Work Matters

  • Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment: A Beautiful Business Book Cover

    I just started reading Guy's new book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. I will do a post about its content around the publication date, which is March 8th 2011.  But I could not resist putting up the cover, as — thanks to Guy's doggedness, good taste, and fantastic social network — the result is one of the most beautiful business book covers I have ever seen.  It would have been aweseome even without that Woz quote, although that quote (especially given the source) is every business book author's dream!

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  • “Have Some Sugar” and Six Other Ways to Be Good: Evidence from BPS Research

    One of the my favorite blogs on the planet is BPS Research,  where folks from the British Psychological Society summarize the latest psychological research — and do so with delightful charm and accuracy.  I was just visiting (it is a great place to look around) and, as part of just one post, they offer "7 Ways to Be Good."

    Check out these links to studies from peer-reviewed journals:

    Learn healthier habits
    Have an energy drink
    Use your inner voice
    Practise self control
    Clench your muscles
    Form if-then plans
    Distract yourself

    They are all wonderful, but I was especially amused by the experiment showing that students who (after an exam that presumably depleted their glucose levels) had a "high-glucose lemonade" were more likely to offer help to a classmate who was facing eviction and to offer larger donations to charity.  No, it wasn't just because the experimenter gave the students a gift…the students in the control condition (who were less generous) were given a low-glucose lemonade.  Sugar isn't all bad! 

  • A Darn Good One Page Summary of Good Boss, Bad Boss in Southwest Airlines Spirit

    The February edition of Southwest Airlines Spirit magazine has a an article on Good Boss, Bad Boss called Lead the Way. I was both delighted and a bit distrubed to see what a great job they did of capturing the central themes in the book with so few words, and few key pictures.  I wrote all those words and the simple page below captures so much it! Below is a somewhat blurry and small jpeg; click here to see the full pdf, which is more clear.

    Good Boss, Bad Boss in Southwest Spirit

  • Five Signs You Are a Bad Boss in Today’s Wall Street Journal

    I was interviewed last week about bosses by the Wall Street Journal's Diana Middleton. Her story "Five Signs You're a Bad Boss" came out today.  The five signs are:

    1. Most of your emails are one-word long

    2. You rarely talk to your employees face-to-face

    3. Your employees are out sick–a lot.

    4. Your team's working overtime, but still missing deadlines.

    5. You yell.

    I was especially taken with point 4 in Diane's list, as it is a sign of bosses who lack both competence and consideration for their people:

    New bosses are particularly prone to giving unmanageable deadlines to staffers, says Gini Graham Scott, author of "A Survival Guide for Working with Bad Bosses."

    A human resources executive at a New York firm who declined to be named because she's currently looking for a new position, says that she began working 15-hour days after her new boss came on board. Her boss' first order of business: Promising more aggressive deadlines to clients. "She would tell the client, 'We can have this for you in three days,' which was impossible," says this woman.

    I have not thought about this one enough, but it really strikes me as diagnostic.  Yes, there are always emergencies that a boss cannot control, but when the boss does not have the skill to prevent such relentless hours from becoming a way of life or the backbone to protect his or people from such exploitation, it is a pretty good sign of a bad boss.

    Clearly, this is not as complete or detailed list. Creating one would be impossible in such a short space.  I would also caution that yelling is complicated, and is sometimes a sign of an over-passionate boss that might otherwise be good.  And even the best bosses — as with all human-beings — may succeed despite these and other flaws.  Certainly, to pick some famous bosses who were sometimes given to yelling, Vince Lombardi and Steve Jobs certainly both were given to screaming now and then.  I am not defending their actions, but there are times that people with flaws are worth the trouble, especially if they are embedded in teams that can dampen their flaws.

  • David Kelley on Love and Money: Dan Pink’s Kind of Guy

    This is a post I out up a few months back.  But as I am a guest on Dan Pink's new show "Office Hours" today at 2 Eastern, I thought I would bring to the top of my blog because David's perspective reminds me of Dan's philosophy and evidence in his bestseller "Drive."  Here goes:

    Yesterday, a couple hundred of us gathered at the Stanford d.school to celebrate David Kelley's 60th birthday.  The outpouring of love and affection was something — the guests included old friends he grew-up with, his family, Stanford colleagues (David is a professor and the main founder of the Stanford d.school), IDEO colleagues (David is co-founder of IDEO, was the first CEO, and the driving force behind the culture), dozens of former students, many of his friends from Silicon Valley businesses, and his friends from the car world (David loves old cars and has a pretty cool collection of old American cars and other cool things like a well-restored and "chopped" Mini and some classic Porsches).  The outpouring of affection was even stronger than it might have been because several years back David was diagnosed with cancer, and he seems to have beat it (his doctor was there, who David thanked for saving his life).

    David is one of the inspiring and wise people I've ever met (I once tried to write a book about him and IDEO called The Attitude of Wisdom… I have written about wisdom in subsequent books, but I still regret not finishing that book.)  One key to David's success is that, before he starts talking to the person in front of him, he actually listens carefully and takes in their body language before offering a comment or opinion — it is a rare talent, and one of many signs of his magnificent empathy. (Here is a recent Fast Company article that covers David and some of his latest accomplishments.)

    Document Kelley Lovemoney

    I could tell a a hundred stories about David, and as part of celebrating his 60th, perhaps I will write out a few more.  But one that has been top of mind lately is his "Love and Money" drawing (he did the one above for Good Boss, Bad Boss, but it remains unchanged over the years).  One of the first times I talked to David in depth, at some point in the early 1990s, as I was asking him about his management philosophy, he drew-out the graphic above and explained that, to run a business, you need to make money, but you also need to retain the talents and motivation of great people.  Yes, he said there are times when love and money go together, but there are always stretches of time when a boss needs to ask people to do things they don't want to do and don't love to make the necessary money required to keep the doors open.  But the smart boss realizes that he or she damn well build up some love points in advance to burn when some unpleasant money tasks are required.  

    This simple idea is strikingly similar to one of the main ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss — albeit one derived from research and theory on leaders rather than David's pencil.  As I argue in the book, the best bosses realize that one of the balancing acts that they walk is between pressing people to perform well for the collective good and treating them with respect, dignity, and injecting joy into their days at work.   This is why I came close to calling Good Boss, Bad Boss "Top Dog on a Tightrope" as the best bosses carry-off this daily balancing act in a masterful way. 

    This is developed on Good Boss, Bad Boss in some detail.  Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1 that focuses on my conversation with David about love and money (the same one where he drew the above picture; the original is in my Stanford office):

    David sees his job, or the job of any boss, as enabling people to experience dignity and joy as they travel through their work days (the love part, what I call humanity) AND to do work that keeps the lights on and provides them with fair pay, health care, and other necessities (the money part, what I call performance).  David says that, although sometimes you can accomplish both at once, there are always stretches when people must do things they don’t love to bring in money.  David explains that great bosses work to strike a balance between love and money over time, for example, by making sure that a designer who has worked on a dull, frustrating, and lucrative project gets to choose an inspiring if less profitable project the next time.

    Managers at IDEO don’t accomplish this balancing act just through bigger moves like project assignments.  They do it in little ways too: When designers have been working like dogs and are tired, grumpy, and starting to bicker, managers find little ways to slow things down, have some fun, and promote civility and mutual respect.  This might happen by making sure that a designer who has been grinding away designing a medical device can get a refreshing break by going to a brainstorming session, for example, on how to improve the airport security experience, get doctors to wash their hands, or design new playing pieces for the Monopoly board game. Managers at IDEO also provide breaks by shooting darts from Nerf guns or launching rubber darts called Finger Blasters at their people – which often degenerate into a full-scale 15 minute battles.  Such adolescent antics won’t work in every workplace.  But when the performance pressure starts heating-up and things are on the verge of turning ugly, skilled bosses everywhere find ways to give people a break, or tell a joke, or just make a warm gesture to place more weight on the “humanity” side of the scale.  As David put it, “foam darts aren’t for everybody, but there is always some form of play in every culture that allows people to let off steam.”

    Happy Birthday David.  As the  Neil Young song about his old car goes,  "Long May You Run."

  • The “Rotten Apple” Effect Happens in Herds of Cows Too

     

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    Thanks to Jason, I learned of some weird but unsurprising research that brings together the bad apple studies described in Good Boss, Bad Boss and work on emotional contagion in The No Asshole Rule.  A five-year study led by Mississippi State University Associate Professor Rhonda Vann found that cows that were "very aggressive, excitable, and out of control" not only got sick more often, weighed less, and wrecked farm equipment, these bad things "rub-off" on the rest of the herd.   Here is the story from Delta Farm Press, called "Calm Cattle More Valuable."  Of course, human groups are different from farm animals in many ways, but the parallel between this and Will Felps' research on bad apples, and related work on "bad is stronger than good"  is striking (See this HBR post).

  • My First Time Attending the World Economic Forum at Davos

    I am in the final throes of getting ready for the World Economic Forum, which takes place this week in Switzerland.  I have never attended before and some of the famous people on the list are rather daunting.  There will be sessions involving world leaders like David Cameron from the UK, Angela Merkel of Germany, Bill Clinton from the U.S., lots of CEOs including Google's Larry Page to Heinken's Jean-François van Boxmeer, and a session by "miracle on the Hudson" pilot Sulley Sullenberg.  You can read about it here in the The New York Times, which has a wonderfully cynical opening paragraph.  

    I am among the many academics invited and will be participating in three sessions. First, I am moderating a session on design thinking and business, which should be interesting as it is becoming ingrained in the positions and practices of so many organizations now.  Second, I am participating in a session on what leaders of the present can learn from leaders of the past.  Third, I give a talk on "the no jerk rule."  The WEF is sufficiently respectable that the organizers thought it was best to refrain from using the world "asshole" in the title.  But I plan to use it a few times in the talk, although perhaps fewer times than usual.   In addition to the sessions I am part of, I am going to focus on learning about scaling, my current primary project, as several sessions focus on the topic and there will be a lot of people there who have a lot of experience with this challenge.

    The place is just buzzing with interesting people and sessions, but I have been warned by the people who run the event and by experienced participants like IDEO CEO  Tim Brown to pace myself as it can get overwhelming.  They also have warned me to bring warm clothes and good snow boots as it is a ski resort.

    I will do some tweeting and blogging.  I don't know quite how much, as I expect I will be busy and distracted. But let me know if there is anything you are especially interested in hearing about, and I will try to address it.

  • Meetings and Bosshole Behavior: A Classic Case

    One of the themes in Good Boss, Bad Boss, as well as some of my past academic research (see this old chapter on meetings as status contests), is that bosses and other participants use meetings to establish and retain prestige and power.  This isn't always dysfunctional; for example, when I studied brainstorming at IDEO, designers gained prestige in the culture by following the brainstorming rules, especially by generating lots of ideas and building on the ideas of others.  And when they built a cool prototype in a brainstorm, their colleagues were impressed.  The IDEO status contest was remarkably functional because it wasn't an I win-you lose game; everyone who brainstormed well was seen as cool and constructive. In addition, the status game rewarded people who performed IDEO's core work well. 

    Unfortunately, too many people, especially power-hungry and clueless bosses, use meetings to display and reinforce their "coercive power" over others in ways that undermine both the performance and the dignity of their followers.   As I've shown, bosses often don't realize how destructive they are because power often causes people to be more focused on their own needs, less focused on the needs and actions of others,and to act like "the rules don't apply to me." 

    I was reminded of the dangers of bosshole behavior in meetings by this troubling but instructive note I received the other day.  It is a classic case.  Note this is the exact text sent me by this unnamed reader, except that I have changed the bosshole's name to Ralph to protect the innocent and the guilty:

    I wanted to pass on to you a trick my most recent crappy boss used to use in meetings.

    The manager I am thinking of is particularly passive-aggressive and also really arrogant at the same time. He was notorious for sending these ridiculous emails that were so long that no one would read them. (He’s also an engineer in every sense of that word) This was at a technology company and we used to start our Mondays off with a business/technical discussion. These meetings initially took an hour but soon turned into 2 and would regularly go 3 and sometimes 4 hours. It was mostly ‘Ralph’ talking expansively about the issues at hand, about those mother-scratchers in the head office and why we shouldn’t take our challenges back to them (Really? Don’t want to solve anything? Really?). It was just unbelievable, we rarely got anything useful accomplished.

    His favorite tricks, though, were pretty much verbatim from your book. He’d arrive 10 – 20 minutes later for almost every meeting and then kill them once in a while. He added an interesting twist to this too. Every so often, if we knew we had work items to cover, we’d forget about the last time and start the meeting without him. Then he’d arrive an hour late without apology, ask what we covered and then make us start the whole meeting again. After all, it couldn’t be a real meeting without ‘Ralph’. And we needed to learn from his vast wealth of experience, didn’t we?

    A few questions:

    Have you ever seen behavior like this in other places?

    If you are a boss, how do you stop yourself from wielding power in dysfunctional ways, and instead, create a functional status contest?

    If you boss acts like an overbearing jerk during meetings, how can you fight back?

  • A Great Pixar Story: Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull Serve as Human Shields

    Note: I originally posted this at HBR.org. You can see the original and the 13 comments here and can see all my posts at HBR here.  I will continue to devote the lion's share of my blogging effort to Work Matters, but plan to post at HBR a couple times a month.

    Pixar is one of my favorite companies on the planet. I love its films, its creative and constructive people (The Incredibles director Brad Bird is among the most intriguing people I've ever interviewed), and its relentless drive toward excellence. There's a pride that permeates that place, along with a nagging worry that, if they don't remain vigilant, mediocrity will infect their work. So I was thrilled to be invited to give a couple of talks about Good Boss, Bad Boss at Pixar last Fall. After the first one, Pixar veteran Craig Good (who has been there at least 25 years — I think he said 28 years), came up and told me an astounding story.

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    The story occurred to Craig because he'd just heard me claim that the best bosses serve as human shields, protecting their people from intrusions, distractions, idiocy from on high, and anything else that undermines their performance or well-being. For him, that brought to mind the year 1985, when the precursor to Pixar, known as the Computer Division of Lucasfilm, was under financial pressure because founder George Lucas (of Star Wars fame) had little faith in the economics of computer animated films. Much of this pressure came down on the heads of the Division's leaders, Ed Catmull (the dreamer who imagined Pixar long before it produced hit films, and the shaper of its culture) and Alvy Ray Smith (the inventor responsible for, among many other things, the Xerox PARC technology that made the rendering of computer animated films possible). The picture to the left shows Ed and Alvy around that period.

    Lucas had brought in a guy named Doug Norby as President to bring some discipline to Lucasfilm, and as part of his efforts, Norby was pressing Catmull and Smith to do some fairly deep layoffs. The two couldn't bring themselves to do it. Instead, Catmull tried to make a financial case for keeping his group intact, arguing that layoffs would only reduce the value of a unit that Lucasfilm could profitably sell. (I am relating this story with Craig's permission, and he double-checked its accuracy with Catmull.) But Norby was unmoved. As Craig tells it: "He was pestering Ed and Alvy for a list of names from the Computer Division to lay off, and Ed and Alvy kept blowing him off. Finally came the order: You will be in my office tomorrow morning at 9:00 with a list of names."

    So what did these two bosses do? "They showed up in his office at 9:00 and plunked down a list," Craig told me. "It had two names on it: Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith."

    As Craig was telling me that story, you could hear the admiration in his voice and his pride in working for a company where managers would put their own jobs on the line for the good of their teams. "We all kept our jobs," he marveled. "Even me, the low man on the totem pole. When word got out, we employees pooled our money to send Ed, Alvy, and their wives on a thank-you night on the town."

    Certainly such extreme staff protection is rare and sometimes it might not even be wise. I can't say that every proposed layoff is immoral or unnecessary. But consider the coda: a few months after this incident, Pixar was sold to a guy named Steve Jobs for 5 million bucks and, as they say, the rest is history. And some 25 years later, that brave shielding act still drives and inspires people at Pixar.

    P.S. I want to thank Pixar's Craig Good, Elyse Klaidman, and Ed Catmull for telling me this story and letting me use it. If you want to learn more about Pixar's astounding history, I suggest reading David Price's The Pixar Touch. It is well researched and a delight to read. While you're at it, check out Alvy Ray Smith's site and Dealers of Lightning if you want to learn about the impact this quirky genius has had on computer animation and other technical marvels.

  • Team Guidelines From A New Boss: How Can He Make Sure People Live Them?

    I got a fascinating note from an employee of a big company about the "team norms" that were articulated by his new boss.  I think they are great, but have a crucial question about them. Here they are: 

    I. Show respect

    Support one another…don't blind-side one another in public.

     Provide one another with a safe place…honor confidentiality.

     Show up to meetings on time…and if you're running late, call.

     Maintain professionalism…especially with clients / learners.

    II. Be transparent

    No hidden agendas

    Get to the point…don't beat around the bush. 

    III. Stay positive

    Celebrate successes

    Have fun

    Here is my question. Talk is not a substitute for action.  Guidelines like these are great when they are drive and reflect behavior, but when they are consistently violated, they are worse than having no guidelines at all because the stench of hypocrisy fills the air.  As such, what advice do you have for this boss to make sure that his team actually lives these norms?

    My first thought was that he should focus on what happens when team members — or himself — violate the norms.  After all, in any human group, people will break rules.  In healthy groups, bosses call out others (and themselves) when transgressions occur, but do it in ways that builds rather than destroys safety and trust.  It's noteasy to do, but I;'ve seen great bosses like IDEO's David Kelley do it in masterful ways.

    That's my first thought. I would love to hear others.

    P.S. A big thanks to the unnamed employee for sending these norms to me.