Leadership and Learning

Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

I have never recommended a book in a blog posting before, but that’s about to change, and for a very good reason.

Sometimes in a good life, you come across a theory, model, idea, course, book or conversation that fundamentally changes the way you see the world. You may have a sense that the scales have fallen from your eyes, that you understand reality in an entirely new and profoundly more accurate and powerful way, that this new way of thinking explains a whole lot more than anything else to-date. And you may feel that knowing what you now know, that there’s no turning back. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, the secret is out, and you are changed.

This is Mark Addleson’s new book, Beyond Management: Taking Charge at Work.

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Management-Taking-Charge-Work/dp/0230308163

I have read who knows how many books on organizations, management and leadership, and many more articles. This book is different, and it is different in a way that is exciting, disturbing and profound. It lays out what we need to understand about organizations if we are to move beyond a tired, exhausted, dysfunctional and counter-productive mental model of what work is.

Full disclosure: I had the privilege to sit in Mark’s class at George Mason University a few years ago when he laid out over several months, point to point, his argument on what is happening in organizations, and what needs to be done. I have to tell you that due to the design of the Master’s program I was in, these lectures were often on Friday night until 10:00 PM. If you’re like most people, there are many things you can think of that you would rather be doing on a Friday night than listening to a lecture on organizations and work. And I have to tell you I often left the lecture hall electrified by the power of Mark’s discoveries and explanation.

So, what’s the ”juice?” What is Mark saying, and why is it so important? Here we go:

• Work has shifted from factories to knowledge work. Instead of a steady, reliable production line, we have today problem-solving, change, ambiguity, conflict, alignment of interests, creativity, collaboration, confusion, clarity, evolving and most fundamentally, trying to make sense of the world and our place in it. “What should we do now? What is the best idea? How can we position ourselves to do something great?” These are the questions of knowledge work.

• Management models are still pretty much what they were for the factory. Hierarchy, a culture of “telling” rather than “asking,” defining outcomes without employee input, and high control are all hallmarks of the factory. They also demotivate virtually all employees.

• As a knowledge worker, you already understand the profound difference between work you do when you are motivated – “switched on” – and demotivated –“phoning it in,” or “going through the motions.” Because your real value is a function of what comes out of your brain, the state in which you work really, really matters. High motivation, excitement, energy and creativity creates beautiful work products. (Knowledge work is much more art than science. Even scientists doing their best work talk about being immersed in the flow of the activity, the genius of a new idea, or the elegance of a theory. It is anything but rote production work.)

• You can’t really “manage” or command creativity. You can’t schedule a meeting at which people will generate insights at 3:45 on a Thursday. You can only foster it and create conditions in which it is most likely to happen – support, encouragement, good working arrangements, and recognition, for example. Already, we see the logical limits of command and control.

• A key part of Mark’s book is to differentiate from the practice of work and “the view from the top.” Being inside the work is to be engaged in all those questions listed above. Trying to understand the client’s perspective, figuring out how to organize around a seemingly impossible request, asking a colleague for an idea on how to change something in the work, communicating, collaborating and generating ideas. Mark’s contention is that most of this is invisible to those running organizations. Instead, they look at what he calls the “D’s.” These include such things as data, dollars, deliverables, and directives. These are all abstracted, reified objects – they are not the work itself. The work itself happens on the telephone when hearing about a surprise in a project, when conflict erupts, when it becomes clear people had really different ideas, when you create information in a way that allows a client to make a good decision. The view from the top regards these often as interruptions to the real work – remember, it is steeped in a production mentality. The deep fantasy is that everything runs like a clock, with no time-outs for the real stuff of knowledge work. (I have heard it said before: “What is work besides solving problems?”) If you think about the tension between a musician and his or her record company, you start to get a glimpse into this divide. The record company would love a predictable schedule of releases that sell millions. The artist is trying to get “out there” what is “in here.” This is creativity, imagination, beauty. It’s not so schedulable. Organizations are only starting to begin to grasp what this all means. It will require a new business model.

• The smartest, most advanced companies already understand this changing paradigm, and are acting on it. Google, Pixar, Harley-Davidson, Zappos and many other much smaller companies seem to be “getting” what work today really means. Taking much more a whole systems view (including customers, communities and other stakeholders), they are rethinking what happens in work, and what it means for leadership. Most others are still fighting last year’s war with a production and factory mental model. Input, throughput, output.

At the risk of doing it injustice, I will say this is a sinfully abbreviated summary of just some of Mark’s key points. If any of the points above resonate, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of the book.

It’s the end of an era.

Tonight, the death of Steve Jobs was announced.

Much has already been written about the man, so no need to go over all that.

From my seat, Apple was a company unwavering in its commitment to excellence. This is in opposition to just plain bad – but not quite bad enough to get you to cancel the contract or switch providers. The new model of customer service for many corporations is “Drive the cost of customer service down as far as possible until customers start bailing.” Just yesterday I had a conversation with a friend who said he hates his bank, but it is such a hassle to change banks that he stays.

Apple unapologetically charged for its customer service, and it’s excellent.

So what about the money? Jobs once famously said something to the effect of — when hearing an interviewer talk about the company’s financial position – that this was a nice number, but it was really just that. A number. It wasn’t very important to him. What really mattered was whether Apple was producing great products.

Do you feel that many of the products coming from large corporations today are really motivated by a quest for greatness? Or a desire to cut costs and maximize shareholder return?

Apple dared to be different, and this should not be understated. At a time when the entire world was rushing to PCs, Apple stood by its vision. Its OS, applications and graphical user interface. Imagine the temptations there must have been to be a PC wanna-be. After all, that’s where the big money was, right?

Jobs demanded the best, and he had a vision. In this way, he was no different than any respectable junior high sports coach, when you stop to think about it.

What is it about the economy, the business culture today that such a posture should be so radical?

Jobs also bridged the artificial gap between art and science. He studied calligraphy as a young man, and this exposed him to aesthetics, design and beauty. Can you say the products of most companies today are aesthetic, designed well, and even beautiful?

But what always got me about Apple was empathy. Empathy is not sympathy – it is the ability to see and understand something as someone else may experience it. It is a cognitive and emotional skill.

The first time I bought an iMac, I opened this beautiful, sleek box and the first thing I saw was a note that said, “We’re as excited about your new Apple purchase as you are.”

They “got it.” They understood that customers were more than revenue-generating units to be seduced with promises of 3 free months of service and then to be shafted at customer service time. Apple related to customers.

Apple products are easy. One of the machines I bought over the years had instructions to the effect of: “Take the computer out of the box. Plug it in. Press the power button.”

That was it. You were in business.

Who hasn’t sworn at a personal computer at some time – trying to get it to print, network, configure or just cooperate?
I have compared Apple’s sense of customers with traditional PC companies’ sense with an analogy. It’s as though we’re at the beginning of the automotive era (and make no mistake; we are at the beginning of the computer era). Most manufacturers think the job of the car is to get a passenger from A to B. And they’re right.

But another company comes along with the question, “How do we make the ride enjoyable?” They start coming up with suspension systems, windshields, padding in the seats. This is Apple. Thinking about the user, not just going from A to B.

Apples are fun. They are built with a sense of humor, irreverence, freshness, even frivolity.

When Jobs recruited John Sculley from Pepsi to be CEO, he asked him, “Do you want to sell sugar water? Or do you want to change the world?” He had a big vision.

It’s the end of an era, and I sincerely hope Apple can keep the vision alive.

The Apple home page tonight, October 5, 2011, doesn’t feature the new iPhone, or any other products.

The home page embodies what Apple has been all about. Beauty, simplicity, grace.

It had an evocative picture of Jobs, and simply says, “Steve Jobs. 1955-2011.” It’s beautiful, and it made me cry.

Thank you, Steve, for making our world, and thousands of my own hours in front of a machine, so much better.

And I hope you’re up there right now telling the Man how much better the whole computing system up there could be – just let you at it.

A final point. You, the reader, and I,  don’t have forever to do what we need to do. The clock is ticking on our contribution, greatness, and dreams. We don’t know what our dates will be. But we do have today. And that’s all we know for sure we have. Let’s make the most of it.

It was a pleasant lunch. As usual in this business, the conversation was around leadership, organizations and culture.

The point was made for the umpteenth time in my life that the federal government often promotes people into supervisory positions who are very skilled technically, but not very good in managing people.

I invoked one of my favorite expressions from Dan Goleman, who quoted one person in such a position who said: “It finally hit me – I have to learn all-new skills.”

One of the diners said, “You know, in my life I’ve had to do that several times.”

It was a succinct, yet powerful statement. No one should overlook or underestimate its significance.

The power in this approach to work and life resides in the adaptability, resilience and change-readiness it is based on. It proves an openness, a yielding to the rhythms of life, and a proper location of subject and object. It is also a way to facilitate movement through the stages of adult development. (See Leadership Agility by Bill Joiner for an excellent treatment of this topic.)

It is a stance of behaviorally being able to let go of things that may have worked, even for decades. It means stepping into uncertainty, risk and even fear. What if it doesn’t work? What if you fail?

Yet the circumstances of our work and lives demand sometimes that we change, even when we may not want to, or like what the change represents. It is the difference between, as Viktor Frankl put it, asking what you want out of life versus asking what life wants from you.

There is no need to belabor the point on resistance to change. We see it frequently; much less often in ourselves, where it is so easy to get up each day and pretty much do what we did the day before – no matter that the context and demands of the environment have changed.

I offered that I have experienced more than a few leaders in workshops and coaching who have proclaimed as soon as we started: “I’ve been at this (insert number of) years, know what I’m doing and I’m not changing.” This is often accompanied by a folding of the arms. Resistance, even stubbornness, thinking that since you have a hammer, every problem must be a nail, rigidity – all these characterize the opposite.

Here are some examples of the kind of deep, personal change I’m talking about — which happen to be essential for leadership in most settings:

• Micromanaging versus granting autonomy
• Trusting versus not trusting (very hard if you’ve been burned)
• Learning to look for strengths instead of weaknesses
• Asking for feedback versus making it clear you are the only one who will give feedback to subordinates
• Admitting mistakes and weaknesses (and what you learned from them) versus “the need to be right”
• Thinking of the impact of your actions on others versus just executing tasks
• Seeing others’ resistance as information versus something that is wrong and to be shut down

Erik Erikson said that during the bulk of our working years, human beings experience either generativity or stagnation. Generativity is creating, giving back, yielding, accepting and living. Stagnation is not knowing what to do when your moves no longer work, when your program is out of gas. It is the state of being stuck.

Are there any all-new skills you need to learn? Hint: Look at the your chronic, recurring, patterned problems. Start there.

What’s not to like about a check-off?

You know, that feeling you get when something is finished and with a satisfied stroke of the pen, you draw a checkmark through that empty box that you drew just so you could put the checkmark through it.

The check-off is particularly satisfying for those whose last letter in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is “J” (Judger). This preference likes closure, completion, resolution and finality. What organization doesn’t like that?  I once worked with a group of coaches who insisted on whiteboarding the tasks for our meetings, each one prompting a “woo-hoo!” when checked. In contrast, “P’s” (Perceivers) like keeping options open, exploring possibilities and continuing to think about what could be. I believe P’s actually experience a kind of grief when something comes to an end. After all, all those exciting other possibilities (which they can sometimes surface late in the process, much to the annoyance of the J’s) are now history – at least for whatever just went out the door.

But Steve Jobs once famously said, “Real programmers ship.” By that, he meant they didn’t just indulge their fantasies around cool code. They complete the application and it goes out the door to be sold. Check.

Jobs and Apple are not a bad place to start a check-in on the institution of check-offs – and yes, they are an institution now. They are such a part of the workplace lingua franca that they occupy a special place right alongside the organizational drivers and DNA strands like “goals, priorities,” and “planning.” They are a huge part of work life.

Think about it. There was a big series of check-offs at the World Wide Developers Conference, where Apple released its new OS and cloud-based connectivity.  But today, millions of other people will check many other things off, big and small.

But the real question for them, and you, is: Is what is being checked off any good?

Immediately, a provocative question like this can create significant discomfort, defensiveness and even confusion among those wedded to check-offs. Check-offs are binary, either/or. Once this question of quality is raised, everything moves into a new realm that is harder to measure, more controversial, certainly more subjective, laden with differing values, politics, assumptions and worldviews.

Wouldn’t the busy, overstressed, maxed-out management team really just rather hear if it got done (binary), and maybe secretly, quietly hope it was good?

Microsoft and Dell and other companies have their big check-offs, but do you hear much about them? Are they good? I hear much less excitement and enthusiasm.

Could it be that Apple cares both about shipping code, and shipping the right code, the good code?

That’s an important question for any organization trying to stay viable, innovative, leading-edge and valued. A simple yes/no can potentially disguises the real issue.

Broaden and deepen the question. What is it that you’re really checking off? How do you know it’s good?

Then, when you’ve answered it satisfactorily, go ahead and draw that checkmark.

Part of my mid-life and daughter-going-to-college-soon plan involves building a recording studio in my basement. (There are worse ways to handle this phase of life.) I like to play the guitar and drums, and apart from occasional purchases that have to be carefully explained in advance of the credit card statement arriving, it’s all good.

If you thought some of your friends were snobs about their stereo sound systems or home theatres, you ought to talk to musicians. They salivate and practically genuflect over the really good equipment, and go out of their way to trash-talk inferior products – it’s almost personal to them. They get angry about bad product.

In looking for the equipment I need – mixers, mics, audio interfaces, DI boxes, pre-amps, etc. – one thing I have noticed is that some companies go to great lengths to build a box that makes their product look very sleek and high end. But when you read the reviews and user opinions they are withering in their criticism.

It’s an interesting strategy – make your product look like something it’s not. Maybe you can fool enough people to get rich, like if you put a really attractive label on a bad bottle of wine.

Where does your energy and effort go? Is it about building something great, or making something mediocre look great? Is it mostly about packaging, “messaging” and covering?

No one faults beautiful design that covers beautiful product, but most people figure out eventually when there is a mismatch.

The great organizational sin of flashy PowerPoint slides must be mentioned here. Some people, with few original ideas, valuable contributions or insights will spend a lot of time making their presentation look oh so good.

Others spend the time on the ideas and concepts, and focus on conveying those clearly and effectively. If you have ever sat through a whizzy PowerPoint presentation but not really know what the point was at the end, you know what I’m talking about.

What’s in your box?

Every organization has opportunities to innovate – either incrementally or via leaps and bounds – in order to better serve its customers.   

What would happen if for one day you led a group of your colleagues to create a radical haven of innovation?  What would happen if you commandeered a conference room, posted a dozen large flip charts on the wall, and for two hours collectively asked:

• What would it look like to be amazing at what we do?
• What can we make incremental progress on today that moves us towards amazing?
• If we were operating at our leadership potential, how might things be different? 
• How can each of us, in our own ways, lead an innovative step towards our goals?

Each and every day presents an opportunity for leaders at every level of the organization to create a radical haven of innovation. 

What are you going to do to lead the effort in your organization?