The Business Sensei

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

No Escaping That For Me

“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

I Told You: 360-Degree Feedback Done Right

“We were thinking of doing a 360-degree feedback to help him understand what other people think.”

This very frustrated comment was made to me recently regarding efforts to explain to a very senior manager that his style of leadership wasn’t working for his team. At that point, all efforts to convince him to change were foundering on the manager’s simple perception that things were working just fine.

Such being the case, it’s hard to imagine how a 360 can help. Sure, he might find that his subordinates don’t like him very much, but he might also feel that his job isn’t to be liked, but to get people to perform.

Read the rest at LabManager Magazine.

Comrade, we meant pies

After reading the recent articles in the NY Times about the Russian spy ring and listening to news reports on it, I’m left wondering just what the point was. It sounds mostly like an episode of Get Smart, complete with over the top recognition phrases and really bad brush passes (in one example, the spy holds out his backpack so that the passing Russian government official can place a bag into it).

Perhaps these 11 people misunderstood their instructions. Instead of being spies, maybe they were supposed to make pies.

The biggest question I’ve having with this story is just what the expected goals were. Why did someone decide on a long-term, expensive, potentially embarrassing operation? It seems odd that so much effort would be expended trying to obtain information that can be readily obtained through the news, Facebook, and Google.

No, I don’t think there’s some deeper, hidden plan here (were I writing an espionage serious game, I would, of course, have a different view… 🙂 ). Rather, I believe this is an amazing example of astoundingly poor planning. This is a project that seems to have been given the same level of critical thought and review as a plan that involves evacuating walruses from the Gulf of Mexico and not thinking about hurricanes.

In this case, I wonder if the Russians figured that they needed information about American life and at least knew they didn’t know much about it. Their assumptions, though, about how to get that information only serve to illustrate just how much they didn’t know about what they were investigating. It’s a wonderful example of how cultural beliefs and assumptions can get in the way of actually accomplishing your goals.

Sometimes the toughest part of learning something is figuring out just how much you don’t know. If the Russians had realized just how trivial this information was, they wouldn’t have needed to go to such lengths to get it. How often do businesses make the same mistakes? Sometimes the information isn’t that hard to get or the product isn’t that hard to build, but our assumptions based on a lack of knowledge cause us to make the whole thing much more difficult.

That can be extremely expensive. It can also lead to the Keystone Kspies.

Pardon me, I think my shoe is ringing.

8 Questions About Your Hiring Process

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

Smoke on the Water

It’s hard to figure out what to say about BP that’s not either political or a joke. In fact, it’s hard to not view BP as a joke right now and to view how they’re handling the oil spill as a sort of Royal Dutch Shell Game.

Okay, sorry. I’m going to try to not tell too many oil company jokes here 🙂

Leaving aside all the political furor over the oil spill, it’s interesting to look at this from a risk management perspective. Psychologically, we view risk in ways that do not always conform the reality of the risk. For example, we tend to assume that if an event occurs once at a certain point in time, then it’ll happen again at that point in time: after the October 1987 market crash, for years afterward some people would jump out of the market in October just in case. Why? Well, it happened once in October (twice if you count the 1929 crash!). In fact, the 1987 crash was a unique event.

Similarly, when a disaster occurs and then doesn’t repeat, eventually we tend to assume not only that it won’t repeat but that the odds of its repeating are going down the longer the time that has passed. Thus, we had a major oil disaster in the Gulf in 1979. We had various smaller spills, but nothing so large after that (the Exxon-Valdez being a somewhat different kettle of oily fish). The natural assumption becomes that the problem won’t recur, either because we know more or because our technology is better or because the stars are in the correct alignment, or whatever reasons we might assign to the (non-)event.

Now, BP did have financial incentives to make these assumptions, and I quite believe those incentives made a big difference to their planning. This left them wide open to what Nassem Taleb calls a Black Swan: an event whose probability cannot be calculated but whose effects are potentially catastrophic (or beneficial, though not in this case). Part of what made the event so powerful is that BP was so manifestly unprepared to deal with it.

I suspect that part of the non-financial reasoning behind BP’s decision is that we no longer really think about oil as dangerous. Sure, we *know* it’s dangerous, but it’s been a part of our lives for so long now that it doesn’t have emotional impact any more. Compare oil to, say, nuclear energy. How did you react? Which is more dangerous? Which can do more health damage? How do you know?

Most people I’ve spoken to have a much different reaction to nuclear energy than to oil. Why? We don’t think about oil, while we do think about nuclear energy. It’s been a while, but my recollection of Three Mile Island is that it affected a much smaller geographic area and many fewer people than the oil spill. Again, this represents a misapprehension or confusion in how we assess risk. Nuclear energy is *scary* and oil is familiar.Fact is, if you have oil heat and your tank ruptures, you’ve got a major problem on  your hands. In some cases, it can be a real problem when familiarity breeds contempt.

Part of risk assessment needs to be not just how likely is an event to occur, which cannot always be calculated, but what gives us reason to believe that it won’t occur? As we see, just because it hasn’t happened recently doesn’t mean it won’t. On the flip side, some events really do work that way: the longer it takes to repeat, the longer it is likely to take. We thus need to understand which type of event we’re dealing with, otherwise we spend our time and energy defending against events that really are highly improbable or unlikely to do much harm while leaving ourselves wide open to the events that have a constant probability no matter how much time has passed and which can do devastating damage.

Decider’s Remorse

Recently, I was attending a board meeting for a certain organization. They were contemplating some significant changes to several long-standing policies, which naturally generated quite a bit of discussion. The various options were carefully laid out and analyzed. There was a great deal of discussion over how well the different changes would address the identified problems. The president very carefully checked to make sure each member had had their say, that each member felt heard, and that each member was comfortable making a decision and accepting whichever decision was reached.

The vote happened, and a decision was made. No problem!

The problem came up at the next board meeting, when the president said, “I’m not comfortable with our decision. I think we should revisit it.”

Read the rest at Corp! Magazine

Long hours can kill you…

Here’s an interesting article on the British study about how working long hours can be detrimental to your health.

Of course, I’ll confess that a big part of why I like it is that I was extensively quoted… 🙂

Heartbreak At Work

Too Many Chiefs

Recently, someone told me that, “We don’t need leadership training. We’re all leaders.” When I asked how well they worked together and actually got things done, she then said, “Well, you know, leaders all have good ideas. We have some strong personalities. It can take a while.”

Overall, she was half right. Just because someone is a leader, that doesn’t mean they automatically have good ideas. In fact, only poor leaders think that they only have good ideas. However, she was correct in that they didn’t need leadership training. Rather, what they needed was membership training.

Read the rest at Corp! Magazine

Why Barnes & Noble was Amazoned

When I speak about innovation, one my favorite examples is how B&N was beaten in their primary market, selling books, by upstart Amazon.com.

Even now, B&N doesn’t quite get it.

Case in point: my book appeared on Amazon.com for pre-order over a week ago. It finally showed up on B&N, and there are few small errors. Nothing major, but it makes it look unprofessional: screwing up the formatting of the title, which is, I grant, minor.

Far more amusing is who they’ve listed as the author: Honore de Balzac.

This may come as a surprise to the folks at Barnes & Noble, but Honore has been dead for a while.

Okay, this isn’t a major issue, but it illustrates a point: when the primary image people have of your “bookstore” is virtual, it pays to get the relevant details right.

On the other hand, if you want to get a brand new book by Honore de Balzac, I guess now’s your chance… 🙂