Work Matters

  • Customer Focused Innovation Executive Program: Work With Tesla to Enhance Customer Experiences, Be Part of a NASCAR Pit Crew, and Learn About Innovation and Design Thinking From Stanford’s Best Teachers

    I have written before about the Customer-Focused Innovation executive program that Huggy Rao, Perry Klebhan, and I launched a few years back at Stanford — see here and here.

    Connected7

     The concept behind this program is that executives learn about innovation and design thinking in two ways, by both learning "clean" academic models during cases studies, lectures, and discussion in the mornings led by the likes of Jennifer Aaker (pictured left), Robert Burgelman, Chip Heath, Jeff Pfeffer, and Charles O'Reilly, along with other of the very best classroom teachers at Stanford. 

    Then, we compliment that "clean models" taught and discussed in the morning with "dirty" hands on experiences with doing innovation in the afternoon. You can see Huggy and I talking about the program here on YouTube along with videos and pictures from the program. As with last year, to get the executives doing something right away and so they can start to get to know each other, the Sunday evening the program starts, Andy (Papa) Papathanassiou who is, among other things, the pit crew director for Hendricks' motor sports, will get executives working in teams in a competition to see who can change the tires fastest (see below). 

    IMG_5307

    For the afternoon exercise, in the past, we have worked with a large energy company to improve the quality of customer experience at their gas stations.  Below are executives brainstorming ways to  improve "the gas station experience" and sell customers more stuff from convenience stores.  This was from the first year of the program, and the guy in the green sweater, Jeremy Gutsche (then a banking executive), went on to start Trendhunter, which is arguably the largest and most frequently updated site in the world that tracks modern trends.

    Team_5_at_work

    For this year's CFI, which runs November 8-13, I think we have something even more exciting, as this excerpt from the Tesla/Stanford press release indicates:

    Design expert Perry Klebahn, the inventor of the modern snowshoe and
    an Associate Consulting Professor at the d.school, will be working
    closely with participants on the Tesla project during the program.
    Klebahn is founder and former CEO of Atlas Snowshoes, former COO of
    Patagonia, and former CEO of Timbuk2.

    Key features of the Stanford collaboration will have program participants conducting:

    • Interviews of Tesla’s key management and dealership personnel
    • Observation of real car buyers at Tesla and non-Tesla dealerships
    • Ideation, design, prototyping and iteration of new vehicle purchase models
    • Presentation of proposed models to Tesla management

    Here is what the Tesla showroom looks like now, but the company is looking for ways to enhance the design and, especially, all aspects of the "car buying experience" as they move toward rolling out lower-priced and larger electric cars that will appeal to a broader market. (those sports cars are beautiful, however)

    TeslaShowroom

    Huggy, Perry, and I hope that some of you and your colleagues might be interested in signing-up for the program. You can see the details here, but I should warn you that this is a pretty expensive program.  Executive education is never cheap at Stanford, but to just break even and keep the group small, this program has especially steep labor costs.  We limit the program to about 30 executives, because the logistics of running the hands-on part in afternoon are intensive.  We provide a dedicated d.school coach for each team, Plus Perry and an a large d.school team do a host of things to keep things humming along.   The advantage, however, is that while most executive education just presents "clean models" (as we do in the morning sessions in a case style class at the Stanford business school) ,it rarely includes the messy hands-on process of doing stuff, visiting a real organization, talking to customers, generating ideas, building prototype objects and experiences, getting initial feedback from customers, and ending with feedback from the executives — from Tesla in this case — who need those ideas immediately.

    Of all the executive programs I teach in at Stanford, and I like them all, this one is the most challenging, most rewarding, and most work for everyone involved. It's an experience for people who want to jump in and do things, not for people who just want to sit on the sidelines and watch.  I believe this is why the lonbg term impact is stronger than most programs.  We see this in the emails, success stories, and yes, failure stories, we still get from former participants.  So if you (and your company) has the money and time for an intense and enlightening week at Stanford, I hope you will sign-up.  I realize that many companies are cutting costs these days, but I believe that investing in innovation is especially crucial these days because, no matter what industry you are in, odds are that you aren't going to survive and thrive by just becoming a smaller and more efficient — but otherwise perfect imitation — of what your organization was and did  before the meltdown. Again, check-out Stanford website and see if this is right for you and your organization.

  • Netflix Culture: An Amazing Slideshow

    This slideshow was on a number of blogs over the summer (see here) , but I wanted to make sure that everyone saw it and, frankly, to get a post here so I have a record of it.  Apparently, Reed Hastings, the amazing CEO of Netflix, put-up a set of 128 slides that is a "reference guide to our freedom and responsibility culture."  I realize that most 128 page slide decks are deadly dull, but this is an exception.  You may not agree with all their values and approaches, but on the whole I think you will be fascinated by the detail and thought.  Now, I have no inside knowledge of what it is like to work at Netflix, but if this is accurate, it is a pretty impressive company — frankly far more enlightened than most in Silicon Valley. 

    They also don't pull any punches, the second slide says that these principles only for salaried employees not hourly. Before laying out their values, they acknowledge that most companies are unaffected by their written values. After laying out their values, they end by saying that a related core value is to question actions that clash with the values. Indeed, that is the real test of any social norm, what happens when someone breaks it?  Are they applauded, do people look the other way, and when people speak-up against the violation do they get slammed?  Or do bosses actually listen and try to make repairs?  Indeed, if you are or were at Netflix insiders, I would love to know if this is hollow rhetoric or a real living and breathing social norm.

     I could go on and on, but this is such an impressive document, you will find many things to get you thinking.  I doubt you will agree with everything — I didn't, as there was a bit too much emphasis on superstars. Indeed, there was a lot of debate in the comments about that.  Of course, I did love the assertion that, unlike many companies, they would not tolerate brilliant jerks. So it is nice to see another company with an (albeit polite version) of The No Asshole Rule.

    Tell me what you think about the deck. I am probably going to assign it next year in my introduction to organizational behavior class and ask the students to write a little on essay on it.

    P.S. Thanks to Whitney and Yosem for telling me about this slideshow.

  • Forbes Column: Get Rid of Jackass Clients

    Shaun Rein, Managing Director of the China Market Research Group, just posted a column at Forbes called Get Rid of Jackass Clients.   Shaun does a great job of making the business case against jackass clients, but I especially like his final argument.

    Finally, life is short. While we all have to put up with difficult
    situations and people sometimes, you can't let chronically difficult
    clients affect the health and well-being of your family. If your kids
    or significant other tell you you're especially grumpy, then think
    about whether a client is causing your stress, and whether that stress
    is worth it. Most of the time it isn't.

    High-paying jobs and the
    resulting benefits like vacation homes, jewelry and gadgets are great,
    but at the end of the day, always remember why you work so hard.


    The No Asshole Rule     talks about the damage done by asshole clients and customers, and talks about organizations that apply the rule. But since the publication of the book, this is one of the main themes that people bring-up again and again, from the professional services firm in Europe that has "evidence-based pricing for asshole clients" to the wine buyer from Berkeley who wrote me that, in his business, a customer could either be be an arse or a no pay, but not both.  These and many other stories led me to develop the ACHE, the Asshole Client from Hell Exam, which you can complete here to determine if your client is a certified asshole.

  • Another Blogger in the Family

    Although my productivity as a blogger has been low lately, my wife — Marina Park — is picking up the slack and then some. As regular readers of Work Matters know, Marina is CEO of the Northern California Girl Scouts. She just started last Sunday as a regular blogger, one of the "City Brights" at SF Gate, the online home of the San Francisco Chronicle and has already put up three posts. I especially like the second one, called Helping Kids Find Their Path.  It starts out with an incident that happened to us recently:

    Last weekend, my husband and I did something I don't think we have
    ever done (which is saying something; we have been together for 32
    years . .. ). We asked our waitress to move us to a different table
    midway through dinner because the conversation going on next to us was
    just more loud tension than either of us was in the mood for. The
    debate was about whether a daughter who loved horses should be required
    to give up horses so she could focus on team sports, which would better
    prepare her for life, and whether a son, who was anxious and unhappy
    about playing soccer, should be given "incentives" to continue.

    It made me sad to hear. Yes, I know it was rude to listen, but we couldn't help it and that is why we asked to move.

    Of course, I am biased, but I like Marina's arguments goes on to make about the limits and virtues of team sports for kids and I love the comments people have made, as they are so thoughtful and balanced.

  • The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work: A Pompous and Insensitive Book

    My post earlier this week was about Morten Hansen's Collaboration, which I found to be one of the best management books that I had read in a long time. In contrast, I thought I would write about the worst workplace book that I have read in a long time, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton, which I first heard about in The Economist in a pretty positive review that made it sound as if the book celebrated work and workers.

    Unfortunately, as I read the book, I found it was really a cheeky assault on the dignity of the people who had invited the author into their lives. Although he described what they did and the complex connections among the world-wide supply chain they were part of  quite well, his apporach seemed to be to belittle and trivialize the work, character, and aspirations of the people he wrote about.

    I was especially disturbed by how much he seemed to disrespect and the managers and workers who produced a biscuit (or "cookie" in American) called "Moments."  He trivialized the skills and enthusiasm of everyone involved in the complex process of developing making these biscuits. The author is a very skilled writer, so his disrespect is woven into his words with remarkable subtlety, such as in these sentences he wrote about his conversation with the "warm-hearted and garrulous" plant manager Michael Pottier:

    "Years of working around noisy machinery had left my host mildly deaf in one ear and given him a concomitant habit of leaning in uncomfortably close during discussions. so close that I dreaded his enunciation of a word with a p or a g in it." 

    Then de Button goes onto convey that, although he was bored with  Pottier's detailed explanations, he was struck by a "surprisingly intense pride in the plant and its workers."  Why he found such pride surprising is beyond me — these people worked hard and saw them self as producing a good product — sure, biscuit's don't save lives, but neither do most books. This kind "cheeky" humor at the expense of people who had taken the time to talk with the author and provided him with warmth and hospitality pervade the book, and at least for me, completely ruined the experience of reading what is a well-researched manuscript with fascinating information about the connections and complexity of the modern workplace. 

    All in all, the book reminded me of one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut's quotes, which I've printed here before:

    “If
    it weren’t for the people, the god-damn people” said Finnerty, “always getting tangled
    up in the machinery. If it weren’t for them, the world would be an engineer’s
    paradise.” Kurt
    Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952:59)


    In similar fashion, Mr. de Button seems fascinated with the machinery of modern supply chains and workplaces, but rather disgusted with the human-beings who invent and run that machinery.     In reading the book, I couldn't help but think of the wonderful books I've read over the years that — although presenting warts and all views of work — still conveyed so much respect and dignity for the people doing the work, including Ben Hamper's amazing Rivethead about his life on the assembly line, Tracy Kidder's astounding Soul of a New Machine, and my favorite creativity book Orbiting the Giant Hairball. 

    Perhaps I am being unfair to Mr. de Button because I don't quite get that English "cheeky" wit that runs throughout the book as I am an unsubtle American. But I have always admired the work and desire for dignity in all the workers I've studied, whether they be bill collectors, 7/Eleven clerks, nurses, teachers, hospital workers, product designers, or CEOs.  I like enthusiasm, skill, and pride in whatever human forms it takes.  And I dislike pomposity and lack of empathy in whatever forms it takes as well, and Mr. de Button chronic self-importance and clever disdain for workers of all kinds made my stomach turn as I read the often mean-spirited Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. 

    P.S. To my amazement, I learned from CV Harquail's comment below that The New York Times reviewed this book in June and reached a similar conclusion. In fact, they used the exact same quote as I did above, and called it mean-spirited.  Please forgive my lack of originality and I guess this is certainly is not a scoop.  Also, see CV's comment for a bit of dirt below — apparently Mr. de Button reacted with some public hostility to the review, but later apologized.  As an author myself, I understand the feeling and have been tempted to do the same when I have received less than flattering reviews. CV thanks so much.

  • Collaboration: Morten Hansen’s Masterpiece

    Hansen_1515 To mark my return to more regular blogging, I thought I would start with the best management book I've read on anything in a very long time, and certainly, if the Jack and Todd were to published a revised version of the 100 Best Business Books, I would put it at the top of the list among all the business books published since they picked their favorites. The book is Collaboration, by Morten Hansen, who is a Professor at both UC Berkeley and Insead, and also has extensive experience working and consulting in industry.  The questions of when encouraging versus discouraging collaboration is Best, what gets in the way of it happening, how to make it happen when you want it, and how to be a collaborative leader– without being a doormat — are issues that face every organization and every manager.  Hansen knows more about this subject as a researcher than anyone out there right now, and because he has worked with real organizations and real leaders, the result is a book that is based on the best evidence, a delight to read because the stories are so good, and relentlessly useful.

    For example, while most authors present simple minded arguments, Hansen's Chapter 2 shows the costs and benefits of collaboration, and provides a simple way for managers to decide when it is worth the trouble or not.  The next three chapters, the heart of the book, really show-off Hansen's skill, as they provide three simple and powerful solutions — Unify people, cultivate T shaped management, and build nimble networks.  Hansen was co-author of the original Harvard Business Review article that popularized the notion of T shaped people, a mantra that is used at both IDEO and the Stanford d.school to describe people who have both deep skills in one or a few areas and who do their own jobs well and also have the ability to work with others, to share ideas with them, to be be civilized, and contribute to the whole.  This the best chapter I've ever read on hiring, breeding, and (when necessary) firing people to create a collaborative workplace — rather than getting hung up on theory, research or ideology, or committing the alternate sin of make excessive claims, telling stories that are fun but useless, or glossing over the difficulties,  Hansen provides evidence-based ideas that bosses can actually used and shows how they have been used, things like not tolerating destructive lone stars, how to use both selection methods to find T shaped people and pay, coaching and promotion to breed T shaped people. And he shows how the most widely used pay for performance systems often undermine collaboration and what can be done to design systems to reverse these ills.

    If you want to get a fuller taste of the book and Morten, there is a free video at BNET of Morten talking about the book here, check it out.

    Finally, a little editorial note. This book was published in May, and although everyone I know who has read it will tell you how great it is, it has not exactly become a blockbuster bestseller. Some 11,000 business books a year are published and it is difficult (and requires a lot of luck) to write a book that has a big impact on the market. Morten even got Jim Collins to write a very nice foreword. In fact, with all due respect to Collins, I think Collaboration is better book than Good to Great — because it is based on better evidence and provides more details about what managers can actually do.  I am hoping that, like Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, which languished for a year before Andy Grove discovered it and talked it up, that despite Collaboration's modest start, the story will be the same.  This is a book that can help every manager do his or her job better, it is a delight to read, and does not contain an iota of breathless hype or bullshit.  This is the kind of book we need right now.  I think that, in addition to this post, I will put up an Amazon review today to do my little part too. I urge you to check out Morten on BNET and read the opening pages on Amazon, this is quite a book.

  • I Am Fine

    I got a couple very nice emails in the last 24 hours asking if I was OK because I had not posted in about a month.  I appreciate the concern, and was actually quite shocked to realize that it had been so long.  The reason I have not been posting is that I have been hyper-focused on getting a complete draft of my next book done.  For better or worse, when I get close to finishing something like that, I get so obsessed that I don't even realize how much I ignore other things. I am happy to report that, on just Tuesday, I sent a complete draft to my editor, and while it will still need some work, it is getting pretty close to being done.

    I will write about the book more here, and let you know the title soon (we are close to settling on it, but not quite).  And given the strangeness of publishing, the book isn't scheduled to come out until September 2010.  They are also talking about linking the publication of the paperback edition of The No Asshole Rule to that launch, which sounds kind of fun to me.  But one thing I would like to say is that, in writing the book, I kept finding that the comments you all wrote on my blog and sent me in emails had a big impact on my understanding of what the best and worst bosses do, and also provided some fantastic examples (like this one) for the book.  So although I have not been blogging, I have been thinking of the folks who read this blog and write on it a lot.

    I expect to get back to blogging regularly again in the next week or so, and once again, thanks for the concern and for all you have taught me.

    Bob

  • Wal-Mart and Girl Scout Cookies: Thin-Minty Gate

    One interesting thing that happened while I was on vacation was the news that Wal-Mart is test-marketing imitations of the two best-selling Girl Scout cookies, Thin Mints and Tagalongs.  To get a "flavor" of the reactions to this move, check-out the post that CV Harquail did on her blog Wal-Mart Knocks-Off Girl Scout Cookies.  And see CV's follow-up post Thin-Minty Gate. Over 150 people commented on the first post and this news has spread far and wide.  As regular readers of this blog know, I am biased in this matter because my wife Marina Park is CEO of the Northern California Girl Scouts. My view (and I am not speaking for Marina, in fact, I didn't tell her I was writing this post) is that — holding things aside like ethics, financial damage done to the Girl Scouts, and other things that harm outsiders — this is a dumb business decision for Wal-Mart, and the real mystery is how the smart people at Wal-Mart (and they are smart and decent human-beings) could do something that:

    1. Further fuels their reputation as one of the most heartless and greedy companies on the planet (true or not, they are seen this way in many places).

    2. Damages their relationships in communities where they already have stores.  In many of those communities, Wal-Mart works closely with Girl Scouts to provide a place to sell the cookies in front of the store.  The weird dynamic of having very similar cookies sold inside Wal-Mart at a lower price may or may not hurt the cookie sales (because most of us realize that, after all, they are going to a good cause — allowing girls to go to camp, on trips, buy equipment for learning projects, supporting programs for inner-city girls and those in juvenile detention facilities, to pay remarkably dedicated and modestly compensated staff members, and on and on). But it clearly hurts Wal-Mart, creating the perception that they are going into direct competition with those girls and are acting out of pure greed.

    3. Makes it harder to open new stories. It turns out that when Wal-Mart wants to put a store in a community, there is organized resistance in about one third of cases and that, when it happens, this resistance is highly effective: the store is stopped about two-thirds of the time.  So, roughly, Wal-Mart fails to get stores where it wants in over 20% of cases as a result of resistance from communities.  And even when they do overcome the resistance, the fight costs them serious time and money.  In light of these facts, going toe-to-toe with Girl Scouts is sheer idiocy because it provides a compelling rallying cry ("Wal-Mart isn't only going to be competing with the local merchants, they are also going to undercut the Girl Scouts") that increases both the likelihood of resistance and the success. I have no access to the numbers, but I am willing to bet that if Thin Minty Gate results in the failure of even one store opening for Wal-Mart, any profits from the knock-off will not offset the cost of losing that one store.

    Perhaps the most interesting question here is how such smart people could do something that is so dumb.  It sounds more like an Onion story that a real story. I don't claim to  have deep or extensive knowledge of Wal-Mart, but we did work with some fairly senior executives from Wal-Mart several years back in one of our d.school classes (see here and here), and I was quite impressed with their action orientation and focus on cost-saving and efficiency.  The brilliance –and the Achilles heel — of Wall-Mart is that they talk and act as if the answer to every problem is to use their scale, bargaining power, and speedy implementation to tackle any problem by driving down the price they pay and pass it along to consumers.  This is great, for example, when they use their bargaining power to bring down the cost of environmental friendly LED lights in their refrigerators so that they become cheaper than traditional lights.  But when "everyday low prices" is the solution to every problem and — despite lip service to other constraints — almost nothing else drives your behavior even when it hurts you badly (as in this cookie caper), your core cultural values can hurt you badly.

    As far as I know, Wal-Mart hasn't announced that they are stopping the knock-offs.  My prediction is that they will come-up with some bullshit business reason to do so.  If they were smart (and there is research on this, on how to deal with mistakes, which we talk about in Hard Facts and I touch on  here and here) they would: 1. Confess it was a mistake, that they should have been more sensitive to the importance cookies to Girl Scouts; 2. Explain this episode has made them more sensitive to how pure business decisions need to be considered in light of community relationships and their corporate image; 3. Announce and take formal steps to show they have learned this lesson. 

    Let's see what happens.  My experience with Wal-Mart is that these are good people who mean well, they are extremely competent, but sometimes are blinded by their culture — this appears to be a case where they suffered from a severe knowing-doing gap that could have been averted by simply asking a few objective outsiders to react to what they were doing.   But asking others for honest feedback and listening to them is something that we human-beings often fail to do, despite the best of intentions. 

  • Alan Webber’s Rules of Thumb

    I haven't posted anything for almost two weeks because my family and I were on a vacation in Spain, a lovely place.  I came back to the usual pile of little chores.  As I sorted through things yesterday, I noticed a copy of Alan Webber's new book, The Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself.  I've always admired Alan for his work as co-founder of the iconic Fast Company, and found him charming when I finally met him at a recent dinner.  But I haven't worked with him and barely know him. 
    So I don't have any particular personal reason to react to The Rules of Thumb the way I did — I started by looking at the book, and I felt the hook set-in as I read the opening quote from Talmud, What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man.  This is the law: all the rest is commentary." 

    And as I started reading, I felt the grip of Alan's charming and engaging writing style, his ability to observe, tell lovely stories.  Alan is far more gentle writer than Robert Townsend, but reading The Rules of Thumb still reminded me of the first time that I read the astounding Up the Organization.  It reads like the best 52 lightly intertwined blog posts I've ever read.  And it is a very fast read — dense without feeling dense — so you get more for the two hours (or less) it takes to read than any book I recall reading in a long time.

    To give you a taste of the book, here are some of Alan's rules that I especially liked:

    #1. When the going gets tough, the tough relax.
    #10. A good question beats a good answer (This, by the way, is the reason the Nobel Prize winners often give for the success of their work — they framed the question better than their peers.)
    #13. Learn to take no as a question (Alan provides great step-by-step advice here).
    #16. Facts are facts. Stories are how we learn (A similar point to Made to Stick).
    #17. Entrepreneurs choose serendipity over efficiency.
    #23. Keep two lists: What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you up at night?
    #30. The likeliest sources of ideas are in the most unlikely places (He makes a great argument for looking for inspiration in all the wrong places).
    #44. When to comes to business, it helps if you actually know something about something (Google is a good example of this principle, so are Men's Wearhouse and Amazon).
    #46. Tough leaders wear their hearts on their sleeves.
    #51. Take your work seriously. Yourself, not so much.  (See this Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis for a cautionary tale: AIG CEOJoe Cassano suffered from a horrible case of taking himself too seriously).

    You may have heard similar rules like these before, but the power of book, and why you will enjoy reading it so much, is Alan's ability to tell compact and compelling stories that bring these ideas to life in ways that few others out there can do.  Alan, thanks for making my homecoming so enjoyable. You saved me from a couple hours of far less pleasant chores. Now I've got to deal with a couple hundred emails…..

  • You Know Your Boss is a Certified Asshole When……

    In response to my blog post asking if people had stories about how asshole bosses had done "collateral damage"  that spread to family, friends, lovers and the like, people wrote quite a few comments be,low the post — all were thoughtful and some quite troubling.  I also got about 15 emails, some of which got me quite upset, notably one from a woman who felt so beaten down by her bosses criticism that day that she had lost her temper during dinner, leaving her children terrified and husband angry at her.  It wasn't all bad news, there was one amusing snippet with a happy ending.  An executive from the southwest wrote me about her mean-spirited boss, who led with a blend of incompetence, cluelessness, and micromanagement that damaged employees' spirits and and company performance.  She reported, "My children nicknamed him GIANT BUTTHOLE." When your kids give the boss a nickname like that, it is a sure fire sign that you are working for a certified asshole.

    This brings up a question that might be instructive to bat around.  A lot of people have used the ARSE (Asshole Rating Self Exam) for this purpose, but I wonder, what are other sure signs that your boss is a certified asshole?  I always think that when a boss starts eating your food without asking permission it is pretty good sign, as it is such a perfect blend of cluelessness and selfishness.  What are some other sure signs your boss is a certified asshole?

    P.S.
     The above story has a happy ending, as this executive banded together with her
    colleagues and they got Mr. GIANT BUTTHOLE fired. Now has his job and
    is committed to building a civilized workplace.