Be more effective in doing good work
Yesterday I posted on Tom Peters list of how to attract talent to your organization from his book Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. But how do you identify talent? Peters covers that as well. He argues that a “true exemplar of talent:
A good point from Tom Peters’ Re-Imagine!: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age:
To attract, retain, and obtain the most from Awesome Talent, organizations will need to offer up … an Awesome Place to Work: A place where people not only get paid “their due,” but also … get to initiate and execute great things.
Peters then offers up his “Talent 25” for how to do this (he expands on each of these points; I won’t do that here, but do recommending getting the whole book):
From Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management:
There is no surer way to undermine a new business venture than to measure it by the profits generated, rather than by the learning accumulated.
He gives IBM as an example of a company that has learned this lesson:
IBM’s top-level growth team understood that when it comes to building a new business, you have to learn before you earn. Given this, they wanted to counter the debilitating assumption that if you’re not holding a new venture accountable for profits, you’re not holding it accountable for anything. Many of IBM’s past growth efforts had stalled when an early push for profits limited a venture’s potential upside by prematurely truncating the learning and experimentation that would have, in time, yielded a more powerful, and better targeted, business model.
After studying a number of organizational leaders at close range, I discovered that they operate in a highly distinctive mental realm when it comes to organization and time management.
In my opinion, what CEOs are really doing in this different realm — the real focus of their time, their core and ongoing project — is what I call managing influence. I first started to understand this phenomenon during an interview with a CEO in which I repeatedly pressed him to describe his “tasks.” Finally he got a bit testy and replied, “Look, there’s just one traditional task I do: I edit drafts of speeches prepared by my speechwriter — and I do that mostly when I’m on a plane. Otherwise, no tasks.”
His retort brought me up short. I finally got it. No tasks.
But in the next breath, I asked myself, “These guys aren’t sitting around watching the flowers grow. So if they’re not doing tasks, then what exactly are they doing?”
Because virtually all their time is spent with others, I deduced that their work had to be conducted in some way through these contacts. By shadowing them, I had discovered, as described earlier, that these contacts were very free-form, consisting mostly of suggestions, questions, observations, and eliciting their direct reports’ views, interwoven with occasional chat about golf, family activities, etc.
What the CEOs were doing, I concluded, was not primarily ordering others, but influencing them through constant contact. So that became my focus: how CEOs use their time to guide their company by influencing others.
We’ve all experienced it: you call your credit card company or some other such company, and are prompted to enter your account number into the keypad. Then, when a real person comes on, they ask you for your account number again.
This is a poor customer experience. Why ask the first time if they are simply going to ask again? I can understand that, for security reasons, they might want the live person to get the number from you. But what possible benefit can it be to them to have you key it into the pad initially if they are only going to ask for it again later?
That’s a rhetorical question. I’m sure the companies have lots of good reasons. But, there are good reasons behind every poor customer experience. We need to get beyond allowing “good reasons” to complicate the customer’s life. And if we say “what’s the big deal with requiring the customer to do another 30 second action,” we aren’t truly thinking of the customer first.