The Business Sensei

The Hydrangea Conundrum

As published in The CEO Refresher.

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.

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.

Mousetrap Company

As published in Corp! Magazine

Remember the classic kid’s game, Mousetrap? In this historic tribute to the legendary Rube Goldberg, players have to assemble an exceedingly convoluted and baroque mechanism that will supposedly catch a mouse. As I have young kids, I recently had a refresher course in the game. What was interesting was the debate about which part of the trap is the most important: the crank turn at the beginning? The shoe that kicks the bucket, the ball bouncing down the stairs, the diver that flies into the washtub or the trap itself falling down the pole? In the end, most of the kids decided that it must be the trap, since without that you can’t actually catch the mouse.

Listening to the debate, I had the rather disturbing experience of being reminded of a certain software company. A similar debate occurred there as well: the engineers who were supposedly designing and implementing the software were being raked over the coals because they hadn’t successfully produced a workable product by the deadline. At first glance, it was clearly their responsibility to build the product, and their failure was costly indeed to the company.

The first glance is not, however, always the most accurate one.

In the game of Mousetrap, a number of things have to happen correctly in order for that all important trap to fall. If the shoe doesn’t kick the bucket, the ball won’t go bouncing down the stairs. If the crank doesn’t turn, the gears won’t rotate and the shoe won’t move. Indeed, while a failure at any point in this wonderfully elegant mechanism will derail the whole thing, failure at the start means that it won’t even get going.

At this software company, the process for getting a release out the door was, unfortunately, even more elaborate than the mousetrap. The biggest problem, though, was the crank at the top. The company had several products, and competition for resources was fierce. What the CEO seemed to be paying attention to was what received the time and energy of the engineers. Although the CEO kept saying that this particular release was critical to the future of the company, he made no effort to organize the company around that release, nor did he delegate that task to anyone else. Thus, the assumption from the top down was that this release couldn’t really be as important as all that.

By the time engineering got involved, the engineers were focused on multiple tasks. Without any direction from above, they took their best guess on which direction to go. Being engineers, that meant that they pursued the interesting technical problems, not the serious business priorities: when not given direction, most people will do the thing they are best at doing, whether or not that is the thing that really needs to be done at that moment.

When it came time to ship the product, the best that could be said about it was that it didn’t crash too often. The customer was not pleased.

What happened here was that there was no logical flow of control or means of prioritizing tasks. Superficially, an unhappy customer was the fault of the engineers; certainly, they took the blame. However, was that really accurate? The engineering team did their job as best they could with the information they had available. The real failure was in the leadership: when no one is leading, people follow the path of least resistance. That may not get you where you want to go. Although the failure did not manifest until the very end, the seeds of that failure were sown long before the engineers ever started working on that particular product.

Fundamentally, it is the job of the leader to set the direction for the company and keep people moving in the right direction.

It is the job of the leader to build the team so that the employees will follow him in that direction. It is the job of the leader to build up his management team so that he does not become the bottleneck.  It is the job of the leader to make sure that the technical problems and the business problems are in alignment and that the biggest contracts are the ones that get priority. This seems obvious, but for something obvious, it certainly fails to happen in far too many situations.

In this particular situation, the company’s mousetrap didn’t work very well. The trap didn’t fall. The rod didn’t move. The diver didn’t dive. The crank might have turned, but it didn’t turn particularly well. Indeed, the company really only got one part of the mousetrap process to work well.

They did manage to kick the bucket.

Stephen Balzac is a consultant and professional speaker. He is president of 7 Steps Ahead (www.7stepsahead.com), an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses to increase revenue and build their client base. Steve is a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play,” and the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill. Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.

Between Two Points

My first jujitsu sensei liked to frequently remind us that if you wanted to go from San Francisco to LA, you didn’t go by way of Portland, Oregon. Naturally, the wise-guys in the class, which included me, would make cracks about the airline schedules. I don’t know if there actually were flights that went from San Francisco to LA via Portland, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest!

Of course, the point my sensei was trying to make was that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. While this is certainly true in normal mathematics, fans of “A Wrinkle in Time,” might recall that a tesseract is the shortest distance between two points. While traveling via tesseract is purely science fiction, the fact remains that sometimes the direct route, that is, the straight line, is not the most rapid means of getting to your destination. Sometimes, you’re better off with a metaphorical tesseract. This is true in business and, as it happens, also in jujitsu (although that’s a separate topic). As a case in point, let’s look at the increasingly popular Results Oriented Work Environments (ROWE).

Read the rest at Corp! Magazine

What Makes Leaders Successful

If you missed my appearance on MYOB Radio on Sunday (or if you heard it and can’t wait to hear it again 🙂 ), you can listen to my interview on what makes successful leadership here.

Baker Street Irregular

Fans of Sherlock Holmes might remember the occasional scene in which a scruffy urchin appears out of nowhere, speaks briefly to Holmes, and then disappears again. Holmes then solves the case, and explains to the stunned Watson that he cultivated the urchins as sources of information. They are his “Baker Street Irregulars.”

For those who prefer a more recent image, fans of James Bond movies will remember the endless parade of agents who show up long enough to give Bond some critical piece of information or equipment. Unlike Holmes’s informants, the mortality rate amongst Bond’s “irregulars” tends to be awkwardly high. Star Trek, of course, was famous for its “Red Shirts,” the red uniformed security officers who would always die within minutes after appearing on camera. In all these cases, the character shows up on camera just long enough to move the plot forward and then disappears. In a very real sense, they have no existence before they are needed and no existence after their function is fulfilled.

When they are present, they exist only to meet the needs of the story, or at least of the hero.

Of course, these examples are all fiction. What bearing could they possibly have on reality? When I run predictive scenario management training exercises, a type of serious game, I find the same behavior manifests: many participants tend to assume that the other players in the scenario are only there to support their goals. They don’t quite recognize that each participant has their own goals and their own needs that they are trying to meet. As a result, conflict often erupts between different individuals and groups who each assumed that the other individuals and groups were present only as “red shirts.”

Read the rest at the American Management Association

As Above, So Below

(just in time for this article, I’ve even managed to get comments working properly (maximum spam blockage/minimal hassle) on my blog!)

While it is well known that rolling stones gather no moss, it appears that they are pretty rough on McChrystals. Recently, the news has been filled with headlines about General Stanley McChrystal and the story about him in Rolling Stone. Agree or disagree with how the situation was eventually resolved, it offers some important lessons for businesses.

While everyone has days when they aren’t happy with their boss, their job, their clients or just about anything else, what you say and how you say it makes a big difference. In General McChrystal’s case, perhaps the most striking elements of the article was not what he said, but what his staff said. Occasionally expressing frustration is normal. Open disrespect in the general’s staff is not, and says more about his opinions than anything he said. This attitude sets the tone for how the general and his staff will interact with others, people who, in a business environment, might be viewed as internal or external customers.

Read the rest at Corp! Magazine

Deja vu All Over Again

“This is like déjà vu all over again.”

–          Yogi Berra

In the classic British science fiction series Doctor Who, there is a scene in which the Doctor is trapped in a time loop: the same events keep taking place over and over with no end in sight. Naturally, this being fiction, the Doctor quickly recognizes what’s going on and figures out a way to break out of the loop. In real life, it’s not quite so easy. Granted, actual time loops tend to be pretty rare; not so the feeling of being stuck in one.

Read the rest in the CEO Refresher

Of steaks and lions

There’s an old saying about throwing steaks to lions in the hopes that they’ll become vegetarians. Apparently, if you do it long enough, the lion eventually grows old, loses his teeth, and gums the steak to death. But they’ll at least consider vegetables at that point.

The current political dance in the Senate is a rather interesting example of lions and steaks. We have a minority party that has found that the best way to succeed is to do everything possible to prevent the majority from accomplishing anything. The majority keeps throwing them steaks and hopes that they’ll become vegetarians. Why? Well, let’s look at this as if it were a corporate boardroom and see what lessons can be learned.

Now, to be fair, most businesses don’t have 100 vice-presidents. However, they have enough. I regularly hear tales of businesses (sorry, I can’t name names) with small coalitions competing with or refusing to cooperate with the majority. In each case, the minority players are working to make the majority look bad. Why? To gain the favor of the CEO, and hence to accrue more personal power to themselves. It seems more than a little silly, since it doesn’t do the company any good: even if the minority is right in their ideas, the cost of the infighting does more to hurt the company than any benefit that the minority’s policies would have brought. And when the minority’s policies are wrong, the damage is even greater.

Unfortunately, what has happened is that the minority coalition has lost track of the goals of the company: they are focused on their own goals, which usually involve succession to the CEO position, a larger scope of authority, bigger pay packages, and so forth. The reasons are as varied as the companies. Sometimes the minority coalition fails and is fired by the CEO or the Board. Sometimes they succeed, and the majority is fired.

What determines the result of the struggle is how the majority handles the competition. If they try to be nice and refuse to compete back, the minority is only encouraged. If they are so afraid of looking bad that they refuse to compete, they just end up looking bad.  It’s only when the  majority demonstrates that they are willing to play the same game, and compete as viciously as the minority that the game changes. Quite simply, in every group in which competition arises, the only way to end that competition is for the majority to demonstrate that the cost of competition is greater than the cost of cooperation and the rewards of cooperation are greater than the rewards for competition.

It doesn’t much matter if we’re talking about IBM or the US Senate. So long as we’re dealing with people, the dynamics are the same. Only the scenery changes.