This article was originally written a couple years ago, but always seems rather appropriate for the holiday season…
The holidays are the season for Yankee Swaps. Now, a Yankee Swap would seem to be a fairly simple and straightforward activity: each person either chooses a wrapped gift or steals an opened gift from someone else. This latter activity can, of course, trigger a chain reaction, but that’s part of the fun. At the end, everyone feels like they had at least some measure of control over the outcome. One would think it difficult, if not impossible, to mess up a Yankee Swap.
However, all things are possible. In this case, one company held a Yankee Swap with incredibly detailed and complicated rules which had as its most salient feature that no gifts were opened until the very end. In other words, the experience was transformed into the equivalent of a very slow grab bag: a long, frustrating, totally random process at the end of which people felt that they had no control over the outcome. Ironically, the most common complaint from employees at this company is that many of the rules are complex, time consuming, and leave them feeling like they have very little control over how they get their work done.
Now, a Yankee Swap is a pretty insignificant event, little more than an amusing party game. However, how a business goes about designing a small process says a lot about how it goes about designing larger, more significant processes: process design is strongly influenced by institutional habits and beliefs. With a small process, it’s easy to see the results of that belief in action because the entire event can be seen at one time; with larger processes, cause and effect may be separated by weeks or months, and the process is often so big that no one ever views it as a whole. The company ends up wondering why their results are poor, but can’t figure out the reasons. Those small processes can provide valuable insights into the company’s methodology and assumptions; recognizing consistent causes of small problems can enable you to avoid large ones. Ultimately, more important than improving one process is improving how the company designs all its processes.
In designing a process, it helps to clearly understand what you are trying to accomplish. Why did this particular company choose to redesign the Yankee Swap? Was there an actual problem that someone was trying to solve? Clearly, someone felt a need to come up with something, although their motives are impossible to fathom. As a result, they got a process that rather missed the point, but did end up reflective of the organization as a whole. However, it’s generally more successful to focus on results:
- Clearly define the objective. If the objective is to solve a problem, take the time to look at the symptoms and consider what they mean. When do they come up? Under what circumstances? Remember, the symptoms are not the problem, they’re just the symptoms. Generate a list of hypotheses and then test them to see if they lead to the observed symptoms. Solving the wrong problem will generally make things worse, not better.
- Describe what a successful outcome will look like. What will have changed? What behaviors will be different? Make this concrete. If success is, “people will have more fun,” how will you know? If the picture isn’t clear, identify the questions you need to answer to bring clarity. This may be an iterative process.
- Identify what you can change and what you can’t. You probably can’t change the economy, but you can change how you deal with it. Tom Watson Sr., founder of IBM, used the Great Depression as an opportunity to build up a highly trained, extremely loyal workforce and a stockpile of equipment. When WWII started, IBM was in an excellent position to capitalize on the reawakening economy. If everything falls into the “can’t change” category, you need to revisit your goal or problem formulation.
- Brainstorm possible solutions or approaches. Record ideas and do not evaluate any of them until you have a significant number of possibilities. Don’t worry if some ideas are silly or off-the-wall: innovative solutions come from the most unlikely sources.
- Will your solutions really get you where you want to go? Do research. Don’t rely on opinion and conjecture.
- Define your action steps.
- Execute and evaluate. Did it work? If not, check your problem formulation and try again.
If you’re not getting the results you want, what steps are you missing?
Here’s the blurb from my appearance on the Full Potential Show. For the actual show, click here.
Can sports be used for more than just fun and pleasure? You bet! The same disciplines or character development, leadership and team based skills applies to almost every other domain in life.
Steve Balzac is a man of many talents. He is a consultant, speaker, and author of 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development. He is a popular speaker on such topics as leadership, team building, interviewing skills, and sports performance. In this interview, he shares the lessons he has learned from the sports he excels in – Jiu Jitsu and fencing – and how they tie-in with the honing of leadership and organizational development potential.
THE TIE IN
a) Use the other person’s force against him (as in Jiu Jitsu)
b) Meet and go with the force of the other person in order to take him to where you want him to go
c) In a difficult situation, attract the other person to where you want to take him
d) Don’t be afraid to try different techniques, even if you have to look like an idiot sometimes
e) Explore and practice the fundamentals well (as in fencing)
f) Build yourself to a point where you can stay focused for long periods of time
g) When you’re up there, you should not care whether you win or lose. If you focus on the outcome, you doubt yourself and hesitate
h) After preparing your team, give them permission to go off and achieve what they need to
i) Look at mistakes as the cornerstone of innovation and as a part of the process of evolution
j) Determine if mistakes repeatedly committed is due to a flaw in the system
k) Don’t do all your research ahead of time – it’s impossible to know everything ahead of time
l) Develop a culture where it’s acceptable of everybody to commit mistakes, including you
m) Consult with your followers to show them you’re interested in listening to their ideas
FINAL POINTERS ON LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT:
1) Tell your own story – what you’re trying to do and why you care about it
2) While you should have an outcome, dwelling on it during show time can actually hinder performance
3) Walk your way backwards through the steps from the outcome – this will make the first step very easy
4) Don’t be afraid to ask someone to show you the way (no team makes it to the Olympics without a coach). This will shorten your learning curve.
FINAL THOUGHTS
• “Experiment” is synonymous with mistakes and breakthroughs.
September 20th,2011
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As published in Corp! Magazine
“Is the product done?” a certain manager asked during a product review meeting.
“It is done,” replied the engineer building the product.
“Are there any problems?”
“There are problems.”
“What is the problem?”
“It does not work.”
“Why doesn’t it work?”
“It is not done.”
I will spare you the transcription of the subsequent half hour of this not particularly funny comedy routine. The manager and the engineer managed to perform this little dance of talking past one another without ever seeming to realize just how ludicrous it sounded to everyone else in the room. It was rather like Monty Python’s classic Hungarian-English phrasebook sketch, in which translations in either direction are random. In other words, the Hungarian phrase, “I would like to buy a ticket,” might be translated to the English phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.”
It was extremely funny when Monty Python performed it. As for the manager and the engineer, well, perhaps they just didn’t have the comedic timing of Python’s John Cleese and Graham Chapman.
As it happens, “my hovercraft is full of eels” moments come about far too often. What was unusual in this situation is that it involved only two people. Usually, considerably more people take part. Thus, instead of a not particularly amusing exchange between two people, there is an extremely frustrating exchange involving several people. The most common failure to communicate is the game of telephone: as the message passes along the line, it becomes increasingly distorted.
What I hear from teams over and over is, “We are communicating! We send email to everyone.” This is where the hovercraft starts to fill with eels. Broadcasting is not really communicating: effective business communications require a certain amount of back and forth, questioning and explaining, before everyone is on the same page.
Who talks to whom? When you send out an email, do questions come back to you? Or do people on the team quietly ask one another to explain what you meant? While it’s comforting to believe that every missive we send out is so carefully crafted as to be completely unambiguous, very few of us write that well. Of that select few, even fewer can do it all the time. Particularly in the early stages of a project, if there are no questions, then there are certainly problems.
When someone else asks a question, either via email or in a meeting, does everyone wait for you to respond? Even worse, does Bob only jump into a thread if Fred jumps in first? Who is Bob responding to at that point, you or Fred? Are you still addressing the main topic or is the hovercraft starting to become eel infested?
It can be extremely frustrating to ask, “Are there any questions?” and receive either dead silence or questions about something trivial. It can easily become tempting to assume that there are no questions and just race full speed ahead. However, until employees figure out how much each person understands about the project and how you will respond to apparently dumb questions, they will be cautious about what they ask. Their curiosity is as much about one another and about you as it is about the project. How that curiosity gets satisfied determines whether you have productive conversations or a hovercraft that is full of eels. In the former case, you get strong employee engagement; in the latter case, you don’t.
If you’ve been working with a team for some months, or longer, and people are still not asking questions then there are really only two possibilities: either your team is composed of professional mind-readers or you are about to find a room full of those pesky eels. No project is ever perfectly defined from the beginning. Questions and debate should be ongoing throughout the development or production cycle. A lack of questions tells you that there is a lack of trust between the team members and between the team members and you. When trust is lacking, so is engagement.
Now some good news: remedying that lack of trust isn’t all that complicated. It does, however, require a certain amount of persistence and patience.
Start by highlighting each person’s role and contribution to the project. Why are they there? What makes them uniquely qualified to fill the role they are in? Be specific and detailed. If you can’t clearly define their roles, you can rest assured that they can’t either. Questions come when people are clear about their roles. Disengagement comes when people are not clear about their roles.
Prime the pump with questions. Demonstrate that you don’t have all the answers and that you need the help of the team to find them. Give each person a chance to play the expert while you ask the dumb questions. When you set the tone, the others will follow. Communications start with the person in charge.
Separate producing answers from evaluating answers. Collect up the possibilities and take a break before you start examining them and making decisions about them. Brainstorming without evaluating allows ideas to build upon one another and apparently unworkable ideas to spark other ideas. Pausing to examine each potential answer as it comes up kills that process.
Encourage different forms of brainstorming: some people are very analytical, some are intuitive, some generate ideas by cracking jokes, others pace, and so on. Choose a venue where people are comfortable and only step in if the creative juices start to run dry or tempers start to get short. In either case, that means you need to take a break. Intense discussions are fine, heated discussions not so much.
Initially, you will have to make all the decisions. That’s fine, but don’t get too comfortable with it. As trust and engagement build, the team will want to become more involved in the decision making process. Invite them in: that demonstration of trust will further build engagement and foster effective communications. Effective communications, in turn, builds trust and engagement.
Having a hovercraft full of eels isn’t the real problem. The real problem is what a hovercraft full of eels tells you about the trust, engagement, and communications in your company.
September 6th,2011
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A nervous looking man in a suit slips furtively through the streets of an unnamed city. He comes to an office building and, checking to make sure that he isn’t being watched, slips inside. There, another man greets him.
“Do you have the plans?” the second man asks.
“Do you have the money?” replies the first.
Perhaps they haggle for a moment, but then the second man hands over the money and the first man hands over an envelope. The second man glances into the envelope.
“I see you kept your word.”
“You earned it,” replies the first man as he turns to leave.
“No,” says the second, as he pulls a gun and shoots the first man, “I bought it.”
“I betrayed my company for you! I proved my loyalty.” gasps the first man, as he falls to the floor.
The second man looks down at the body on the floor and says, “The man who betrays one master will assuredly betray another.”
If this scene sounds familiar, it probably is. Some variation of it appears in hundreds of movies, from James Bond to WWII action films to fantasy adventure. The trope is a simple one: a man betrays his country, company, organization, or teacher. The person to whom he sells out reaps the rewards, but never believes the traitor’s protestations of loyalty to his new masters. Eventually, it ends badly for the traitor.
Now, if this scenario were only a work of fiction, there would be little more to say. Unfortunately, the fictional part is the end: in real life the disloyal person is rewarded and given every opportunity to betray his new masters.
Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership
August 22nd,2011
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As published in the CEO Refresher
A friend of mine was telling me over coffee about a problem he was having with a light fixture in his house. It seems that every light bulb he put in would burn out in short order. No matter what he checked, everything seemed to be working correctly, with the notable exception of the instantly expiring light bulbs. Eventually, he got a bright idea: he put in a compact fluorescent bulb. He assured me that this was not because he’d run out of incandescent bulbs, but because he really didn’t want to call in an electrician and be told the problem was something obvious. Oddly enough, though, the compact fluorescent bulb did the trick. It worked perfectly and hasn’t yet burned out. While my friend has no idea why the incandescent bulbs don’t work in that light socket, he did solve his major problem: lighting the room.
Now, the obvious point here is that it’s all about finding the right fit: just because someone looks like they fit into your team doesn’t mean that they actually fit in. Like many things that seem blindingly obvious, it’s not quite correct. There are three valuable lessons to be learned from this experience.
The first point is that feedback is only useful if you pay attention to it. After a few bulbs burned out, the solution was not to curse and keep screwing in more light bulbs unless, of course, your goal is to become a punch line in some sort of elaborate light bulb joke. Once it becomes obvious that what you’re doing isn’t working, there is no point in yelling or complaining about it. Light bulbs are notoriously unimpressed by how much or how loudly you curse at them. People are not much different. Yelling at someone produces grudging change at best; you’re more likely to just convince them to go elsewhere. Trying something different, however, can yield surprisingly good results. The best leaders pay attention to how people are responding to them, and adapt their leadership style as their employees become more skilled and capable. On the other hand, if you find that people on your team are getting burned out, it’s time to try something different. You need a different team or a different style of management, possibly both. To put things a different way, a consistent lack of fit can alert you that something is wrong with your team, no matter how good it all looks on the surface. The lack of fit might be you!
The next point is that it’s easy to become focused around solving the problem in a very specific way, as opposed to accomplishing the goal. My friend was burning out light bulbs and poking around with a volt meter, because he was busy trying to understand why the socket wasn’t working. It might have been the socket. It might have been a box of bad bulbs. It might have been something completely different. In a very real sense, none of those things mattered: what mattered was that he wanted to illuminate the room. Taking a different approach allowed him to do that. By keeping the perspective of the overall goal, it becomes easier to brainstorm multiple different solutions, to innovate instead of simply fix what’s broken.
Finally, rooms are rarely lit by just one bulb. Indeed, looking around different rooms I almost always see multiple light fixtures, lamps, sconces, etc. It’s easy to get caught in the mindset that each socket must hold the same kind of bulb. It is also a common misconception that the best way to build a team is to have a group of people with similar skills. Certainly, that makes it easier to divide up the work and to make compare one person’s contribution against another’s. However, it also makes for a team that is more limited, less able to solve a variety of problems. A the risk of stretching this analogy out of shape, if the reason the incandescent bulb was going out turns out to be something that eventually involves every socket in the house, my friend could easily find himself in the dark. Similarly, one software company hired only engineers who were expert algorithm developers. When customers complained that the product was unusable, they were in the dark about what to do. They simply didn’t understand how to address interface problems. While having both incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs won’t help in a power failure, in other situations you are far more likely to have at least something working. Similarly, a more varied team might not solve every problem they encounter, but they will solve a lot more problems.
While all these lessons are important, there is also a “zero-eth” lesson: had my friend called an electrician, he would have saved himself a great deal of time and aggravation and illuminated the room much more quickly. Instead, he was stuck until he accidently hit on a solution. How often do business problems get dealt with that way?
July 18th,2011
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As published in The CEO Refresher
Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting down in front of your brand new 72 inch flat screen TV. The picture is fantastic, and the room is huge, or at least good-sized. After all, if the room is too small, it’ll be hard to sit far enough from the screen to really appreciate the picture. But, assuming that you have a little distance, the quality and the detail is just amazing. You can relax and see everything. Of course, if the show you’re watching is really exciting, you may find that you’ve missed a few of those details while you focused on the main action. That’s hardly unusual, and is a reason why people will often watch a movie more than once. Successive viewings allow them to pick up the little details that they might have missed the first, or even the second, time through.
Now, should you be sitting a little too close to that screen, it can be difficult to pick up some of the details. You can focus really well on the spot in front of you, but other parts of the screen can be hard to see. You might need to shift position or turn your head to follow the action. Even then, if the action gets too exciting, you may find it confusing or hard to follow. You might even find yourself getting caught up in the details that are right in front of your nose and ending up with a very confused perspective on what the entire show was all about.
At one time, I worked with a company that kept exhorting people to focus on the big picture. At the same time, they kept setting extremely aggressive goals with very tight deadlines. Everyone was pushing themselves to the limit trying to meet the deadlines. It was more than a little difficult for people to focus on anything other than the immediate problems they were trying to solve. It was kind of like sitting a bit too close to that 72 inch flat screen television and getting caught up in the exciting details right in front you.
At various meetings, it swiftly didn’t become clear that no one really knew what the big picture was. The reason it didn’t become clear was that at the first couple of meetings those who raised questions or attempted to find out what the big picture was were castigated for not paying more attention to that big picture. They were also chewed out for not focusing more on their areas of individual responsibility. People learned very rapidly to focus on their own areas and nod sagely in response to questions about the big picture. At least that way you’d only get chewed on over one thing.
The resulting product could be described charitably as a little schizophrenic. It was the equivalent of the blind men describing the elephant, with the added benefit of having a fifth blind man sitting nearby talking about the elephant’s wings.
If you really want people to focus on the big picture, there are a few things that need to happen in order to make that possible.
First, silly though it may seem to mention this, you have to have a big picture. I can’t count the number of organizations, for-profit and non-profit alike, where I’ve asked about overall vision and gotten nothing but static. A 72 inch television shows snow really well, so well that you might not even realize that you’re looking at static. Take the time to delineate your vision.
Second, you need to make it easy for people to see the big picture. The company I mentioned earlier was trying to make it hard for people to ignore the big picture. Unfortunately, the harder they made it to ignore the big picture, the harder they made it to see the big picture. There’s a reason why people see movies more than once: when we’re excited or stressed we miss the details that are not in front of us. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t get instant replays. Therefore, we need to reduce the stress level if we want people to pay attention to things that are not of immediate concern.
Third, distance makes a big difference. When we’re too close to the problem, it’s hard to see anything beyond it. Just like sitting too close to that 72 inch TV, we forget about things not in our immediate field of vision. If you want people to focus on the big picture, you need to create some metaphorical space so that they can take it in. That requires taking the team away from the daily routine to periodically review the big picture. Help each person see why their piece is important and how it fits in. Connect the dots. Give people perspective.
Finally, encourage questions and give honest answers. That includes admitting when you don’t know. Don’t yell at people for not seeing the big picture; instead, view it as feedback that either the big picture isn’t being communicated well or isn’t clear. Invite feedback and encourage people to contribute to fleshing out the picture. It’s a lot easier to focus on the big picture when you feel involved.
It’s amazing how much better the picture is when you give yourself the space to enjoy it.
As published in the Worcester Business Journal
My 6-year-old son is seriously into Star Wars. As we were watching the movies recently, he turned to me and asked, “Why is Darth Vader such a mean leader?”
Coming from a kid who thinks the Sith are kind of cool, the question took me by surprise. On the other hand, it’s rather heartening to see that even a small child can recognize bad management. Of course, the real question is not what makes Darth Vader such a bad leader. After all, when you’re the Dark Lord of the Sith, you don’t really need a reason. More aptly, the question is: What does it take to be a good leader?
No Intimidation
First, we have to dispense with the primary weapon of the Sith: fear. Darth Vader rules through terror, but the fact is, you don’t need to have the power to choke people to death using the Force to create a climate of fear. Fear is very effective at getting people to move away from something. In the practice of Jujitsu, fear of injury is often quite sufficient to convince an attacker to dive headfirst into the ground or into the nearest wall. Some mistakes are a natural part of doing business. When people are shamed for making mistakes or threatened with loss of their jobs if they don’t measure up, they become less creative, less dedicated and errors are not corrected.
Team Spirit
To be a positive leader, the first step you need to take is to focus on affiliation. You might also think of it as team spirit. When people come together to form a team, the first thing they do is look for common ground. To really create affiliation, the leader needs to actively get to know his team members and encourage them to get to know one another.
Independence
Next is building autonomy. Perhaps counter-intuitively, autonomy is the result of having structure. Structure lets each team member know what the others are doing well enough to trust them when they aren’t visible. That trust is what permits autonomy.
Lack of structure is chaos. Too much structure is stifling. For example, when an employee comes up with a good idea and your response is to ignore them, that is too little structure. When you say, “Good idea! Here’s how we can make it better!” that’s too much structure. Appropriate structure is to say, “Great idea! How did you come up with it?”
Great Expectations
Competence is not just hiring competent people. It’s creating an atmosphere of competence. Nothing succeeds like the expectation of success.
Managers can motivate employees in one of two ways: you can focus on failures, and make dire predictions about what will happen if employees screw up; or you can focus on success, and remind the employee of the things they did well.
The keys to great leadership are: get away from fear, build affiliation, create structure to enable autonomy, and craft an atmosphere of competence.
The hard part is finding the right balance for your team and your company. Start slowly and let yourself accelerate as you learn to use these techniques effectively. You’ll soon be amazed at how fast you’re going.
May 31st,2011
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As published in Corp! Magazine
If a tree falls in the driveway and no one is awake to hear it, does it make a sound?
The answer is a definitive yes. A very loud, cracking noise to be precise.
Not only does a large tree do a very good job of blocking a driveway, it isn’t exactly the best thing for the car that happened to be in that driveway.
April Fool’s Day in Boston started out like a typical Boston spring day: temperatures plunged overnight and we had an ice storm. As the old saying goes, there’s nothing like a spring day, and the morning of April 1st was nothing like a spring day.
Walking out of the house, I was confronted with a very large, very heavy tree lying across the driveway and my car. Needless to say, moving that tree was not going to happen. Because the storm had brought down a good many trees, it was going to be quite some time before I could get anyone in to deal with the tree for me.
In an odd, but perhaps not surprising, way, I found myself thinking about some of the problems I frequently help businesses deal with. Like the tree, the problem looks huge, immovable, overwhelming. Depending on how you look at it, that may even be true. By the same token, when I was asked recently to help a company with a particularly large, vexing problem, my first observation was what they really had were two small problems. Interrelated, yes, but each one could be attacked separately and far more easily than trying to brute force through the apparent larger problem. A large tree, or a large problem, is immovable; individual branches and pieces, on the other hand, are another story.Thanks to the power of social media and email, it wasn’t long before a friend showed up to drop off a chainsaw. Now, I’ve never used a chainsaw in my life, but I figured that as long as I was careful and avoided contact with any body parts that I particularly wanted to keep, it couldn’t be all that difficult. So, while my wife was looking up instructions on how to use a chainsaw, I went to work.
Fifteen minutes later, I successfully had the chainsaw firmly wedged in a large branch.
“Why didn’t you cut notches?” asked my wife.
“Notches?”
While I spent the next two hours with a handsaw working to free the chainsaw, she patiently explained what she’d just read about cutting notches in a large branch to keep the chainsaw from binding.
It is not unusual to jump into solving a problem and then run into an unexpected obstacle. Sometimes the original solution doesn’t work. Often, the basic idea is correct, but the implementation is flawed or incomplete. Recognizing the difference is critical to effective problem solving. When you get stuck, it’s necessary to slow down and understand what isn’t working and why. Brute force only compounds the problem: Had I tried to wrench the chainsaw out of the branch, it would have broken and I would have been back to being stuck behind a large tree, unable to get out of the driveway. Similarly, reflexively throwing more people and more money at a business problem just wastes resources: Figuring out, or finding someone who can figure out, the right solution may seem like a waste of time in the short-term, much like reading the instructions on how to cut with a chainsaw, but saves a tremendous amount of time and effort in the long-run. Making mistakes along the way, while sometimes leading to sore muscles, are inevitable parts of the process and provide opportunities for learning and expanding our skills.Clearing away the individual branches was a necessary first step, but the trunk of the tree still remained. One end was still slightly attached at the point where the trunk broke, about 15 feet off the ground, the other end lying across my car. Cutting through a tree that’s over your head is not the best move unless you have a particularly thick skull. Although I’ve certainly been accused of having just that, putting it to the test seemed a tad unwise. Nonetheless, we still had to get rid of the tree.
We set up two aluminum stepladders widely spaced below the trunk, and then I cut through the tree as near as I could get to my car. This time, I remembered the notches. As the one end of the tree slid forward and settled on the ground, the rest settled on the ladders. We could safely drop that to the ground and cut it up. I was then able to finish cutting up the piece on the car and get that out of the way.
Now, the fact is, when you see a tree lying on your car, the natural response is to be just a little concerned. After all, cars are not built to handle trees falling on them. Indeed, one might be forgiven for believing that the car is pretty much wrecked.
Similarly, many times a business problem appears equally overwhelming. It’s big, it’s seems immovable, and even after a plan is developed, it may be difficult to assess just how serious it really is. All too often, our brains provide us with all sorts of worst-case scenarios that, unfortunately, seem all too reasonable and logical… and which cause us to not handle the problem as well as we could. It isn’t until you figure out an effective means of attacking the problem and dive in that you can take control of the situation and reasonably assess the damage.
It turns out that Subarus are very tough cars. No glass was broken, the doors and hatchback all worked fine, and the car ran smoothly. There’s a lot of damage, but it’s all covered by insurance. With the driveway cleared, I had no trouble driving the car to the body shop. In the end, by breaking down the problem and being willing to learn from the inevitable mistakes along the way, what appeared to be a major disaster turned out to be little more than a minor inconvenience.
What are you doing about the obstacles that are keeping you from moving forward?
May 18th,2011
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When I spoke at ERE Expo, Todd Raphael, editor of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, interviewed me on why companies make hiring mistakes. The interview is now up on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUFbWww7Pic.
As published in Corp! Magazine
Very few companies are ever driven out of business by their competitors.
I’ve found that this statement upsets a great many people, all of whom are quick to jump up and start providing examples of companies that were, in fact, driven out of business by their competitors. This is missing the point. Indeed, it’s rather like a detective in a murder mystery concluding that the cause of death was that the victim’s heart stopped. It matters whether the heart stopped due to lead poisoning, for example in the form of a bullet, or due to some other cause. Indeed, understanding exactly what led to that heart stopping moment is a key part of solving the mystery.
Similarly, while it’s not so unusual for a failing company to have the coup de grace administered by a competitor, how they got to that point makes all the difference. Focusing only on the end point provides a very simple, comfortable solution, but not necessarily a particularly useful one.
Robotic Chromosomes, for example, was a company that dominated a particular niche in the bioinformatics market. They were an early entrant into the field and their products were initially the best on the market.
Over the course of several years, though, they developed a view of their clients as idiots. The fact that their clients were all highly educated research scientists did not enter into the equation. If they had trouble using the software, they were idiots. As a result, the company became increasingly less open to feedback from either clients or the market. While their market share was increasing faster than the market itself, they could get away with that attitude. Eventually, though, their growth started lagging the growth in the market. Phrases like “law of large numbers” and “temporary aberration” were batted about. When their market share started shrinking, phrases like, “temporary aberration” became even more popular. The view of the clients as insanely stupid for buying competing products became more common.
Today, they no longer exist. Were they driven out of business by their competitors? Only in the sense that they put themselves in a position to allow their competitors to drive them out of their dominant position in the market. Sure, their competitors may have pushed them over the cliff, but they were the ones who chose to walk to the edge and lean over.
Now, it may reasonably appear from the preceding description that Robotic Chromosomes was taken down by a clearly defined event, that is, viewing clients as idiots. That is not, however, quite correct. While it may appear that way in retrospect, the reality is that Robotic Chromosomes suffered from a series of cascading errors. Each mistake was small, easily overlooked or ignored. Each mistake led to more mistakes until eventually the company was suffering from so many small cuts that it eventually had no strength left to resist when its competitors moved in. So how does a company avoid this death of a thousand knives?
The obvious answer is that they needed better communications. While true, it again misses the point. Communications is where problems show up, but the communications are rarely the problem. Rather, the dysfunctional communications are the symptom of the problem. It’s critical to look beyond the symptoms to identify the real problem. Otherwise, you spend all your time looking at the wrong things, as Robotic Chromosomes so eloquently demonstrated.
Avoiding that fate requires a willingness to accept negative feedback; it means being willing to hear what people are saying about your product, your service or your management style. If you aren’t willing to listen, or if you structure the way in which you listen to negate the feedback, you’re setting yourself up for failure, one step at a time. For example, creating a culture that mocks and demeans your clients is not a recipe for success, and closes you off from valuable feedback from those clients.
Being willing to accept feedback is only a first step though. You have to create a context in which employees are not afraid to give you that feedback, and in which they believe that providing feedback is worthwhile. If people believe they’ll be punished for being critical or regarded as “not a team player,” it’ll be hard to get them to provide feedback.
Next, you need to clearly define your goals and also define how you’ll know whether you’re succeeding or failing. Robotic Chromosomes had very fluid definitions of success, definitions that shifted regularly to avoid facing unpleasant results. It’s important to separate the evaluation of the feedback you’re getting from the testing to see if the criteria for that evaluation are valid. In fact, verifying the validity of your criteria should be done before you then evaluate your feedback: otherwise, it’s too easy to redefine success and give yourself a few more cuts. None of them seem all that bad at the time.
Step by step, over the course of several years, Robotic Chromosomes successfully created an environment where any negative feedback could be ignored because that feedback was always coming from idiots. Their competitors didn’t drive them out of business. They drove themselves out of business; their competitors simply put them out of their misery. How will you avoid the death of a thousand knives?
Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead (www.7stepsahead.com), an organizational development firm focused on helping leaders grow their businesses. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.
March 10th,2011
Published Articles | tags:
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