Work Matters

  • Asshole Wrangler: A New Job Title

    I have heard managers describe themselves as "toxic handlers" or "in charge of asshole management," but I heard a new job title this morning that I will now use when talking about The No Asshole Rule:  Asshole Wrangler.  It came in this charming note from a manager:

    "I had planned to do
    some therapeutic reading while recovery from surgery and didn't get to your
    book until the day I came back to work..  Unfortunately I have been
    anointed the a*hole wrangler from my senior management team and three days out
    of work leaves plenty of mess to clean up.  Therapy came in an all
    nighter, finishing your bulk in one sitting.  The TCA list will definitely
    be shared with my HR director; we haven't found a good way to quantify behavior
    and your example will be invaluable    ."

  • The Cult of Done Manifesto

    This is in the spirit of the The Knowing-Doing Gap, and wonderfully concise.  I don't agree with everything — for example, I believe in editing and all forms of iteration.  And pretending you know what your doing when you don't is sometimes necessary, and a good thing to do when failure does little damage, but I hope my surgeon, airplane pilot, or the CEO of AIG aren't just pretending (although I suspect that they are faking it at AIG)! 

    I love the attitude and it is advice is spot on at least for creative people and for people who want to learn new things.  The manifesto is from the Bre Pettis Blog.  You can find the original here.  This is it:

    Dear Members of the Cult of Done.

    I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.

    The Cult of Done Manifesto

    1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
    2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
    3. There is no editing stage.
    4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing
      what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even
      if you don't and do it.
    5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
    6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
    7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
    8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
    9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
    10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
    11. Destruction is a variant of done.
    12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
    13. Done is the engine of more.

    I thank Ryan Jacoby from IDEO for sending this to me. In the email where Ryan sent it, he added, "This
    comes to me from Ken Meier. Ken is a colleague that gets things done. He laughs
    in the face of perfection.    " That is the right attitude for doing creative work in particular, because as I have written here before, the most creative people actually fail more than their more ordinary counterparts, simply because they do more stuff. See this post on Dean Keith Simonton's book Orgins of Genuis for more discussion and evidence.

    Since I believe in iteration and editing, what changes would you suggest? What would you add? Would you take out anything?

    I might add "Are you talking about getting it done, are actually getting it done?

  • Red Does Drive Men Wild: It Isn’t Just a Myth

    33571

    OK, they didn't use red pumps. They used red shirts.  And this research may fit under the category of psychologists demonstrating what everyone already knows.   But I was still pretty amused to see that Andrew Elliot and Daniel Niesta published an article called "Romantic Red: Red Enhances Men's Attraction to Women" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2008, vol 95:1150-1164). Note this is not a marginal journal, it is among the most prestigious journals in psychology. 

    In a series of five studies, starting with subjects looking at a picture of woman against red versus white backgrounds, the researchers found that heterosexual men were more attracted to a woman pictured against the red background.  Other colors had no effect and the "romantic red" effect did not affect how female subjects rated the attractiveness of the woman in the picture.  In another experiment, the researchers selected a picture of a moderately attractive woman from the website "hotornot.com" and used photoshop to produce two (otherwise identical) pictures of her in a red and a blue blouse. 

    The sample strikes me as mighty small in this final study (12 in the red condition, 11 in the blue condition), but the effects were large.  The young men who viewed the woman in red blouse reported that they found her more attractive in general, would be more likely to ask her on a date, found her more sexually desirable, and would spend more money on a date with her compared to the same woman woman in blue.  This research also found that color had no effect effect on men's attributions of a woman's kindness, likeability, or intelligence. And it showed that the subjects in the study were unaware how color was affecting their preferences. 

    Here is part of the the researchers' justification for their "red-sex" hypothesis:

    "As such, it is likely that women, like other female primates, display red more often and more prominently when nearing ovulation. We also think it reasonable to posit that men, like their more primitive male relatives, are predisposed to interpret a display of red by a female conspecific as a sexual signal and to respond accordingly." (page 1151).

    We human beings sure are weird, huh?

  • Interview With Huggy Rao About “Market Rebels”

    Our website www.evidence-basedmanagement.com just posted an interview with Huggy Rao about his great new book Market Rebels. Check it out, he is a mighty smart guy. Thanks to Daphne for all her work on this and the site in general.

  • The Best Talk On Creativity I Ever Saw

    This amazing talk is by Elizabeth Gilbert, at TED. She is the author of Eat, Pray, Love, the smash bestseller.  I saw at at Metacool and it is the best talk on creativity I ever saw.

  • Peter Drucker: “One Either Meets or One Works”

    I got this quote from Paul, and then found it was in Drucker's New York Times Obituary. I love it, but find it a useful half-truth, as meetings are necessary for setting the stage for work and work does often get done in them (albeit often not very efficiently). I think the biggest danger is when meetings become a substitute for work, or there are so many it is impossible to get anything else done: I recall an executive I interviewed at manufacturing company years ago who told me that her company was so meeting intensive that she only went to about 25% of the meetings she was "expected" to attend, and even then, she had no time do her other work. Now, that is a sign that something is wrong!

  • Taking the Blame: Why Warren Buffett Has Class and Competence, and is Practicing Evidence-Based Management

    Check out the difference between Warren Buffett
    and some of his peers:

    “When Lehman Bros. CEO Richard Fuld testified on
    Capitol Hill this month, members of Congress grilled him to own up. Fuld said
    he takes full responsibility for his decisions, that he "felt horrible
    about it," but that the largest bankruptcy in history was due to
    circumstances beyond his control. Likewise, a trio of former AIG chief
    executives — Hank Greenberg, Martin Sullivan and Robert Willumstad — deflected
    blame in oral and written testimony to Congress.” From USA Today.

    ‘Mozilo says he was blindsided. “Nobody saw this
    coming,” he told investors in a conference call. “S&P and Moody’s didn’t,
    but they simply downgrade bonds. They don’t take hits. Bear Stearns certainly
    didn’t.” Mozilo’s take seems to be that aggressive lending by mortgage
    companies had nothing to do with the industry’s troubles: “It was the
    deterioration in real estate values that was the base cause. We had none of
    these problems as real estate values were going up.”  Mozilo also blames the Federal Reserve. “The
    Fed knowing that well over 60% of the loans made were indexed to the Fed funds
    rate, increased the rate seventeen times. You never knew when they were going
    to stop. So for a Fed governor to say the lending industry had this coming is
    unbelievable when the Fed was a contributing factor to this.’  On former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, from BusinessWeek.

    ‘"Our industry … needs a bridge to span the
    financial chasm that has opened up before us," General Motors CEO Rick
    Wagoner told the Senate Banking Committee in prepared testimony. He blamed the industry's
    predicament not on failures by management but on the deepening global financial
    crisis.’   On GM CEO Rick Wagoner in
    November 2008, From the Associated
    Press    .

    ‘General Motors Corp
    on Monday unveiled an unusually frank advertisement acknowledging it had
    "disappointed" and sometimes even "betrayed" American
    consumers as it lobbies to clinch the federal aid it needs to stay afloat into
    next month. The print advertisement marked
    a sharp break from GM's public stance of just several weeks ago when it sought
    to justify its bid for a U.S. government on the grounds that the credit crisis had undermined its
    business in ways executives could never have foreseen. "While we're still
    the U.S. sales leader, we acknowledge we have disappointed you," the ad
    said. "At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below
    industry standards and our designs became lackluster."  GM CEO Rick Wagoner backtracks in December
    2008, from Reuters.

    ‘Even the world's
    best-known investor couldn't get it right in 2008, apologizing to his
    shareholders for doing "some dumb things" with their money.  Billionaire Warren Buffett said in his annual
    letter to shareholders that while last year was a bad year for all investors,
    he made some mistakes that he now regrets. "I made some errors of
    omission, sucking my thumb when new facts came in that should have caused me to
    reexamine my thinking and promptly take action," Buffett wrote in a letter
    released this morning.’  From ABC
    News    . February, 2009.

    These are hellish
    times, but they are also interesting times in that they reveal a leaders’
    character.  Wagoner finally apologized
    because he eventually realized that the American public would accept no other
    account.  Buffett apologized because he seems
    to believe that, economic conditions aside, that he personally screwed-up and
    he believes – but cannot assure his shareholders – that he has learned from
    it.  Note only does this show class, it
    turns out that research on CEO and management apologies shows that the firms
    with the best performance over the long haul are led by people who get credit
    when things go well and take blame when things go badly. Taking blame indicates
    that the CEO has learned something from the troubles and is going to take steps
    to correct course; denying blame is seen as a sign of self-delusion, a lack of
    control over the company, and an inability to learn. As Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote
    in Hard
    Facts    :

    Leaders who claim that
    “it isn’t my fault” and “I couldn’t have done anything about it” aren’t doing
    themselves or their organizations any favors over the long haul. 
    Deflecting blame might help them keep their jobs for a time, enjoy better
    mental health, and persist in the face of failure.  But ducking the heat
    shatters the illusion of control.  Investors, customer, employees, and the
    press conclude that leaders who don’t take responsibility for mistakes and
    setbacks lack the power to make things better.  Controlled experiments by
    Fiona Lee and her colleagues show that hypothetical managers who took
    responsibility for bad events like pay freezes and failed projects were seen as
    more powerful, competent, and likeable than managers who denied responsibility. 

    The wisdom of
    acknowledging blame is confirmed by two studies that tracked Fortune 500 firms
    over long periods.  Both were careful studies designed to rule out
    alternative explanations.  Gerald Salancik and James Meindl examined 18
    Fortune 500 firms over 18 years.  They found that, especially in firms
    with wild swings in performance from year to year, performance was superior
    down the road when executives attributed both good and bad
    performance to internal actions.   Similarly,
    Fiona Lee and her colleagues examined yearly stock price changes in 14
    companies over a 21-year stretch.  They found that taking blame for setbacks
    wasn’t just effective in companies with wild performance swings. In years when
    senior management blamed their firm’s troubles on internal and controllable
    factors, stock prices were consistently higher the next year, compared to when
    executives denied responsibility for setbacks.

    Of course, taking
    blame isn’t enough, a leader actually needs to change the organization’s
    course, but I do admire for Buffett refreshing bluntness.  And if anyone can turn things around, he can    .

    P.S. Also see this related post on "mea culpa"

  • The Case Against Cutting the Bottom 10%

    In The Layoff, the HBR case I have been blogging about, I come out pretty strongly against across-the-board 10% cuts focused on those ranked lowest, usually on the basis of the last performance evaluation.  There are several reasons I believe this:

    1. Performance evaluations in most organizations are done badly enough that the way the bottom 10% are selected is flawed, and indeed, most people in flawed systems know that — and see them as unfair.

    2. An across the board cut punishes the most efficient units most, the least efficient units least.

    3.  An across the board cut assumes that the best way to weather the bad times — and then recover quickly when the good times return — is to have an organization that is a perfect imitation of the one that you had before, but is just 10% smaller.   This last one is especially troubling, as strategic adjustments are almost always needed to weather and recover from tough times.

    I have been getting a bit of push back from people  who are telling me that, although nothing is perfect (I agree with that), across the board cuts are most fair.

    Let me know what you think.  This decision is facing many bosses right now.

  • Free Download of HBR Layoff Case For First 23 People

    I blogged earlier about a case called The Layoff on the current Harvard Business Review, where I was one of the invited commentators.  HBR has a weird system now where authors get to "give away" 25 PDF's of their articles. I downloaded two, although I did have some  weird problems where it appeared on Notepad rather PDF.  I thought the best thing to do was to simply offer the remaining 23 copies to readers of Work Matters. Here is the URL they sent:

    http://custom.hbsp.com/b01/en/implicit/p.jhtml?login=SUTT022609S&pid=R0903A

    Thanks!

    Bob

  • Leader Selection: Disturbing Evidence That Looks Trump Performance

    Voting study

    Who would you choose to sail your boat?  Who would you vote for? Who do you want for your boss?

    The little test above is from a study summarized in the always wonderful BPS Digest, my vote for the best place in the world to find translations of academic research.  It is from a forthcoming study in Science.  As BPS reports:

    "John Antonakis and
    Olaf Dalgas presented photos of pairs of competing candidates in the
    2002 French parliamentary elections to hundreds of Swiss undergrads,
    who had no idea who the politicians were. The students were asked to
    indicate which candidate in each pair was the most competent, and for
    about 70 per cent of the pairs, the candidate rated as looking most
    competent was the candidate who had actually won the election. The
    startling implication is that the real-life voters must also have based
    their choice of candidate on looks, at least in part."

    Then, the researchers asked kids and adults the "who would you choose as the captain" question and "For the pair of candidates shown above, 77 per cent children who rated
    this pair, and 67 per cent of adults, chose Laurent Henart, on the
    right (the real-life winning candidate), rather than Jean-Jacques Denis
    on the left."

    This is one of those things we've all suspected, but the evidence still jolts me a bit — although I picked the guy on the left because, as a sailor, I equate messy hair with sailing skill, an irrational bias as well.

    P.S. The reference is: J. Antonakis, O. Dalgas (2009). Predicting Elections: Child's Play. Science, 323, in press.