Work Matters

  • A Hypothesis About Level 5 Leaders

    To continue the theme of leadership from the last post, it all reminded me of a series of incidents I had a couple years back when Jim Collins Good to Great was really hot (although it remains pretty darn hot, that thing keeps selling like crazy).  The concept from the book that especially caught attention, as most readers will recall, was the notion of Level 5 leaders, those humble and relentless leaders who work like crazy to make the organization successful, while consistently putting the needs of the organization ahead of their own needs and wants.  Like most ideas in business, this is an old one (read Drucker, this theme abounds), but Collins wrote beautifully about it.

    The thing that struck me, however, was that I had conversations with at least five leaders during one stretch who all claimed that they were Level 5 leaders.  In all five cases, these were people who talked relentlessly about themselves and — following the research on how power turns people into self-centered jerks — all were remarkably oblivious to the negative reactions to their leadership style.  Indeed, at least two I can think were classic narcissists.

    Thus, my hypothesis (which may be wrong, so I would love your reaction):  "Leaders who claim that they are Level 5 leaders rarely, if ever, turn out to be Level 5 leaders." 

    Reactions? Am I being too cynical?

  • A Simple Definition of Leadership

    I've been reading a lot this summer, especially on innovation and leadership.  They are both difficult subjects to frame in simple and accurate ways that provide useful lessons.  Leadership is especially tough, as so much has been written about the subject, it is so inconsistent, and yet the books keep coming out and people keep buying them.  It is among the most fascinating and frustrating subjects that I've ever wrestled with — yet there is still huge demand out there, as there should be, because we need better leaders and every leader I have ever met is hungry for simple (but not simplistic) ideas that are right and useful. 

    All this came to mind this morning as I was reading Michael Maccoby's book The Leaders We Need. This is very thoughtful book and I recommend it.  I was especially struck by his definition of leadership. he goes through some of the various definitions (Of course, not all of them… that would take hundreds and hundreds of boring pages), and then proposes:

    There is one irrefutable definition of a leader, and that is     someone people follow. 

    He then adds: "This may be too simple a definition for many academics, but once accepted it opens the door to plenty of hard thinking."

    I confess that I have been thinking about it a lot this morning.  It does seem wonderfully simple and it does seem right.  But I wonder what others think. Is it too simple?  Is it useful?

  • The Pixar Touch: A Great Book by David Price

     

    Pixar
    I have read a lot of stories about organizations over years, especially about the success or failure of innovative organizations, but The Pixar Touch is one of the very best. I've been quite interested in Pixar since Huggy Rao and I did an interview of Brad Bird for the McKinsey Quarterly, but I learned a lot from this book I didn't know.

    The story itself is stunning; I had not realized that the start of the dream went way back to Ed Catmull's dreams as a teenager and his goals as a doctoral student and young man to start making computer animated movies.  The twists and turns in the story are remarkable.  There are plenty of stories about Steve Jobs and his often difficult personality, but there are other things that emerge that I found even more interesting.  One has to do with the wild swings in Pixar's strategy. Apparently, when Jobs bought it from George Lucas for 5 million bucks, he got a pretty good deal because Lucas was going through an expensive divorce and needed the money. 

    The other twists and turns that I found interesting where all the different kinds of companies that Pixar tried to be during the years before it became a successful film company. For some years, they tried to be a computer hardware company, selling high-end graphics machines.  They also tried to be a computer software firm at times. They made TV commercials to pay the bills.   At one point, they almost had a deal to sell a whole bunch of machines to Phillips to use for medical imaging, but Jobs pissed-off the Phillips people so much that they walked.  Jobs also came fairly close to selling the company several times, especially to Microsoft, as he would occasionally give-up on it (Who could blame him? He pumped millions and millions of dollars into it, and it never made any money until Toy Story came along).

    Jobs approach to organizational strategy, if that it what you want to call it, reminds me of strategy in high-velocity environments as described by my Stanford colleague Kathy Eisenhardt.  One strategic direction after another — many of which seemed unlikely at the time — was embraced with vigor and intensity by Jobs, and his ability to at least briefly convince others that it was right and certain to work (using his famous reality distortion field) is interesting and impressive.  But in many ways, I am more impressed with Jobs' ability to quickly drop an old strategy when there was good evidence it was failing, and then turn to the next one with equal enthusiasm. 

    This may sound sort of crazy, but I also think it is how skilled strategists act when what they are doing carries a huge risk.  You need to build enthusiasm about what you are hoping to accomplish, as energy and the self-fulfilling prophecy increase the chances that a risky idea will succeed.  But you also need to be equally skilled at pulling the plug when your current tactic is failing (See this post about Andy Grove's comments on leadership, he is proposing a similar mindset).  One of the ideas that was viewed as "most dumb" by the people around Jobs was — before Toy Story  was released ,and the company was still deep in the red — started pushing very hard for an IPO.  The lawyers and investment bankers thought he was nuts. Well, after Toy Story became a huge hit — even though they had no other track record  of success –Jobs quickly took them out for an IPO… setting off a stream of events that made him a billionaire for the first time.  There is also an argument made in the book that, by an rational standard, Jobs should have closed Pixar years before Toy Story, but he persisted because he couldn't handle another failure after getting fired by Apple and failing at NEXT.  Desperation is sometimes the mother of innovation!

    One other fascinating thing.  Now, Pixar is part of Disney and executives from Pixar like the amazing John Lasseter (fired by Disney animation years ago) are now in charge of Disney's film animation efforts. But during the production of the first Toy Story, people at Disney — including CEO Michael Eisner — demanded specific changes in the plot that made it a better movie, and the expertise of diverse people at Disney made it a better movie in many other ways. The blood between Disney and Pixar started getting bad as Pixar became more successful (especially between Eisner and Jobs), and Disney animated films started getting worse and worse. But I had not realized how much Disney had helped in the early days of Toy Story.

    Finally, during several visits to Pixar over the past several months, I have been struck by how virtually everyone from two-time Academy Award winner Brad Bird to a guy I met who started out working at Pixar as a janitor years ago absolutely refuse to take their success for granted.  They are proud of what they have accomplished, but downright paranoid about the risks of taking a turn toward mediocrity.  This blend of pride and paranoia stems, in part from the fact that they were weirdos, outcasts, and — in case of Pixar and its forerunners– on the edge of being shutdown so many times over a 20 year or so period (the number of different places and ways that the founders Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith worked to ultimately create this success were astounding, from early work at the the University of Utah, to Alvy Ray Smith's work at Xerox PARC where he got fired because management believed that color graphics had no future in the modern office, to several years spent working in New York for a generous and bold multi-millionaire, to the years working for Lucas, and then the sale to Jobs… and all along, although Alvy Ray Smith left because he his relationship with Jobs soured, and John Lasseter joined-up, the vision of making top quality computer animated films drove these founders throughout.) 

    In addition to the fact that success has not come to easy to these persistent people, the other force that fuels the pride and paranoia of these people is the history of Disney's animation studio (where both Lasseter and Brad worked, and both were fired too), where a once great studio begin turning out mediocre work because they became self-satisfied and started resting on their laurels.  They started doing work that of such poor quality that it depressed and angered the old animators who had made it such a great place.  The belief in the importance of a great story and the power of creating characters that express authentic emotion goes back to the earliest days of Disney and are beliefs that guide what happens at Pixar to this day. 

    So, in addition to being a fascinating and well-told story, I would nominate this book for my personal top 100 business books — and I think it belongs in Jack and Todd's book.  The lessons about leadership, strategy, culture, innovation, persistence — and the degree to which random events rather than planning shape human and organizational history — are all on display.

    P.S. If you are interested in books about creative organizations, I also recommend Dealers of Lightning, a well-crafted history of the glory years at Xerox PARC.

  • Jack and Todd Pick the 100 Best Business Books of All Time

    Best Books

    Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten, the guys who run 800CEORead, have a book coming out in about six months called The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Jack and Todd's company focuses on business books, and these two guys — especially Todd — are obsessed with them: with reading business books, understanding the differences between the good and the bad, and calling attention to books that they believe should make an impact. Their website is not only a good place to order books, it also contains all kinds of great information and opinion . 

    They have brought together much of their knowledge in this forthcoming book, and as part of the fun, they are running the The Countdown Book Club.    People who pay about 100 bucks get six books, one a month as the publication of their book approaches. The first five are among Jack and Todd's favorites and the six is their "100 Best" books.  I don't know all the books they picked, but you can find a lot of them if your eyes are good enough to read print on above the cover.  I also know (because Todd interviewed me about it) that they were kind enough to choose The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action (which I co-authored with Jeff Pfeffer) as one of the 100 best books.  Thanks guys!  And I know that Todd loves Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick, and I bet that is on the list.

    I am going to join the book club because it sounds fun and  I am a  big fan of Jack and Todd. If you order books from them — they are by far the best most reliable for bulk orders in particular — and get to talk with or email with their people you will find that they are some of the civilized and competent folks around.  Jack and Todd don't agree on everything, including the title of The No Asshole Rule.  Jack doesn't like it; Todd thinks it is fine.  But regardless of their view of the title, they are clearly enforcing it in their company. 

    I can hardly wait to read their book, as these guys are both very smart and have strong opinions.

  • A Stuffed Bear Reads The No Asshole Rule

    Black Bear NAR

    I have no idea what this means; it is one of those strange things that people send me.  But it is kind of cute.

  • Leadership: Do You Believe That Your People Can Learn?

    I have written here about Carol Dweck's fascinating research on the differences between people who believe that their IQ's are fixed versus those who believe their IQ's are malleable. As she shows in Mindset (which summarizes a large body of careful research), people who believe that "being smart" results from learning and experience are much more likely to try new things, to ask "dumb" questions, and to risk failing.  In contrast, people who believe that IQ is fixed believe that having to work hard to learn things is a bad sign because it shows they aren't that smart, so they avoid situations where they have to learn new things and that involve struggle or failure.  For people who believe that IQ is fixed, the focus is on convincing other people that they know a lot already, that they learn very fast, and that they rarely fail or make mistakes. 

    A new academic paper by Professors Peter Heslin and Don VandeWalle applies the logic of Dweck's research to managers and the assumptions that they hold about their people.  They report three studies and an intervention. Their first experiment entailed showing nuclear power plant managers videos of an employee who first displayed poor negotiation skills, and then in a second video, displayed good negotiation skills.  Those managers who believed that human talents are "fixed" (e.g., agreeing with statements like " As much as I hate to admit it, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.  People can't change their deepest attributes.") were compared to those who had a "growth" mindset (e.g., agreeing that "People can change even their most basic qualities.")   In this first experiment, those with the "fixed" mindset were significantly less likely to notice improvements in employee negotiation performance in the second video.  A follow-up study also showed that managers with a "fixed" mindset were less likely to notice a drop-off in negotiation performance when they saw the "good" negotiation performance video first, and the "bad" one second — in contrast, those with the "growth" mindset were more likely to notice the drop in performance. So the growth mindset doesn't just mean that people see the world through rose-colored glasses — they are more likely to notice negative changes too.   And a second follow-up study showed that people with "fixed" mindsets who received negative background information were less likely to notice performance improvements when viewing the "good negotiation performance" video six weeks later, when compared to people who had a growth mindset.

    Finally, this paper also reports an intervention that Heslin and VandeWalle where they worked with managers who had a "fixed" mindset to see if they could be changed to have a "growth" mindset.  They used a series of interventions to change these beliefs, including showing them videos with research indicating that the brain is capable of "growing like a muscle,"  encouraged them generate reasons to believe that people are capable of developing their abilities, and having them write an email to hypothetical protegee outlining arguments that abilities can be developed and talking about times when they had "personally overcome professional development challenges."  (Indeed, this trick of getting people to write an argument that runs counter to their belief as a cornerstone on many attitude change experiments, as well as brainwashing techniques used in natural settings — including to brainwash new cult members and prisoners-of-war.)  These interventions led these managers to change from the "fixed" to the "growth" mindset, and to notice changes in employee performance at roughly the same rates as those managers who held the "growth" mindset from the outset.

    The upshot of this research is that managers who believe that employee
    ability is fixed are less likely to notice when an employee that they
    believe to be "poor" does good work, or when an employee that they
    believe to be "good" does poor work. But the silver lining is that the fixed mindset isn't fixed!  You can teach an experienced manager a new mindset!     

    Like all research, this set of studies has limits.  But I applaud the researchers for not only uncovering a fascinating pattern, but also going through the work to change the people they were studying, apparently for the better. And the lesson for all of us, as much social psychological research has shown, is to be careful what you believe — as you will likely see it, even if it isn't true.  

    P.S. The reference to this research is Heslin, Peter A. & Don Vandewalle (2008) Managers's Implicit Assumptions About Personnel.  Current Directions in Psychological Science. 17: 219-223.

  • Getting Power: Wisdom from Jeff Pfeffer

    Jeff Pfeffer
    Last week, I was talking with with Jeff Pfeffer, my friend and frequent co-author, about power in organizations.  Jeff is author of Managing With Power, a great book, which is a standard text for management classes on organizational power and politics throughout the world.  I had just finished reading the first draft his new book on power, and I asked him "You write about many ways to gain power, but don't actually use most of them in your life. Why is that?" For example, Jeff recommends spending time having lunch and the like with powerful people you don't know and also identifying potential enemies and spending time getting them to like you.  He provides empirically sound steps (often based on his own research) about how people who want power should identify the most powerful people and groups, and try to join those groups, to pick an office location that will put you in constant contact with as many powerful people as possible, and a host of other things that I've rarely seen Jeff do. 

    Jeff's answer, which I've heard from him before and shows much wisdom, was something like "You can have influence or you can have freedom, but you can't have both. I prefer freedom, my book is for people who prefer to have a lot of influence in an organization."  Indeed, a key implication of Jeff's research, is that if you want to have power, you need to spend your life around lots of other people, often people you don't necessarily like or would choose to socialize with otherwise, and to constantly be thinking of ways to wield influence over them to your advantage.  I've written about this before, and in fact, it is in my list of 15 things I believe on the left of this post (it is #3).

    But it really struck for some reason the other day.  It also reminded me of something that the unhappy wife of one of the most successful rainmakers at a large law firm once said to me.  She was complaining about how all consuming her husband's job was, and in particular "We don't have any real friends, we just have one dinner after another with clients and potential clients.  When they are no longer clients, I rarely see them again, even if I like them because we are off with other clients."

    Interesting stuff.  It is also astounding how well-crafted Jeff's writings are on power, especially given it is something he usually doesn't want for himself.  His new book will need to go through the editing process and all that, and doesn't have a title yet — but I found it compelling, extremely useful (for people who want to hold or get power), and as always with Jeff, evidence-based. 

  • Yes! The Latest on Influence from Robert Cialdini

     

    Yes

    I have been using Robert Cialdini's classic book Influence as a text in my introduction to organizational behavior class for about 20 years.  This charming and evidence-based book reviews six tools or "weapons" of influence that you can use to persuade others — and how to defend against unwanted influence attempts.  Perhaps the best testimonial to the power of this book and the ideas is that, when I run into students years later, it is usually the first thing they mention about the class, and upon closer questioning, I often realize is it the only thing! 

    Cialdini has joined with two co-authors — Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin — to write a kind of sequel to Influence, called Yes! 50 Scientifically Ways to Be Persuasive. I recommend the book highly, as it presents all kinds of clever and effective influence tactics.  You can learn everything from the virtues of inconveniencing people, to why restaurants shouldn't offer a basket of mints for people on the way out, to how to use — and how not to use — fear as a motivator.  Yes! is based on the best behavioral science research and is an easy read. I can't quite recommend it above Cialdini's original as it doesn't quite have the personal charm of the original and, the original book provides six principles that can be applied in all sorts of different settings, while the 50 short chapters in Yes! each is wonderful, it is a lot easier to remember and act on 6 principles. 

    For my class next year, I will likely still assign the original influence and make Yes! a suggested read.

  • Asshole Parking: Another Sign of a Certified Jerk

    Crazzzy stupid parking

    One of the examples of rude behavior that comes up in The Civility Solution is people who park in obviously selfish ways.  I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and she complained about someone we know who prides himself in taking two spaces (just like the above picture) to protect his car from door dings. I think that is a nearly perfect example of someone who is so self-absorbed that they don't even consider the negative effects of their behavior on others. It is also pretty similar to how CEO Paul Purcell defines an asshole at Baird — someone who consistently puts his or her self-interest ahead of others.  I would love to see the correlation between parking behavior and scores on the ARSE (the asshole rating self-exam).

    P.S. The above picture comes youparklikeanasshole.com. You can see more pictures there of asshole parking.

  • The Best You Can Be Is a Perfect Imitation of Those Who Came Before You

    Picture1
    I was reminded of the above cartoon by a recent email from someone who had remembered seeing it in Weird Ideas That Work. I thought I'd post it because I bought the rights to use it.  I think it does a lovely job of showing how much of what people in organizations do happens because they have always done it.  So they don't have to think about it very much — which is good for efficiency but bad if they are doing the wrong thing. Worse yet, in many places, if they try to do something differently, they will be teased, punished, and often expelled.

    I recall, for example, what happened when one of my students who worked as an IBM summer intern many years ago came to the office wearing a yellow tie.  Because the "uniform" in those days was a white shirt and red tie, he was teased like crazy by his co-workers.  But he didn't realize they were serious until he showed up a second time with the deviant yellow tie, and his boss pulled him aside and give him a stern lecture about evils of wearing the wrong tie.  This student concluded that IBM in those days was focused on conformity, not performance, so he went into another line of business and is now CEO of a big company. Note this was before Lou Gerstner took over — he understood that the IBM unifrom was a symbol of mindless action and being stuck in the past too, which is why he came to work the first day wearing a blue shirt.

    Along these lines, the hats cartoon and the old tie story remind me of a conversation I had with management guru Warren Bennis when I was on the academic job market for the first time (this was about 1983). He warned me that some of the most prestigious Ivy League schools (where I was interviewing)could be very stifling places, and as the title to this post says, that the "The best you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you."  I thought that was brilliant line, and also a lovely diagnostic test for an organizational culture.

    I was lucky to end-up having a rather strange career at the Stanford Engineering School, where my colleagues and I have been encouraged to do many different and wonderful things — for example, helping David Kelley to start the Stanford d.school, something that I don't believe would be possible in most other universities.