The Business Sensei

Eye of the Hurricane

I was lying on my back. Standing around me were four people who, only two weeks before, had been teaching a class on appropriate emergency response in jujitsu.

The fact that I was flat on my back on the ground was not, in one sense, unusual. A friend of mine was taking his black belt exam and I had volunteered to let him demonstrate his throws on me. Things went slightly off the rails when he threw me, lost his balance, and ended up kicking me in the head.

The “thwock!” echoed through the gym.

One of the instructors was supposed to take charge. They stared down at me. I stared up at them. Eventually, I said, “Someone get me an ice pack.”

One of the men jumped slightly, turned, and ran out of the room. A moment later, he ran back in with one of those first aid kid chemical cold packs in his right hand.

“It’s not cold,” he yelled.

“You have to squeeze it,” came a voice from somewhere in the room.

In case you were ever curious, yes, it is possible to squeeze one of those cold packs too hard.

For such a small cold pack, the contents covered a remarkably large area.

I looked at my now soaking gi. I got to my feet.

“I’m fine now. Please don’t help me any more.”

Fortunately, in this situation, there was no permanent harm done and the fact that several people froze at the moment of crisis was merely embarrassing. My gi wasn’t even stained.

Unfortunately, many businesses are not so lucky. Even more unfortunately, it’s not the actual disasters that freeze them: handling the rare fire or power failure is barely a blip in the proverbial routine. Rather, the “disasters” that throw everything off balance and freeze decision making in its tracks are those that could have been anticipated or for which management thought that they had prepared.

Despite all their training, when the accident occurred, the four jujitsu instructors metaphorically lost their balance by focusing on the image of how bad it could be. That prevented them from acting immediately to determine how bad it actually was.

At Lacunae Software, the ship date was two days off when QA found a major bug in the software. Rather than stop, investigate the severity, and determine an appropriate course of action, the CEO announced that delaying the ship would clearly doom the company. He castigated QA for disloyalty and ordered the product to ship on schedule. Customers were not happy, costing the company more than the delay would have. Acting out of fear of how bad it could have been made the situation worse.

When things are going well and something suddenly goes wrong, it can be very easy to focus on all the potential negatives. That doesn’t help. Successful companies have the habit of focusing on what can go right. Developing that mindset takes practice:

Take a deep breathe and recognize that you have more time than you think. This is quite probably the hardest step.

• Remind yourself of the vision for your product and company (you do have a vision, right?).
• Review the steps necessary to manifest that vision. It can help to write them down as you go through them.
• List the things that can go right to move you forward from where you are. Be realistic, and also optimistic.
• Any time you find yourself focusing on what can go wrong, stop and shift back to what can go right. Evaluate the problems later.

Far too many companies never define their vision nor do they map out the path to success. The secret to success is staying on balance. The secret to not losing balance is knowing where you’re going, reminding yourself how you’ll get there, and focusing on the positive.

North Korean Rocket Change

I was listening to a news report this morning about North Korea’s latest rocket launch. It was quite the show, with hordes of journalists invited to watch and report on North Korea’s military might. According to one report, North Korea was also showing off for potential buyers of its military equipment.

As anyone who has ever given a software demo might suspect, North Korea’s rocket demo had similar results: it crashed. Unlike software, you don’t get to reboot the rocket and try again.

Although the news report wasn’t entirely clear on what happened, it appears that just before the first stage of the rocket finished its burn and dropped away, stages two and three both tried to ignite.

This did not go well.

Although perhaps less visually spectacular, the results are much the same when a business attempts to implement a “North Korean Rocket” approach to organizational change.

Organizational change is never easy, and on top of that, most companies make it considerably harder than it needs to be.

Change is a process: like launching a rocket, each stage needs to fire in turn. Attempting to fire the stages all at once or out of order only leads to a spectacular boom.

At least with a rocket, you might get some visually stunning fireworks.

The first stage of organizational change is getting your employees comfortable with the idea of making a change in the first place! This is one situation where focusing on what’s wrong is the right thing to do. You want your employees talking about why the status quo isn’t so hot, and how things really could and should be better. After all, if they’re all happy with the status quo, why would they want to change? As many a manager has learned, the more force you apply to make people change, the slower they go and the more likely your change initiate will fail.

Once people are in the mood for change, it’s time for the second stage: building some excitement. Rather than grumbling about how bad things are, it’s time to ask how things could be better. What would the company be like if we did make a change? How would that feel? What would working at that changed company be like? Look at both benefits to the company and benefits to the individual: no one wants a change that will leave them worse off.

In stage three, it’s time to focus on creating the confidence to change successfully. No matter how excited people may be at the idea of change, if they don’t believe they can do it, they won’t really try. It’s time to get them talking about previous successes, especially successful changes they’ve made in the past.

Finally, in stage four, it’s time to get people contributing ideas for change. Getting everyone involved dramatically increases the odds of success. The more confident and excited people are, the better the ideas they’ll come up with. The more involved they are in the idea generation process, the harder they’ll work to make the changes happen.

I worked with one client who would say to me, “Okay, I get it. I should do this, and then this, and then this.”

About then, I’d stop him, and say, “No, just do this one thing.”

He didn’t like that: it was too slow.

Every week, he’d complain that the project wasn’t moving forward. Every week, I’d ask him what he’d done, and he’d list off “this, and this, and this.”

Eventually, he decided to try going through the stages in order and one at a time. Suddenly, he saw progress.

Like the rocket, ignite the stages in the right order, and you make very rapid progress. Try to ignite them all at once or in the wrong order and you have a North Korean rocket launch: straight up in the air and then straight down into the ocean.

If they’re lucky, they might still be able to sell arms to Pottsylvania.

Happy Groundhog Day!

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray finds himself reliving the same day over and over again. Great movie, and solid proof of the old adage that adventure is something really dangerous and exciting happening to someone else. As much as watching Groundhog Day can be lots of fun, actually experiencing it is something else again. Thus, it never fails to amaze me when organizations willingly enter the Groundhog Zone.

No, I don’t mean that they are afraid of their own shadows, although that sometimes happens too! Rather, they are trapped in a cycle that is at best non-productive, at worst, downright destructive to the organization. Worst of all: everyone knows its happening and yet no one does anything about it. Unlike Bill Murray, though, they aren’t actually trapped. They just think they are.

For example, I worked with one two thousand person organization on some serious leadership issues. The first time the organization ran into this particular problem was decades ago, and it nearly destroyed the business. Many of the top people stormed out to found a competing company. The same thing happened again some twenty years later. The third time around, we made some progress: there was no fissioning of the business. Everyone stayed put and the first steps were taken to resolving some of the long-standing structural problems that were causing this cycle to repeat. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but it happened.

Okay, that’s an old business. Should we really be concerned with problems that only come up every twenty years? That’s up to you; I suppose it depends on when the next time the cycle rolls around. But Groundhog moments are not limited to older companies. Younger companies can have the same problems.

At one company, the engineering teams are unable to make decisions. The same issues come up week after week: every Monday is Groundhog Day! While there is a lot of talking and a great deal of motion, there is no progress. Running around in circles may feel good, but doesn’t exactly get you anywhere. Management regularly gets involved in various ways, and always with the same results: there’s some yelling, some threats, maybe a few people get fired, and there’s a brief flurry of forward motion. After a few weeks or a couple months, though, they are right back to where they started. Even though many members of the management team know there’s a problem, even though they keep talking about the problem, they take no action despite the cost to the organization: on the order of six figures per month. Groundhog Day indeed!

So what do you do when you realize that you are trapped in Groundhog heaven? Since every company’s Groundhog Day is uniquely theirs, the key is to know how to generate possible solutions, rather than find a one-size fits none approach.

First of all, don’t be afraid of your own shadow. Recognize that something isn’t working the way it should. The longer you pretend the problem doesn’t really exist or the longer you just hope it’ll go away, the worse it will get. As Einstein famously said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity. Whatever you’re doing to change things isn’t working. It’s time to try something else.

In Bill Murray’s case, Groundhog Day just happened overnight. In the real world, you didn’t get into Groundhog mode overnight and you won’t break out of it overnight. Stop looking for quick fixes: if they haven’t worked yet, they aren’t likely to in the future. You’ll spend more time and money trying quick solutions that don’t break the cycle than you will in committing to one solution that may take some time to implement. Organizational change, even beneficial change that everyone claims they want, is still difficult. If it wasn’t, Groundhog Day would be over by now.

Look outside the company for ideas. Let’s face it, you’ve got some really smart people working at your company (if that’s not true, you have bigger problems!). If they haven’t managed to change things, it might just be because they either don’t know how or they are too busy doing their jobs to devote the time and energy necessary to driving the changes necessary, or both. Whatever the reason, recognize that if they could, they would. Look at other companies and adapt their solutions to your specific culture and situation and bring in the resources you need to actually break the cycle.

Bill Murray has no choice but to repeat Groundhog Day over and over. Fortunately, you aren’t Bill Murray. What choice will you make?

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, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

New Year’s Resolutions? Forget it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do I control the outcome?

Can I measure progress in a meaningful way?

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

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

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

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

Good luck!

Yankee Swap Rorschach

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?

Thoughts on multitasking

When we multitask, we force our brains to continuously move information around. Ever notice how your computer starts to slow down and the disk light flashes more when you have a lot of apps open? The computer has to constantly rotate information from the hard disk to RAM depending on which app you’re using. Our brains are very similar. Unlike computers, however, which never get tired, our brains very quickly get tired.

Another problem is that our brains are built to remember uncompleted tasks. As we start to stack up uncompleted tasks, more and more of our mental computer becomes engaged in tracking the uncompleted tasks, leaving less available to deal with the problem in front of us.

The net result is that multitasking brings about a short-term pop in productivity, for maybe a couple hours (if that), but productivity swiftly declines after that. Unlike other skills, which improve as we use them, our performance while multitasking does not improve: instead, our ability to concentrate on a problem may actually decline because we develop the habit of switching too often and too soon.

An office with a lot of multitasking is almost always one in which work flow and office routines are not well developed or thought out. Most so-called emergencies aren’t.

So how is that some people (e.g. athletes) appear to do multiple things at once? If you practice something until it becomes second-nature, then you can appear to multitask. The key is that the practiced activity no longer takes any appreciable amount of concentration: think of it as a body macro. However, like macros they are hard to interrupt, change on the fly, or pick up in the middle if you do get interrupted.

Goof Gas Change

As published in The Business Enterprise

“We’re going to make this company great!”

As the villainous Boris Badenov spreads his goof gas, America’s most brilliant scientists are transformed into idiots. Even the smartest investigators are not immune. In desperation, the country turns to the one person, well, animal, who can save them: Bullwinkle J. Moose. Bullwinkle, it turns out, is immune to goof gas because he is, quite simply, simple. Bullwinkle cannot be affected by Boris’s goof gun because Bullwinkle has no intelligence to start with.

Moving from the world of cartoon satire to reality, we come to sunny California, and Clovis, the CEO of Clovis Systems. One fine day, Clovis announced a major restructuring.

“We are good,” he said, “but as a company, we need to be great.”

His particular choice of words was inspired by the title of the book that had inspired him to action: Jim Collin’s “Good to Great.”

The only problem with “Good to Great” is that you have to recognize the implicit assumption: that you’re starting from “good.” If you’re starting from “pathetic,” well, it doesn’t work quite so well. In fact, Clovis Systems was immune to “Good to Great,” for reasons eerily similar to why Bullwinkle Moose is immune to goof gas.

To make matters worse, Clovis’s approach to the whole concept of moving to greatness was lacking. “Great” is an impressive sounding word, but what does it mean? The answer depends on the person and the organization. By never defining what he meant, by never painting a picture of what “great” would mean, Clovis doomed his efforts from the start. But even if he had conveyed a clear destination, that wouldn’t have been enough.

Clovis made his announcement and then he didn’t follow through. If you want people to change, you need to do more than just tell them about the change.

To begin with, Clovis needed to help his employees recognize that some major changes were even necessary. From their perspective, things were pretty good. Having Clovis announce a major restructuring out of the blue looked to them like goof gas. All Clovis managed to do with his announcement was generate confusion, and confused people don’t move forward: they dig in their heels and try to stop moving until they can figure out what is going on. Therefore, Clovis should have started by talking with his employees about the disadvantages of the status quo. What were they unhappy about? What would they like to see done better? What was getting in the way of their doing their jobs?

Only by getting his employees thinking about what was wrong would they become open to the idea of change.

Once people start to think about change as desirable, the next step is to get them to think about it as possible and is something that they are capable of bringing about.

Trying to persuade them rarely works. The more you push, the more they resist. Instead, it’s time for a new set of questions. What would help you make the change? How have you made successful changes in the past? What resources do you have to help you make the change? What resources do you need? What strengths do you have that will make this work? What strengths does the company have?

Notice that every one of these questions focuses on the positive: on why the change is possible. If you focus on the negative, then all you’ll get is a litany of objections. While it’s important to identify and overcome obstacles, first you need to convince people that they are capable of overcoming those obstacles! Focus on success, not on failure.

Once Clovis had his team thinking of change as desirable and as something they could do, then it’s time to get concrete. If you wait too long, you’ll lose momentum, so it’s important to take advantage of the enthusiasm while it lasts. How will we make these changes? What do we need to do? How will we get started? How will we know we’ve started? How will we know we’re making progress?

Sometimes, if it’s hard to figure out how to start, it can help to forget about the how and focus purely on what you want to have happen. Get people talking and brainstorming and see how many different ideas you can generate. Do it right, and you’ll be amazed how many different approaches you’ll have.

Periodically, pause and summarize the progress you’re making. Echo it back to your employees. Let them see the small successes from the start. Each success builds momentum and keeps people believing that they can succeed. Recognize that people will make mistakes and that’s not a problem. Make it easy to recover and move on; you want employees to admit mistakes and correct them, not hide them out of fear of punishment.

Finally, keep everyone in the company moving forward together. When people move as a group, they support and encourage each other. When you leave people behind, the others stop to help their friends, or they insist on going back to get them. Either way, you lose forward momentum. If you already have strong teams, take advantage of their strength. If you don’t have strong teams, think of this as an opportunity to build team work. In either case, provide coaches, opportunities to practice the changes, room for experimentation, and vivid images of what the results will look like. Done right, not only will the mediocre teams become strong, but the strong teams will become excellent.

Clovis claimed he was serious about making his company great. However, he never did the work or committed the resources to make the change happen. In the end, he was breathing goof gas.

The Corporate Culture Conundrum

I get asked a lot about corporate culture. In this case, I ended up responding to a very detailed query at such length that I decided to include it here since I doubt the person interviewing me will be able to use all of what I wrote (I’m also posting this after the article comes out, so I don’t upstage anyone).

Let’s start by defining culture. At root, culture is nothing more than the residue of perceived success. In other words, it is the accumulated knowledge of how to be successful at a particular company and how the company is successful in the marketplace.

Why success and not failure? Simple. We tend to repeat the behaviors that appear to bring us success, and discontinue those that do not. Moreover, cultures based on failure simply do not survive. At some point, there have to be successes in order for the culture to remain viable.

I focus on perceived success because what really matters is not whether a behavior is really successful so much as our belief that it is successful. For example, in the 1990s, Nokia firmly believed that its success was due to its innovative management style. The reality was that they had a hot product, cell phones, in an exploding market. When the market saturated, their revenues dropped off along with every other cell phone provider in 2000. Today, Nokia is increasingly irrelevant. If everyone at the company had come to work wearing Groucho Glasses every day, their product would still have sold and they might very well have ascribed their success to their innovative dress code. The results would have been pretty much the same, although people might have been inspired to tell better jokes.

Because culture contains within it the memory of success, it is very hard to change. No one likes to change what’s working! What’s worse is that a behavior rarely succeeds all the time: when something doesn’t work, we ascribe the failure to “not trying hard enough” and resolve to do better. The resulting semi-randomness to the success produces a response similar to playing a slot machine: random success is highly addicting.

This phenomenon becomes particularly important when we realize that the business environment changes more rapidly than the culture. A once successful behavior gradually stops working. However, because it fades out slowly, intermittent successes along the way serve to make the behavior stronger and stronger even as its usefulness is decreasing. When it comes to not changing a behavior, it takes only the occasional success to make up for an awful lot of getting kicked upside the head.

This also means that there are two key aspects to culture: what we do and why we do it. Most organizations focus purely on the “what” and ignore the “why.” Even when an organization attempts to change culture, they almost always focus on what they are doing. Unfortunately, when you only change the what, you are changing the superficial. The underlying why will rapidly pull the new behavior back into alignment with the original behavior; although cosmetic changes may persist, the new “what” will be fundamentally identical to the old.

The “whys” of culture also interlock: there is rarely one reason for a particular behavior. As a result, attempting to change one “why” can also be quite difficult because a) it’s hard to identify it precisely, and b) the rest of the interlocking structure of beliefs pulls it back. It is quite possible for a CEO or senior management team to simply chop off a piece of a corporate culture, but it can be quite unpredictable what else they’ll lose: for example, when IBM dropped its traditional full-employment policy, they also lost a great deal of employee loyalty and their historic “IBM takes care of me and my family, I take care of IBM” employee mindset.

With that said, let me jump over to your questions:

1. How do you know when there's something wrong with your corporate culture (what are 2-3 signs), or how do you know if things need improving just a bit?

Something is “wrong” with a corporate culture when the culture can no longer obtain resources, that is to say clients and revenue, from its environment. The early symptoms can manifest in several ways before the revenue drop really hits. The most common is a persistent feeling of being stuck: more and more effort is expended for less and less success. Previously successful revenue generating behaviors are losing their effectiveness, but doing so in fits and starts.

Another common symptom is increasing defensiveness on the part of management: executives don’t want to hear why something isn’t working, and attempts to address problems are met with denial. At exactly the point where the executive team should be bringing in outside help, they become increasingly unwilling to do so. An outsider is far too likely to grind the sacred cows into hamburger. IBM’s decision to bring in Lou Gerstner in 1992 is an example of a company overcoming that fear of outsiders and actually addressing their problems.

A third symptom of culture problems is a persistent inability to make and keep decisions. When teams within the company, or the company as whole, continually revisits discussions and can’t seem to follow-through on goals, that’s a major warning sign that you need to take action.

2. Where do generational differences among staff and colleagues come into play?

Let’s start with the elephant in the living room: the Gen Y myth. This whole concept that Gen Y’ers are somehow less dedicated, less motivated, or less <insert here> than Gen X or Boomers is, quite simply, a myth. Indeed, the whole idea that the younger generation is less respectful, dedicated, hard-working, and so forth, than their elders is itself a cultural belief that goes back at least to Socrates.

What is different, however, is that Gen Y’s do not share the cultural belief that you graduate from college, work at one job for 40 years, and retire to enjoy your “golden years.” While this was, or at least appeared to be, a valid cultural belief at one time, it is no longer valid in the current environment and shows no signs of regaining validity. However, for those who grew up with it, it is very difficult to put it aside.

Within an organization, what matters first is not the generational differences but the degree of immersion in the culture of the organization. Younger employees are less deeply immersed in the culture; they’ve had less time to absorb it and to assume its values. Thus, they are more likely to propose ideas and approaches that older employees view as violating cultural values and hence are more likely to reject. Note, by the way, that I’m referring less to chronological age than to amount of time with the company. Since the older employees typically have more authority, younger employees are more likely to be frustrated. How they cope with that will, however, be strongly influenced by their generational cultural values: a Boomer or X’er might decide that if they stick around and pay their dues, they’ll get a voice in due time; a Gen Y’er is probably more likely to go somewhere else. One solution is not inherently better than another.

3. How do you cultivate a creative and collaborative team (what 2-3 three things can really build that team culture)?

Culture is whatever is seen as successful. If you want people to collaborate, reward collaboration. Sounds simple, but it just doesn’t happen. Companies focus on individual performance and individual reward. As a result, they get a bunch of individuals often competing for a limited pie. While it is important to acknowledge and reward individual contributions, that cannot be all that you reward and it should never be set up in a way that creates competition between team members.

4. It's all about innovation, how best to encourage creative brainstorming for service/product innovation (what works and what doesn't and why)?

There are four culture traps to avoid and four cultural beliefs to build. The four traps are:

Perfection — We must make the perfect mousetrap… which works until someone comes along with a cat.

Protection — We must not hurt our existing products. Pity our competitors don’t feel that way…

Identity — We’re an X not a Y. IBM was a serious business company in the 1980s. They didn’t “do games.” Now they’re heavily involved in serious gaming.

Creeping Box — We’re so far outside the box no one can catch us. Just ask Yahoo… Once you move outside the box, the box grows and suddenly you’re just one of the pack.

The cultural values to foster

Continuous education — Keep people learning. Don’t limit people to taking classes in their areas of expertise; rather encourage employees to study whatever interests them. Innovation comes from putting together apparently disparate pieces of information.

Making mistakes — How do you respond to mistakes? Innovation is a messy business. If mistakes are punished, no one will risk making them and innovation will falter. Thomas Edison famously said that he’d learned a thousand ways to not make a light bulb. Easy to say, hard to live.

Strategic breaks — Allow the breakthrough to happen. The “eureka” moment doesn’t happen when we’re exhausted from banging our head against the wall. It comes when we take a break and do something different. Learn how to take breaks strategically.

Patience — Don’t wait for a crisis to force your hand. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but waiting for the last minute to start innovating is the number one cause of premature death amongst new ideas.

5. How do intangibles like volunteerism, office greening, impact corporate culture?

Intangibles matter to the extent that they reflect the corporation’s values, beliefs, and aspirations. Volunteerism can be very important in a company that views itself as a good citizen of the community. However, to be effective, intangibles have to be worth the time and energy expended on them. If employees who volunteer their time end up being paid less or promoted less frequently than those who don’t volunteer their time, volunteerism will fade out. The behavior that is rewarded will become part of the culture, and the culture will attract those who believe in the values manifested through the behavior.

6. What are other intangibles that are important but corporations may not be keen about their importance?

How meetings are conducted, whether employees are permitted to work from home, how much freedom and autonomy versus direction employees are given, how mistakes are handled, how disagreements are managed, how permissible it is to question authority, are just a few of the intangibles that shape cultures.

7. How important is culture today and why?

Organizational culture is probably the most important most powerful force in any corporation. Because culture is the lessons of the past, it provides the template for how to behave in the future. Once a corporation loses sight of its culture, it’s only a matter of time before it slams into a brick wall.

8. Is your sense that most firms are focused on their culture, why or why not?

While many firms focus on their culture, they focus on the wrong aspects of it. Most companies focus purely on the “what,” those superficial artifacts that are easy to see but which have the least significance. It’s hard to focus on the “why.” Indeed, really delving into the “why” of your culture is rather like performing open heart surgery on yourself. In other words, you need the assistance of a trained outsider who is not immersed in your culture to see the elements you take for granted.

9. Any interesting, stats, surveys or other data about corporate culture?

Let me point you my book, “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development.” Chapter one is about culture and the entire book discusses how organizational development shapes and is shaped by culture.

10. If a company can make only one change in it's culture, how to determine what should be that priority?

The biggest priority is changing the belief that you can change only one thing… Seriously, culture change is not a precise, surgical operation. Sure, if you’re only after changing the “what,” you can pick one thing, but for anything non-trivial you have to go after the “why.” That requires taking the time to really understand what values and assumptions that are taken for granted are no longer valid, and then building up a new set of values and assumptions. Most culture change fails because it tries to focus too narrowly on one thing. Corporations go through a lot of pain and spend a lot of money only to experience a fleeting success before the culture reverts back to the way it was: when you seek to change only one thing, everything connected to that one thing acts to pull it back to its original form.

A Tale of Two Light Bulbs

As published in the CEO Refresher

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?