applied to many others retail settings too):

    1.   Am I — and other customers — warmly greeted by employees when they enter the store?  He said this was a general sign that employees were focusing on customers.  He added that the small social connection and associated feeling of obligation makes it a bit harder for people to walk out of the store without buying anything. 

    2. Are the bathrooms clean?  He joked that people in his company must think he has a small bladder because he is always asking to go the bathroom.  He argued that dirty bathroom are a sign that the managers and employees are failing to execute in other ways, and because customers react so negatively to dirty bathrooms, it was especially bad for motivating sales and return visits.

    He said that, when he spots these signs, he immediately has a huddle with the store manager and employees to explain why they are of such concern to him and to persuade them to start changing their behavior right away.  He also emphasized that his firm uses all kinds of quantitative measures to run the stores, but as he pointed out, these simple measures add something that can't be seen just from looking at the numbers.

    Ireally liked the elegance of his two measures and how he tied them to his immediate actions.

    I wonder, what other simple measures do you use — as a customer or manager — to assess if a store is being ran well or badly?

    P.S. I was sitting next to a marketing professor from another university during the talk. He argued that if you look at Wal-Mart's recent financial challenges (which the press seems to attribute to such deep cuts in the merchandise prices), part of the problem may be that they are failing along the lines suggested by this veteran CEO.  As he noted, Wal-Mart is eliminating some greeters and moving others away from the entrance; an article in RetailWire comments on reduced and altered use of greeters: "A lot of changes have taken place at Walmart over the years since Sam Walton's passing, but the latest may have him flipping over in his grave. "  That marketing professor also asserted the cleanliness of Wal-Mart bathrooms have slipped in recent years (This is hearsay as I am not a regular Wal-Mart customer; I did try to look online for evidence to support the claim, and while there were individual complaints, I didn't see any systematic evidence one way or another).

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Rule One: Learn to See Results in Color

    Old formulation: Measure financial returns to shareholders.

    New formulation: Measure the real value sought by stakeholders.

    Rule Two: Internalize Externalities

    Old formulation: Externalize every cost you can.

    New formulation: Own your impact, negative and positive.

    Rule Four: Give it Away Until You Charge for It

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

    New formulation: Pursue collaborative gains through invisible handshakes.

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

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