The Business Sensei

BlackBerry Jam

They sit there in the room, their eyes fixed on the head of the table. There stands a man, quite probably the team’s manager. He is speaking, presenting some gem of long-since-forgotten lore. Those watching him seem rapt, focused, intent upon his brilliance. But look again. Notice the strain around their eyes, the sweat upon their brows. See the twitching of the hands, as though each man and woman in that room could keep their hands upon the table only with great effort. Watch longer; see the hands slipping off the table, sliding towards pockets and purses. See realization cross the faces, observe the hands forced jerkily back towards the table, as if their owners were fighting against some horrid, hypnotic compulsion. Over and over again, the hand is pushed back.

But attention is finite, will power limited. Eventually, a hand reaches a pocket. It slips out seconds later, an object tightly clutched in its grip. A flicker of bliss passes across a man’s face as he glances furtively down at the object in his hand: a BlackBerry.

So it was in 2005, in the days when the Blackberries ruled the world. Coming out of the distant north, from a place, or so it is said, far out on the rim, Blackberries quickly came to dominate the corporate world. Everyone had to have one. At the very thought that the Blackbery network might go down, panic would spread across the land. A few months later, in 2006, Webster’s Dictionary proudly proclaimed the new word of the year : “Crackberry.” BlackBerry seemed unstoppable, its spread inexorable. And then, as rapidly as it had grown, BlackBerry shrank, faded, vaninshed away. Of that invincible empire, but a single outpost remains, fighting to not vanish away and be forgotten. What force, what power broke the might of BlackBerry?

Success.

That is correct: what destroyed BlackBerry was its own success. Confident in their power, they forgot that when you build the perfect mousetrap someone will come along with a cat. Unlike a mousetrap, the cat does not need to be reset, it doesn’t need the mouse to come to it, it is fun to play with, and it keeps your feet warm at night. Also, the purr is soothing. While BlackBerry’s co-CEOs were busily dismissing the iPhone as, “a toy,” Apple and Google were busily striking deep into the heart of their empire. iPhones and Android phones are not just business devices. They are entertainment devices and are fun to use. BlackBerry, or to be more accurate, Research In Motion, stood still while those around them kept moving.

One of the challenges in innovation is that what a company becomes good at, it naturally wants to keep doing. Innovation becomes an exercise in perfecting the existing product and building up impenetrable barriers to competitors. The catch, however, is that the wall that keeps others out also keeps you in. Research In Motion kept making better and better “business” phones. They let their product define them until they could no longer change as the world around them moved on. In 2007, the first iPhone arose to challenge the BlackBerry. Much to RIM’s surprise, this upstart “toy” proved surprisingly popular. RIM’s attempt to respond with a touchscreen phone of its own was a dismal failure, and their attempts at an Appstore and at adding an MP3 player to their phones were equally unsuccessful. From owning some 70% of the market in 2006, the BlackBerry is now less than 2%. That was the price of their success.

Real innovation is a messy business. It requires trying a great many different things and being wrong most of the time. Indeed, successful innovators fail far more often than they succeed. When a company does succeed, though, it naturally wants to protect and extend that success: they start thinking about how much more successful they would be if only all those messy, and costly, mistakes could be eliminated. They start looking for reasons why their product is invincible, instead of experimenting with things that might kill it. Your cash cow is sacred only to you; to everyone else, it’s just hamburger waiting to happen. Guided by their successes, Research In Motion focused ever more tightly in making better and better Blackberries. That single-minded obsession caused them to develop corporate tunnel vision: all they could see in the future was their own inevitable triumph. In that, they joined with other great companies such as Polaroid and Kodak, who missed the digital photography boat, IBM which was dethroned by the PCs it invented, Digital Equipment, whose CEO declared the PC, “a toy,” Barnes & Noble, which was successfully Amazoned, and a host of others.

So how does a company remain innovative?

Recognize that the more tightly you focus, the less you see. Sometimes it pays to take your eyes off the ball and look at the big picture. What else is going on? Pay particular attention to those competitors you see as jokes. What are they offering your current customers and, even more to the point, what are they offering your potential customers? Apple and Google didn’t take on BlackBerry in its corporate strongholds; rather, they vacuumed up all the rest of the oxygen and the corporate strongholds followed.

Remember that mistakes are part of the game. You can learn from them or hide from them: it’s your choice whether you are receiving feedback or experiencing failure.

Put your focus on process and strategy, not just on results. When you think strategically, you can start to anticipate the moves others might make. Unlike chess, the rules don’t have to stay the same. If you’re making the rules, someone else will break them. Why wait for them to do it and seize the initiative? And if someone else is defining the rules, you have nothing to lose by breaking as many of them as you can. Who says a business phone can’t play music, videos, and games? Research In Motion, that’s who.

Those meetings are still going on. Hands are still slipping into pockets. Men and women are still furtively glancing down at the objects in their hands. Today, those objects are Droids and iPhones. Tomorrow?

Steve’s new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers, is now available. The initial run sold out in two days at Amazon.com; order your copy now.

Make It Easy

In jujitsu, there are two ways to throw someone: you can make it hard for them to stand up or you can make it easy for them to fall down.

When you make it hard for someone to stand, something very interesting happens. The harder you make it, the more they fight back. Unless your opponent happens to be asleep or under the influence of mysterious hypnotic powers, the very act of attempting to force them off their feet triggers and instinctive and intense resistance. This happens even when training with a cooperative partner who is perfectly willing to be thrown! It is the moral equivalent of standing on someone’s foot while trying to pick them up.

Conversely, when you make it easy for someone to fall down, they naturally follow the path of least resistance. It’s not that they make a conscious effort to fall, rather it’s that if you gently let them have your way, they suddenly discover that they are enjoying an up close and personal relationship with the ground. For the practitioner, this is a much more pleasant and much less effortful experience than trying to make it hard for the other person to stand up. Oddly enough, the fall is also more devastating.

Jujitsu, in short, is about minimum effort, maximum results. In a very real sense, the best practitioners are also the most lazy. They get what they want and they work exactly as hard as they need to get it, no harder.

Now, I’ve rarely seen a manager literally stand on an employee’s foot and try to throw her, but I do frequently see the equivalent behavior over and over.

In one particularly egregious case, a manager at one large and rather well-known technology company told an employee that he wouldn’t get a raise because he made the work look too easy. In a judo match, your throw is not annulled because you made it look effortless. In fact, those judo players who can make throws appear effortless are the best regarded in the sport. Does it really make sense to dismiss the value of an employee’s results in such a cavalier fashion? Is the manager encouraging future productivity or simply future activity?

At Soak Systems, engineers actually wanted to spend time fixing bugs in the software. Management, however, developed an arcane and excessively complex method of prioritizing bugs and scheduling people’s time. By the time the process was complete, the engineers had no say in which bugs were fixed or when they should be worked on. Functionally, that meant that when engineers uncovered serious bugs in the software, they weren’t allowed to fix those bugs: instead, they had to sneak in over the weekend to do the work. After a while, many of the engineers became increasingly discouraged or burned out, and eventually started shrugging and letting management have its way. At least, that way they stayed out of trouble. Management successfully made it so hard to fix the bugs that the bugs didn’t get fixed.

Does it really make sense for the managers to, metaphorically, be standing on employees’ feet so dramatically? After all, management did want to ship a working product! The more management tried to control engineering and force them to fix the bugs in a specific way, the less work actually got done.

In a very real sense, the goal is not to impose your will on people but to make it easy for them to do their jobs, to get them to focus their time and energies to produce the maximum possible return. When you figure out what your actual goals are and then create a path of least resistance to accomplishing them, people will naturally and instinctively move along that path. So how do you do that?

Your first obstacle is the hardest one to overcome. As every martial artist learns, the toughest opponent is the one they see in the mirror. If you find yourself getting angry or falling into a “I’ll show them!” mindset, it’s time to step back and take a break. Give yourself some perspective. Getting an opponent angry is an old martial arts trick and one that never stops working, especially on beginners. Don’t make beginner mistakes.

The next step is to find out if you’re standing on their foot. Ask questions. Understand what problems or obstacles your employees may see. Involve them in brainstorming and discussion. Help them help you to build a picture of the desired outcome and invite their suggestions on how to get there. The more you get them involved, the more you educate yourself. Pay attention to how your actions or the company’s rules are being perceived. Are they pinning people in place or are they making it easy for employees to accomplish the goals of the company?

You may not always like what you hear. Jujitsu students are frequently quite frustrated when their training partner says, “Hey, you’re standing on my foot!” When someone tells you something you don’t want to hear, they’re demonstrating their respect for and trust in you. Appreciate that and build upon it. If you respond harshly or with anger, you only cut yourself off from information; you don’t change anything.

Pay attention to what behaviors you are encouraging and which ones you are discouraging. When you stand on someone’s foot, you are encouraging pointless activity and exhausting, wasteful conflict: what do you suppose that employee at that high tech firm I mentioned earlier did on future projects? When you make it easy for people to do their jobs, you are encouraging constructive argument, innovation, and productivity.

So go ahead and make it easy. What’s stopping you?

The Doom of Yahoo?

If creativity were simply a matter of having a bunch of people in an office, well, IBM of the 1980s and 1990s would have been the most creative business on the planet. The company employed close to 300,000 people worldwide, all working out of offices. As we all know, IBM went on to invent Windows, the Internet, online search, social networking, and the mobile phone. Oh wait, maybe not.

Creativity is an odd beast. According to the New York Times, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo decided that the reason she had to end Yahoo’s telecommuting policy was to make the company more creative. Another article in the Times claimed that the reason was because Yahoos weren’t actually working at home: the article mentioned Yahoo employees founding startups while on Yahoo’s payroll. At least the explanations for Mayer’s actions are creative, so maybe her policy is already bearing fruit!

Unfortunately, the idea that forcing everyone into the office will somehow enable managers to “keep an eye” on employees is both pointless and counterproductive. Again, if that were all it took, we’d be seeing a lot more amazingly productive employees at all those companies that don’t allow telecommuting. Yet, the reality is the other way around, provided the organizational culture and metrics for measuring performance actually encourage the appropriate behaviors. Frequently they don’t, which certainly appears to be the case at Yahoo. Bringing people into the office isn’t going to change that. Fixing a culture trapped in a cycle of defeat is much harder than a few slogans and forcing people to all mix at the water-cooler; however, forcing everyone into the office certainly feels like Taking Action. It is an Exercise of Power. It feels good, even though the actual results are likely to be both less positive than its supporters believe, and less negative than the naysayers are predicting. In short, a few people will probably leave and the rest will get used to working in the office again. At that point, all the old problems will still be there and will still be killing Yahoo. If Yahoo wants to fix that, perhaps they should learn how to set actual effective goals, with a well-defined strategy that they can then evaluate. I’m sure that’s what they think they’ve already done; I’m also quite sure that if they had actually done it right, they wouldn’t be having the problems they claim they are trying to fix.

Let’s face it, if you have effective goal setting and measurable strategy, then an employee who founds his own startup while on the payroll should be picked up simply because he won’t be meeting his objectives. Moreover, employees with goals they believe in and who are working for an organization they value do not, as rule, start their own companies on the side. Forcing people to sit where they can be watched over may force some people to behave, but it won’t make them enthusiastic or creative. If Yahoo is looking for compliant employees, they’re on the right track. If they really want creativity, maybe not so much.

As far as creativity, again that’s a tricky problem. In the 1990s, Yahoo was so far outside the box that they created a new box. Since early 2000, however, Yahoo’s been stuck in that very same box of their own creation while other companies, notably Google, thought outside of it. As I discuss in my talk, “Organizational Culture and Innovation: A Two-Edged Sword,” creativity is largely a function of environment and culture. Individuals do matter, of course, but even the most creative people will be stifled if the culture doesn’t truly support innovation. Even in organizations that claim that their culture supports innovation, what they really mean is that they support innovating in what they already do, not coming up with something radically different: the desire to protect existing products is very powerful, although it won’t stop your competitors from eating your lunch. Thus, after a certain point organizations become better and better at making what they already do more and more effective, but become equally resistant to doing something that’s really new. In other words, you can improve your better mousetrap all you want until someone shows up with a cat. You have to know how to change your culture and build up the four elements that support creativity if you really want to see serious innovation.

Google built a creative culture from the ground up. That culture involves people working closely together. Yahoo does not have that culture. Just bringing people back into the office isn’t going to change that. Yahoo is far more likely to end up not with creativity but with compliance.