Speaking Up Takes Confidence, Candor, and Courage

Have you ever wondered whether your work efforts were really creating value? From what I've seen in organizations, a lot of people have that experience. The problem is that many times they don't do anything about it.

Not long ago I spoke at a company meeting about the challenges of complexity in organizations. At one point, I asked the audience members to identify and discuss simplification opportunities in their areas. During the report-outs, one woman described how she and her co-workers spent hours each week on the cosmetics of a particular report to make sure that it looked good when it went to senior management. She went on to say that this focus on style rather than substance was a waste of time. When I asked why she continued to do this, she quickly said that her boss expected it. Her boss was also in the room, and when asked about the report said, "I don't care what it looks like, as long as it has the right information."

This kind of disconnect is not unusual. One of the main reasons that employees knowingly continue valueless activities is the lack of candid dialogue between people at different organizational levels. For example, many times I've heard people say that their manager is "unapproachable" or "too busy" to talk about changing the way things are done. And while that observation is certainly true in many cases, it's also often code for: "I'm afraid of my manager's reaction." On the other hand, many senior leaders wonder why their people don't raise issues more proactively. As one senior person said to me, out of frustration, "I don't know how many more times I can tell them that they are empowered!"

So what does it take to break this logjam so that dialogue flows more freely and spontaneously? Let me suggest two steps:

Take responsibility for the truncated dialogue. And that means everyone — managers and subordinates alike. While it's easy to blame others, the reality is that it takes two parties to short-circuit a relationship. For the most part, this happens unintentionally. We usually make assumptions about what we can talk to our manager about or not, or what the boss expects — and then we act on these assumptions without testing them. We also may fear that the manager will think poorly about us if we bring up something that she doesn't agree with, so it's easier to say nothing. Managers, however, do the same thing — they assume that their people feel comfortable enough to initiate conversations, or send subtle signals to subordinates that they really don't want to be approached with new ideas.

Do something about it. Jack Welch used to say that self-confident people are one of the key characteristics of a high-performing organization — because they will not be afraid to speak up. But nobody becomes self-confident just because Jack Welch (or some blogger) says that it's the right thing to do. Instead you have to gain that confidence by pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone a little at a time. For example, if you realize that you're wasting resources on an activity that doesn't add value, but are hesitant to approach your boss, start by talking with other colleagues about it. See if others feel the same way. If they agree, develop a joint proposal for not only stopping the unproductive work, but also for reallocating time to higher payoff areas. Then go to the boss as a team, not only to talk about this idea but also to test his openness to these kinds of initiatives in general.

If you're a manager, you can foster self-confidence by creating "safe space" forums where anyone can raise issues without consequences. You can also encourage your people to get together and identify non-value added work and present it as a team. Or you can initiate a more formal process, like Work-Out or process-mapping to surface the ideas.

Whether you are a subordinate or a manager, the key is to take some sort of action to increase the candor and flow of dialogue in your organization. If you do nothing you are just reinforcing unproductive patterns. But if you do something, you can trigger a cycle of increasing self-confidence and higher performance — and create a much more pleasant place to work.

What's your experience with opening up a dialogue about unproductive work?

Speaking Up Takes Confidence, Candor, and Courage
Ron Ashkenas
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 17:57:46 GMT

Tim Cook and Apple’s Tricky Next Steps

 

And so it begins: the life of Apple, post Steve Jobs. Jobs announced that he would step down as CEO, effecting a smooth transition to known successor Tim Cook.

Jobs is surely not just any retiring CEO. As an entrepreneur, he built a company that changed history. Like many entrepreneurial founders, he did it by force of personality and personal vision, without much concern for consensus or committees. And like many, he paid the price when the narrative took hold that he'd lost his touch, and his board lost faith. But very unlike that typical experience, he found his way back to the CEO job and put the company back in the game. It was quite a feat, and speaks to the specialness of this particular man.

But now it's time for Apple as an organization to pull off a feat of its own: it needs to continue on its trajectory without a visionary founder to rally behind. It has had the luxury of having a personification of its ethos, and now it must either allow someone else to be that, or learn to operate effectively without one.

History shows it isn't easy. Wang did not survive the departure of An Wang; Digital Equipment never flew high again after Ken Olsen. Untold numbers of firms that hadn't attained such heights when they lost their founders fizzled more quietly.

But history also shows it's possible to continue on a bold path post-founder. Sometimes it's because a new visionary leader manages to inspire. Jeff Sonnenfeld notes in The Hero's Farewell (still the best book on CEO succession, and particularly good reading for this week) about IBM, AT&T, Sears, and General Motors that "their days of greatest glory were not under the reign of the founding entrepreneurs," but under the professional managers that followed them.

Sometimes, too, organizations go onto greater glory because they've learned how to manage without a legend walking the halls. It should be possible, after all: it's the organization is who has been doing the work all along. One man's labor is a drop in the bucket. This has been the achievement of UPS since Jim Casey. Post Sam Walton, it's what Walmart hopes to pull off.

The problem is that, in order to make the bold moves that keep companies from succumbing to creative destruction, leaders need license to act. And founder entrepreneurs have incredible license. At Apple, Steve Jobs' word can be law — and not just in the narrow sense of organizational policy but in the bigger sense of what deserves to be developed, what customers covet, what constitutes cool. Again, the license is not unlimited; founders who misjudge markets royally lose their license to operate. But the reality is that it often is not the perfectness of a particular idea, but the vigor behind its execution, that makes something big succeed. And a leader whose vision is unchallenged internally has a greater ability to marshal that energy. This is the sense in which Apple has enjoyed a luxury.

When a non-founder takes the helm, the organization is not so universally convinced that the soul of the company resides in him or her. The question of who is the true keeper of the flame is suddenly in play, and others on the premises, whether they aspire to the CEO role or not, anoint themselves. The mission zeal that makes an organization so powerful when united can make it, without a unifying force, disastrously prone to internecine battles.

Whether Apple's new leader can keep the company riding high is dependent on his own skills. Most important for Tim Cook is that he not assume that he has the same license, and that he seek consciously to earn it. But it is even more dependent on the organization - Tim Cooks' direct reports, and their direct reports, and the legions of middle managers who are the lifeblood of the place. They must remain committed to the proposition that an Apple unified is more powerful than an Apple divided. They must find ways to make bold decisions they can collectively embrace. They must learn to project their own guiding light.

Tim Cook and Apple's Tricky Next Steps
Julia Kirby

The Problem with Perfection

If you're not familiar with the law of diminishing returns, it states that at a certain point adding more effort will not produce significantly more gains. The challenge is knowing when you've reached that point. For many managers this is an important question: How far do I keep going on a project before I declare that it's "good enough" — and that further effort will not significantly change the outcome?

Several years ago I worked with a project team charged with increasing sales to its large corporate customers. At the first meeting the team brainstormed ways to drive up sales, but before moving ahead decided to collect data about current sales and survey sales managers and customers. Since it wasn't clear which ideas might work, this seemed like a logical next step — until the data analysis work dragged on for months as the team tried to reach the perfect answer.

I've seen this pattern in many organizations where, instead of moving into action, managers insist on doing more analysis. In some cases this is part of a company-wide "paralysis by analysis" culture, while in others it is a personal tendency of the manager or team involved. Either way this oft-repeated pattern results not only in wasted effort, but significant delays in moving forward.

From my experience, there are two often-unconscious reasons for this unproductive quest for perfection. The first is the fear of failing. In many organizations, coming up with a recommendation that doesn't ultimately succeed can be career limiting. So to avoid this fate, managers put in extra effort to get the "right" answer, and back it up with as much data and justification as possible. Then, if it doesn't work, nobody can say that they didn't do their homework.

The second driver of unproductive perfection is the anxiety about taking action. Studying problems and coming up with recommendations is safe territory; while changing processes, procedures, incentives, systems, or anything else is much higher risk. Action forces managers and teams out of their comfort zones, driving them to sell ideas, deal with resistance, orchestrate work plans, and potentially disrupt work processes for colleagues and even customers. So one way to avoid dealing with these messy issues is to keep the study going as long as possible, thus delaying any action.

Because of these psychological dynamics, breaking free of unproductive perfection is not easy. But if you are a project sponsor, leader, or team member, and want to move into action more quickly, here's an approach you can try: Instead of viewing "action" as something that follows research, think about how action can occur parallel to research. In other words, rather than coming up with perfect recommendations and then flipping the switch months later, start by testing some of your initial ideas on a small scale immediately — while collecting more data. Then you can feed the lessons from these experiments into the research process, while continuing to implement and scale additional ideas.

For example, in the sales case described above, the team shifted its patterns by selecting three corporate customers where they could quickly test some of their ideas, in a low-risk way, in collaboration with the sales teams. With one customer, the sales leader experimented with selling products and services together, rather than having services as an after-sell. A second sales leader added a paid advisory service to his offering. The third worked on building relationships higher up in the C-suite. The lessons from these experiments were then incorporated into the team's recommendations, which were then tested with several more customers and so on. Within a year, most of the corporate sales teams were working differently and increasing their overall sales.

Clearly the ideas that first emerge through this iterative approach are not going to be perfect, but by sharpening them through field-testing rather than theoretical analysis they will eventually become good enough to deliver results. Working in this way also reduces the risk of recommending the "wrong" ideas and the anxiety about managing change, since small-scale tests provide rapid feedback and engage others in the organization right from the beginning.

Perfection certainly makes sense when designing an airplane or an office building. But if the search for perfection is leading you to diminishing returns and an avoidance of action, it might be worth taking a different path.

Does your organization have a problem with perfection?

The Problem with Perfection
Ron Ashkenas
Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:44:00 GMT

Finding Your Next Big (Adjacent) Idea

It's unusual that an analyst will ask you to stop thinking about the far future, but I need you to back away from the Corning A Day Made of Glass video on YouTube. All that clear glass is clouding your vision. More and more, as I talk with companies about their next big product innovation, they can't get far-flung ideas out of their mind. They can't wait to get there, but they can't justify making the investments needed to get there. They prevaricate while smaller, more proximal innovations, more likely to succeed rapidly, languish unattended.

The ideas won't pine forever; if you don't act on them soon, someone else will. We call these innovation opportunities adjacent possibilities and we have just written a new report about them called We've blogged elsewhere on the topic; let me share some more details with those who aren't reading Forrester's research.

To get this right, you have to think right. The idea of adjacent possibilities started with evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman, who used it to explain how such powerful biological innovations as sight and flight came into being. More recently, Steven Johnson, in Where Good Ideas Come From, showed that it's also applicable to science, culture, and technology. The core of the idea: People arrive at the best new ideas when they combine prior (adjacent) ideas in new ways. Most combinations fail; a few succeed spectacularly.

This has always been the case, but Johnson shows us that modern cities and networks accelerate the rate of idea formation. The more ideas circulate, the more they'll collide in new ways to generate new things. As they combine, these seemingly small ideas become big. Add a ubiquitous Internet and hungry developers and manufacturers around the globe and you should expect more of these innovations to accumulate in a shorter time than before. It's clear that this is happening. But what does it mean for you?

It means you should direct your team to obsess about today's adjacent possibilities, not tomorrow's distant improbabilities. Have the courage to set aside the ten-year future vision because there is no way you will anticipate all the adjacent possibilities that will have to combine between now and then to accurately predict what products you will sell or how you will sell them that far out. That's not for lack of intelligence on your part. It's because most of those adjacent possibilities on which you will ultimately depend have yet to emerge from the combination of other adjacencies on which they will depend.

Therefore, rather than try to predict what your company will be like in ten years, spend your time observing today's adjacencies more carefully. Start with the core customer need that you fulfill — understand it clearly by regularly scouting out other, sometimes nontraditional, ways customers meet the needs you think you are satisfying. In the world of whole-home audio where companies like Sonos and Logitech want to distribute music throughout the house, the biggest competitor to their products is the simple act of turning up a stereo really loud in one room so you can hear it in another.

Once you're ready to see all the adjacent ways that people meet the needs you hope to fulfill, you can then explore the entire product and service experience that you deliver. What are the adjacent product experiences that you could create to reinforce the value of your current product? Bathroom scales may not seem a fertile ground for innovation, but there is an entire revolution yet to occur in the digital relationship that wraps around that bathroom scale. If your company could offer a scale that connects to a health and weight loss app on your customer's mobile phone, would you even try to make money from the scale or would you give it away for free as long as people use your app?

Think of all the companies that should rightly think that this product experience is an adjacent possibility that they could offer — Logitech, Jenny Craig, the producers of The Biggest Loser, the insurance company — the range of possible competitors (and partners) is varied and extensive. This product is so obvious that if this is an adjacent possibility for your company, you should stop reading this and begin planning how you'll participate now.

That's the kind of urgency and immediacy that innovating the adjacent possible leads to. While it's intellectually stimulating to understand where good ideas come from, it's terrifying to realize just how quickly good ideas that can upend your business will appear in the future. If you're not prepared, it will be immobilizing to find just how easy it is for competitors to act on these ideas because they learned how to identify, depend on and even exploit adjacent possibilities — things that are already possible today and can be easily recombined in a new way to generate the next big thing.

Finding Your Next Big (Adjacent) Idea
James L. McQuivey
Tue, 09 Aug 2011 12:25:56 GMT

Why You Should Never Make Wishes

Next time you come across a wishing well or fountain, don’t fall for it. You can still pitch in a coin or two if it’s for a good cause but just don’t make a wish like you are suppose to. In fact, you should NEVER make wishes if you want to be successful at anything.

Too often we end up wishing for things. We wish we could have more money. We wish we could be better looking. We wish we could be in better shape.

What I would like to do is propose that you wipe out the word ‘wish’ from your vocabulary. Instead, replace it with the word ‘commitment’. So instead of making wishes for the things you want in life, make commitments instead.

Make Fully Committed Decisions

When I do my motivational keynotes, I tell my audiences to make ‘fully committed decisions’. That is, they should make strong decisions to pursue their goals with total commitment instead of just wishing to become successful.

This may seem like a simple play on words to some people but there is indeed a significant difference between making totally committed decisions and simply making wishes. Whenever commitment is involved, there will be a much stronger incentive to take whatever action is required to work towards achieving your goals.

Example Of Commitment

Early on in my martial arts competition career, I marveled at the World Champions I saw. I wished that I could perform martial arts at their level. I wished that I could become a World Champion myself. I trained regularly but didn’t really excel in competition at the beginning.

Then instead of merely wishing to become a World Champion, I made a totally committed decision to try my darn hardest to work towards a World Championship title. I decided that I would do whatever it takes to win. I even had this down on paper.

This commitment automatically resulted in certain actions that I didn’t do before. In addition to committing myself to a strict training schedule, I booked myself to attend more major tournaments across the continent just so I could get more exposure to the top competitors in order to learn from their performances. I accepted that fact that I wasn’t going to win right away at these bigger events.

I also found and connected with a few past World Champions. These past champions were in the position to offer me some private coaching sessions even though I had to fly somewhere to meet up with them (and pay hefty fees). My justification was that the best people to learn from are those who have already accomplished what you are aiming to do.

I don’t remember exactly when I made this mindshift from just wishing to actually making a totally committed decision to become a World Champion. But I do know that the progress was not quick. However, there was steady progress over several years and in 1999, I finally became a Karate World Champion for the very first time.

Steps To Move From Wishes To Commitments

So based on my experiences so far, here are the major steps to move from simple wishes to major commitments for your success.

1. Identify what you wish for in life (career, health, finances, relationships, etc.)
2. Extract the goals you are willing to make fully committed decisions on
3. Write these fully committed decisions down on paper and sign it as a self contract
4. Announce these commitments to others

The reason why this mindshift works is because commitment does interesting things to our heads. It helps set us up in a way so that we end up doing the things we have to do in order to become successful. Making totally committed decisions will have a positive, profound impact on your life.

Why You Should Never Make Wishes 

Clint Cora Mon, 

08 Aug 2011 16:00:40 GMT

Don’t Give Up

Life is full of twists and turns and it is sometimes easy to get sick of the many gyrations that are needed to make a business thrive, a project launch, or even to get internal signoff in some bureaucratic version of the Hokey Pokey.

It would be so easy to quit.

But a part of you knows that many a failure turns into the big success story. In start-up land, Air B&B notably went for 4 years with scraping the barrel kind of funding and just recently received $112 million. Most people don't remember how dire the Apple situation was in 1997 when Steve Jobs returned. A share of Apple back then would buy you a cup of coffee; now it'll get you a nice bottle of Opus One from, say, 1987.

Business is full of stories of perseverance and pursuit — of the almost-failed hero who didn't quit when times were dark. Those stories admonish quitters, and honor the survivors. I should know. I am both.

My dark night literally came in a late evening 1987, when I was attacked by a serial rapist (I was #24 in a long string of crimes, I came to learn later) as I walked home alone to my rented room after a college study session at Denny's restaurant. After the attack, I spent hours with the police capturing details, viewing a police lineup, and visiting the ER to do the rape kit and get sutures for a knife wound.

There were moments in the middle of that night when I thought about quitting. By this time in my life, I had already experienced enough child protective services, enough violence, enough sadness, and enough battles to last many lifetimes. Until that point, I had believed that these struggles were escapable. But the terrorizing thoughts that ran through my mind that night were that I was somehow doomed to this kind of existence. That 

I must have deserved this. That it was a punishment from God for being disrespectful to my family in even trying to escape. The terror was that I must have done something to bring this on.

If there is such a thing as hell, I am convinced it feels just like that night when a fire of ugly thoughts burns you up from the inside. I admit that I wanted to give up on my life, to end it then because I didn't want to face the shame. I didn't think my friends would want to know me. I didn't think I had the strength to face the pain that would surely follow as the incident took its course through the justice system, interminable counseling sessions, and vivid night terrors. But I did fight. I fought for my dignity. I fought for strength, and I fought for the love-filled life that I experience today. If I had given up, I would not be here to experience any of today's joys, probably the most precious of which is my relationship with my husband and son.

I could have shared a professional business story because I have those too, but it is the visceral nature of our darkest moments I want us to connect to. The desire to quit never comes on a sailboat, feeling the wind on your face, during long hikes in the mountains, or after joyous mountain bike summits. It's not those puppies and sunshine moments that test us. It is when we feel lost, overwhelmed, and exhausted that we feel the desire to quit. Wanting to quit comes when you are tired of the fight and sick of being beaten down in the darkest times of suffering and loss. It's when we can't raise funds and we will be forced to shut our doors. It is when we find out we were betrayed by a fellow founder. It's when a product that needs to work isn't living up to its promise and the marketplace is beating the crap out of the company. It's when we don't know if we'll have another client and we don't know how we'll feed our families. These relentless fears crowd in on us, taking up space. We need something to break our way our way, but instead just the opposite happens — we feel more trapped than ever. That's when the desire to quit floods in.

While I am a survivor, I am also a quitter. In 2010, I shut down my strategy consulting company. I just wasn't able to find a way for it work without a level of persistent attention and energy that had become unsustainable. What had once been inspiring and challenging had become a grind; it was sapping me of my energy. After 11 years of building it, I did what seemed to others a sudden about-face and quit. Colleagues, clients, friends almost universally thought I had lost my mind. I was told I had failed, and I heard that people said to one another that I lacked courage. Hmmph. I mean really. Hmmph.

Life is full of twists and turns. But it also has straight stretches of open road. As each one of us has to learn for ourselves, failure can lead us to a new place. Many times that means sticking it out, pushing through, and yet, sometimes that means putting the thing down. Perseverance is needed in life to be successful, and it is wisdom that lets us know when enough is enough. Sometimes, to get where you're going, you first have to leave where you've been.

If I hadn't put down Rubicon, I know I would still be doing that one thing. All. The. Time. And many people I respected pointed me back to the consulting life because I had proven to be successful at it. As if what I'd done up to this point defined all of what is possible in the future. But a part of me imagined there could be a different way to contribute my domain expertise, and passion for igniting cultures of innovation. And this is key; I imagined it before it was true. I had no proof that I would find a new outlet to use my abilities. That is until this week, when I joined the Board of Directors of EPAX, a NASDAQ-traded education company.

And so sometimes quitting lets us create space to create the next thing. My career wasn't going to be over just because I didn't stick to the firm I had started, and built and led for 11 years.

While your story of wanting to quit will certainly differ from mine, I want to share this: just because you stop doing something doesn't mean you are quitting. Sometimes it's bravery to know it's time to stop and walk away. Experiencing failure isn't the same thing as failing. Letting go doesn't mean you're giving up. And stopping isn't quitting; it is just a pause that lets you sort out where you'll turn next. In our black-and-white, win-or-lose society, we admonish quitters and we celebrate survivors. But life is more nuanced than that.

When might it be your time to "quit"? I can't answer that for you, but I can give you this as a guideline: You can quit things like businesses or projects if you know they are merely one means to your passion. You know if you've done your very best to make it work. But what you can't quit is fighting for your purpose, and living, and finding new, more effective ways to bring forth your passions in the world. We can quit things, but what we can't quit is fighting for our dreams.  

Don't Give Up
Nilofer Merchant
Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:12:36 GMT