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Archives for May 2009

Sometimes, It Does Hurt to Ask

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From Seth Godin’s post yesterday, “It doesn’t hurt to ask“:

Actually, it does hurt. It does hurt to ask the wrong way, to ask without preparation, to ask without permission. It hurts because you never get another chance to ask right.

If you run into Elton John at the diner and say, “Hey Elton, will you sing at my daughter’s wedding?” it hurts any chance you have to get on Elton John’s radar. You’ve just trained him to say no, you’ve taught him you’re both selfish and unrealistic.

If a prospect walks into your dealership and you walk up and say, “Please pay me $200,000 right now for this Porsche,” you might close the sale. But I doubt it. More likely than not you’ve just pushed this prospect away, turned the sliver of permission you had into a wall of self-protection.

Every once in a while, of course, asking out of the blue pays off. So what? That is dwarfed by the extraordinary odds of failing. Instead, invest some time and earn the right to ask. Do your homework. Build connections. Make a reasonable request, something easy and mutually beneficial. Yes leads to yes which just maybe leads to the engagement you were actually seeking.

Jim Collin's New Book Now Available: How the Mighty Fall

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Jim Collin’s new book is out today. It is called How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. Collins shows “how to spot the subtle signs that your successful company is actually on course to sputter — and how to reverse the slide before it’s too late.”

There are five stages of decline:

  1. Hubris born of success
  2. The undisciplined pursuit of more
  3. Denial of risk and peril
  4. Grasping for salvation
  5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death

This looks like superb stuff. I am very much looking forward to the book.

While you are waiting for it to arrive, BusinessWeek has an exclusive excerpt from the book, along with many other materials. They include:

The Future of Work

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The cover story for the May 25 edition of Time is on The Future of Work. Here’s the summary:

Ten years ago, Facebook didn’t exist. Ten years before that, we didn’t have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25‑year high, work will eventually return. But it won’t look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values — and women will increasingly be at the controls. Here are 10 ways your job will change. In fact, it already has.

The ten changes they discuss are:

  1. The fall of finance
  2. Bringing ethics to management
  3. Employee benefits
  4. The change from a career ladder to a lattice, and the growing role of flexible working arrangements
  5. Postponing retirement
  6. The rise of green jobs
  7. The role of women
  8. The leadership transition to Generation X
  9. US manufacturing
  10. The last days of cubicle life (by Seth Godin)

How to Create a TED-Quality Presentation

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The talks given at the TED conferences are some of the best you will ever see. While the actual conference is open to only about 1,000 attendees by invitation only, most of the presentations are available free online.

I highly recommend checking out some of the TED talks. Two sentences on their website sum up what you are in for. The first is their site tagline: “Ideas worth spreading.” That’s what TED is about. The second is “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.” Fantastic.

One of the reasons the talks are so good is that the TED organizers provide the presenters with ten speaking guidelines (the “TED Commandments”). I admit that the concept of “TED Commandments” is a bit hokey, but they are nonetheless very helpful. Here they are:

  1. Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
  2. Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before.
  3. Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
  4. Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
  5. Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
  6. Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
  7. Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
  8. Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
  9. Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
  10. Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

(HT: Garr Reynolds; SA)

Leaders Take Time to Reflect

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From Marcus Buckingham’s excellent book The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success:

The best leaders I’ve studied all discipline themselves to take time out of their working lives to think. They all muse. They all reflect. They all seem to realize that this thinking time is incredibly valuable time, for it forces them to process all that has happened, to sift through the clutter, to run ideas up the proverbial flagpole and then yank them down again, and, in the end, to conclude. It is this ability to draw conclusions that allows them to project such clarity.

Brad Anderson [CEO of Best Buy] disciplines himself to take a two-hour walk every week. Yes, this helps to keep him fit, but it also gives him time to ruminate.

Sir Terry Leahy refuses to carry a cell phone [like someone else I know]. He has identified his time in cars, trains, and planes as his most productive thinking time and he guards it jealously. Besides, he says, people know where I’m going. They can reach me when I get there. [Note: I would recommend carrying a cell phone, but just not answering during those times of thought.]

Dan Cathy, the president of Chick-fil-A, disciplines himself to go into seclusion in his cabin in the hills of North Georgia once a quarter. When I asked him what he does during this day, he replied, “Nothing. I just use it as a time to remind myself of those few things that I am certain of.”

Do not be overcome by the temptation to think that the essence of your work is dealing with the urgent. It is not. You have to take time out to reflect. Just get out and think. The two hours (or more) that you take to do this will be worth far more than the two hours of tactical work that you would have gotten done otherwise. So discipline yourself to do this regularly.

And when you do this, get away from your desk. Go somewhere interesting. Go walk along the river, or drive someplace unique. Or just walk in the area. Whatever you do, don’t subscribe to the thinking that you have to be in your desk or even in the building to be doing real “work.” (And if your company thinks that way, point them here.)

Sometimes you need to be spontaneous with this as well. A few years ago when I was working on the website redesign for where I work, I had my biggest breakthrough when, after spinning my wheels for the morning on how to organize the content, I just left to go play a game of Frisbee golf at an interesting place. Those two hours were far more productive than anything I would have got done by staying at my desk.

One more thing: Note Buckingham’s point that this reflection time results in drawing conclusions. So many in our society are afraid of coming to conclusions and settled convictions on issues. That is a recipe for becoming a boring person. It is also death to leadership, because the most important attribute of a leader is clarity. And you will not have any clarity if you are afraid of coming to conclusions.

Six Different Styles of Leadership

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Here is a good, brief summary over at the Wall Street Journal of six different leadership styles, as summarized by Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence). The six styles are:

  1. Visionary
  2. Coaching
  3. Affiliative
  4. Democratic
  5. Pacesetting
  6. Commanding

“The most effective leaders can move among these styles, adopting the one that meets the needs of the moment.” However, some of the styles need to be used very sparingly.

I think that these six styles probably do not capture the full range of useful leadership styles, but this is a helpful initial context.

Slack Work is a Close Cousin to Vandalism

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Proverbs 18:9 says “one who is slack in work is close kin to a vandal.” The above hose box is a good example of this.

From the outside, it looks great. But when it came time to hook up my hose to it, I found the task almost impossible.

The valve that you hook the hose up to was positioned at a really odd angle. This made it very difficult to maneuver the hose into a position where it could actually make the connection. On top of that, they apparently used very cheap material, making the connection even more difficult (and risking a break — if I ever need to unhook it, I don’t know if it will be able to take it).

The result? A lot of wasted time. It was later that day or weekend, I think, when I came across the above proverb. Suddenly, the lights went on and I started seeing this everywhere: poor workmanship is akin to vandalism because both create unnecessary work — and expense — for others.

Therefore, if you are against vandalism (and I hope you are!), then you should also be against shoddy work.

But here’s the thing: shoddy work often disguises itself in an attempt to save money. So we don’t realize that we are being shoddy; we think we’re being frugal.

This hose box is the perfect example. I doubt that the company which made it was intentionally trying to be shoddy. They were just trying to make it really, really cheap.

I admire the attempt to save money — and pass on a lower priced product to the customer — but in this case, they were just shifting the bill. Instead of incurring the cost to themselves of using better materials and creating a better design, they used a sub-par design and shoddy materials which, in turn, passed on to me a greater expense in terms of my time. They saved money, but they cost me time.

I would have much preferred that they had spent a little more designing and building the product and just charged me a bit more for it.

I have a hundred more examples to give. There is the carpet in my basement, for example. The people who lived here before finished off the basement — thanks! — but apparently put down the cheapest possible carpet that they could. The result is that if you walk down here with socks, thread from the carpet will collect all over them.

And although I don’t want to say that they themselves thought this way, we do know that a lot of people who are getting ready to sell a house do think like this: “Well, we just need to finish off this basement [or do whatever] so we can sell the house. So let’s just do this as cheaply as possible.”

I’m glad to have the carpet, and I grant that this problem isn’t huge, but let’s serve the next people that will live in our homes by doing things with a little more quality. This doesn’t require extravagance. But just don’t do things in a way that you’d want to redo yourself if you had to live with the consequences. And if you have a very, very frugal bent, then do things better than you’d do just for yourself.

Which brings us back to the main productivity lesson here: don’t save your own money, time, or effort when it is simply going to cost someone else more money, time, or trouble. That’s a cousin to vandalism, because both end up placing an unnecessary burden on another person.

What is Management?

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A common definition of management is getting things done through others.

I don’t like that definition very much because it leaves out the human component. This definition could just as easily apply to machines. Why would we want to speak of people in the same way?

Further, you can “get things done through others” while chopping them up in the process.

I think a better definition is provided by Stephen Covey: management is developing people through tasks. This brings in the human component. Management is not just about getting things done, but developing people in the process.

The result is, ironically, that you will in turn be able to get even more done in the future, since whenever a manager’s team is productive they are at the same time increasing in their productive capacity.

But that is not why you manage in this way. You manage with this goal in mind because it is the right way to treat people — that is, because you are managing people, not machines.