Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist or The Spirit Of The Times, or temporary craziness, occurs in business, too. Over the past few years watching disintermediation of industry after industry has not only terminated scores of businesses, but also dramatically changed the business processes of the survivors. 

There are still top down organizations trying to hold off new customer-driven competitors, while increasing pressure strains remaining resources. But fewer of them. 

Remember reengineering? That worked pretty well...for a while. 

The management pyramid? Was that in Egypt? 

Took a while to figure out that best value just means lowest price. And figure out, figure out, figure out. 

Y2K? Dodged that bullet. Whew! 

Participative management? Fewer places to participate these days. 

Doing-more-with-less seems to keep morphing, popping up like a champagne cork on the tide. Maybe because it’s not a prescription but a description. 

In How To Create A Mind, Ray Kurzweil says that being early is just as bad as being late. He’s been successful in the inventing business for almost 50 years, and has been early, on time, and late.

Taking advantage of the now

How do you sift the media-anointed from the real? 

Alan Kay recommended, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”  For many of us, we’re moving the ball smartly, trying to find the end zone.  

Which means throwing out many of the analytical tools that will tell you when you’ve committed too much, adopting the tools that encourage carrying on until game’s over.  

I liked Bonnie Raitt’s observation, “Wow! Twenty years to become an overnight success.”

The future shows up regardless.

Springtime. We need a rainmaker! 

Management Reports

Management reports remind me of the peephole in my front door. I seldom see anything I recognize.

Management reports are backward-looking documents, rehashing the recent past. Often used as part of a roll-up, by people charged with repeating others’ reports, usually without understanding them. (See GIGO)

At best, they represent 90 minutes of diversion condensing the last 50 hours/30 days/90 days of work.

Worse is a response of “Let’s discuss,” which turns into hours of the dance of gray fantasy, “Tell me what you want, I’ll agree.” A smart economist told me last month, “You don't torture a dataset until it confesses.”

If the right answers were available, don’t you think I’d have put ’em in there? I wrote one of these reports last week.

Ever notice that when the right answers are available, they are no longer worthy of the report? We’ve already moved to a next stage.

“Just checking, did we get through the next gate when I wasn’t paying attention?” It’s a management fantasy, like being on a cruise ship and waking up in a new port.

If you weren’t going to use management reports to reverify known history again, or trying to change reality to observers’ preconceptions, what might you do?

I’ve always found management reports are light on senior commitments, “When I come down the trail, hotly pursued by the entire population of hostiles, you’re sure you will have that skyhook rented and ready?” 

“I assure you, we’ll really try our best!”

Or what about celebration? The middle of a project can get kind of dreary, or it can be wonderful. That’s up to manglement. Which do you think gets you better work product?

Heck, something good must have happened, otherwise how will we remember what good is?

If you’re just going to roll up your GIGO, how about supplying some top down information that improves strategy, speed, or safety? Best practices are either blindingly obvious or they’re fiction. Best practices are hard work, a lot like blogging, and that’s why we pay the top guys the big bucks.

How would you improve this list?

Tips 4 The Big Chair – Goodness that will curl your toes!

Supporting Cast

Some of the feedback from readers of Knowledge Work was, How did I get time to get out of the office, away from the office?

I realized I have some strong feelings about where work happens, including a 15 year old screen saver that floats You Don’t Make Any Money In Your Own Office across my computer screen any time I lose focus.

A great deal of my success comes from knowing and cultivating experts. I observe that some people cultivate experts, some don’t, and the ones that do are generally more successful, able to succeed in a wider range of situations. The rest of success comes from luck and personally doing a lot of high quality work.

I am strongly organized to make maximum use of outsiders, and still do my own work.

Typically, I organize my day to be with the people who can show me what I need. That generally means being out of the office when other people are available to be seen. Yup, face-to-face.

But we’ve got all this technology! Ever see a flame war on social media or email? Somebody not paying attention during a conference call, OK EVERYBODY not paying attention on a conference call?

I remember one time I was selling enterprise videoconferencing, so of course management wanted communication by videoconferencing. What a saving! What efficiency!

Our team was in our conference room proposing an unbeatable offer on a multi-million dollar offering. Suddenly the “identified buyer” looked out of the picture, to the side, then looked back at us and said, “I’ll have to call you back.” Shut ’er down.

Perhaps we don’t always pick up the true situation with some of these electronic tools.

So in addition to getting out, I find I am doing work when others are not available. That speeds up my progress. I’ll usually have assignments in before opening of business...because I have other places to be.

One time I was working in an office, smoke coming off the keys. A lonely peer asks, “Can I interrupt you for a minute?”

“That’s two,” I replied.

I use 7 to 9 am to harvest a fairly extensive roster of incoming communication. This morning, one of my advisers said I was unusually disciplined sharing incoming communication with others who could use it. That’s a major part of cultivating a network of experts.

I’ve had to watch subordinates. I guess my bosses thought they might steal the silverware. How do I know you’re working if I can’t see you?

I’ve come to believe that I should spend my time with subordinates making sure we share a common understanding of what they are doing, and how to judge acceptable finished work.

Then get out of the way.

When I get a subordinate doing mostly excellent work, my next level is to turn that work into something more important and fulfilling for them, often by introducing them to an appropriate expert. FIELD TRIP!

I spend my time on subordinates who don’t bring a personal commitment to excellence recruiting their successors. I don’t create somebody else’s excellence. That’s like pushing rope.

Funny thing though, excellent subordinates and I find workload starts taking less and less of the day. That’s a corollary of Parkinson’s Law - Work expands to fill the time available. Leaving time for improving our situation, like The Swamp on M.A.S.H.

How are you getting more out of our information economy?

Rainmakers – Audience tested five minute exercises in excellence.

Please join us Tuesday September 10^th at 6:30 PM for the Capital Technology Management Hub (CTMH) meeting (it's FREE) at Teqcorner in McLean, VA. Sales Lab's Rainmaker 21 – Your Dealer Network, 300 seconds of enlightenment, preceding the headliner presentation, What is the New Game of Work? by Jack Gates, Sales Lab. How to Register - CLICK HERE

What Drives Your Promotion?

Read some interesting posts that less than half of a group of employees think they will be promoted any time soon.

Hunh?

Their idea is that if they do wunnerful work, they should be promoted?

That’s not how it works.

A promotion occurs when the organization has a need, not when an employee does work they really like.

A need occurs when somebody drops dead in the traces, or when the organization expands.

Personally, I like the expansion part better, because then the promotion criteria is simpler.

You kill it, you eat it.

I’ve noticed that endless promotion consideration based on internally focused, customer agnostic systems, generally create a suboptimal promotion. Why would you let staffers who are not clueful make up criteria for a promotion? It’s a theoretical choice for a theoretical assignment that will intersect a world of consequences.

Paying customers who can and will fire your whole organization for performance provide useful guidance. If you have senior employees making up opinion-based criteria, you’re wasting money and time.

If you’re not in an organization that paying customers are growing, you are unpromotable. 

 

And what have you done for the fleet today? ADM Art Money’s war cry.

Join us: Monday, July 1 9:45 – 11:30 am, for Google+ The Center of the Internet, at 40PlusWashington, DC – Free, informative, and entertaining.

Focus Frameworks

Last Friday I attended a fascinating presentation, Why Do People Do Stupid Things? by Thomas Hoffman of PScience Associates. There was a lot of meat in his presentation, and the most valuable idea I took away is that there are a half dozen exercises I can do before taking action that will improve my results (reducing common stupidity).

That doesn’t mean I will always succeed, but I believe I can improve my results on a case-by-case basis. Valuable morning.

Here’s the kicker. Doing all six exercises on a formal basis should take all of ten minutes. Oy!

I spend a lot of time in meetings. My butt is not shy about communicating when I’ve spent too much time sitting instead of moving forward.

So if there is a ten minute rocket docket to better performance, why do committees continue to keep the minutes and waste the hours?

One time I was installed to run a startup after an investor coup. I met the new VP Administration, who was also recruited by the investors. She was very accomplished, but curious how we were going to make headway with a mulish workforce. I bought her a copy of Robert’s Rules Of Order, and said we would run every meeting for the benefit of the minutes, since we were being closely watched by the investors, and had to report several times a week anyway.

Documentation quickly trumped chaos, and shortly thereafter our direct reports became barracks parliamentarians. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was better than what they were wallowing in before we arrived.

Often I see that managers want a system to improve their decisions and without a formal framework, spend their time going round in circles like Little Johnny With One Foot Nailed to The Floor. Especially in the current economic climate, they end up fully engaged in paralysis by analysis.

Better to adopt one system, any system, and start moving, because as soon as the system is mastered, it starts being modified, sometimes for better, often for worse.

The point is that you can’t lose if you never leave the planning/consideration stage. Of course, you can’t win, either. In the end, it’s the number of wins, not the number of losses that count. Indeed, it is most often a series of quick losses right up to the ultimate (and important) win.

Join us at the Capital Technology Management Hub on February 12 at 6:30 for 300 seconds of Rainmaker 18 – Leadership, Technology, and Change before Michael Clark presents Social Media: Evolving in the Work Place at TeqCorner.

Boomerang Management

Boomerang Kids are adult children who move back into the family home, usually a sign of a weak economy. I loved Terry Bradshaw parading around nekkid in the Fish Room in Failure to Launch.

So here’s a new term, Boomerang Management, for when a former management team comes back and takes over because the current team isn’t getting the results desired. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Often these “boomers” still have significant equity tied up in their former venture.

Frequency? I’m seeing better than one a month.

Outcome? Generally worse than existing. Times have changed, most groups have undergone a radical transformation, most of all the environment these organizations operate in has changed forever.

I was working with a group that got thrown back earlier this year. The former CEO came back from a long retirement with a secret sauce – outbound cold call phone solicitation to businesses! Enough of this social web nonsense! This was the core of the organization!

It took five weeks to hire four and fire six. They hadn’t counted on voicemail.

It’s an executive-centric business view, that the economy rotates around a prime mover with sufficient strength, knowledge, and skills. There’s some kind of echo from when the Pope arrested Galileo for saying the Earth orbits around the Sun.

No matter how hard the Pope protested, solar-centric was the only way the math worked.

Your Boomerang Management sightings?

Pirate, Executive, or Administrator?

I see three solutions for many positions. I first noticed this model when we were bringing up the cellular industry, for CEO positions, but have since seen it for many positions in many industries.

The Pirate

A leader in starts and turnarounds, keeps the tribe together with vision, hacks, and personal examples. Budgets are theoretical, because we’re working new situations. There is never enough resource, so we have to apply whatever we’ve got to what we need to get to the next step. Kara Swisher’s AOL.COM: how Steve Case beat Bill Gates,nailed the netheads, and made millions in the war for the Web is a great book showing this type of leadership

The Executive

Makes the most of an existing operation, bringing economical systems and delegation. Has the advantage of historical performance to improve against, often scaling is a major accomplishment. Jack Welch in his heyday defines this behavior for me.

The Administrator

Doing more with less has been the mantra for over a decade. Occasionally I’ve seen fat organizations, but more often I’ve watched poorly defined missions exited. I’ve also seen how this mindset causes organizations to disregard achievable, mission saving strategies. The Administrator often leads to entropy, and is followed by ceasing operations or transferring assets to someone who can create more value with them.

I was explaining this to one of my favorite Pirates last week. Times are hard, and he was trying to sell himself into an Administrator position. Had he grown the company, he would have created havoc. The owners had an emotional attachment to tanking.

After I explained the model and what was expected, he said, “Now why would I want to do that?”

What do your people expect?

Leadership and Management

For over thirty years, “You manage things; you lead people” from Grace Hopper was my guide in distinguishing between leadership and management. This month I’ve had several learnings that make me want to refine that idea. While she could have been wrong, I suspect I am coming to a fuller understanding of the good Admiral.

I’ve always imagined those “things” as file cabinets, common equipment with a defined purpose.

You plan for how many file cabinets you need based on number of files and capacity of each drawer. Last week, Jack and I were running the check-in table at an open source event. Based on the scarcity of people doing other administrative tasks, we were overstaffed. Based on providing high quality welcoming, we were correctly staffed. That wasn’t leadership, however it did generate precise data of our “no-show” rate, which is important in a pizza-fueled environment, and possibly for a couple of other reasons.

As anyone who has ever ordered letter sized file cabinets for legal sized files can attest, having the correct capabilities and attributes is important. Defining capabilities and attributes required of people is not that hard, and seldom done correctly. It is harder now that we are in a time of rapid change. But completing the first attempt means there is a better chance of completing follow-on attempts, until maybe (who knows?) that practice becomes an expected part of a culture.

Nothing like having your file cabinets in the wrong place to assure their lack of contribution. Staging people with proper equipment to meet actual demand is a good trick. I laugh when “managers” ascribe a failure to unexpected demand. I ascribe it to a lack of effective management.

So what about Leadership?

Murphy’s Laws of Combat – Planning, #3 No plan survives the first contact intact.

People are hugely adaptable. They can out-think and out-work other options. That’s why they have survived for all of history. (If there wasn’t history, it was another record, like geologic.)

Leadership involves walking the talk. Whatever you do is what you can expect your best people to do, good and bad. Best you do what you want them to do.

Leadership involves going first, doing the work, understanding the work. How many times have you seen a management requirement, some nice-to-have, that created project failure?

Leadership involves getting the enthusiastic support of the following. That’s not exhortation, That is showing something that absolutely works better. Best practices are either blatantly obvious, or they are not best practices.

Does this change how you observe your favorite leader?

User, Maker, Prototyper

Dark. Parking lot. I’m with a really smart research scientist, and we’ve been talking long enough we’re getting into new areas.

“Have you ever finished a prototype on time?”

He laughs, “If it’s controlled by time it’s a project, not a prototype.” Aha!

Many watchers try to judge the value of prototype work as if it were production work. Whether due to placement on some theoretical organization chart, or just our inalienable self-given right to sprout an opinion, most default to Tommy Smother’s dictum, “I’m an American, I don’t have to know any facts.”

Should prototype work be optimized? Always. But that seems more in the province of leadership than management.

Kevin Kelly’s Found Quotes 6 posts: I confess that, in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that men would not fly for 50 years. Two years later, we ourselves were making flights. This demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such a shock that I have ever since distrusted myself and have refrained from all prediction. -— Wilbur Wright Speech at Aero-Club de France, 1908

Clearly, Wilbur was demonstrating the hard-won skills to lead development.

There is even an award for valuable original work that was not understood when it was done.

Years ago, I was a master carpenter at a Fortune 20 Industrial when the chairman announced the company would no longer invest in basic research, just applied research. This was so long ago I had to go to the library to find out that basic research was defining properties and applied research was solving specific problems. Since that announcement they have shrunk. Or perhaps rightsized.

A user takes something already made and gets value from it. Ordering a book from Amazon, making holes with a drill press, cleaning up around the house, users use tools to create value.

Makers create tools that users use. It’s the next step up in understanding. When you can’t decide if someone is a luthier or a mean picker, luthier, the maker, takes precedence...and I would figure he has some important insights about playing.

In Keith Richards” autobiography, Life, he details his search to understand how the blues developed. He learned the story of how Sears offered an inexpensive mail order guitar to musicians who played homemade 5 string banjos, so they played their new guitars tuned like a banjo. Keith tried it, mastered it, put it on a Telecaster, and that’s why a bar band can’t quite get Honky Tonk Woman.

So prototyper, maker, user, where does a cost conscious manager put the guys who don’t want to pay attention, don’t want to improve their work? Pretty obvious, isn’t it? Somewhere else!

At each level there is a need for constant improvement, which comes from the people doing the work.

In the construction trades, one who has mastered the craft and continues to get better is called a mechanic, a term of admiration.

Join us at DevFestDC September 28^th, for awesome new technologies and resources for building projects and companies!

Redo

Users work differently from makers, for good reason. If you make a mistake buying a book on Amazon, you can usually go back an action, or a screen, call it a redo. Makes sense to just keep hammering keys until you get what you want.

Makers often don’t have redo, so there’s an emphasis on using a planning and structure to reduce rework. I cut that board three times and it’s still too short! Well then, Measure twice, cut once.

Working in an IDE (Integrated Development Environment – programmer’s code-making software) discovering an error can require taking out days of development.

The old observation that one programmer can do the work of a thousand programmers is valid because many programmers spend the next morning tearing up whey did the previous day. One step forward, two steps back.

Sales Lab’s Planned Workcycle addresses the need for Architecture and Design before Executing, and came from construction contracting. If you order a crane, it better be busy the whole time it is on-site, and after it leaves, you best not need that crane again.

The Workcycle also has an original structure for how to do Evaluation which makes Evaluation work a whole lot better. I’ve found it increases efficiency in many types of complex projects.

How does the availability of Redo change the value of Planning, the process of Executing?

Drop The Other Shoe

I was watching an organization internally announce a major new direction...sometime in next three years.

They had a clear definition of where the organization was going and what was creating the need for the decision. They also had a clear vision of the benefits for every associate, and the requirements for each person who wants to successfully make the transition. Serious preparation started the same day as the announcement.

The result was positive buzz. These people were on fire, optimistic, making plans, taking immediate action. That had been missing for the previous two quarters, and was a major driver of the new strategy.

Based on current progress they will be ready to switch to their model in less than a year, and will be able to take advantage of successful market conditions.

What caused this decision? The same things most other organizations are facing, softening demand, threatening punitive, contradictory regulation, confusion about the markets and the coming economy. Nothing new.

What was remarkable was that the owners, by taking long term specific action, instead of moaning and hugging the toilet, have made their organization a better place to be and to join, right now.

If you can’t see an attractive course ahead, make one up. Velocity increases luck.

Positive Benefits Of An Internal Meeting

There’s a bunch written about the waste of internal meetings. Sure they are often an absolute waste of time, but if the commentary is negative, we never improve.

I am currently in an asynchronous organization. It would be a deal-breaker to all work together, as we all have widely dispersed customer obligations. We all produce results.

The only reason we choose to work together is the history and promise that we can get much better results  together.

Most mornings I have a 40 minute phone call with one of my partners. It’s a 9 o’clock break after my first two hours.

During today’s meeting, I wrote down three blog post titles, came up with improvements to six websites (only four worked), defined the next steps to two start-up projects, and synced up for a group meeting this evening. I figure I got ten hours of worthwhile new tasks (and I work REALLY fast), that I am motivated to do, because they are all much better defined than before this conversation.

Near as I can tell, he only got two blog post titles, a streamlining of a major programming effort he is developing, and he knows for sure where the cocktails will be at the end of the day.

I am now thinking we should measure and track the immediate gains that are unlocked in an internal meeting, to start to define a baseline of what a good meeting is, learn the best way to design a meeting, and determine what meetings can be canceled for terminal stupidity.

“In the loop,” “team morale” and “management updates” shouldn’t be grounds for a meeting.

An hour is a terrible thing to waste.

Whaddya say?

Leadership or Management? Who Cares?

Recently I participated in a session about leadership experiences which drew from the rich experience of the people in the room, not merely a lecture by the person in front of the room.

The facilitator would set up a business situation and asked the audience of executives to share their experiences. I have found that listening to what others have faced and overcome is quite instructive and real.

A colleague sitting beside me grumbled at the conclusion of each topic - “that's not leadership – it's management.” In his eyes, none of the eight topics discussed that day passed muster as addressing leadership.

Although it was distracting to hear his continuing negative comments, I came to realize a couple of enlightening elements about leadership.

• There is a very fine line separating a management action and a leadership action when trying to catalog the act. But this is like trying to determine how many angels can fit on the head of a pin – who knows and does it matter? Was the solution successful? Did it advance the organization toward the vision (goals); did it create results? If so, Great! Next time the situation comes up, let's consider using it again. Adding a name-tag to the action adds no value whatsoever.
• My grumbling colleague spent much energy in slotting the activities, but took nothing useful away from the meeting. I heard about experiences and related results and took away many nuggets of useful information about better leadership practices. Two people, sitting side by side with vastly different outcomes.

Following the meeting, my business partner asked me – 'what was the best thing you got from this meeting?'

After a moment's thought, I summed it up as follows: leadership can be learned, but it can't be taught.

Do you find that thin line between what's leadership and what's management important? How so?