The Business Sensei

Mayan Apocalypse? Oh My!

There have been a lot of questions about where this Mayan apocalypse thing comes from. According to recent research conducted by Mayan scholar Perry Mede, the current legend actually stems from a combination of two Mayan legends.

Although fearless in battle, the Mayans had a deep fear of being kissed by an Alpaca. This is not an unreasonable fear, at least according to those who have been kissed by an Alpaca. Mayans worried a great deal about the “Alpaca lips.”

The other big fear held by the Mayans was that their lips would get stuck together. This rare condition was known amongst Mayans as the “Epoxy lips.”

These fears came together into the Mayan legend of the end of time as being kissed by an Alpaca whose lips got stuck to you: sort of a “alpaca-poxy-lips.” Evidence of this is found in the last words of the chief of the Mayans, Mayan Bissa-son, who said, “Mmmph, mmph, mmmpphhh!” Historians believe this to mean, “Get this **** alpaca off me!”

The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, routinely features tales of bumbling managers. The popularity of Dilbert, and the degree to which it resonates with people, are a testament to his accuracy; indeed, Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss has become an iconic figure. Dilbert aside, however, I have observed that very few leaders intentionally act like the pointy-haired boss depicted in the comic strip. Rather, they engage in pointy-haired behaviors without realizing the effect they are having on the organization as whole. Let’s explore some examples of such behaviors and their unintended consequences.

1. Pointy-haired bosses break their own rules and figure either no one will notice or no one will mind because they are in charge. In one company, the CEO called everyone together to talk about the importance of really working hard and putting personal needs to one side in order to ship a product. At the end of the talk, he announced he was leaving for a two week vacation in Hawaii and wished everyone good luck. This did not go over well. One vice-president, who had apparently not been warned, almost choked on his coffee. When the CEO came back, two people had quit and the rest were up in arms.

2. The pointy-haired boss believes that he is separate from the group he leads. In fact, leaders are also group members, with a very important and well-defined role. Through their actions, leaders set the norms for their group. For example, the manager of a team at a large software company imposed a $.25 penalty for being late to meetings. When he was subsequently late himself, the team gleefully demanded he pay up. After a brief stunned moment, he tossed a quarter into the pot. No one complained about the fine after that. What the leader does is directly mirrored in the organization. When leaders find that employees are not living up to the standards of the organization, they often need to look in a mirror and see what example they are setting.

3. Pointy-haired bosses fail to recognize the culture they are creating. To be fair, it’s hard to see your own culture from the inside, and despite what many managers and CEOs believe, culture is formed not from what you say but from what you do. As MIT’s Ed Schein observes, “Culture is the residue of success: success in dealing with external challenges and success in internal advancement.” What behaviors are successful in the organization? What behaviors are rewarded? The very behaviors that people tell me they want to change are frequently the ones they are encouraging.”

4. Pointy-haired bosses lack an understanding of group/team dynamics. They like to say that their organization is “different,” and the research on group dynamics doesn’t apply. That’s like the people in early 2000 who said about the stock market that “This time, it’s different.” If you’re dealing with people, patterns repeat. It pays to recognize the patterns and understand how they are manifesting in your specific situation.

5. Pointy-haired bosses are often unable or unwilling to create a clear, compelling vision for their organization that gets everyone involved and excited. The best way to attract and retain top talent is to make people care about what the company is doing. That’s best done through painting a vivid picture of the outcome and creating clear goals.

6. Pointy-haired bosses motivate through short-term rewards and/or intimidation. They assume they know what their employees want, rather than taking the time to ask or to observe how people are responding. Short-term rewards and intimidation generate short-term spikes in performance, but build neither loyalty nor the desire to go the extra mile. Unfortunately, far too many people are willing to sacrifice the longer-term performance of their team for a short-term gain. In one company, the head of engineering “motivated” employees by inviting them to join him for happy hour in a bar on Friday nights. Had he asked, he would have realized that what the team wanted on Friday nights was to go home and have dinner with their families. Instead of motivating the team, he made them feel imposed upon.

Finally,

7. Pointy-haired bosses do not believe in asking for or accepting help. It’s not about asking for help, it’s about investing time and money to enable the company to accomplish its goals. The boss’s time is a resource; skilled leaders invest their time and the time and money of their business where that will produce the best return. Sometimes the best return is obtained by investing in an employee, sometimes by investing in a contractor.

Very few leaders deliberately engage in these Pointy-haired boss behaviors. Rather, their behaviors are the result of their own corporate success story. Therefore, for all that even one or two Pointy-haired boss behaviors can derail an organization, behaviors acknowledged to be counter-productive are very difficult to eradicate. Nevertheless, the ability of a manager or CEO to recognize these failings and invest in changing themselves is the true test of great leadership.

Vote!

Nov 6, 2012. Election Day.

Vote!

If you’re not willing to be part of the process, don’t whine about the results.

Lost in Map Land

The map, as many people know, is not the territory. However, as discussed in a recent NY Times editorial, some iPhone 5 users are finding that the map app doesn’t even do a job representing the territory. I haven’t had that particular problem yet; I’ve been too busy with a different irritating feature of iOS6: podcast management.

In iOS5, I could download my podcasts through the Music app and assemble them into playlists on my iPhone. In iOS6, Apple removed that functionality from the Music app — oh, you can still make song playlists, just not podcasts — and moved podcast management to Apple’s podcast app. Not only is this app slow and buggy, it doesn’t allow users to assemble playlists.

This leads me to wonder if Apple is succumbing to the Creeping Box trap. The Creeping Box trap is something I wrote about in my book, The 36-Hour on Organizational Development, and spoke about in several talks I’ve given on organizational culture and innovation. Fundamentally, it’s what happens when the box you’ve been thinking outside of finally catches up with you. In Apple’s case, the original iPhone created a whole new standard for smart phones. The iPad created a whole new space for tablet computing. Apple blazed the trail, and plenty of other companies followed them or are on the way. They are all in a new box that Steve Jobs built.

Here’s the thing: Apple’s competitors have much less to lose than Apple. They are trying to knock Apple off its perch. Assuming the have the sense to not bet the farm, the worst that can happen to them is that the status quo remains unchanged: “The <new, revised, improved> <Google, Amazon, Samsung, Nosuchco> <Nexus, Kindle Fire, Galaxy, Clay Slab> is really nice but doesn’t live up to the <iPhone, iPad>. Still consumers will like… and so they’ll sell enough of their tablets to make it worthwhile to try again. And, if they beat the iPhone or iPad, the rewards are immense. Indeed, I know many people would argue, with a great deal of justification, that there are plenty of phones out there as good or better than the iPhone 5.

Don’t get me wrong: the iPhone 5 is a beautiful piece of technology. I’ll probably upgrade to one eventually (unless I decide to stick it out and see what the iPhone 6 looks like 🙂 ). But it’s a lot closer to the iPhone 4s than the iPhone 3g was to the original iPhone. Apple may be growing the box, but it sure isn’t outside it, and they have lots of company in there.

So here’s the thing: Apple’s competitors are looking to find a way out of the box that Steve Jobs created. Is Apple?

What You See is Why You Do

I’m frequently asked for help motivating employees. The fact is, motivation is not that hard… provided you’ve built the right foundation!

When someone tells me that his department has a motivation problem, my first question is, “What’s your vision?”

The most common response is a blank look. Vision? Isn’t that some silly psychobabble or convenient buzzword?

Unfortunately, the concept of vision is often treated that way. Your vision, however, and your enthusiasm for it, are what make the difference between people who just show up and do their jobs and people who are excited and determined to excel.

People are motivated by their hopes and dreams, by causes, by being part of something that matters beyond the next paycheck. If you are the CEO, your enthusiasm is what brings the vision to life. If you are a manager, VP, department head, etc, then your enthusiasm in how you communicate the vision is what brings it to life for your team. If they see that you don’t care, why should they care?

I was recently listening to an Old Time Radio Science Fiction podcast of the classic Fritz Lieber sotry, “A Pail of Air.” At the end of the story, they played John F. Kennedy’s famous speech in which he vowed that the United States would land a man on the moon and bring him back again. Even now, 50 years later, it is still a powerful speech. Listening to him, it’s easy to see how his vision galvanized a nation.

The good news is that you don’t need to be John Kennedy to galvanize a company.  People devote hours to charities and hobbies because they have a vision of making a difference or achieving something significant. The key is to craft an exciting vision and then let your enthusiasm show.

I’ve often observed that the apparently unmotivated person at the office is the same person whom you’d find outside each evening training for a marathon or a hundred-mile bike ride (aka a “century”): it’s all a question of where they find meaning. I figured the concept was pretty clear, even though I’ve never run a marathon or ridden a century. I could never convince myself that it was worth the time and the pain involved in training for one of those endurance events.

Last summer, my father-in-law, Ira Yermish, died suddenly and unexpectedly. He was 64 and a serious endurance athlete, with seven Iron Man competitions and innumerable marathons and bike centuries under his belt.

This coming August, my wife, daughter, and I will be riding the Philly Livestrong Challenge in his memory. Livestrong raises money to help improve the lives of people with cancer, making this event even more significant: my mother died of cancer 13 years ago. Suddenly I have a cause, so training for a bike century just doesn’t seem quite so overwhelming.

Whom do you know who has died of cancer, or is living with it today? Please help make people’s lives better by donating to the Livestrong Foundation.

That vision thing? Yeah, it works.

Make Believe Can Really Help Business

I was very pleased to see that Lizzie Stark’s new book, “Leaving Mundania: Inside the World of Grownup Make-Believe” is now available. Lizzie’s book is an excellent explanation of live-action roleplaying (larping) and how it works.

But  wait? Isn’t larping just a game? How can it help my business? I’m glad you asked.

All businesses need to provide leadership to their members, motivate employees, and negotiate with individuals and organizations. The problem is practicing those skills in an environment that doesn’t feel artificial. A well-designed, serious larp provides an engrossing, entertaining training experience. Players are able to get into the game and as a result deal with the problems that come up much as they would in real life. Whether a player gives up in frustration after encountering an obstacle or comes up with a creative out of the box solution, that tells you they’ll likely do the same thing on the job. Conversely, when someone shines in the game, but is a mediocre performer on the job, that alerts employers to untapped potential.

In sports, teams practice their skills over and over to deal with every conceivable scenario. Businesses rarely have that luxury. When I design a serious larp for a business, the experience of playing in the scenario enables employees to practice and hone skills before the critical situation in which they are needed. Employees also have the opportunity to experiment and make mistakes in an environment in which there are no financial consequences to the business. Finally employees who need additional skill training can be identified before they fail on the job.

If you want an academic treatment of larping, click here. Otherwise, I encourage you take a look at “Leaving Mundania,” and think about how you can use the games she describes to help your business (and have a good time!).

Good leadership traits? Not so fast…

I frequently hear about someone exhibiting good “leadership traits.” Someone who exhibits leadership traits, the argument goes, is more likely to become a successful leader, or at least a leader.

The whole concept of identifying traits and then attempting to identify those traits in other people as a way of meaning, well, anything has a long and venerable history.

In the field of Sport Psychology, a great deal of effort was put into identifying the traits of top athletes and then using those traits to identify potential top athletes from amongst young athletes.

It failed. Miserably. Despite this fact, it’s still popular. In one of my graduate sport psych classes, we were presented with the data on using traits to identify potential top athletes (worse than chance, as I recall). Despite this, about a third of the class insisted that they would still use that method of selecting new athletes for the Olympic Team because, “It just has to work!”

In the field of leadership, a great deal of effort was spent on identifying the traits of top leaders and then using that information to identify potential leaders. It failed as well.

While it seems like a very attractive concept, that if we could just identify the traits of top <X>, then future top <X> would share those traits, it just doesn’t work. Amongst other things that came out of the various studies is that many of these top athletes and leaders did not even exhibit those traits or characteristics when they were young (were they traits that simply hadn’t manifested or learned behaviors? Not clear), and many of those who did never developed into top <X> despite all the attempts to make them so.

A good current example of this flawed reasoning is something someone recently brought to my attention: the concept of Edison Traits. It feels good, but based on the results of similar efforts in other areas, is likely to be meaningless. It appears to be based on the argument that if someone exhibits traits similar to those the history books tell us that Edison exhibited, they’ll grow up to be like Edison or something. It also appears to argue that Edison himself must have had ADHD (I’m not sure why), and that this is beneficial in becoming a brilliant inventor like Edison.

The idea that Thomas Edison had ADHD is, itself, questionable. Intensely inquisitive, challenge seeking, high intelligence does not equal ADHD (so if you think that everyone in your office has ADHD, odds are pretty good you need to take another look…).

At the risk of going off on a tangent, the general concept of trying to argue that ADHD is “Hunter’s Mind” or anything else other than a difficulty in executive functioning is also flawed. That’s not to say that ADHD can’t be used to your advantage: consider Robin Williams.

However, the argument that ADHD is an advantage to a hunter (for example) ignores the reality of survival hunting: long periods of boredom, hours spent practicing skills, etc. To the extent that I’ve read up on this topic, in present day Hunter/Gatherer societies (e.g. in Papua New Guinea), people who cannot regulate attention do not make good hunters.

To some extent, at least some of these beliefs stem from the observation that kids with ADHD do better in martial arts and similar activities. The key is “do better than what?” They do better than they would in more sedentary activities and better than they do in activities with less immediate feedback. Do they do better than kids without ADHD? Once we correct for athleticism, intelligence, etc, the answer is no. Everything that is seen as an advantage for kids with ADHD (e.g. rapid field shifting) is quite easily learnable with sufficient practice by people without ADHD, and those people without ADHD are also much more able to spend the time in routine, boring practice (granted, highly intelligent children and adults often have trouble with routine practice, but that’s not ADHD — that’s normal boredom with routine activities with distant payoffs. The best fix is to make the activity more interesting if at all possible).

Moving back to the question of leadership traits, your odds are better if you train people in effective leadership skills. If you really want to see how someone will be as a leader, put them in scenarios in which they can demonstrate leadership (if you don’t want to risk the farm, predictive scenario serious games are a good tool for leadership identification and development).

In the end, performance, not some mysterious set of traits, is your best method for identifying leaders.

The Death of Brainstorming?

An article by Susan Cain appearing in the NY Times a few weeks ago argued that brainstorming is counterproductive, a poor way to stimulate creativity.

While the arguments are persuasive, they are also flawed. They appear to proceed from the assumption that brainstorming is a relatively simple process that can be done by any group at any time. In fact, effective brainstorming is surprisingly difficult, and problems with team cohesion, decision making, and leadership can easily turn it into an unpleasant time-waster. Teams that haven’t developed good conflict management and debate skills are also unlikely to brainstorm effectively. Rather than producing good ideas, they are likely to experience exactly the sorts of groupthink that Cain argues is likely to occur.

Fundamentally, though, Cain’s article confounds several problems and concludes, therefore, that brainstorming doesn’t work. So let’s look at how to make it work:

Don’t take on too much in one day. 3-4 topics are about it, probably less. In general, the more important the topic, the more that should be your focus. Spending several days on one large topic is often seen as a “waste” of time, but, done correctly, is actually the most likely way to get useful results.

Give yourself lots of time and take short breaks every 60-90 minutes. Take a long lunch break and get out of the office. Brainstorming is surprisingly draining, so taking regular breaks gives people a chance to refresh their perspective and keep the creative juices flowing. Once people start getting tired, the quality of ideas and effective debate decline rapidly.

Don’t try to cram more work into the day: after 4-6 hours of serious brainstorming, people are drained. If they know they have to go back to work afterward, they’ll hold back during the brainstorming, or do low quality work because they’re tired. Go out to dinner or something afterward and call it a success.

Separate idea generation from idea evaluation. Evaluating ideas as they are presented only invites argument and defensiveness. Instead, spend half your time collecting ideas, no matter how outrageous. Some people brainstorm very effectively by being silly or cracking jokes. Let it flow. I’ve found that the craziest ideas often provide the spark for the best solutions. After you’ve collected enough ideas, then take a break, or even wait until the next day, and then evaluate them. A little distance gives wonderful perspective.

Assign someone to collect ideas; don’t rely on memory. Use multiple whiteboards, an easel with a giant pad of paper, your favorite technology, etc. It can often help to bring in an outside facilitator who has no emotional connection to any outcome. This also helps prevent the appearance of bias or of having someone emotionally connected to a particular outcome attempting to influence the result.

Work in a large, brightly lit space. Institutional gray only dampens creativity. Yes, physical environment matters. A change of venue, away from the office, can work wonders.

If you find your team slipping into a groupthink mentality or unable to agree on a course of action, that’s not a problem with brainstorming. That’s a problem with your debate and decision making process. Bring in someone who can help you fix it, or your brainstorming efforts are going to be a waste of time (in addition, problems with debate and decision making are likely to be reducing your productivity in other areas as well!).

Brainstorming is a powerful tool, if you use it correctly.

Komen Along With Us

The firestorm incited by the Komen Foundation’s decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood hit the front page of the NY Times today.

What’s interesting here is the magnitude and virulence of the reaction. It’s not like Komen’s decision is the first attack on Planned Parenthood. Indeed, viewed in context, one could argue that this is just one attack out of many relatively indistinguishable attacks. So what’s going on here?

Fundamentally, the Komen Foundation made people feel like tools and fools, while simultaneously making them feel disgusted with themselves.

How this happened is relevant to any organization, non-profit or for-profit, that depends upon a large constituency to provide it with resources, be those resources money (e.g. customers buying product or making donations), time (e.g. volunteers), credibility (e.g. convincing your friends to support the organization), etc.

Organizations pay attention to their power bases. Organizations group people into a few different major groups:

1. The people who don’t care and won’t care no matter what; no significant effort is expended on these people.
2. The people who fundamentally believe in the cause/mission/values of the organization and provide resources to the organization, but pay little attention to the details. The organization will invest a certain amount of its resources in the form of public relations and outreach to convince these people to continue provide their resources (time, money, goods, etc). Because these people have demonstrated that they aren’t all that involved, or will provide resources no matter how much they might complain, the organization doesn’t really care what these people think or do so long as they continue to provide those resources.
3. The people who pay close attention and are actively involved and mobilized. These are the people who are actually important to the organization because they might withdraw their support if they don’t like what they see. The organization will focus its efforts on courting those people and make policy decisions intended to please those people.

Now, one can argue that if you push the people in category 2 far enough, they might well change their behavior and withhold resources. This is a valid argument, however there are two problems with it: 1) it can take a very long time for someone to decide they are so unhappy as to radically change their behavior and 2) would you pay more attention to the person who has already demonstrated their willingness to withhold resources if they are not happy or to the person who has demonstrated that they might withhold resources in some nebulous and poorly defined future state, but to date has been willing to swallow whatever you feed them?

In the case of the Komen Foundation, if someone jumps up and screams and yells about them cutting funding to Planned Parenthood, but in the end says, “But I strongly believe in their mission, so I’ll continue to give them money,” then that person’s opinion doesn’t matter. That’s category two.

Here’s the problem, at least for an organization: people enter category two because they believe in the values of the organization and see the organization as being congruent with their belief system. In the case of Komen, many people not just donated their money, but they also advertised the organization, gave their time, and encouraged their friends to donate. They saw themselves as part of a larger group dedicated to a worthy cause. They saw themselves as valued contributors to that worthy cause.

And then, pow!, all these people suddenly find that the values they thought the group held are not actually the values. They suddenly find that Komen is operating according to a set of values that may, in fact, contradict the values of its supporters. It’s kind of like thinking that you’re supporting Smokey the Bear and discovering that you’re really supporting Stokey, the fire-setting bear.

In other words, people get very upset when they realize they are in category two. They are upset for three significant reasons: the easy and obvious reason is that they’ve just discovered that they are being taken for granted. Instead of being seen as valued contributors, they are being seen as tools. This makes no one happy. We like to feel important, that the organization views us as a person, not a tool to its own ends. This is one of the reasons, by the way, why really good customer service is such a powerful tool for creating customer loyalty. It makes people feel they matter.

The second, and more serious, reason is that when an organization appears to be acting against its stated values, we feel fooled or tricked. For example, people tend to get more upset when an Apple device fails to work correctly than when a Windows device fails to work correctly. Apple Just Works and when it doesn’t, we feel tricked, whereas when a Windows device fails to work correctly, that’s just normal. When Google does something perceived as evil, people react very strongly: for example, when Google agreed to censor search results in China. Facebook, on the other hand, is an entirely different story.

The third, and most serious reason why people get upset, is that when we realize that supporting the organization means acting against our own personal values, we feel deeply betrayed. Not only did we support something we actually don’t believe in, we’ve put our credibility on the line by convincing our friends to support it as well. Now it’s personal: our self-image has just been called into question.

In one stroke, Komen managed a triple whammy: they hit all three reasons why people might get upset. The only surprising thing is that the reaction hasn’t been even stronger. On the other hand, the news cycle is still young.

New Year’s Resolutions? Forget it!

It’s barely the start of the new year, and I’ve already received half a dozen identical articles touting the benefits of SMART goals as the solution to all my New Year’s resolutions.

Now, to be fair, they have a point as far as it goes: New Year’s resolutions have a shorter half-life than champagne at a New Year’s party. However, that’s about as useful as these articles get.

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, SMART goals are often touted as the secret to personal and business success. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty safe bet that most of these goals will go the way of all New Year’s resolutions. Why? Because none of these articles actually tell you how to make SMART goals work. In fact, most people who try the SMART approach for any but small and relatively easy goals frequently find themselves frustrated and disillusioned.

Well-constructed goals are extremely powerful tools for getting things done, increasing concentration and motivation. Successfully completing a well-constructed goal builds self-confidence. Unfortunately, creating a well-constructed SMART goal is not quite so simple as the average article makes it out to be.

To begin with, a specific goal is only useful if it’s something you can control. Although this may seem obvious, the fact is that far too many people set goals that appear to be under their control, but really are not. For example, consider the athlete who sets the goal of winning an upcoming tournament: it’s specific, it’s measurable, it has a time of completion associated with it, and presumably it’s highly relevant to the athlete. Is it achievable? Depending on the athlete’s level of skill, very possibly. However, the athlete has no control over the difficulty of the competition. He may simply be outplayed by a more skilled opponent.

Furthermore, although the goal is measurable, in that the athlete will know whether or not he accomplishes it, the measurement is not particularly useful. At no time will he know how close he is to accomplishing the goal, where he needs to focus his energies, or what else needs to be accomplished. The athlete is far better served by setting the goal of exercising certain key skills in the competition, skills that have a high probability of leading to a victory. Not only will he gain the self-confidence boost of accomplishing his goal, he may just win the tournament. Whether your goal is winning a competition, selling a product to a particular customer, or getting a specific job, focusing mainly on outcomes only gets you in trouble.

Another problem is that a goal may simply be too big. If a goal takes years to accomplish, it can be extremely difficult to maintain motivation. Big, ambitious goals are wonderful, but they need to be carefully structured. It is vital to break them down into subgoals that can be accomplished in a much shorter period of time. The perception of progress is critical to maintaining motivation, whether for an individual or a team.

Having too many goals is another common problem. Well constructed goals are great, but if you have too many of them at once, they become a distraction. Many people can focus on three to five unrelated goals without a problem, but not ten or twenty. Keeping in mind that each goal might generate numerous subgoals along the way, it’s easy to see how having more than a few key goals can easily balloon out of control.

Is the goal something you really care about? Many people have goals that they don’t really care about. Perhaps they’ve been told it’s something they ought to do or they believe they should do, but they don’t really care about the outcome. If you don’t care whether or not you accomplish a goal, it’s hard to find the motivation to do it.

Used properly, SMART goals can be a very powerful and effective tool. Well-constructed goals can increase motivation, improve focus, and build self-confidence. Used improperly, they can decrease motivation, and destroy self-confidence. If you’re using SMART goals, here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do I control the outcome?

Can I measure progress in a meaningful way?

Is my goal too big? How can I break it up?

Do I have too many goals? Is there enough time in the day/week/month to work on each one?

When will I work on each piece of my goal? How will they chain together?

Do I really care about my goal? Is this something I genuinely want to accomplish?

Good luck!