As published in the CEO Refresher
For a great many years, the majority of discussions I’ve heard about the Superbowl focused on the ads. This year, of course, was different. Sure, there was plenty of speculation about the ads, but most of the discussion had to do with the New Orleans Saints finally qualifying. It’s not easy to have an even more losing reputation than the pre-2004 Boston Red Sox. At least Red Sox fans knew that their team had won the World Series once upon a time, albeit so long ago that the event was very nearly mythical. Indeed, the Sox qualified many times, only to snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory.
The Saints never got that far. They just lost. Until this year, when suddenly the big news was that they were playing in the Superbowl.
Naturally, the pundits were out in force in the days leading up to the game: detailed explanations for why New Orleans couldn’t possibly win, how the Colts were simply too strong, too well prepared, too skilled a team to be beaten, and so forth. The opinions were logical, well thought-out, and seemed to make perfect sense.
The reality, however, was something just a tiny bit different. On the Sunday before Mardi Gras, the Saints won the Superbowl.
How could so many experts have been so wrong? Frankly, outside of people who are extremely serious about football or people who bet large sums of money on the Colts, probably no one actually cares. In a business environment, however, having the experts be dramatically wrong can be expensive for more than just a few people. It can harm not just the people who made the mistake, but the rest of the organization as well. So perhaps the real question is what can be done to improve decision making accuracy and expert predictions within an organization?
The fact is, all those experts who were predicting victory for the Colts were relying on, well, expert opinion and “previous experience.” In this case, their “previous experience” with the Saints was that the Saints were not particularly good players. The Colts, on the other hand, were well-known to be a strong team. The pundits thus made the mistake of comparing the Colts of today to the Saints of yesterday. What they missed was that something had changed. The very fact of the Saints making it to the Superbowl was a signal that something was different this time around: either everyone else was playing a lot worse, or the Saints were playing a lot better.
In a business, the tendency is to apply expert opinion and previous experience to many situations. When the business is facing a difficult or intractable problem, potential solutions are often evaluated based on opinions of how that solution should work out based on its perceived similarity to some other situation. If the previous situation and the current situation are sufficiently similar, then you can make some reasonable predictions based on the past; indeed, the past is generally one of the most powerful methods available for predicting the future. The ability of an expert to correctly recognize points of similarity and draw valid conclusions from them is a very valuable one.
A break in similarity, however, is a clue that something major may have changed. It is a clue that the previous situation and, therefore, opinions and judgments based on that previous situation, may not apply. When that happens, it’s critical to recognize the change and be willing to disregard all of our expert judgments in favor of a slower, more careful evaluation.
Of course, if the pundits had recognized that the situation was too different to make a meaningful prediction, there wasn’t much they could have done: at some point, only actually doing the experiment, that is, playing the game, will give you an answer. In football, or most other sports, that’s part of the fun: if we always knew in advance who would win, it would be awfully boring.
In a business, though, boring can be good. So what do you do when you’re evaluating a potential solution to a problem?
It helps to look at the points of similarity between your solution to a problem and the situations you view as similar. What is the same? What is different? Do those differences represent a fundamental incongruity between the two situations? Or perhaps you can only see a small piece of the other situation. This is not all that unusual when one business looks at how another business is solving a problem: I worked with one small software company that decided to adopt the Microsoft Way, whatever that was. It didn’t matter though: they were going to price like Microsoft, develop like Microsoft, act like Microsoft. Unfortunately, they weren’t Microsoft. It didn’t work for them. It may have worked for Microsoft, but Microsoft had resources that this company did not. Pointing out that Microsoft didn’t do things that way when they were small didn’t gain any traction.
In this case, it can help to study other companies that look like your company to see how they are addressing similar problems. The greater the similarity, the more likely you are to get valuable information. Sometimes, the present, rather than the past, is the best predictor of the future!
Sometimes, of course, the best way to evaluate your solution is to rely on none of the above: personal experience, expert opinion, even a study of similar situations and companies, don’t provide you with enough valid data to evaluate your solution in the present. In that case, you might have to actually play the game: you need to figure out how you’ll know if your solution is successful in the long-term and the short-term. You need to know not just where you want to go, but also how you’ll know if you’re on track to getting there.
In the short-run, this is the most difficult approach. It involves taking some risks. It may also involve the biggest return.
Or you can settle for predicting the results of the game.
As published in ERE.Net
Recently, I heard a hiring manager comment that she would “Prefer not to hire anyone at all.”
Her company is growing. They are actively looking for people. At the same time, this manager who has been tasked with building up her team is openly telling candidates that if she has her way, not one of them will be hired. Indeed, given the choice, it’s hard to imagine candidates accepting an offer if they did get one, compared, say, to an offer from an enthusiastic and confident employer.
While making the observation that this woman lacked confidence might be something of an understatement, it is only a start.
Confidence begets confidence, just as lack of confidence begets lack of confidence. This manager was demonstrating a lack of confidence in herself, her company, its hiring process, and in the candidates. That, in turn, makes it extremely difficult to attract top people: if the hiring manager doesn’t seem confident, what does that tell the candidate about the company?
While most businesses viewed the Great Depression as a time to hunker down, cut everyone possible from the payroll, and hide under the bed until things got better, one CEO took a different perspective. He saw the Depression as an opportunity to find the best people, build their loyalty and commitment, and stockpile equipment and material against the day the economy turned. Tom Watson’s confidence that things would get better propelled IBM into becoming the global powerhouse it remains to this day.
In another example, a recent news report featured an economist claiming that hyper-inflation and total social collapse is just around the corner. Is that likely? I’m no economist, but I have to wonder how many people today remember Dow 36,000? James Glassman’s book was published at the height of the Internet boom: in October 1999, just a few short months before the market crashed in March 2000. The predictions of a rosy future stretching into forever were loudest, and most believable, at the top; what does that say about the news today?
In the end, though, while this woman’s lack of confidence may have been made obvious by the economy, and helping her reframe the news was an important step, further investigation revealed the economy wasn’t the actual cause. The actual cause was both more immediate and less obvious: she fundamentally didn’t trust the hiring process her company used. If you don’t trust the process, it’s hard to have confidence in it, and the more vulnerable you are to surrounding influences such as the news. In a strong economy, her lack of trust could easily go unnoticed simply because the positive news flow would allay her fears; without the positive backdrop, however, her fear and her lack of confidence in the system were fully exposed. Sadly, this lack of confidence appears to be the case in a great many different companies.
It’s a topic I write about in the next Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. In that article, I specifically get into some ways to address the problem. While it’s certainly true that we don’t control the economy, we can control how we react to it. We control as well how well our recruiting systems are designed and how well trained we are in using different parts of it. Understanding what we control and how to exercise that control well is the key to true confidence.
November 12th,2010
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How often have you heard someone from a company say, “We hire slow and fire fast?”
I’ve heard this line so often that it sounds sort of a like a mantra or one of those wise sayings that are taken for granted but are generally wrong: “I invest for the long term,” or “There is no room for emotions in the work place,” or “The Red Sox will never win.”
This is not to say that it’s always wrong to “hire slow.” However, it’s important to understand the different ways that a company can hire slow. Some of them make more sense than others. What, fundamentally, does it mean to hire slow? For that matter, what does it mean to “fire fast?”
Read the rest at the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership
October 25th,2010
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Okay, the Peter Principle, that each person in an organization is promoted to their level of incompetence, is legendary. Since it was first advanced by Lawrence J. Peter in the 1960s, it’s been one of those things that is spoken about amusingly but with a certain element of “yeah, right.” (which is, I believe, the only example of a double-positive making a negative, but I digress.)
Well, if you’ve ever wondered if the Peter Principle works, it turns out that it does. This year’s management Ignoble Prize went to The Peter Principle: A Computational Study. The researchers found that not only does it work, it’s potentially unavoidable if ones duties following a promotion are essentially unrelated to ones duties before the promotion. In other words, the skills of an engineering manager are not identical to those of an engineer. Being a good salesmanager is not the same as being a good salesman, and so on. The study went on to state that organizations could improve their efficiency by promoting randomly the most and least competent performers!
Looking at this study, I’m struck by the basic assumption underlying it: the principle works if the duties as you move up are substantially different from what they were at the “lower” level. Unfortunately, this is a pretty valid assumption. There is a cultural belief in most businesses that management is “higher” on the corporate ladder than being an individual contributor. As a result, if you really want to increase your salary and status in the company, you need to keep climbing. Unfortunately, this means that there’s a very good chance that eventually you’ll reach the point that you can’t do the job well anymore, and hence you’ll be stuck in a job that doesn’t fit your skills and talents.
It’s a very perverse incentive!
It occurs to me that instead of insisting on the ladder or believing that doing well at job X means that you’ll do well at job(not x), perhaps a better approach might be to give people the opportunity to try out a new job. Providing some sort of training for the new job is also a good idea. It’s rather disturbing how often people are “promoted” into management and then given no training on what to do. In a perfect example of the Peter Principle, they are taken out of the job that they excel in and for which they probably trained for many years, and put into a job for which they have no training and possibly no talent. The former, at least, can be fixed.
Of course, even when there is management training, it has to be done right. The occasional one-off, soon forgotten until the next year, is hardly sufficient. Consider how much training it probably took for the person to be successful in their previous job! Management training needs to be focused, given the reality of time constraints that exist in most businesses, and it also needs followup. Waiting a year until the next training won’t do it!
It takes a lot of effort to avoid the Peter Principle. I suspect that many businesses are figuring they can’t afford to do anything about it. My question is, can they afford not to?
Remember the classic kid’s TV show, the Flintstones? Fred and Wilma Flintstone are a stone age couple who live in something that looks oddly like the 1950s with rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. Despite this, the show had nothing to do with either rock music or getting stoned. It did, however, have an episode which predicted that the Beatles were a passing fad. So much for prognostication! Fortunately, that episode is not the point of this article.
In one episode, Fred complains to Wilma that he can’t understand what she does all day. How hard can it be to take care of a house? Of course, as Fred swiftly learns, after he and Wilma make a bet, the answer is very hard. Fred, of course, makes a total mess of the whole thing. Now, obviously, the cartoon was playing off of social issues of the time and was intended to make people laugh. The obvious lesson, that a “non-working mother” is a contradiction in terms, is hopefully one that most people have figured out by now. The less obvious lesson is the much more interesting one: it is often impossible to gauge from the results, or from watching someone work, just how difficult a job actually is or even how hard they are working! Conversely, how people feel about the results has little bearing on how hard you worked to get them.
Read the rest at the CEO Refresher
I was recently quoted in an article called “Brain Training.” The article is on applying neuroscience to the workplace, and all the great benefits this would bring about.
I was skeptical. My comment was this:
“While it’s certainly possible to gain some improvement in decision making abilities by better understanding how our brains work, I question how significant the improvement will be “in the field.” It strikes me as rather like trying to learn jujitsu or tennis through a detailed study of body mechanics. Will it help? To some degree, but ultimately, if you want to become skilled in those sports you have to get out and practice under the supervision of a good coach.
To the extend that brain sciences can help us develop better training programs, they are a big plus. But they cannot replace practice.”
The author didn’t quite use all of this, but he kept the general point.
Today, I read about a study out of Harvard that found that simply referring to neuroscience as the explanation for a phenomenon increases the likelihood that people will believe the explanation, even when the explanation has no inherent meaning: “the effect is due to frontal lobe circuitry.”
In its own way, it is no more meaningful than the famous line from Doctor Who: “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!” which Jon Pertwee famously made up after he forgot his technobabble.
And yet, it works. Businesses are spending tons of money using neuroscience to explain employee behavior instead of looking at what’s happening in front of their eyes!
Why are they so convinced that neuroscience will find the answer, and that the answer will then be easy to apply in the office? Must be due to frontal lobe circuitry.
August 20th,2010
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“Destiny! Destiny! No escaping that for me!”
– Gene Wilder in “Young Frankenstein”
As fans of Mel Brook’s classic comedy Young Frankenstein know, Gene Wilder’s destiny as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein is to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and create the monster. This being a comedy, things do work out somewhat better than they did in the original story. Destiny, it appears, can be changed with sufficient effort. Indeed, precisely because Frederick Frankenstein realizes that he’s following in Victor Frankenstein’s footsteps, he is able to turn things around at the last minute and bring about a happy ending.
In my consulting projects and in conducting leadership training with various groups, from college students through executives, I’ve frequently observed destiny in action. People play out the roles that they believe they are supposed to play out. Organizationally, we act as we’ve been taught to act in our various roles: CEOs are expected to behave in one way, managers another, engineers yet another. For example, in some companies it’s perfectly normal for engineers to show up to work in jeans and T-shirts, but totally inappropriate for a manager to do the same.
Read the rest at Corp! Magazine
What is the most important factor in successfully recruiting top candidates? If you said things like salary, benefits, or the economy, you’d be wrong. It’s your organizational culture. I have a longer article in the upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership about the role of organizational culture in the hiring process. To give you a taste of it here … let me first say that when you start to throw around terms like “organizational culture” you may think that it’s academic, or that it’s abstract. It’s not.
Read the rest at ERE.Net
I’ll be doing a webinar on Feb 1 on the topic of “Cartesian Splits and Chinese Splits.” The webinar will focus on mental side of sport performance. Here’s the description:
Many gifted children tend to focus the greater part of their energies on intellectual pursuits. When they participate in sports, they often find themselves frustrated by the experience of “getting it” intellectually, but being unable to execute the techniques being taught, or finding that their body just does not appear to respond the way their mind does. Gifted children will often respond by increasing their focus on their intellectual skills, neglecting or dismissing the value of the physical. Mental training techniques such as relaxation and visualization combined with integrated mind/body activities in a mastery setting, such as martial arts, can provide gifted children the opportunity to developtheir physical skills in a fun and supportive environment. This seminar will draw upon current research in the field of sport psychology as well as the instructor’s own experiences in both competitive and non-competitive sports.
More information and a registration link is available at http://giftedonlineconferences.ning.com/
January 21st,2010
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This is the short version of an article that was accepted for publication by the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. The full version will probably be out in a month or two.
It’s not enough to say that if you want to keep the best people when the economy improves, you just need to communicate more. It matters what you say and how and when you say it. Communication occurs in the context that you’ve created over time, and how your communications will be received will depend a great deal on that context. If you want to keep your best people, then you need to do your homework. (Or, conversely, if you want to recruit someone else’s key people, find companies that did not do the homework suggested in this article.)
Read the rest at Ere.net
January 2nd,2010
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