The Business Sensei

Using the Force: What Every Exec Can Learn from Darth Vader

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.

Cut Big Problems Into Solvable Pieces and Get Moving

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 Efficient Light Bulb

As published in The Imaging Executive

Once upon a time, there was a light bulb. This light bulb was quite a remarkable light bulb: it was praised far and wide for its incredible efficiency. This light bulb gave off no waste heat. This light bulb did not contribute to global warming. It had no carbon footprint.  It did not rely on fossil fuels. Truly, it was an amazing light bulb and visitors came every day to see this remarkable light bulb.

One day, though, a traveler coming to see the light bulb in action was delayed by an unfortunate flood that closed several roads. He did not arrive until well after night had fallen. Much to his surprise, he found the light bulb sitting in a pitch dark room.

“Why aren’t you giving light?” asked the traveler.

“Give light!” replied the light bulb in shocked tones. “You must be joking. If I did that, I would use fossil fuels. I would have a carbon footprint. I would give off waste heat. I would no longer be efficient.”

“But isn’t the purpose of a light bulb to give light?” asked the traveler.

“I’ve always been told to be efficient,” replied the light bulb with a shrug. If you have never seen a light bulb shrug, it is truly a wonder to behold. The traveler would have been amazed, except, of course, that the room was too dark for him to see the miraculous event.

Once upon a time, there was a software company named “Soak, Inc.” Soak’s product relied upon a very complex database server. One day, the VP of Engineering stormed into the office and declared, “The server is too slow. We need to speed it up.”

From that day forth, every effort was focused on improving the speed of the server. Other issues were deemed insignificant beside the one, critical, goal of performance. Engineers who dared to raise other issues were publically humiliated for wasting the company’s time. Bugs that did not relate to performance issues were deemed “optional.” People who spent time reviewing the optional bugs and trying to fix them were warned that their insubordination would cost them their jobs if it did not cease immediately.

Eventually, Soak developed an amazingly efficient server. It was fast. It was robust. It was ready to demonstrate to potential clients.

The demo started out remarkably well. The server did not crash, causing some to believe that this couldn’t actually be a demonstration of a software product. Indeed, the server performed flawlessly. All would have gone well indeed for Soak had not someone noticed that the data being delivered by the server didn’t make sense. Yes, what the server had gained in performance it had lost in accuracy. In other words, it was incredibly good at very rapidly delivering useless or incorrect information.

When the engineers were questioned about this unfortunate oversight, they shrugged and replied, “We were told to be efficient.”

While it is not nearly as amazing to see an engineer shrug as it is to see a light bulb shrug, the effects are much the same.

Once upon a time, there was a large company called “Red.” Red Inc. had a team of salesmen who were, it seems, not producing the necessary volume of sales.  While this may have gone a long way toward explaining the name of the company, it was not exactly a viable long-term strategy.

One day, the VP of Sales decided that the problem was clearly that the salesmen were not calling enough potential clients. They were wasting their time. They needed to be more efficient with their calls.

Much effort was spent focusing on the calling habits of the salesmen. They were given scripts. They were forced to practice making calls with various managers listening in and rating them on their performance on these practice calls. Those salesmen who demonstrated too great, or at least too obvious, a reluctance to make calls were dismissed. Those who questioned whether this was the right way to approach the problem either learned quickly to shut up or were also dismissed.

The sales team became very efficient at making calls. Sales did not increase. The remaining salesmen shrugged.

It turns out that even the best salesmen are reluctant to make calls. The problem was not with making the calls. The problem was with projecting the necessary confidence and optimism to attract and hold the interest of the client. Clients, it seems, are not all that likely to buy from salesmen who do not appear enthusiastic and confident in what they are selling. It also helps to know how to close the deal.

In each of these situations, a goal was set, a metric for success was defined, and that metric became the sole determinant of progress. Goals are extremely powerful tools: the best thing about them is that you accomplish them. Unfortunately, sometimes the worst thing about goals is that you accomplish them. In each of these examples, they accomplished their goals. A dead light bulb is extremely efficient, but not useful. Similar observations can be made about the server and the sales team.

Before leaping into setting a goal, especially a goal to solve a problem, it helps to understand the actual problem and to understand what the actual symptoms are. At Red, they assumed that an unwillingness or inability to make calls was the cause of the low sales and set their goals accordingly. We’ll never know how many top salesmen they dismissed because they didn’t realize that even the best salesmen suffer from call reluctance. Rather than create useful goals, they fixated on a symptom. That did not, however, actually change anything.

At both Soak and Red, the respective VPs stated that they were trying to solve the problems their companies were facing as rapidly and effectively as possible. They were setting goals. They were Taking Action! Taking action is certainly helpful, but it is even more helpful to be taking the correct action. Since it’s not always possible to determine just what the correct action is, it becomes even more critical to listen to the feedback and questions from the people who are charged with actually executing the action. The engineers and the salesmen knew that something was wrong, but no one was willing to listen to them. Remember, a key aspect of successful goal setting is understanding the feedback you’re getting.

I realize that many of you reading this are probably chuckling to yourselves and thinking that this scenario could never happen at your companies. The folks at Soak and Red said the same before, during, and even after it happened to them. The light bulb had no comment.

Setting a goal, for example, to be more efficient , seems like it makes sense and certainly feels good. However, it pays to determine if that goal is actually going to get you what you want. Otherwise, you may just end up with a dead light bulb.

Common Hiring Mistakes

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.

Balance the Individual and the Team for Top Performance

As published in Corp! Magazine

In Monty Python’s classic comedy, “The Life of Brian,” there is a scene fairly early in the movie when the people of Jerusalem have decided that Brian is the Messiah and are standing waiting on the street outside his window. Brian’s mother screams out at the crowd, “You are all individuals.”

The crowd replies: “We are all individuals.”

A pause, and then a lone voice yells, “I’m not.”

This is typical Monty Python absurdist humor, but it makes a very serious point. What is standing outside Brian’s window is not a group of individuals, it’s a mob. A mob is a group in which individuality is lost in the urge to conform to the group. As the movie progresses, we see the mob do various ludicrous things as they follow their unwilling prophet. Brian’s followers are, of course, convinced that they are acting according to his instructions and executing his desires, no matter how much Brian screams to the contrary. This being a Python film, the sequence of events is absolutely hilarious.

In a business, not so much. Unfortunately, the tendency for a group to lose individuality in the service of a charismatic leader or a particularly enticing corporate vision is not restricted to comedy. At one large software company, the dynamic became quite extreme: employees were expected to arrive at a certain time, eat lunch at a certain time, visit a certain set of restaurants, leave at a certain time, and so forth. No deviation was tolerated. The mantra was, “We’re a team. We do everything alike!”

Sound fanciful? I wish it were.

The problem is that a team that loses its individuality is not a team, it’s a mob or a rabble. It can be a very disciplined mob or rabble, sort of like the Storm Troopers in “Star Wars,” but it’s still a mob. Like the Storm Troopers, it’s very good at dealing with routine situations, but isn’t very good at dealing with the unexpected: new tactics from the rebels or, if you prefer, new competitors or existing competitors adopting new strategies. The other problem is that when a group focuses on homogeneity, it loses its ability for the strengths of some to compensate for the weaknesses of others: the Storm Troopers, for example, cannot successfully shoot the broad side of a barn.

At a different high-tech company, the only engineers hired matched a very precise and very limited profile. Not only did you have to solve a certain set of puzzles, you had to solve them in just the right way. Alternate solutions were not tolerated. This created a team that was very good at creating intricate, convoluted algorithms, and a user interface that was equally intricate and convoluted.

None of these situations are as extreme as that portrayed in “The Life of Brian,” but then again, they aren’t as funny either.

Later in the movie, we see the opposite end of the spectrum: the members of the People’s Front of Judea are so busy drawing insignificant distinctions between each of their positions that they are not functioning as a team. Rather, they are a horde. Each person is operating according to their own individual needs and goals, with no actual concern about the goals or strategy of the group. In a horde, everyone is a hero, entitled to his or her share of the plunder and devil take the hindmost. Cooperation is almost accidental, and the group is likely to break apart at the slightest disagreement:  the People’s Front of Judea can’t even quite figure out why the Judean People’s Front broke off, but is quite happy to yell, “Splitters!”

At a certain manufacturing company, each department was totally focused on doing its own job. None of the departments considered how their actions or decisions affected the others. Within each department, much the same thing was happening at an individual level. Rather than figuring out how to work together, they spent their time blaming one another for the inevitable failures. Fixing this issue saved the company in question several hundred thousand dollars a year.

The challenge, of course, is to find the middle ground, where the individual and the team are in balance. While it’s extremely difficult to find the exact middle, anywhere in the general vicinity works pretty well. Peak performance occurs when people are committed to the goals of the company and the team, and are also free to pursue their personal goals and work the way they want to work. Is it easy? No: less than one team in five ever gets there. However, it sure beats a horde or a mob of people chanting, “We are all individuals.”

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. 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.” For more information, contact steve@7stepsahead.com.

Make a New Plan, Stan

As published in Corp! Magazine

Jesse Livermore, the legendary stock trader of the early twentieth century, was famed for his ability to keep his cool no matter what the market was doing. He neither became discouraged when he lost money or exhilarated when he made money, and he made a lot of money. His greatest triumph was making $100 million (no, that’s not an error) on Oct. 29, 1929, the day of the market crash that preceded the Great Depression. He was one of only two people to make money that day. As people were panicking around him, he calmly covered his short positions into the chaos. What was his secret?

It was simple: Jesse Livermore had a plan. Over the course of his trading career, he developed a plan for when to buy and when to sell. When the plan didn’t work, he stepped back, analyzed the failure, and adjusted his plan. Jesse Livermore’s plan failed many times, especially during his early days as a trader. He went broke more than once and, in 1915, was a million dollars in debt. But Jesse Livermore never failed.

Now this may look like sophistry: he created the plan and the plan led him into bankruptcy. Isn’t that a failure? Sure: it was a failure of the plan. By creating an external construct, a plan, Livermore was able to prevent his emotions from dominating his trading. More broadly, he was able to place the failure outside himself. It’s much easier to change one’s plan than it is to change oneself. On the flip side, when things went well, he could enjoy the fruits of victory without allowing the excitement to color his perceptions and cost him his profits. Each day, he knew that he had followed his plan.

This lesson can be easily applied to the business world, especially today. The news is a steady drumbeat of economic disaster after economic disaster, bankruptcies, shrinking sales, and so forth. It’s extremely difficult to not become discouraged; I regularly hear from business owners that they are no longer listening to the news. It’s simply too depressing. Unfortunately, restricting information only reduces a business’s ability to act when the opportunity presents itself; you won’t even know that the opportunity is there! Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, was reputed to read the papers every day all through the Great Depression. He had a plan, and part of his plan involved staying aware of what was happening around him. He was waiting and watching for his moment of opportunity. That moment came, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So how do you go about making a plan?

• Start by defining a broad vision of what your business wants to accomplish. What will the world look like if you’re successful?
• Identify the steps needed to bring that vision into reality.
• For each step, identify how you will recognize whether or not it is working. It pays to decide upon your metrics before the pressure is on, and to identify the signs of trouble as early as possible. Jesse Livermore never bought a stock without deciding in advance the conditions under which he’d sell it, whether for a profit or a loss. As a result, his losses were small and his profits large.
• Break those steps down into activities that can be done on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
• Define appropriate checkpoints where you can evaluate progress and determine whether or not your plan is working. Remember to allow sufficient time to collect enough data to make a good decision. Evaluating before you have enough information is an excellent way to abandon a successful plan before it has time to pay off.
• Execute your plan, day in and day out. You measure your own success or failure by whether or not you stuck to the plan.
• Constantly review and revise your plan as you learn more. Failures of the plan are simply an opportunity to evaluate and adjust.

When we fail, it can be difficult indeed to get up and try again. But when the plan fails, it’s relatively simple to modify it and keep going.

What’s your plan?

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. 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.” For more information, visit www.7stepsahead.com or contact steve@7stepsahead.com.

Death of a Thousand Knives

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.

Of Deck Chairs and Ocean Liners

As published in The CEO Refresher

“Just give me the numbers!”

Falling firmly into the “I just can’t make this stuff up” category, the preceding statement was made by the head of a certain engineering department. He wanted the performance figures on a series of database lookups so that he could determine if the database code was performing up to specifications. This would be a perfectly reasonable request except for one minor problem: the database code was not producing the correct results in the first place. Performance was sort of irrelevant given that getting the wrong answers quickly is not necessarily all that helpful, although it may be less irritating than having to wait for the wrong answers. It’s rather like driving at 75mph when lost: you may not know where you are or where you are going, but at least you’ll get there quickly. Or something.

In another example, the engineers developing a bioinformatics data analysis package spent all their time arguing about the correct way to set up the GUI elements on each page. The problem was that when they actually ran one of the calculations, the program appeared to hang. In fact, I was assured by everyone, it just “took a long time to run.” How long? The answer was, “maybe a few weeks.”

This may come as a shock to those few people who have never used a PC, but a few weeks is generally longer than either a PC or a Mac will run before crashing. Besides, the complete lack of response from the program regularly convinced users that the program had crashed. The engineers did not want to put in some visual indicator of progress because they felt it wouldn’t look good visually. They refused to remove that calculation from the product because “someone might want to try it.” Eventually, they grudgingly agreed to warn the user that it “might take a very long time to run.”

In both of these cases, the team was solving the wrong problem. Although there were definitely complaints about the speed of the database, that was very much a secondary issue so long as the database wasn’t producing correct results. And while the user interface decisions were certainly important, designing an elegant interface for a feature that will convince the user that the product is not working is not particularly useful. At least rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic was only a waste of time. It didn’t contribute to the ship sinking.

The element that made each of these situations noteworthy is that in both cases there were people present pointing out that the wrong problems were getting all the attention. The people making the decisions didn’t want to hear that. They wanted to solve a certain set of problems and, by golly, they were going to solve them! This is a version of the Hammer syndrome: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Sometimes, though, that nail turns out to be a thumbnail.

So why were these teams so insistent upon solving the wrong problems? Fundamentally, because they could. Simply put, if you give someone a problem they can solve comfortably, and one that they have no idea how to approach, they will do the former. In addition, they had never established clear metrics for success, never established standards by which they would know if the database was fast enough or the user interface was good enough. As a result, they built their goals and evaluated their performance around those issues. They were not being evaluated on whether they got the right answer, despite the opinions that the customers might have in that regard.

While clear, specific goals are certainly good things, goals also have to make sense. When a company is constantly seeing flaws in its products, it can be a very valuable exercise to look at the goals assigned to each person and each team in the company. Do those goals make sense? What problems or challenges are they addressing? Are the goals complementary, or are there significant gaps? If the engineering team is being evaluated on how many bugs they can fix and the QA team on how many new bugs they can find, what happens to the step where fixed bugs get verified? If no one is responsible for that happening, it won’t get done (and didn’t, in several software companies!). If the team focuses on the wrong problems, they’ll spend their time fighting symptoms or revisiting solved problems, and never deal with the real issues.

Therefore, even before you can set goals, you have to know what the problem is that you are trying to solve. That means first separating the symptoms of the problem from the problem itself. The symptoms are only symptoms; frequently, they can point to many possible problems. It’s important to look at the symptoms and brainstorm which problems they could be indicating. When you start developing solutions, you then need to ask what the final product will look like if you go ahead with your solution and you need to know what success looks like. Make sure that your proposed solution will actually solve at least some of the potential problems you’ve identified, and develop some way of testing to make sure you are solving the correct problem. In other words, have some checkpoints along the way so you can make sure that you’re actually improving things. Only then can you start to set goals that will effectively guide you to producing a quality product.

What are you doing to make sure that you are not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?

Storming the Black Gate

Near the end of the award winning movie, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Aragon leads his pitifully small army to the Black Gate of Mordor, realm of Sauron the Dark Lord. Sauron’s forces outnumber Aragorn’s by easily a hundred to one. On the surface, there appears to be little chance of success. Indeed, during the planning of the assault, Gimli utters the famous line: “Certainty of death, small chance of success… What are we waiting for?”

As those familiar with the story know, the attack is diversion. Its goal is to draw the attention of Sauron so that Frodo can destroy the Ring of Power. Aragorn, however, cannot let on that the attack is anything but an all-out assault on Sauron’s fortress. To fool Sauron, indeed, even to convince his soldiers to follow him, he must act and speak as though he has complete confidence that his badly outnumbered army can win. Aragon must not just be confident, he must be so confident that people will be inspired to follow him to almost certain death. That act of confidence is what makes it possible for Frodo to succeed and for Sauron to be defeated.

Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership

Smell Test

As published in Corp! Magazine

The door opens onto a room filled with equipment: banks of computers, spectrometers, air and tissue samplers and things that you cannot even recognize. The hum of electronics fills the room and there is a definite odor of fish. As you look around, you can see dozens of fish waiting to be analyzed for oil contamination. The purpose of all this machinery is to determine if seafood is safe to eat after the Gulf oil spill.

Sounds like something out of a science-fiction movie. That’s because it is something out of a movie: reality is not nearly so visually impressive. It turns out that the most sophisticated instrument for determining the safety of seafood is the trained human nose. With remarkably little training, the human nose can do something that all the expensive and elaborate electronic equipment cannot do: figure out whether a fish is contaminated or not.

About 20 years ago, a Japanese business decided to conduct a thorough chemical analysis of fine wine. They used sophisticated equipment and complex computer analysis to determine the chemical composition of the perfect bottle of wine. They then produced a wine that perfectly matched their profile.

In the ensuing blind test, tasters had no trouble recognizing the Japanese wine: it was universally described as “having the taste of dishwater and a bouquet of dirt.”

Once again the human nose proved superior to all the fancy equipment that was brought to bear on the question.

When speaking to a group of managers, I asked them to describe their company’s goals. The response was a rather confusing medley of Gantt Charts, Microsoft Project, comments on the latest decision support software and so forth. What was their approach to management? Once again, the same cacophonous medley ensued.

Fish, wine and management have a couple of things in common.

First and foremost, all those fancy tools and gadgets are tools, nothing more. There is nothing inherently special about them, any more than there is anything inherently special about a hammer. In the hands of a master craftsman, a hammer can be a very useful and versatile tool; in the hands of someone without that skill, a hammer is little more than a device for making sure that every problem looks like a nail.

By the same token, the value of management support software, or whatever other power tools are being used, is only as great as the skill of the manager using it. Tools leverage skill; if there is no skill, there is no leverage. There is also a strong possibility of cutting yourself off at the knees: power tools can be dangerous. In other words, all the management support tools in the world won’t help someone who doesn’t know how to manage. More to the point, just as a trained human nose is the best tool for detecting contaminated fish, the best leaders and managers are those who have actually learned how to lead and manage.

From a very practical perspective, the best leaders are those who can connect with their followers. It’s not about Gantt charts or other fancy tools. It’s about building trust and enabling people to feel that they can count on you.

Wait, isn’t that backwards? Doesn’t the leader need to be able to count on his followers? Sure. And the way you get there is by demonstrating that they can count on you, that they can trust you.

In a sadly familiar tale, at Soak Systems, no trust exists between different departments, between marketing and engineering, between engineering and the CEO. Why is there a lack of trust? The CEO constantly visits clients and makes promises that engineering can’t possibly fulfill. Even worse, he regularly changes direction and priorities: one day project X is vital to the future of the company, even when it fails to ship on time or when it ships and doesn’t work. The next day, it’s project Y. Each prediction of impending doom is followed by another prediction of impending doom if the project doesn’t work.

At this point, no one believes the CEO. No matter how important or unimportant his pronouncements, they are all greeted with the same level of skepticism. All his charts and graphs are failing to convince anyone. Is it possible for the CEO to reverse the trend and actually build credibility? Sure! The easiest way is for his prediction of doom to come true just once. Granted, that’s not particularly useful, but it is the easiest approach.

A more difficult approach is to put aside all the shiny tools and actually pay attention to the people. If he is willing to learn how to build trust and establish connection with his followers, then there’s a good chance he can turn things around. But he has to be willing to learn instead of being distracted by all the pretty toys.

I said earlier that there are two things that wine, fish and management have in common. We’ve discussed one. The other is pretty simple.

They all stink when they’re bad.