After reading the recent articles in the NY Times about the Russian spy ring and listening to news reports on it, I’m left wondering just what the point was. It sounds mostly like an episode of Get Smart, complete with over the top recognition phrases and really bad brush passes (in one example, the spy holds out his backpack so that the passing Russian government official can place a bag into it).
Perhaps these 11 people misunderstood their instructions. Instead of being spies, maybe they were supposed to make pies.
The biggest question I’ve having with this story is just what the expected goals were. Why did someone decide on a long-term, expensive, potentially embarrassing operation? It seems odd that so much effort would be expended trying to obtain information that can be readily obtained through the news, Facebook, and Google.
No, I don’t think there’s some deeper, hidden plan here (were I writing an espionage serious game, I would, of course, have a different view… 
). Rather, I believe this is an amazing example of astoundingly poor planning. This is a project that seems to have been given the same level of critical thought and review as a plan that involves evacuating walruses from the Gulf of Mexico and not thinking about hurricanes.
In this case, I wonder if the Russians figured that they needed information about American life and at least knew they didn’t know much about it. Their assumptions, though, about how to get that information only serve to illustrate just how much they didn’t know about what they were investigating. It’s a wonderful example of how cultural beliefs and assumptions can get in the way of actually accomplishing your goals.
Sometimes the toughest part of learning something is figuring out just how much you don’t know. If the Russians had realized just how trivial this information was, they wouldn’t have needed to go to such lengths to get it. How often do businesses make the same mistakes? Sometimes the information isn’t that hard to get or the product isn’t that hard to build, but our assumptions based on a lack of knowledge cause us to make the whole thing much more difficult.
That can be extremely expensive. It can also lead to the Keystone Kspies.
Pardon me, I think my shoe is ringing.
What is the most important factor in successfully recruiting top candidates? If you said things like salary, benefits, or the economy, you’d be wrong. It’s your organizational culture. I have a longer article in the upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership about the role of organizational culture in the hiring process. To give you a taste of it here … let me first say that when you start to throw around terms like “organizational culture” you may think that it’s academic, or that it’s abstract. It’s not.
Read the rest at ERE.Net
It’s hard to figure out what to say about BP that’s not either political or a joke. In fact, it’s hard to not view BP as a joke right now and to view how they’re handling the oil spill as a sort of Royal Dutch Shell Game.
Okay, sorry. I’m going to try to not tell too many oil company jokes here
Leaving aside all the political furor over the oil spill, it’s interesting to look at this from a risk management perspective. Psychologically, we view risk in ways that do not always conform the reality of the risk. For example, we tend to assume that if an event occurs once at a certain point in time, then it’ll happen again at that point in time: after the October 1987 market crash, for years afterward some people would jump out of the market in October just in case. Why? Well, it happened once in October (twice if you count the 1929 crash!). In fact, the 1987 crash was a unique event.
Similarly, when a disaster occurs and then doesn’t repeat, eventually we tend to assume not only that it won’t repeat but that the odds of its repeating are going down the longer the time that has passed. Thus, we had a major oil disaster in the Gulf in 1979. We had various smaller spills, but nothing so large after that (the Exxon-Valdez being a somewhat different kettle of oily fish). The natural assumption becomes that the problem won’t recur, either because we know more or because our technology is better or because the stars are in the correct alignment, or whatever reasons we might assign to the (non-)event.
Now, BP did have financial incentives to make these assumptions, and I quite believe those incentives made a big difference to their planning. This left them wide open to what Nassem Taleb calls a Black Swan: an event whose probability cannot be calculated but whose effects are potentially catastrophic (or beneficial, though not in this case). Part of what made the event so powerful is that BP was so manifestly unprepared to deal with it.
I suspect that part of the non-financial reasoning behind BP’s decision is that we no longer really think about oil as dangerous. Sure, we *know* it’s dangerous, but it’s been a part of our lives for so long now that it doesn’t have emotional impact any more. Compare oil to, say, nuclear energy. How did you react? Which is more dangerous? Which can do more health damage? How do you know?
Most people I’ve spoken to have a much different reaction to nuclear energy than to oil. Why? We don’t think about oil, while we do think about nuclear energy. It’s been a while, but my recollection of Three Mile Island is that it affected a much smaller geographic area and many fewer people than the oil spill. Again, this represents a misapprehension or confusion in how we assess risk. Nuclear energy is *scary* and oil is familiar.Fact is, if you have oil heat and your tank ruptures, you’ve got a major problem on your hands. In some cases, it can be a real problem when familiarity breeds contempt.
Part of risk assessment needs to be not just how likely is an event to occur, which cannot always be calculated, but what gives us reason to believe that it won’t occur? As we see, just because it hasn’t happened recently doesn’t mean it won’t. On the flip side, some events really do work that way: the longer it takes to repeat, the longer it is likely to take. We thus need to understand which type of event we’re dealing with, otherwise we spend our time and energy defending against events that really are highly improbable or unlikely to do much harm while leaving ourselves wide open to the events that have a constant probability no matter how much time has passed and which can do devastating damage.
Recently, I was attending a board meeting for a certain organization. They were contemplating some significant changes to several long-standing policies, which naturally generated quite a bit of discussion. The various options were carefully laid out and analyzed. There was a great deal of discussion over how well the different changes would address the identified problems. The president very carefully checked to make sure each member had had their say, that each member felt heard, and that each member was comfortable making a decision and accepting whichever decision was reached.
The vote happened, and a decision was made. No problem!
The problem came up at the next board meeting, when the president said, “I’m not comfortable with our decision. I think we should revisit it.”
Read the rest at Corp! Magazine
Here’s an interesting article on the British study about how working long hours can be detrimental to your health.
Of course, I’ll confess that a big part of why I like it is that I was extensively quoted…
Heartbreak At Work
Recently, someone told me that, “We don’t need leadership training. We’re all leaders.” When I asked how well they worked together and actually got things done, she then said, “Well, you know, leaders all have good ideas. We have some strong personalities. It can take a while.”
Overall, she was half right. Just because someone is a leader, that doesn’t mean they automatically have good ideas. In fact, only poor leaders think that they only have good ideas. However, she was correct in that they didn’t need leadership training. Rather, what they needed was membership training.
Read the rest at Corp! Magazine
When I speak about innovation, one my favorite examples is how B&N was beaten in their primary market, selling books, by upstart Amazon.com.
Even now, B&N doesn’t quite get it.
Case in point: my book appeared on Amazon.com for pre-order over a week ago. It finally showed up on B&N, and there are few small errors. Nothing major, but it makes it look unprofessional: screwing up the formatting of the title, which is, I grant, minor.
Far more amusing is who they’ve listed as the author: Honore de Balzac.
This may come as a surprise to the folks at Barnes & Noble, but Honore has been dead for a while.
Okay, this isn’t a major issue, but it illustrates a point: when the primary image people have of your “bookstore” is virtual, it pays to get the relevant details right.
On the other hand, if you want to get a brand new book by Honore de Balzac, I guess now’s your chance…
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Omaha giving a talk on leadership. The room was packed (in fact, the best attended talk at the conference!), and the response was enthusiastic. The one slightly odd comment that I got afterward was that the talk should have included group exercises.
This was an hour talk and there were at least 100 people in the room. A group exercise? I figured it was a joke. Then I found out that some of the other speakers had received similar comments, quite possibly from the same person. I’m wondering now if the commenter actually listened to any of the talks. One of my points was that a good leader takes the time to understand what can reasonably done in a certain amount of time, and that trying to cram too much in is a recipe for disaster. At least one other speaker made similar points.
Apparently this unknown commenter was either not listening, didn’t believe it, or simply has no concept of what he (or she) is asking for. That, in turn, makes me wonder about how this person does as a manager. I have to wonder if they’re busy pushing their team to attempt more and more in less and less time with no sense of whether or not it makes sense to do that amount of work in that amount of time.
Realistically, part of being a successful leader is recognizing what people can and cannot do in the time available. The goal is not to drive people harder and faster, but to use the time well. Complex projects take time to complete; driving people too hard at the beginning makes it much less likely that you’ll get to the end. Rather, what actually works is to start slowly and pick up speed; to choose your targets and focus your energies; and not to throw in something if it would detract from the overall experience rather than adding to it.
Some years ago, I was working at a high tech company during a recession. Granted, it wasn’t a Great Recession, but it was bad enough. There came a certain point where an employee who had not had a raise in two years, went to the CEO and asked for a raise. The CEO’s response: “I agree that you’re one of our top performers. But, in this economy, you have nowhere to go, so I’m not giving you a raise.”
The CEO had forgotten one little point: when we least expect it, economies get better. It’s exactly when things are looking worst that the opportunities start to appear. In this case, the employee left and had a new job with a 50% raise within a couple of weeks. He told me later that if he’d received almost any raise, he’d have stayed. It wasn’t about the money.
Now, when I tell this story in training exercises or when I’m giving a talk, someone always says that if the CEO and the employee had only communicated then the situation would never have come up. That’s a nice sentiment, but not one that quite makes sense. The two people in this little dance were communicating. Unfortunately, the content of their communication led them down a path that did not benefit the CEO or the company at all; in fact, the loss of that employee at that time set product development back six months.
Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership
“This is like déjà vu all over again.”
- Yogi Berra
In the classic British science fiction series Doctor Who, there is a scene in which the Doctor is trapped in a time loop: the same events keep taking place over and over with no end in sight. Naturally, this being fiction, the Doctor quickly recognizes what’s going on and figures out a way to break out of the loop. In real life, it’s not quite so easy. Granted, actual time loops tend to be pretty rare; not so the feeling of being stuck in one.
Read the rest in the CEO Refresher
