Work Matters

  • Why the Sharp Distinction Between “Individual” and “Group” Brainstorming is False in Real Teams

    I wrote a post earlier in the week about how the claim in The New Yorker that brainstorming "doesn't work" is an oversimplification.  I gave various reasons:  Most of this research is done with novices rather than skilled brainstormers, only looks at one measure (quantity), and ignores how brainstorming is done and the impact it has in real organizations.  As I have been thinking about this research a bit more and of the brainstorming that Andy Hargadon and I studied at IDEO years ago, that I see at the Stanford d.school, and especially, that I've seen in recent weeks in some very skilled groups I have seen in action, something struck me:

    The comparison between group and individual brainstorming that underlines this research is false, or at least irrelevant, because both happen at once when skilled practioners do it.

    When a skilled facilitator calls a brainstorm, he or she usually gives the topic in advance and asks members of the group to do some individual thinking about it before the gathering; for example, I once went to a brainstorm at IDEO on how to give an itchless haircut.  I dutifully went to a stylist and asked her to give me an an itchless haircut  She did things like wrapped my neck really tight with the top of the smock and put a bunch of talcum powder on my neck.  So I came prepared to add some ideas. The funniest part was one designer who tried to talk his barber into giving him a haircut while he hung upside down.  It was a crazy idea, but the notion of using gravity to solve other design problems was not — so having this story in the IDEO culture was useful.   

    In addition to the routine practice of encouraging solo idea generation before the group meets (and most relevant to the research) is that if you watch skilled teams, there is a blend of individual and collective idea generation going on most of the time DURING the brainstorming session.  Typically, in a group of say 6 or 7 brainstormers, you will have 2 or 3 people talking about the idea that is in play at the moment — one written on a post-it, written on the board, illustrated with a drawing, or a quick prototype.  Meanwhile, the other 4 or 5 people are half listening, writing ideas on post-its, drawing, building something, or semi-tuning out and just thinking about how to mix their ideas with with those they are hearing and seeing around them.

    There is a method called "brainwriting" where members write ideas on slips of paper, then pass their ideas to each other, and generate new ideas in response to others — all in silence.  As least one experiment shows that brainwriting enables people to develop more and apparently better ideas compared to brainstorming alone. This research is interesting in that, when you watch the best brainstorming groups, although they don't work in silence (the solo brainstorming happens before they meet in many cases … and since they are working in ongoing projects, they have time for individual silent contemplation afterwards as well), people are constantly switching between "solo" mode to generate ideas and "social" mode to share their ideas, listen to others, and build on the ideas of others 

    Real groups do "brainstorming" in much messier ways than it is sliced-up in psychological experiments, but the headline here is that in practice, if you watch how the pros do it, it entails a blend of individual and group idea generation — even during group gatherings.  This insight is, I think, important because skilled brainstormers are constantly switching between "solo" and "social" mode and the best facilitators — I think of people like Perry Klebahn and Jeremy Utley at the Stanford d.school — constantly take steps to help brainstormers switch back and forth between these modes in the moment.

    Again, I don't want to defend brainstorming too strongly because there may well be better methods for facilitating idea generation and creativity in general .  As I said last time, I do believe that teaching groups how to fight well is probably more important than teaching them how to brainstorm (and a lot harder) if you want to spark creativity, a point made well in The New Yorker story.  I also believe — and can show you evidence, notably from the late Robert Zajonc — that it  is impossible for human-beings to withhold judgement about anything they encounter (despite instructions to do so during brainstorming).  But I confess to be annoyed by the conclusion that "brainstorming doesn't work" because it is based on research that is largely irrelevant to how it is actually done in teams and organizations that use it routinely.

  • Do You Have a GOOD and SIMPLE Performance Evaluation Form?

    As many of you know, I have expressed considerable skepticism about whether performance evaluations are even worth using, if they do more good than harm.  And Sam Culbert has gone the next step with his book, Get Rid of the Performance Evaluation. 

    Even though this debate will continue to go on, the fact is that lawyers, HR executives, and the force of tradition — and some rational reasons as well — mean that most organizations aren't going to be getting rid of these things anytime soon. As such, I was talking with a senior HR executive and she asked me if I knew of any examples of good and simple performance evaluation forms — the one her firm uses is way too complicated and she is looking for ideas about how to simplify it. 

    I thought that was a great question. If we must use these things, they might as well be as short and effective as possible, despite their limits.  Can anyone help?  Has anyone ever used one or used one now? 

    Please describe it in as much detail as you can and you get bonus points for sending a picture or pdf or something like that of the form.

      Thanks!

    P.S. I just did a Google search for "Performance Evaluation Forms" and there are a lot of images of them… but it is tough to tell which are good or bad from looking at them — I bet the form itself is a lot less important than the quality of conversation that happens before, during, and after people get the feedback.

  • Why The New Yorker’s Claim That Brainstorming “Doesn’t Work” Is An Overstatement And Possibly Wrong

    The current version of The New Yorker has a wonderful article by Jonah Lehrer called "Groupthink" (you can see the abstract here).  It does a great job of showing how creativity is a social process, cites wonderful research by Brian Uzzi showing that when people have experience working together in the past they produce more successful Broadway musicals (up to a point, too many old friends is as bad as too few), and offers research showing that groups where members engage in constructive conflict are more creative — all themes I have talked about at various times on this blog. 

    I do however have a major quibble.  At one point, Lehrer states flatly that brainstorming doesn't work.  He later quotes creativity researcher Keith Sawyer as saying that people are more efficient at generating ideas when they work alone than in groups, something that is well-established.  But that is not the same as saying there is conclusive evidence they don't work.

    I once devoted way too much time to the question of whether this research shows that brainstorming is useless. In the name of full-disclosure, please note I am a Fellow at IDEO and also a co-founder of the Stanford d.school, which both use brainstorming a lot. But I am not at all a religious zealot about the method. I see it as just one sometimes useful method, and I have often said that the d.school in particular should spend less time teaching brainstorming and more time teaching people how to fight. (And if you want evidence that the d.school believes in more than just brainstorming, look at their Bootleg.)

    But please consider several facts about the brainstorming literature, at least as it stood about 7 or 8 years ago when I last reviewed it carefully and which is consistent with a more recent paper from The Academy of Management Review (Here is the abstract, which is quite short):

    1. Nearly all brainstorming research is done with people who have no training or experience in doing or leading brainstorming. In fact, there is at least two studies showing that, when facilitated properly, the so called productivity loss disappears. Check this 1996 study and this 2001 study.  To me, these two studies alone call into question the approach taken in most brainstorming studies, which don't use facilitation.   In other words, the conculsion that brainstorming doesn't work is based largely on studies that use unsupervised brainstorming virgins.

    2. As Keith Sawyer's comment implies, nearly all this research looks at only one measure of effectiveness, how quickly people can produce ideas.  Because people in groups have to take time to listen to each other, it slows the idea generation process. Most brainstorming studies compare the speed at which people generate ideas such as "what can you do with a brick" when sitting alone and talking into microphone versus doing so in face-to-face groups. In fact, if creativity is about both talking and listening, if you look at the data from these same studies, I once figured out that people are exposed to substantially more ideas per unit of time when you compare group to solo brainstorming — and I would argue that talking and listening are both key elements of the social process underlying creativity.

    3.A key part of face-to-face brainstorming is building on and combining the ideas of others.  This comparison is impossible in most brainstorming studies because an individual working alone is not exposed to the ideas of others.

    Indeed, one of the very first posts I did on this blog in 2006  dug on this issue.  As I wrote then, "To put it another way, if these were studies of sexual performance, it would be like drawing inferences about what happens with experienced couples on the basis of research done only with virgins during the first time they had sex." I also wrote about brainstorming here in BusinessWeek and they started with this setup.

    The upshot of my research and my reading of brainstorming experiments is that, if you are just looking at the speed at which an individual can spew out ideas, individual brainstorming is likely superior. But if you look at the range of positive effects has at a place like IDEO — spreading ideas around the company, teaching newcomers and reminding veterans of solutions and technologies and who knows what,  providing variety and intrinsically satisfying breaks for designers working on other projects, creating what I called a functional status contests where designers compete politely to show off their creativity (a key job skill), and impressing clients, brainstorming may have numerous other positive benefits in real organizations where creative work is done — none of which have not been examined in those simple experiments.  If so, those findings about pure efficiency may well be beside the point when it comes to evaluating brainstorming in organizations that use it routinely.

    In short, I believe that Lehrer's statement that brainstorming "doesn't work" is too sweeping because it has not been studied adequately in real organizations or with people who have real brainstorming skills. Again, I would describe this as a quibble; the article in The New Yorker is otherwise excellent.

    P.S. for the true nerds, here is the 1996 academic article on brainstorming that Andy Hargadon and I wrote:

    Download ASQ Storming

  • More Evidence That Sleep Deprivation Turns Employees Into Assholes (Due to Loss of Self-Control)

    Those of you who have followed this blog, and especially, Good Boss, Bad Boss will know that a pile of evidence already shows that sleep deprivation turns people grumpy, insensitive, and dulls their cognitive abilities — in other words it turns them into dumb assholes.   An interesting newish paper adds to the pile of evidence.

    A pair of interesting studies on sleep deprivation were published in the October issue of the Academy of Management Journal by Michael Christian and Aleksander Ellis.  In both a field study with 171 nurses and a more controlled laboratory study with students, they found that when people suffered sleep deprivation, they suffered both a loss self control (measured with items like "my will power is gone" and reverse-scored "I feel calm and rational") and to feel more hostile (measured with items like "scornful" and "disgusted").  In turn, these foul emotional states led the nurses to engage in more workplace deviance, things falsifying receipts for reimbursement, dragging out work to get overtime, used drugs or booze on the job, said something hurtful to someone at work, and intentionally working slower.  The ugliness observed in the workplace was replicated in a more controlled experiment with 75 students" half the students were kept awake by the experimenters for a night in the lab and the other half arrived from a good night's sleep in the morning.  The results were replicated in the lab study, and the added twist was that the experimenters created a situation where there was an incentive for students to steal an answer sheet for a test they took, and there was more stealing by the sleep deprived students.

    This study is a nice contribution because it uses two methods and shows that lack of self-control and hostility appear to be important reasons that sleep deprivation is so vile.  I always find this kind of research quite disturbing because so many important decisions are made by people who are sleep deprived.  This include thousands of doctors who are serving their residencies in emergency and operating rooms right now as well as the corporate and government officials who made all those major decisions during the financial meltdown in late 2008.

  • “The No Asshole Rule in Our Zappos Museum”

    The title of this post is from the header of an email I just got.  Here is the text:

    Dear Bob,

    Zappos is building a museum and we would like to include a signed framed copy of The no Asshole Rule in our “Library Exhibit.”  What is the best address for us to send you a copy of your book to sign?

    Doonesbury? A museum?  What's next?  Who knows. Being the asshole guy has been wonderful and weird.

    P.S. I am leaving out the author's name — it wasn't Tony Hsieh or a senior executive.

  • New CEO Studies: Nuances of Narcissism, Flattery, and Opinion Conformity

    ASQ CoverI got my copy of the Administrative Science Quarterly in the mail the other day. You can see the cover to the left, it is famous for pretty pictures like this one by Signe Pike, whose mother Linda Johanson is the managing editor (and has been for at least 30 years I can recall).  I was one of two associate editors for four years in the 90's and, although I liked doing it in many ways because the work was challenging and I especially liked working with Linda, the weight of having to write over 100 decision letters a year on papers (which would be sent out for evaluation by three anonymous peers first) eventually wore me down. 

    Academia is petty and I can be touchy, so I got especially tired of the hostility from people who got papers rejected as many academics have big egos and turn hostile in the face of rejection (ASQ is the most prestigious organizational research journal and rejects over 90% of papers submitted.   It is so picky that it has been running late for years — note the June 2011 issue just came out this week.  But the quality is always very high.).  There is even one author who is still mad at me because some 15 years later because, even though we accepted his paper, we wouldn't let him publish it until he fixed his lousy writing.   I never thought I would be teaching freshman English to an Ivy League professor, but he needed it.

    The journal has been in good hands in recent years, with the last editor being my scaling co-author Huggy Rao from Stanford and the new editor being Gerald Davis from  The University of Michigan (who I worked with when he was a Stanford student 20 years ago or so). 

    Perhaps because I had just wrapped-up a doctoral seminar on leadership, there were two articles that really caught my eye.  I wasn't shocked by the findings, and you likely won't be either, but was pleased with the rigor.  The three studies from two articles were done in different ways, but the upshot is that CEOs are swayed heavily by praise and ass-kissing of all kinds, especially narcissists, and the effects aren't pretty. In short:

    If you are a CEO, these studies show how hard it is for you to wade through and tune out all the bullshit and ass-kissing that come with the job.  Those flattering stories that the press wants to write about you are dangerous to your organization's health — especially if you are narcissist, but even you are not. And all that insincere ass-kissing and agreement from your board and your management team may help them get ahead, but can hurt you and your company. It can fuel an inflated self-assessment of your skills, cause you to cling to failing strategies, hurt your firm's long-term performance, and cost you your job.

    I offer more details about these studies if you want to learn more; if all you want is the headline, I suggest you stop here.

    The first was by Arijit Chatteerjee and Donald Hambrick, which compares highly narcissistic CEOs to to their less narcissistic peers in two studies. The first was a sample of 152 CEOs from 134 computer hardware and software firms.  I loved their measures of narcissism: how prominently the CEO was pictured in the annual report; the number of times the CEO's name was mentioned in the typical press release; and the difference in compensation (both cash and non-cash) between the CEO and the next highest paid executives.  They argue this measure is reliable and valid because these items were fairly highly inter-correlated (.71 was the Cronbach's alpha for measurement geeks) and they also had a panel of experienced security analysts rank 40 of the CEOs in terms of narcissism, which further supported their ranking method.  

    The findings of this first study focus on how narcissism appears to serve as a filter for outside cues.  The highly narcissistic CEOs were less responsive to whether recent firm performance was good or bad — they tended to continue to make equally risky investments (more risk was indicated by spending more money on R&D, big capital expenditures, and acquisitions of new companies) regardless of recent performance.   In contrast, their less narcissistic peers became more cautious in bad times and tended to take bigger risks during good times.  The most interesting finding was about media praise.  The less narcissistic CEO's weren't affected much by media praise, but the highly narcissistic ones tended to make considerably riskier investments after getting praised in the media.

    So the upshot is the narcissists were swayed more  by "social praise" and less by recent performance!

    Their second study dug into something called "acquisition premiums," the well-documented tendency for companies to overpay when they buy another company.  This was measured by comparing the acquired company's stock price four weeks before the acquisition was announced to what it was finally sold for.  The authors used a different sample of 131 big acquisitions (over 100 million) across diverse industries, and measured narcissism the same way as in the first study.  They found some interesting parallels to the first study: Recent media praise tended to have a stronger effect on the acquisition premiums paid by highly narcissistic CEOs.  A single flattering article was associated with paying a 7% larger  premium among the less narcissistic  CEOs (28% versus 35%) and a 14% premium (29% versus 43%) among the highly narcissistic CEOs.

    In short, this research suggests that most companies pay big acquisition premiums, that recent media praise makes it even worse for all CEOs, and especially worse for narcissists.

    The second article, which I will describe more briefly, is by Sun Hyun Park, James Westphal, and Ithai Stern. It looked at the impact suffered by CEOs who are surrounded by people who engage in (relatively) more intense and frequent flattery (e.g., offering exaggerated compliments) and opinion conformity (e.g., expressing agreement even when they don't quite agree) as measured by surveys of their board members and top managers.  These very persistent researchers managed to gather these kinds of data about 451 CEOS.  The findings probably won't surprise you much:

    More flattery and opinion conformity was linked to CEOs having more favorable evaluations of their own strategic judgments and leadership skills, being less likely to make strategic changes when firm performance suffered (just like the narcissists in the first study), and more to prone to lead firms that suffered persistently poor performance.  The authors also present suggestive evidence that flattery helps bring down CEOs in the end, that it not only is linked to weaker long-term firm performance, it increases the chances that those very same ass-kissing board members are going to fire the CEO when things turn south.

    James Westphal and his colleagues have published many studies like this one that show how the social psychology of CEOs, boards, and top teams color their behavior in often discouraging ways.  For example, an earlier study by these folks suggests that engaging in flattery is a smart personal strategy for board members want to gain additional lucrative appointments, as ass-kissing is associated with getting more board memberships — especially for white males, but not so much for women and minorities!

    As I said at the outset, none of this will likely surprise you.  But it adds further fuel for skeptics who argue that CEOs are at least as irrational as the rest of us. 

    Taken together, this research provides lots of evidence about how boards and top management teams ought to act when selecting and dealing with CEOS and about the hazards that  CEOs face — and hints about why it is so hard for both CEOs and those who oversee them to do the right things.  The headline for me is that praise and flattery often benefit those who provide it, but can be dangerous to those who recieve it.

  • Google: “A place where it simply isn’t efficient to act like an asshole.”

    I just got off the phone with a reporter who was asking about Google, which topped Fortune's best place to work list for the third time.  He wanted to talk about Google's lavish perks and how being a great place to work might be a result of their success rather than a cause. I agreed that money does buy a lot of goodies and massive financial success is such a powerful perfume that it can make everything smell better than is really the case. But I am less cynical about Google than most winners of such awards because of things that have been in place, and from what I can tell, have largely been preserved, from the start that go beyond their famous luxuries, good food, and generous compensation — and put them a cut above many top tech firms that provide similar goodies.  

    The first reason is that Google does not unduly emphasize status differences among people at different levels or within in the same level.  If you watch how people interact there — receptionists and executives, young engineers and senior executives, and people from less prestigious versus more prestigious parts of the company — the more powerful people treat the less powerful people with an unusually large amount of respect, even deference, and the less powerful people don't cower or kiss-up nearly as much as I see in most places.   Yes, Googlers are sometimes guilty of being arrogant when it comes to outsiders (although I see signs of modesty creeping in), but I have to give Larry and Serge credit for creating such norms mutual respect from the start and building an organization that appears to have sustained them  (in fact, just yesterday, I found an old interview that Jeff Pfeffer and I did with Larry Page in late 2002, and he talked about the importance treating everyone with respect and how often the people Google hires showed him that his initial opinion was wrong).

    The second reason, as senior executive Shona Brown told me in 2006 or so (she was #4 in those days, and now heads Google.org), is that Google appears to be a place where it simply isn't efficient to act like an asshole.  When The No Asshole Rule first came out, I did a talk at Google and asked the crowd if Shona was telling the truth.  The general sentiment was she was right, but more telling was, afterwards, a young woman came up to talk to me.  She patiently waited for everyone else to leave.  Then she seemed rather nervous as she started talking about Shona's words.  This woman admitted that she really  wasn't a very nice person. But after a few months at Google, she learned that she had to be nice to everyone, because otherwise, she couldn't get anything done!  Now that is a sign that an organizational norm is working.

    So, while Google is imperfect, as all human organizations must be, it is nice to see that "don't be evil" still appears to infect the company's soul, that Google seems to demonstrate it is possible to be an effective and civilized organization, and that treating people probably does help bolster and sustain performance in this iconic company.

  • Inside Apple: Adam Lashinsky Revealing and Well-Crafted Book

    LASHINSKY_Inside Apple_HCLast week, I opened up my copy of Adam Lashinsky's new book, Inside Apple.   It was about 8 at night, and I figured I would read the first chapter and do something else.  Well, I looked-up, and it was 1:30 in the morning, and the book was done.  Frankly, a business book hasn't grabbed me like that in a long-time.   Adam not only writes well, he provides the most complete picture you can find of how Apple actually is organized, how they divide-up the work, the pecking order, the mindset — the kind of stuff that people like me who are interested in organizations want to know.

    This is not an authorized book like Isaacson''s blockbuster Steve Jobs.  But Adam has been following Apple for many years as a reporter at Fortune, and before that, at the San Jose Mercury. He did many interviews with former Apple employees, and although it is unclear how much access that Apple allowed him (and knowing Apple, he likely isn't allowed to say), I can tell you that I've talked to several journalists over the years who have complained that he gets better access than the rest of them. He also does a great job of capturing the complexity and hypocrisy of the place.  I especially loved this paragraph late in the book, on page 175:

    Apple is company of paradoxes. Its people and institutional bearing are off-the-charts-arrogant, yet at the same time, they are genuinely fearful of what would happen if their big bets go bad.  The creative side of the business that was dominated by Steve Jobs is made up of lifers or near lifers who value only an Apple way of doing things — hardly the typical creative mind-set. The operations side of Apple runs like any company in America, but better, and is led by a cadre of ex-IBMers, the cultural antithesis of Apple.  Apple has an entrepreneurial flare yet keeps people in a tightly controlled box, following time-tested procedures. Its public image, at least seen through its advertising, is whimsical and fun, yet its internal demeanor is cheerless and nose-to-the grindstone.

    Good stuff, huh? I was interested in Adam's opening arguments that Job's was a productive narcissist, which he linked to Michael Maccoby's Narcissistic Leaders and to The No Asshole Rule a bit too.  Many other things about the book were interesting, but three especially stood out for me, and reinforced my beliefs (and now some concerns) that I voiced in my post last year 5 Warning Signs to Watch for at Apple:

    1.  Apple is nearly the exact opposite of the kind of organization hyped by people like Gary Hamel and even Peter Drucker.  It is centralized, secretive, fear-ridden, punitive, and not much fun for most people who work there.  But it works because the pieces of the "organizational design" fit together, or at least did fit together when Jobs was there, in an elegant way.  The secrecy is so severe that, when products are launched, even senior people are surprised by the final product because people are on a strictly "need to know" basis.  But this is offset with a system of roles and responsibilities — and crucial to all of it– is what Apple calls the DRI, the directly responsible individual, a centerpiece of the organization.  There is clear responsibility placed on individuals, not so much on groups and committees.  Although groups and some committees do exist, the DRI can always be found and is where attention is focused.  Which means that that it is clear where to go to provide guidance, to integrate their work with others, and who will be fired, blamed, and replaced — and celebrated too. 

    Essentially, and you can see this in the organization chart on one of the first pages of the book, Apple is designed so that all major (and many minor) decisions are made by a very small group of people, they are not influenced much by suppliers, customers, 99.9% of employees or anyone else; rather is what my friend John Lilly calls a "genius driven" organization.  So, with Jobs gone, the question on the table is if the brilliance of CEO Tim Cook and a few others like Jonathan Ive (head of design) and Scott Forstall (head of IOS software) can sustain the firm's dominance and creativity. These are mighty smart people and they have been slowly weaned from Jobs as he was so sick for so many years.  But the design of the organization places more pressure on senior executives doing the right things than any large company I know.

    In contrast, other organizations have decentralized systems where numerous semi-autonomous businesses are responsible for their own profits and losses, and top executives are essentially managing a portfolio.  HP operated quite successfully this way for decades under Hewlett and Packard.  The had numerous divisions (I recall about 45 when I first got to Stanford in 1983), and it was run by what some insiders called the "mafia model:" if  your business was sufficiently profitable (around 10% net profit per year as the going rate as I recall), you simply paid that "protection money" to  corporate, and you could do whatever you wanted within reason.  If your numbers were lower, you would get "help," and if they didn't improve or if senior management lost faith in you, you were removed.  Certainly, this kind of structure places pressure on leaders to prune, merge, and start new businesses –and to deal with overlaps and conflicts between businesses — but such a structure spreads the leadership chores — and risk — among multiple teams, each of which acts with great autonomy.  (Google is much more decentralized than Apple, for example, but is moving to become more centralized.  For example, when Larry Page took over as CEO, they had so many products done by so many different decentralized groups he went to Wikipedia to get a list of them all–and then he and his team started trimming them).

    My point here, and this follows an old conceptual perspective called "contingency theory," is that other organizations that want to be like Apple –and that seems like so many now — need to be especially careful about copying individual pieces, because the reason it works is that the multiple elements fit together. 

    2.  I am very impressed with how thoughtful Apple's team is about allowing people to focus on what they are doing, and to not be distracted by so many of the other things that most organizations expect from their people. They don't believe in the concept of general managers.  They don't give groups or businesses P&L's… there is only one, that is for the whole company.  They focus on saying "no."   As Adam quotes Jobs, his "Focus is not saying yes. It is saying no to really great ideas."  This "elegance is refusal" philosophy is extended to strategy and organizational design as well.  There are simply a lot things that weigh on many managers and employees at other places that aren't present or are less present at Apple.  Managers aren't asked to be responsible for a local P&L, they know amazingly little about what is going on in other parts of the company, they aren't asked to go to as many meetings or be on as many committees and are instead expected to do what they do perfectly and as little else as possible. 

    This focus on simplicity and reduction of load is also seen in the emphasis on keeping teams as small as possible. The tendency to make teams ever bigger is an awful disease, not so much because it costs more money, but because, as Harvard's J.Richard Hackman has shown, it slows teams and undermines their performance as members end-up spending more time dealing with coordination issues and coalitional battles and less time doing the work at hand.  Apple gets the importance of small teams at all levels (e.g., Adam reports that a 2 person team "wrote the code for converting Apple's Safari browser for the iPad, a massive undertaking”).  They also have an unusually small board of directors — seven members — for a company of that size.  

    This extension of the elegance philosophy beyond their products has huge advantages as the "signal to noise" ratio appears to be quite impressive at all levels and in all functions — people tend to get good information, the information they need (and no more), and aren't confused or distracted by other things.  At senior levels, this means they get the information they need and it means that, although there is discussion and debate at times, when a decision is made, there is less of the usual arguing or undermining.    And if there are failures in implementing, you will be forgiven if senior executives believe you acted intelligently enough and hard enough, but you will be shown the door very quickly if they believe you were dumb or lazy.

    3.  Adam did a great job of describing the company with all its warts and negative side-effects.  I was struck by how Apple is a place that is driven by the pride of doing great work, that it was not about having fun.  That it is was also not about getting rich for most employees. Apple pays competitive salaries for Silicon Valley,  but not at the very top of the market like NetFllix.  And only a few employees who were in early made big fortunes from the stock.  In fact, Jobs hated talking about money.

     My personal reaction, and others no doubt have different motivations and preferences, is that it would be an awful place to work.  The extreme secrecy means there is extreme paranoia.  It means you often don't even know a lot of co-workers, let alone what they are working on — and if you ask them, you can get in big trouble.  Fear is everywhere.  Apple seems to take pleasure in pushing around other companies — competitors, suppliers, and those that just get in the way — just because it can.  And, let's face it, while Jobs was one of the most effective assholes in history, he was still an asshole (Isaacson reported he went through over 70 nurses before finding 3 he liked).   I worry that the bully worship that has emerged in the wake of Jobs death has not only apparently been long institutionalized at Apple, it is now being imitated and gloried by people who lack Jobs' obsessive genius and who are not embedded in an a system that is designed to amplify the best qualities of a obsessive perfectionist and to dampen the worst.

    Jobs said the journey is the reward, a nice sentiment, and I like the pride, thirst for excellence, and action orientation that Adam describes, but spending my days deep in fear, paranoia, and secrecy isn't for me. Life is too short.

    In any case, if you can't get a job at Apple or don't want to, Inside Apple provides the best — most complete and balanced — coverage of how the place works, the elements you might want to copy, and those that you might avoid — that Apple has apparently succeeded DESPITE rather BECAUSE they are used. 

  • Taking People With You By David Novak: Great Read and Most Useful

    Taking_people_with_you_coverMost books by sitting CEOs seem like they are pure fluff pieces, or worse, pure vanity projects.   As such, when I was contacted by a Penguin publicist about having a chat with David Novak, CEO of YUM! Brands about his new book, Taking People With You, I jumped at the chance to talk with him because he is so experienced and successful at scaling –Yum Brands! includes Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC — which what Huggy Rao and I are currently studying.  But I didn't expect much from the book. To my surprise, after spending a good hour and half with the book in anticipation of the conversation, I was stunned by how good it is — Novak really digs into the details of what he does to sustain, grow, and keep improving this huge company, and how any boss can learn from what he and his colleagues do.  

    The reason the book rises above most others of the genre is that it is based on a program that Mr. Novak teaches himself about eight times a year to people at YUM!, which is also called Taking People With You.  This book is based on that program, so it contains many of the specifics from this program, which as he told me, he has refined over the years as he teaches it about 8 times a year and, so far, it has involved about 4000 people from YUM! The three overall sections are: Get Your Mindset Right, Have a Plan: Strategy, Structure, and Culture, and Follow Through to Get Results.   These headlines are typical, and certainly not original, but once I started digging into how the book deals with them, I was very impressed with the detail, and specific suggestions, and how each chapter contains such specific and useful tools. Consider a few "picture step-by-step change," "choose powerful versus limiting mindsets," "get to know people," "get whole brained," and there are self-assessment tools throughout.   I argued in Good Boss, Bad Boss that the key to effective leadership, and one of the hardest things for any leader to achieve is self-awareness, knowledge of ones strengths and weaknesses and being in tune with what it feels like to work for you.  Taking People With You impressed me so much because it shows how to become more self-aware as a leader, and spotlights the specific skills that every leader needs to be effective.

    As for Mr Novak, I found him quite delightful, straightforward, and most efficient.  I was especially struck with a few things he emphasized. First, when I asked him how he spent his time, he answered that developing great leaders in the company was his number one priority.  Unlike so many companies who turn this responsibility over to professional trainers or worse yet outside vendors, Mr. Novak has developed and taught the Taking People With You workshop himself to 4000 people, and is now "cascading" it so his senior executives will teach it to others as well, so the plan is to touch 35,000 people in the company. 

    Second, when I asked him about bad behavior (as readers of this blog know, I have written quite a bit about how "bad is stronger than good"),  he had a great line, something like: "We are a company that believes in recognition, and that means recognizing both good and bad behavior."  When I asked for an example, he said that YUM! "is not the place for you if you think that you are better than everyone else."  He argued this is especially important to the company, because if managers and leaders see themselves as better than the people who work in their stores or better than their customers, then it undermines their ability to understand customer's and employee's motivations and needs, and it causes them to keep their distance from people they should be interacting with and listening carefully to every day.  (Note I was especially struck by this because I am reading Adam Lashinsky's wonderful new book Inside Apple, which certainly is a different culture, as it Apple appears to be a place where people are more or less required to think of themselves as better than others.  I will write something on Inside Apple  later in the week.)

    Third, Mr. Novak also had some interesting thoughts on what he called "the tensions between centralization decentralization," and he argued that one of the keys to YUM!'s success — which is doing incredibly well in China and other international markets — is that, while there are multiple non-negotiable elements of the culture (I like "Be Restaurant and Customer Maniacs… Now!), they err on the side of decentralization. He emphasized this meant that in places like China and India, the country team is made-up of mostly locals who understand the culture and it meant customizing menus for local tastes such as selling more desserts in France and having more vegetarian choices in India. I was quite interested to hear him talk about this approach, because as we are studying scaling, this tension between having a core set of principles and a shared mindset in concert with the need to give people enough decision-making power to adapt to local conditions is something that comes up again and again, whether we talk to someone like David who is opening thousands of restaurants in China or a chef in San Francisco who has just opened his second restaurant that is in a much different neighborhood than the first.

    Once again, Taking People With You with is a good read and is especially impressive because it is the rare leadership book that contains specific steps you can take to become more aware and more skilled at your craft.

  • Why Bosses Who are Civilized and Caring, But Incompetent, can be Really Horrible

    GoodBoss_pb3

    I haven't been blogging much the last couple weeks because, in addition to the usual madness that goes with the holiday and start of the term, I have been wrapping up a new chapter for the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback, which will appears March 15th (but I suspect will be shipping before that, Amazon usually does).  Above is the new cover, which I quite like because it stands out and is now more distinct from The No Asshole Rule. 

    I had planned to write just a few pages for the Epilogue, but once I took the time to think about what I had learned since Good Boss, Bad Boss was published, I became rather obsessed and wrote a lot of text.  As my editor Rick Wolff wisely advised, I trimmed back the original draft quite a bit, but it still runs about 8,000 words. The opening looks back on the experience and devotes special attention to Luiz Uruza, the boss of the trapped Chilean miners (who I first wrote about at Psychology Today.)  and was interviewed about on CNN International.  I then present new nine lessons I've learned or come to believe in more strongly about what it takes to be a great boss. 

    To give you a taste, I thought you might like to see the fourth lesson (warning, this will be copy-edited, so it may read slightly different when it is published, but the point will remain the same):

    4.  Bosses who are civilized and caring, but incompetent, can be really horrible.

    Perhaps because I am the author of The No Asshole Rule, I kept running into people – journalists, employees, project managers, even a few CEOs – who picked a fight with me: They would argue that good bosses are more than caring human-beings; they make sure the job gets done.  I responded by expressing agreement and pointing out this book defines a good boss as one who drives performance and treats people humanely.   Yet, as I started digging into the experiences that drove my critics to raise this point – and thought about some lousy bosses – I realized I hadn’t placed enough emphasis on the damage done, as one put it, by “a really incompetent, but really nice, boss.” 

    As The No Asshole Rule shows, if you are a boss who is a certified jerk, you may be able to maintain your position so long as your charges keep performing at impressive levels.  I warned, however, that your enemies are lying in wait, and once you slip-up, you are likely to be pushed aside with stunning speed. 

    In contrast, one reason that baseball coach Leo Durocher’s famous saying “nice guys finish last” sometimes right is that, when a boss is adored by followers (and peers and superiors too) they often can’t bring themselves to bad-mouth, let alone fire or demote, that lovely person.  People may love that crummy boss so much they constantly excuse, or don’t even notice, clear signs of incompetence. For example, there is one senior executive I know who is utterly lacking in the necessary skills or thirst for excellence his job requires.  He communicates poorly (he rarely returns even important emails and devotes little attention to developing the network of partners his organization needs), lacks the courage to confront — let alone fire — destructive employees, and there are multiple signs his organization’s reputation is slipping. But he is such a lovely person, so caring and so empathetic, that his superiors can’t bring themselves to fire him.

    There are two lessons here.  The first is for bosses.  If you are well-liked, civilized, and caring, your charms provide protective armor when things go wrong.  Your superiors are likely to give you the benefit of the doubt as well as second and third chances – sometimes even if you are incompetent.  I would add, however, that if you are a truly crummy boss – but care as much for others as they do for you — stepping aside is the noble thing to do. The second lesson is for those who oversee lovable losers.   Doing the dirty work with such bosses is distasteful. But if rehabilitation has failed — or things are falling apart too fast to risk it — the time has come to hit the delete button.

    I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you agree? What did I leave out?  How do you deal with one?  And, following my recent post, are the advantages to working for one of these lovable losers?