The Business Sensei

Controlling the Little Things

One of the more painful experiences I had in jujitsu was when my instructor taught finger holds. We assume that because our legs are generally quite strong, it would be difficult for someone to force us to go somewhere we don’t want to go. That assumption lasted as long as it took my instructor to apply a finger hold. All he had to do was take control of the smallest joint of one finger and suddenly my legs would go exactly where he wanted them to go. By manipulating one little thing, he could convince people much larger and stronger than he was to become extremely cooperative. Controlling one small joint gave him control over their entire body, however controlling the body did not produce the same control over the arms and legs: the hands and feet still moved freely, and would regularly engage in what may be politely referred to as “nose seeking behavior.”

Now, you might be thinking, “Well, so what? That’s just leverage!”

Well, yes, it is leverage. And if that was the whole point, the correct reaction would indeed be “so what?”

Leverage, as we all know, enables us to move something large through control of something small. Jujitsu is merely a fairly straight-forward application of this principle. However, the principle is not limited to the physical. Our perception of control is determined not by the big things in life that we control, but by the little things. To put this another way, if we want people to tackle big, challenging projects, we have to convince them that they have at least some control over the outcome; they have to believe that their actions matter and have a reasonably good chance of producing positive results. Conversely, when we don’t have control over little things, we tend to assume that we can’t control the bigger things. Even worse, that feeling of not having control translates into a loss of initiative and creativity. Leverage cuts both ways.

In any organization, those stressors that decrease our sense of control are thus the most damaging. Organizational politics are one obvious example, but at a more direct level, the less control employees have over their immediate environment, the less initiative they take overall. Being able to, within reason, decorate your office or cubicle creates a sense of control. Conversely, when companies have elaborate rules that unduly limit personal expression, control is seriously decreased. Without that sense of control, employees become more like the person whose finger is being twisted rather than like the person doing the twisting: they might be compliant, but they are not enthusiastic or committed.

An article in the NY Times discussed how Google addresses exactly this issue. Google doesn’t just allow employees to decorate their work area; employees get to design their work area. Google provides them with the equivalent of high tech tinker toys that employees can use to build the work area they want. Feel like having a treadmill? No problem. Walking desk? Sure. The article pointed out that Google doesn’t even have an official policy about coming in to the office; rather, the assumption is that the employee will work out a reasonable schedule with her team. This is control in action: employees are given control over their environment, even whether to come to the office to work. This control, coupled with making the office an very enjoyable place to work, leads to employees who exercise their control to work longer and harder than anyone could ever force them to work. Indeed, one of the problems Google has is that sometimes they have to chase people out of the office! What would you do to have problems like that?

When we have to force someone to do something, either through threats or through lavish rewards, they don’t get a sense of control or commitment. They are being controlled, but they are not in control. Now, if all we want is compliance, maybe that’s just fine! Indeed, if the task is easy, that may even be sufficient. However, if we want a committed, enthusiastic work force that believes themselves capable of tackling big projects and overcoming apparently overwhelming obstacles, the secret to getting there is to give them control of the little things.

Controlling the Little Things

One of the more painful experiences I had in jujitsu was when my instructor taught finger holds. We assume that because our legs are generally quite strong, it would be difficult for someone to force us to go somewhere we don’t want to go. That assumption lasted as long as it took my instructor to apply a finger hold. All he had to do was take control of the smallest joint of one finger and suddenly my legs would go exactly where he wanted them to go. By manipulating one little thing, he could convince people much larger and stronger than he was to become extremely cooperative. Controlling one small joint gave him control over their entire body, however controlling the body did not produce the same control over the arms and legs: the hands and feet still moved freely, and would regularly engage in what may be politely referred to as “nose seeking behavior.”

Now, you might be thinking, “Well, so what? That’s just leverage!”

Well, yes, it is leverage. And if that was the whole point, the correct reaction would indeed be “so what?”

Leverage, as we all know, enables us to move something large through control of something small. Jujitsu is merely a fairly straight-forward application of this principle. However, the principle is not limited to the physical. Our perception of control is determined not by the big things in life that we control, but by the little things. To put this another way, if we want people to tackle big, challenging projects, we have to convince them that they have at least some control over the outcome; they have to believe that their actions matter and have a reasonably good chance of producing positive results. Conversely, when we don’t have control over little things, we tend to assume that we can’t control the bigger things. Even worse, that feeling of not having control translates into a loss of initiative and creativity. Leverage cuts both ways.

In any organization, those stressors that decrease our sense of control are thus the most damaging. Organizational politics are one obvious example, but at a more direct level, the less control employees have over their immediate environment, the less initiative they take overall. Being able to, within reason, decorate your office or cubicle creates a sense of control. Conversely, when companies have elaborate rules that unduly limit personal expression, control is seriously decreased. Without that sense of control, employees become more like the person whose finger is being twisted rather than like the person doing the twisting: they might be compliant, but they are not enthusiastic or committed.

A recent article in the NY Times discussed how Google addresses exactly this issue. Google doesn’t just allow employees to decorate their work area; employees get to design their work area. Google provides them with the equivalent of high tech tinker toys that employees can use to build the work area they want. Feel like having a treadmill? No problem. Walking desk? Sure. The article pointed out that Google doesn’t even have an official policy about coming in to the office; rather, the assumption is that the employee will work out a reasonable schedule with her team. This is control in action: employees are given control over their environment, even whether to come to the office to work. This control, coupled with making the office an very enjoyable place to work, leads to employees who exercise their control to work longer and harder than anyone could ever force them to work. Indeed, one of the problems Google has is that sometimes they have to chase people out of the office! What would you do to have problems like that?

When we have to force someone to do something, either through threats or through lavish rewards, they don’t get a sense of control or commitment. They are being controlled, but they are not in control. Now, if all we want is compliance, maybe that’s just fine! Indeed, if the task is easy, that may even be sufficient. However, if we want a committed, enthusiastic work force that believes themselves capable of tackling big projects and overcoming apparently overwhelming obstacles, the secret to getting there is to give them control of the little things.

The Four Innovation Traps

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Practically speaking, innovation is about optimism, risk taking, and effective decision making. It is not the province of one wild-eyed kid in a garage or the iconic lone inventor. No matter how much movies make innovation out to be the result of some crazy inventor having a sudden brilliant insight, innovation comes from the organization; it is about building the environment which fosters creativity and which gives people room to explore. In order to make that happen, we have to avoid four traps and make sure we institute four key elements.

The four innovation traps are:

• Perfection trap – making our products and services more perfect always feels like a worthwhile goal. Make no mistake, to a great extent it is worthwhile. However, each generation has less “gosh wow!” than the previous one. My iPhone 4 was a lot better than an iPhone 3G, but the iPhone 5 wasn’t enough better to convince me to upgrade from the 4. The 5s was. Pursuing perfection can blind us to alternatives, and it’s the alternatives that defeat our “perfect” products. The perfect mousetrap is wonderful until someone shows up with a cat.
• To much to lose trap – we become focused on not hurting our existing products. Just remember, if you don’t turn your cash cow into hamburger, someone else will.
• Identity trap – the company defines itself in terms of its products: “we’re a database company” or “we’re a hardware company.” Specialization is great until your niche becomes irrelevant. IBM reinvented itself to have a life outside of mainframes and is doing quite well.
• The creeping box trap – it’s great to think outside the box. The problem is, once you move outside the box, it eventually grows to surround you again. Yahoo thought it was outside the box until Google came along. As already mentioned, Apple is in the box that Jobs built. Organizations get so focused on their own cleverness that they forget that other people are looking to think outside their box.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

Make it easy

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

It’s worth a brief discussion at this point of the concept of making things easy. My first jujitsu sensei used to frequently remind me to not stand my partner’s foot when I was trying to throw him. It was frustrating for me and didn’t particularly amuse my partner.

All too often, we get in our own way when we want people to do something. There is a big difference between making it hard for someone to say “No” and making it easy for them to say “Yes.” When we make it hard to say “No,” we are also making it hard to say “Yes” because we are, in effect, denying the other person autonomy or control. When we make it easy for them to say “Yes,” we are constructing the situation to produce the results we want and letting the other person freely choose to give us those results. As one Googler in that NY Times article put it, even on days off she comes into the office: there’s always healthy food available and it’s a more interesting place to be.

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal.  Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers.  In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources.  Steve Balzac is the 21^st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

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.

Escaping the Motivation Trap

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

So how do we escape from the motivation trap?

I’ve frequently walked into an organization and been told, “The problem is Phil. He’s unmotivated.”
When I chat with Phil, I quickly find out that he’s a marathon runner, or a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, or volunteers in a homeless shelter, or one of dozens of other activities that require a great deal of consistent, focused, effort. In other words, motivation.

Phil isn’t unmotivated. He’s just not motivated to do the thing his manager wants him to do at that moment.

The first step to escaping the motivation trap is simply the realization that people are always motivated to do something. We want to make it easy for them to channel that motivation into their jobs.

When it comes right down to brass tacks, an organization is a community of people with a purpose. It doesn’t matter whether we’re looking at a corporation, a non-profit, a school, a hospital, or a cycling club. Every organization has a purpose, expressed through its culture and conveyed in its vision and organizational narrative.

People who join the organization are going to be at least open to the organization’s vision. At best, they are already excited and eager to be part of it. If either of these points is not true, you have a serious problem in your organizational culture and narrative, the ability of your people to convey the purpose, or your hiring process – we’ll discuss that last point in the next chapter.

The next point is that it is the rare person indeed who comes to work wanting to do a bad job. However, if we just get wrapped up in our use of rewards and punishment, it is possible to turn enthusiastic people into people who no longer care or are happy to do a bad job. Unfortunately, we have some cultural beliefs that tell us that people don’t want to work and are lazy, uninterested, and take no pride in their work. The myth that workers don’t want to be there and have to be forced to work is a cultural value dating back to a time during the industrial revolution when horrible working conditions did, indeed, destroy motivation. As is often the case, cultural values have not yet caught up with reality.

People who are part of a community seek to gain status in the community. Thus, given the opportunity, members of an organization will act in ways which increase their status in the organization, provided they believe their actions matter and can see a path from where they are to a place of higher status. That status will typically translate into greater referent, legitimate, or expert power as well. We can take this a step further and observe that people always choose actions that they believe will increase their status in some way: we need to feel we are making progress in the activities to which we devote our time and energies.

The other side of the equation is that any large project is going to be draining at times. There will be moments of frustration and points where people are so tired, angry, or upset that they feel like just throwing in the towel and storming off. This is not something to just ignore or say that “professionals keep going” and other trite phrases. Professional athletes have people cheering them on and helping them through the long down periods.

Thus, motivation really comes down to unleashing people’s natural desires to do well, increasing their competence and status, and supporting them during difficult periods. It’s about using referent power to build those individual relationships we discussed in the previous chapter, and being there for people.

In this case, a necessary component of referent power boils down to how do you present yourself and what sort of example are you setting?

Are you genuinely interested in your team members as people, or is your interest in them only to further your own career? As Google found out, employees respect and trust managers who have the employee’s interests at heart. Similarly, if you want people to respect and trust you, you have to respect and trust them first. Motivation comes from working with someone who respects you and cares about your career: that is what makes it possible to trust the feedback that you are making progress.

Do you have strongly held beliefs and values? In other words, are you committed to something other than yourself? When someone is only committed to themselves, it’s very hard to trust them; you never know which way they’ll jump. However, people who are committed to a clear set of values can be trusted to hold those values even when it’s inconvenient.

Along the lines of strongly held values, do you demonstrate integrity? Remember that all leadership is at least partially transactional. While transactional leadership is quite limited on its own, it is the basis for anything deeper and more powerful. Without integrity, that transactional foundation will be unstable. Without the transactional foundation, inspiring others becomes impossible, and you’re back to using force: inspiring promises won’t work particularly well if no one believes you. At one company I worked with, a certain manager always found a reason to not follow through on promises he’d made; it wasn’t long before he had a department full of people who spent most of their time sitting around grumbling and doing the minimum amount of work necessary to keep getting a paycheck. The most bizarre part of the experience was that he seemed genuinely bewildered by their reactions, which brings us to the next point.

Can you make an emotional connection to other people on the team and in the organization? Logic is all well and good, but when it comes to deciding whom to trust and whom to listen to, emotion drives the train. If your team can’t make an emotional connection with you, they’ll never really trust you and will abandon you when a better opportunity comes along. Sometimes, they won’t even wait that long. That was, in the end, what happened to the manager I just mentioned. His personal brand became toxic; no one would stay in his department. He went back to being an individual contributor, where he was much happier.

So, with these points in mind, how then do we actually enable motivation?

Before answering that, let’s recognize something very important: there are no magical motivational techniques. Although the techniques we will look at are ones that can be easily done with people rather than to them, it’s still possible to turn each “with” into a “to.” It depends on your presentation.

The Game’s Afoot!

Remember Sherlock Holmes’s famous line: “Come Watson! The game’s afoot.”

While some have argued that Holmes was referring to a soccer match, in fact this line almost always preceded Holmes going forth and solving the mystery.

This time, though, Watson was the brilliant one.

The news of Watson, the IBM supercomputer, winning Jeopardy has been all over the web lately. I was lucky enough to attend an event at IBM in Littleton where they explained a bit about Watson and how it was developed, followed by the final Jeopardy show.

Yesterday, I received an email from someone arguing that Watson was, quite possibly, just a publicity stunt. After all, doesn’t a computer have an innate advantage in buzzing in? And what”s the big deal about a computer answering questions? After all, can’t Google do that?

Here’s my response (although since I’m quoting myself, I get to add all the things I wished I’d thought of when I originally responded 🙂 )
An interesting post on Watson, but your questions are easily answered… just use Google 🙂

Seriously, as impressive as Watson’s question answering was, that wasn’t what made it so successful. Let me address your other points first, though.

The trigger finger point: all human players develop heuristics for training themselves to buzz in as quickly as possible without getting locked out. Watson has its own algorithms, based on how much confidence it has in its answer. There were times when the human players beat Watson to the punch. However, just as a human player will try to keep the questions in an area where he has greater knowledge, which translates to an improved ability to respond quickly, Watson does the same. Just as humans respond more rapidly when we have higher confidence in our answers, so does Watson.

Watson vs. Google: try typing a typical Jeopardy question into Google: “A city whose first airport is named for a WWII hero and whose second for a famous battle from the same war.” What you’ll get is a discussion of how Watson answered that question (Toronto???). Google forces us to ask questions in a way the computer understands; Watson answers questions the way we naturally speak. Although probably oversimplified, Google does keyword matching ranked by popularity. Watson is attempting to do semantic matching — in other words, answer based on meaning. That’s more like what we do, although Watson doesn’t necessarily mimic how we do it.

The real secret to Watson’s success, though, was less about its ability to answer questions as its ability to gauge the confidence of its answers. Watson bets small amounts when it has low confidence and large amounts when it has high confidence, just like a person (or at least how a person might wish to act). However, Watson is considerably more able than most people to accurately assess the likelihood of its being right or wrong.

Watson is also able to calculate with a high degree of accuracy where Daily Doubles are likely to occur. Apparently, it’s a statistical calculation based on past games, and Watson can run that calculation very, very fast. Faster than any human. Given the previous discussion on confidence, we can see that this strategy gives Watson a chance to really clean up.

In short, as impressive as is Watson’s ability to understand English and understand puns (yes, it can do that!), the real secret to Watson’s success is that it knows how to win big when it’s right and cut its losses when it’s wrong.

Now that’s a lesson we might all benefit from!