Work Matters

  • Felt Accountability: Some Emerging Thoughts

    This blog and much of the rest of my life were swamped last week by the intense reactions to the story about how badly United Airlines treated Phoebe and her parents when she traveled as an unaccompanied minor.  You can read the blog post with the original story (and the 90 comments that were not too hostile to print) and the family's statement if you missed it. Also, Diego at Metacool did an insightful post about why the story went so viral.

    At some point, I should write a post with the twists and turns of the story: the surprising hostility, the lies and veiled threats from the media, the stories about United that are far worse than the one published here (warning: stranded older teenagers might be worse than stranded young kids in some ways as they fall into a weird no-mans-land), and the senior executive ( I won't name him, he can out himself) who is on United constantly because he has no choice for his job, despises what they have devolved to, and reports he is sending back the expensive gift he got a few days ago to thank him for the 2 million miles he has flown with United — he is going to suggest that they use the money to give some passenger a little better (or at least less bad) service.

    As I recover from all this madness, I continue to think about felt accountability, the concept that I used to frame the United story.  Huggy Rao and I are rather obsessed with this notion as it is so central to scaling-up excellence — and for de-scaling bad behavior of all kinds.   United is, I believe, a place that has lost that feeling of mutual obligation to do the right thing, where management helps employees, employees help management, employees help each other, employees help customers,  and where customers feel compelled to pitch and play a helpful role too. 

    I am thinking — Huggy gets part of the blame here too — that there might be four different levels or kinds of accountability that a group or organization might have, which go something like this:

    Authorship

    This comes from my friend, early stage venture capitalist, and d.school teaching star Michael Dearing — we heard it just yesterday from him.  This is what you get get in a small start-up, from an inventor, and yes, from book authors like me.  That feeling that not only am I obligated to do the right thing, but that I am the person responsible for designing and making it as great as I can.  Steve Jobs had this in spades, of course, but you mostly see it in smaller organizations or pockets of bigger organizations.  I think of Brad Bird at Pixar as another example, especially his amazing efforts on The Incredibles, how it was his vision, but how he still instilled the feeling in so much of team:  Whatever little part they were working on, he made many members of the team feel as if they were authors — if you want the feel of working with Brad, although DVD's are fading, check out the "behind the scenes" material on The Incredibles DVD.  Amazing stuff. 

    Mutual Obligation

    David Novak, CEO of Yum! brands, argues that this should be the goal of a great leader, to create a place where it feels like you own it and it owns you.   This is what United has lost, what I still feel at Virgin America, JetBlue, and Southwest most of the time.  IDEO and McKinsey have the same feel, as do Procter & Gamble and GE.  I saw it at the Cleveland Clinic when I was patient there.  I also think of people who work for the Singapore government, who can be remarkable in this regard.  These organizations aren't perfect, none can be, but there is palpable weight on people, they feel pressure to do the right thing even when no one is looking, as the old saying goes. And they pressure others to do so as well.   

    Indifference

    Think of the average hair salon, where each stylist rents a chair.  Or a group dental practice, where dentists share a common receptionist and a few services and little else. Some organizations are designed this way and can be quite effective. The mutual dependence is weak, it is a "we don't do much for you, so you don't have to do much for us" situation.   People don't have contempt for their colleagues or customers, it is just indifference.  I was thinking that United had devolved to this state.  But after the deluge last week, I realized it was worse than that.  Hence, my proposed last category.

    Mutual  Contempt

    I first heard hints of this notion at an unnamed university I worked at briefly quite a few years ago.  Right after I arrived, one of my new colleagues said something "this is the kind of place where, when you a full professor, you not only don't care about your colleagues, you feel good when something bad happens to them."   I should hasten to add that this was probably an overstatement, that such contempt seemed to be largely between groups and departments, not so much within them — and they have new leadership and things seem to be better. 

    BUT I also fear that this describes the modern United Airlines, everyone seems to despise everyone else.  I hope I am wrong about this, but the awful stories rolled in from so many sources that it seems as if all the years of cost-cutting, all the battles with unions, all the management changes, all the stress that customers have endured over the years have conspired to bring the organization — at least most it — to this dark place.   It appears that many United employees are keenly aware of this sad state of affairs and it hurts them deeply — especially front line employees.

    I was especially struck by a long comment from a guy who said he was a 25 year United pilot.   If you want to read the whole thing, it takes awhile to get there from the original post as there are 90 comments, and you have to click about four pages back, it is by Greenpolymer, August 14th, at 9:24 pm.  I think this link gets you to the right page if you scroll down toward the bottom.

    This pilot tells a brief story earlier in the post that really got to
    me. It reflects terribly on United's management, and shows that people who act on feelings they are accountable to passengers are punished  — despite claims by senior executives to the contrary:

    I had the
    gall to apologize to my 150 passengers for a shares delay of 45 minutes
    one day. I was asked to write a letter of apology TO MANAGEMENT for
    mentioning the problem. (I think the videos also say something about
    being truthful and taking responsibility)

    This is the worst — and most disturbing — part:

    I used
    to be the Captain who ran downstairs to make sure the jetway air
    conditioning was cold and properly hooked up. Who helped the mechanic
    with the cowling and held the flashlight for him. I used to write notes
    to MY guests, and thank them for their business. I wrote reports,
    hundreds of reports, on everything from bad coffee to more efficient
    taxi techniques.

    No more. I have been told to do my job, and I do my job. My love
    for aviation has been ground into dust. After 15 years of being lied
    to, deceived, ignored, blamed falsely; and watching the same mistakes
    being made over and over again by a "professional management" that never
    seems to learn from the copious reports of our new "watchers", I give.

    It's not an easy thing to do. I am an Eagle Scout, an entrepreneur,
    and a retired Air Force Officer with over 22 years of service. Those
    twelve points of the Scout law still mean something to me, especially
    the first three. I have been in great units and not so great units, and
    the difference ALWAYS came down to LEADERSHIP. Most (and I will be the
    first to admit not all) of the employees that you all have been talking
    about here are desperate. They would give anything to find a LEADER,
    with a VISION, and a sense of HONOR to lead this company.

    Painful, isn't it?  "I used to be… I used to be… I used to be."  I think he is a victim of the years of contempt, which is something far more vile than indifference — not just for United customers, but for people like him who want to care.

    Once again, this post is just to explore some emerging ideas — and to start stepping back from the United incident (although clearly I have not been completely successful at that).  To return to the big picture:

    1. Any comments on the my four categories?  Do they ring true? Any advice?

    2. Now the hard part.  We will return to this one.  How do you build an organization that starts and remains a place where felt accountability prevails?  Tougher still, once it is lost — as seems to be the case at United — how do you get it back?  Or is it impossible?

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

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

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

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

     Charles Hobart/United Airlines Spokesman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Annie and Perry Klebahn

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

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

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

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

    A few key details.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • “Ascent of the A-Word” Geoffrey Nunberg’s Great New Book

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    You have probably have heard of  Geoffrey Nunberg — that brilliant and funny linguist on NPR.  He has a brand new asshole book called Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First 60 years.  I first heard about it a few weeks back when I was contacted by George Dobbins from the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.  He asked if I might moderate Nunberg's talk on August 15th, given we are now fellow asshole guys.  I was honored to accept the invitation and I hope you can join us that evening — you are in for a treat.

    The book is a satisfying blend of great scholarship, wit, and splendid logic.  It is a joy from start to finish, and the reviewers agree.  I loved the first sentence of the Booklist review “Only an asshole would say this book is offensive. Sure, it uses the A-word a lot, but this is no cheap attempt to get laughs written by a B-list stand-up comic." 

    Nunberg starts with a magnificent first chapter called The Word, which talks about the battles between "Assholes and  Anti-assholes."   I love this sentence about the current state of public discourse in America "It sometimes seems as if every corner of our public discourse is riddled with people depicting one another as assholes and treating them accordingly, whether or not they actually use the word."  As he states  later in the chapter, he doesn't have a stance for or against the word (although the very existence of the book strikes me as support for it), the aim of the book is to "explore the role that the notion of the asshole has come to play in our lives." 

    He then follows-up with one delightful chapter after another, I especially loved "The Rise of Talking Dirty,"  "The Asshole in the Mirror," and "The Allure of Assholes."  I get piles of books every year about bullies, jerks, toxic workplaces, and on and on. Although this isn't a workplace book, it is the best book I have ever read that is vaguely related to the topic. 

    I admired how deftly he treated "The Politics of Incivility" in the chapter on "The Assholism of Public Life."  Nunberg makes a compelling argument that critics on the right and the left both use the tactic of claiming that an opponent is rude, nasty, or indecent  — that they are acting like assholes and ought to apologize immediately.   Nunberg documents "the surge of patently phony indignation for all sides," be it calling out people for "conservative incivility" or "liberal hate."    He captures much of this weird and destructive game with the little joke "Mind your manners, asshole."

    I am barely scratching the surface, there is so much wisdom here, and it is all so fun.  Read the book.    Read and listen to this  little piece that Nunberg did recently on NPR.  This part is lovely:

    Well, profanity makes hypocrites of us all. But without hypocrisy, how could profanity even exist? To learn what it means to swear, a child has to both hear the words said and be told that it's wrong to say them, ideally by the same people. After all, the basic point of swearing is to demonstrate that your emotions have gotten the better of you and trumped your inhibitions

    We hope to see you at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on August 15th, it should be good fun.

  • Adding Women Makes Your Group Smarter — The Evidence Keeps Growing

    I was intrigued to see the new study that shows companies perform better when they have women on their boards.  Check out this story and video at CNBC.   Here is the upshot: "Credit Suisse analyzed more than 2,500 companies and found that companies with more than one woman on the board have outperformed those with no women on the board by 26 percent since 2005."

    This result becomes even more compelling when you pair it with a rigorous study done a couple years ago.  It showed that groups that have a higher percentage of women have higher "collective intelligence" — they perform better across an array of difficult tasks "that ranged from visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games and complex rule-based design assignments," as this summary from Science News reports. In that research, the explanation was pretty interesting, as the authors set out to study collective intelligence, not gender.  As Science News reported:

    Only when analyzing the data did the co-authors suspect that the number of women in a group had significant predictive power. "We didn't design this study to focus on the gender effect," Malone says. "That was a surprise to us." However, further analysis revealed that the effect seemed to be explained by the higher social sensitivity exhibited by females, on average. "So having group members with higher social sensitivity is better regardless of whether they are male or female,"

    Yet, despite all this, there is still massive sexism out there, especially in the upper reaches of many corporations. Note this report from the Women's Forum: "While women comprise 51% of the population, they make up only 15.7% of Fortune 500 boards of directors, less than 10% of California tech company boards, and 9.1% of Silicon Valley boards." 

    Pathetic huh?  And it is pretty good evidence that all those sexist boys who love going to board meetings and retreats unfettered by those pesky women are just hurting themselves — and their shareholders — in the end.  But perhaps there is justice in the world, as this just may be a case where "times wounds all heels."

    Indeed, I wonder when we will see the first shareholders' suit where a company that has no women on the board, and suffers financial setbacks, is sued.  Their failure to do so could be construed as a violation of their fiduciary responsibility.  I know this sounds silly, it does to me.   But lawyers and shareholders have sued — and won — over far more absurd things, as this would at least be an evidence-based claim (albeit one that stretches the evidence a bit too far for my tastes).

  • It is 1-3-2: Bronze Medal Winners are Happier than Silver

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    Yesterday I was sort of watching the Olympics — reading the New York Times on my iPhone and occasionally glancing-up at the TV.  There was some swimming race I wasn't following on the screen, but I looked-up because of all the enthusiasm by the guy on the screen.  I was sure he had won a gold medal.  Actually he hadn't, he had won bronze.  His name is Brendan Hansen and he won it in the 100 meter breaststroke — that is him above.  In looking into his story, there are lots of reasons for him to be excited,as he was the oldest athlete in the field at 31, he had retired after the Beijing Olympics and done a comeback, he is only the 13th swimmer to win a medal after the age of 30, and he was not favored to win a medal.  So he certainly deserves to be happy for many reasons. 

    But his joy on the screen reminded me of a cool study I first heard of nearly 20 years ago that, I strongly suspect, still holds true.  A team of researchers found that, while gold medalists are happiest about their accomplishments, bronze medalists in the same events are consistently happier than sliver medalists.  This was first established in a 1995 study by Vicki Medvec, Scott Madey, and Tom GIlovich.  They coded videotapes of Olympic athletes from the Barcelona Spain summer games just after they learned of their performance, such as swimmers like Brendan Hansen right after their race. Then they coded the emotions again when they were awarded the medals on the podium.

    They found that gold medalists displayed the strongest positive emotions, but bronze winners displayed stronger positive emotions than silver winners. The researchers replicated these same 1-3-2 findings in two other events, including the Empire State Games, an amateur competition in New York.

    The researchers proposed that this finding is driven by what is called "counterfactual thinking," those thoughts of what might have been if something different had happened.  In particular, they proposed that silver medals did upward comparisons to the gold medal winner, while the bronze medalists did downward comparisons to people who didn't win medals.  As one of the authors, Tom GIlovich, explained to the Washington Post, "If you win a silver, it is very difficult to not think, 'Boy, if I had just gone a little faster at the end . The bronze-medal winners — some of them might think, 'I could have gotten gold if I had gone faster,' but it is easier to think, 'Boy, I might not have gotten a medal at all!' "

    I guess, to put perhaps too fine a point on it, silver medalists see themselves as the first loser, while bronze medalists see themselves as the last winner.

    Like all research, this won't hold in every case, other factors come into play, especially — as you could see with Brendan Hansen — that happiness is also a function of what you get versus what you expect, and exceeding expectations is a universal trigger of positive emotion. So, for example, if the U.S. basketball team, who are strong "overdogs" get a gold get a bronze instead, I bet they won't act as happy as Hansen after they learn of the result.

    Enjoy, and as we watch the Olympics, let's see if those bronze medalists look a bit happier than the silver medalists standing along aside them, as Medvec and her colleagues found.

    P.S. Here is the source:

    "When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medalists." Medvec, Victoria Husted; Madey, Scott F.; Gilovich, Thomas. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 69(4), Oct 1995, 603-610.

     

     

  • Wired Story Wraps With My Argument That Steve Jobs Is Like A Rorschach Test

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    I can't even recall quite when it happened, but several month back a Wired reporter named Ben Austen called me about a piece he was doing on Steve Jobs' legacy.  I confess that kept the conversation short, in large part because I was just getting tired of the story — and I think everyone else is as well.  But this turned into the cover story, which — despite my lack of enthusiasm about the topic — is one of the most balanced and well-researched pieces I have seen.  At least that became my biased opinion after I saw that he plugged my last two books in the final three paragraphs!  Here is the whole piece if you want to read it and here is my argument — you can read the whole excerpt about Jobs as a Rorschach test here, where I put it in earlier post. Here is how Ben Austen ended his piece:

    As he was writing his 2007 book, The No Asshole Rule, Robert Sutton, a professor of management and engineering at Stanford, felt obligated to include a chapter on “the virtues of assholes,” as he puts it, in large part because of Jobs and his reputation even then as a highly effective bully. Sutton granted in this section that intimidation can be used strategically to gain power. But in most situations, the asshole simply does not get the best results. Psychological studies show that abusive bosses reduce productivity, stifle creativity, and cause high rates of absenteeism, company theft, and turnover—25 percent of bullied employees and 20 percent of those who witness the bullying will eventually quit because of it, according to one study.

    When I asked Sutton about the divided response to Jobs’ character, he sent me an excerpt from the epilogue to the new paperback edition of his Good Boss, Bad Boss, written two months after Jobs’ death. In it he describes teaching an innovation seminar to a group of Chinese CEOs who seemed infatuated with Jobs. They began debating in high-volume Mandarin whether copying Jobs’ bad behavior would improve their ability to lead. After a half-hour break, Sutton returned to the classroom to find the CEOs still hollering at one another, many of them emphatic that Jobs succeeded because of—not in spite of—his cruel treatment of those around him.

    Sutton now thinks that Jobs was too contradictory and contentious a man, too singular a figure, to offer many usable lessons. As the tale of those Chinese CEOs demonstrates, Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs,” Sutton says. “It usually tells you a lot about them—and little about Jobs.”

    The point at which I really decided that the Jobs obsession was both silly and dangerous came about a month after his death.  Huggy Rao and I were doing an interview on scaling-up excellence with a local CEO who founded a very successful company — you would recognize the name of his company.  After I stopped recording the interview, this guy — who has a reputation as a caring, calm, and wickedly smart CEO — asked Huggy Rao and me if we thought he had to be an asshole like Jobs in order for his company to achieve the next level of success…. he seemed genuinely worried that his inability to be nasty to people was career limiting. 

    Ugh.  I felt rather ill and argued that it was important to be tough and do the dirty work when necessary, but treating people like dirt along way was not the path to success as a leader or a human-being.  Perhaps this is my answer to the Steve Jobs Rorschach test: I believe that Jobs succeeded largely despite rather than because of the abuse he sometimes heaped on people.  Of course, this probably tells you more about me than Jobs!

  • Charter Schools, California and New York City: $6000 vs. $13,500 Per Pupil

    Huggy Rao and I have been reading and talking about charter schools for our scaling-up excellence project.  Charter schools come in many forms, but the basic idea is that these often smaller and more focused schools are freed from many of the usual rules and constraints that other public schools face, and in exchange,  are held more accountable for student achievement – on measures like standardized test scores, graduation rates, and the percentage of students who go onto college.  

    There is much controversy and debate about these public schools:  Are they generally superior or inferior to other forms of public education?  Are they cheaper or more expensive?  Can the best ones be scaled-up without screwing-up the original excellence?  Which charter school models are best and worst? 

    There is so much ideology and self-interest running through such debates that, despite some decent research, it is hard to answer such questions objectively.  But one lesson is unfortunately becoming clear enough that there is growing agreement — that my home state of California is so poor that it is a lousy place to start a Charter school of any kind.  I first heard this a few weeks about from Anthony Bryk, a renowned educational researcher and the current President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.  He was also directly involved in starting and running one (or perhaps more — I don't recall for sure) charter schools when he lived in Chicago. 

    Tony told me that California was providing such meager funding that — although much of the charter school movement started here, there are many charter schools here, and many of the organizations that start and run these schools (called "charter management organizations") are  here — the funding that California schools receive is so meager that they are increasingly hesitant to start schools in California because the schools are condemned to mediocrity or worse.

    I started digging into it, and what I am finding is distressing as both a Californian and an American.  I knew that our schools were suffering, but I did not realize how much.  For a glimpse, here is an interesting and detailed article on scaling-up charter schools in Education Week from last year.  As Tony warned me, the charter operators described in this article are struggling to sustain quality in California and are looking elsewhere. Here is an interesting excerpt:

    Aspire, in Oakland, has also focused so far only on California. It opened its first charter school in Stockton, Calif., in the 1999-2000 school year and has grown by several schools each year. The CMO operates 30 schools and has nearly doubled its enrollment, to 12,000, over the past three school years. James Willcox, the chief executive officer of Aspire, said the difficult budget climate in California is causing him and other Aspire leaders to think about opening schools outside the state. “It’s getting harder and harder to do quality schools in California,” he said, “because the funding is so painfully low, and charter schools get less per student than traditional public schools.”

    He isn't exaggerating. I was shocked to see, for example, that (according to the article) the State of California is currently providing less than $6000 per pupil each year; in contrast, New York City provides $13,500.  Ouch.   I know that government wastes lots of money, and certainly there are inefficiencies in education.  But can we afford to do this our kids and our future?  As Tony suggested, California has degenerated to the point where all they can do is support a teacher for every 30 kids or so, a tired old classroom and school, and little else.

    I knew it was bad, but I didn't know it was this bad.  There is plenty of blame to go around — we all have our own pet targets — but perhaps it is time to put our differences aside and do the right things.

  • Can You Handle the Mess?

    Proto messy

    Remember that speech from a  Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson famously ranted at Tom Cruise "You can't handle the truth?" I was vaguely reminded of it when I saw this picture. It reminded me that, when it comes to creativity and innovation, if you want the innovations, money, and prestige it sometimes produces, you've get to be ready to handle the mess. 

    I love this picture because it is such a great demonstration that prototyping — like so many other parts of creative process — is so messy that it can be distressing to people with orderly minds.  This picture comes from a presentation I heard at an executive program last week called Design Thinking Bootcamp. 

    It was by the amazing Claudia Kotchka, who did great things at VP of Design Innovation and Strategy at P&G — see this video and article.  She built a 300 person organization to spread innovation methods across the company. She retired from P&G a few years back and now helps all sorts of organizations (including the the Stanford d school) imagine and implement design thinking and related insights.  As part of her presentation, she put up this picture from a project P&G did with IDEO  (they did many). We always love having Claudia at the d.school because she spreads so much wisdom and confidence to people who are dealing with such messes.

    That is what prototyping looks like… it even can look this messy when people are developing ideas about HR issues like training and leadership development and organizational strategy issues such as analyses of competitors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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