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On Multiplying Rules

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Well said by Marcus Buckingham in First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently:

“Some managers are hamstrung by their fundamental mistrust of people. A mistrustful manager’s only recourse is to impose rules. For a mistrustful person, the managerial role is very stressful.

The rules rarely succeed in anything but creating a culture of compliance that slowly strangles the organization of flexibility, responsiveness, and perhaps more important, good will.”

That is a key point: multiplying rules strangles good will. And if you strangle good will, you eliminate the motivation for people to do very much beyond mere compliance. In other words, you will have ripped the heart out of the organization.

4 Key Beliefs Regarding Innovation

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In his book FedEx Delivers: How the World’s Leading Shipping Company Keeps Innovating and Outperforming the Competition, Madan Birla states that his experiences “with one of the most innovative companies in the history of free enterprise—FedEx—and my success in helping other companies become truly innovative” has shown him four key things about innovation:

  1. Everyone has the capacity to be creative.
  2. Creativity is a function of the mind and must be understood in the context of a mental model.
  3. Developing creative people (minds) requires the right mental environment (model) and the right leadership practices.
  4. A critical mass of creative people will enable the development of an organization-wide culture of innovation.

Setting the Leadership Tone is Not Enough

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Jim Collins and Jerry Porras are right when they state in Built to Last:

Mechanisms–build that ticking clock! The beauty of the 3M story is that McKnight, Carlton, and others translated the previous four points into tangible mechanisms working in alignment to stimulate evolutionary progress — a step Norton never took. Look back at the list of mechanisms at 3M. Notice how concrete they are. Notice how they send a consistent set of reinforcing signals. Notice how they have teeth.

If you’re a division manager, you better meet the 30 percent new product goal. If you want to become a technical hero at 3M, you’d better share your technology around the company. If you want to receive a Golden Foot Award and become an entrepreneurial hero, you’ve got to create a successful new venture with actual products, satisfied customers, and profitable sales. Good intentions alone simply won’t cut it. 3M doesn’t just throw a bunch of smart people in a pot and hope that something will happen. 3M lights a hot fire under the pot and stirs vigorously!

We find that managers often underestimate the importance of this fifth lesson and fail to translate their intentions into tangible mechanisms. They erroneously think that if they just set the right “leadership tone,” people will experiment and try new things. No! It takes more than that. It requires putting in place items that will continually stimulate and reinforce evolutionary behavior [embodied in the principle “try a lot of stuff and keep what works”].

Beautiful…Systems?

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Tom Peters is right in Re-Imagine! when he writes:

We avoid words like “beauty” — and the concept of beauty — between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. (Especially if we work in the likes of HR or IS or Logistics.) But as part of the urgent process of re-imagining organizations, we must embrace both the word and the concept — and make beauty the primary attribute not only of product design but also of process design.

In short, we must create an enterprise environment in which enterprise systems are no less than … Beautiful Systems.

Mastering Both Ends of the Spectrum

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Yes:

“An effective leader must be the master of two ends of the spectrum: ideas at the highest level of abstraction and actions at the most mundane level of detail.”

That’s from Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in In Search of Excellence. They elaborate in this way:

“The value-shaping leader is concerned, on the one hand, with soaring, lofty visions that will generate excitement and enthusiasm for tens or hundreds of thousands of people. That’s where the pathfinding role is critically important. On the other hand, it seems the only way to instill enthusiasm is through scores of daily events, with the value-shaping manager becoming an implementer par excellence. In this role, the leader is a bug for detail, and directly instills values through deeds rather than words: no opportunity is too small. So it is at once attention to ideas and attention to detail.

Keeping the Monkeys Off

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Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? is a classic Harvard Business Review article on time management for managers. I can’t find it online for free, but here is a summary that is so good that you probably don’t even need to read the full article:

You’re racing down the hall. An employee stops you and says, “We’ve got a problem.” You assume you should get involved but can’t make an on-the-spot decision. You say, “Let me think about it.”

You’ve just allowed a “monkey” to leap from your subordinate’s back to yours. You’re now working for your subordinate. Take on enough monkeys, and you won’t have time to handle your real job: fulfilling your own boss’s mandates and helping peers generate business results.

How to avoid accumulating monkeys? Develop your subordinates’ initiative, say Oncken and Wass. For example, when an employee tries to hand you a problem, clarify whether he should: recommend and implement a solution, take action then brief you immediately, or act and report the outcome at a regular update.

When you encourage employees to handle their own monkeys, they acquire new skills—and you liberate time to do your own job.

Creativity and Innovation are Different

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Tom Peters in In Search of Excellence, quoting Theodore Leviit:

The trouble with much of the advice business gets today about the need to be more vigorously creative is that its advocates often fail to distinguish between creativity and innovation.

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things. . . . A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action….

If you talk to people who work for you, you’ll discover that there is no shortage of creativity or creative people in American business. The shortage is of innovators.

All too often, people believe that creativity automatically leads to innovation. It doesn’t. . . . The scarce people are the ones who have the know-how, energy, daring, and staying power to implement ideas. . . .

IT Pros: Macs Cost Less to Manage Than PCs

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A post at TUAW summarizes the results of a study that does a good job of showing the problem with organizations not getting Macs because they are “too expensive.” Here are two paragraphs from the post:

According to the survey, Macs were cheaper to troubleshoot and required fewer help desk calls; system configuration, user training, and servers/networks/printing were all cheaper for a Mac environment than a PC environment. Software licensing fees turned out to be nearly identical for both platforms.

The survey doesn’t factor in the costs of the Macs themselves; Macs do present a large up-front investment, especially compared to the budget-priced Dells you usually see populating most office cubicles. However, half of the survey respondents noted they switched to a Mac platform because of a lower total cost of ownership.