Harvard Business Review 5 years 2004 – 2009

Performance goals often induce people to favour tasks which will make them look good over tasks that will help them learn. A shift towards learning goals will make managers more open to exploring opportunities to acquire knowledge from others.

There must be an expectation that people will openly disagree with each other in meetings. Politics must be kept to a minimum, allowing real teamwork to take hold.

You also need to beware not to overdo collaboration such that it turns from being the oil that greases to the sand that grinds things to a halt.

The world has become much more interconnected, and if executives don’t know how to tap into the power of those connections, they’ll be left behind.

The Unselfish Gene. We are more co-operative and less selfish than most people believe. Organizations should help us embrace our collective sentiments.  by Yochai Benkler This is an outstanding article which I encourage all to read.

”Those of us who have looked at self interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity – myself especially – are in a state of shock and disbelief.”  Alan Greenspan.

The way the modern web organizations work flies in the face of the assumption that human beings are selfish creatures. For decades, economists, politicians, legislators, executives and engineers have built systems and organizations around incentives, rewards, and punishments to get people to achieve public, corporate, and community goals.  Yet we see all around us people co-operating and working in collaboration, doing the right thing, behaving fairly, acting generously, caring about their group or team, and trying to behave like decent people who reciprocate kindness with kindness. Through the work of many scientists, we have begun to see evidence across several disciplines that people are in fact more cooperative and selfless – or behave far less selfishly – than we have assumed. Perhaps humankind is not so inherently selfish after all.

After years of arguments to the contrary, there is growing evidence that evolution may favour people who cooperate and societies that include such individuals.  That is perhaps why using controls or carrots and sticks to motivate people isn’t effective.

People who think they are acting in a context that reward self-interest behave in a manner consistent with that expectation; participants who feel they are in a situation that demand a pro-social attitude conform to that scenario. Some people want to cooperate because it feels good; people are rewarded when they trust others. Many of us are, by a combination of nature and nurture, and the interactions between us, much better and less selfish than our standard models predict.

People care about doing the right thing, whatever that is. Clearly defined values are crucial to cooperation; discussing, explaining, and reinforcing the right or ethical thing to do will increase the degree to which people behave that way.  In order to foster cooperation, it is critical to set up systems that appeal to participants’ intrinsic motivations – that is, what they want to do from within – instead of systems based on monitoring people and rewarding or punishing them according to their behaviour.  We shouldn’t try to motivate people by offering them material payoffs; we should also focus on motivating them socially and intellectually by making cooperation social, autonomous, rewarding, and even – if we can swing it – fun.

Why does the self-interest myth still dominate? It is not entirely wrong, sometimes there are trade-offs. The cold war juxtaposed socialism vs. capitalism, the collective interest vs. self-interest. The end of the cold war era has made it possible to see new scientific observations for what they are: progress rather than a threat to capitalism. Human beings tend to seek simple and neat explanations to complex problems. Almost two generations of human beings have been educated and socialized to think in terms of universal selfishness.

Bringing Minds Together by John Abele

The default mind-set should be inclusive and questioning, confident and humble. Set the stage for collaboration and employ ritual, symbolism, or humour to disarm and inspire. Recognize that diversity is an antidote to groupthink. When will all these approaches start catching on in boardrooms, mayor’s offices, and universities? Look around you. They already are.

Building Collaborative Enterprise by Paul Adler, Charles Heckscher, and Laurence Prusak.

Collaborative communities encourage people to continually apply their unique talents to group projects – and to become motivated by a collective mission, not just personal gain or the intrinsic pleasure of autonomous creativity. By marrying a sense of common purpose to a supportive structure, these organizations are mobilizing knowledge workers’ talents and expertise in flexible, highly manageable group-work efforts.

Interdependent process management is explicit, flexible, and interactive. Processes are carefully worked out and generally written into protocols, but they are revised continually as the demands of the work and clients change. They are shaped more by the people involved in the task than by those at the top. People support what they can help create. It is only by involving your key people that you can be confident that you have good procedures that have credibility in the eyes of their peers.

Businesses need a lot more than minimal cooperation and mere compliance. They need everyone’s ideas on how to do things better and more cheaply. They need true collaboration. Today reliability is no longer a key competitive advantage, and we are at a new turning point. The organizations that will become the household names of this century will be renowned for sustained, large-scale, efficient innovation. The key to that capability is neither company loyalty nor free-agent autonomy, but rather a strong collaborative community.

Who Moved My Cube, creating work spaces that actually foster collaboration by Anne-Laure Fayard and John Weeks.

Casual interactions between workers promote trust, cooperation, and innovation, and companies have devised open plans and common areas to encourage them. Three factors need to be prevalent; proximity, privacy and permission to interact. Keeping virtual offices open 24/7 conveys permission to use them informally.

Technology, Tradition and The Mouse Disney’s CEO Robert Iger interviewed.

There is a need to respect the past, but it is a mistake to revere your past. You have got to be an optimist. You can’t be a pessimist. When you come to work, you’ve got to show enthusiasm and spirit. You can’t let people see you brought down by the experience of failure. It is the CEO who determines strategy, who is its major proponent, and who says, “This is where we are going.” When I was at Harvard Business School a few years ago they were doing a study on Disney’s Pixar acquisition. They did a really good analysis. But they didn’t understand the emotion that entered into the decision. That’s something you can’t measure at a business school and you can’t learn until you do it. I have a great job. We are in the business of delivering fun. We entertain.

Notes by [e-mail] 04.07.2011

Harvard Business Review June 2011

This issue is about unleashing innovation which is a difficult subject. I believe there needs to be an atmosphere free of fear with tolerance and diversity, where young people thrive and where progress and curiosity are key drivers as opposed to financial incentives. Hierarchy, bureaucracy and too many rules are enemies of innovation. “Bureaucrats play by the rules, innovators play with the rules.” Please find a few notes from the June issue below.

The editor says HBR has become a conversation rather than a lecture – the difference I think is important and a more open ended approach is probably useful in management / staff relationships too.

What makes a team smarter? More women! by Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone.

There is little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises. What is really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women.  What do you hear about great groups? Not that they are really smart, but that they listen to each other.  They share criticism constructively. They have open minds. They are not autocratic. Groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups.

Before You Make That Big Decision…by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Oliver Sibony.

The people recommending a course of action will have delved more deeply into the proposal than the executive has time to do. Inevitably, lapses in judgment creep into the recommending team’s decision-making process, because its members fell in love with a deal, say, or are making a faulty comparison to an earlier business case. Questions that should be asked are; Is there any reason to suspect motivated errors, or errors driven by the self-interest of the recommending team? Have the people making the recommendation fallen in love with it? Were there dissenting opinions within the recommending team? Could the diagnosis of the situation be overly influenced by salient analogies? Have credible alternatives been considered? If you were to make this decision again in a year, what information would you want, and can you get more of it now? Do you know where the numbers came from? Can you see a halo effect?  Are the people making the recommendation overly attached to past decisions? Is the base case overly optimistic? Is the worst case bad enough? Is the recommending team overly cautious?

Procter and Gamble experience suggests six lessons for leaders looking to build new-growth factories: Coordinate the factory with the company’s core businesses, be a vigilant manager, start small and grow carefully, create tools for gauging new businesses, make sure the right people are doing the right work, and nurture cross-pollination. Although individual creativity can be unpredictable and uncontrollable, collective creativity can be managed.

Customers Can Rally Your Troops by Adam M Grant

Leaders who connect employees with end users motivate higher performance. Gratitude from end users is a powerful reminder of the value of continued quality improvements.  Show pictures, circulate inside stories, and share outside stories! When customers, clients and patients describe how a company’s products and services make a difference, they bring a leader’s vision to life in a credible, memorable way. Employees can vividly understand the impact of their work, see how their contributions are appreciated by end users, and experience a stronger concern for them.

Segmenting the Base of the Pyramid by V. Kasturi Rangan, Michael Chu, and Djordjija Petkoski.

To succeed you need to link your commercial interests with your constituencies’ well-being. As companies make money, the communities in which they operate must benefit by, for example, acquiring basic services or growing more affluent. (this article deals with business approach to poor third world people, but the principle stated should in my view be universally pursued, regardless of the state of development)

The Paradox of Excellence by Thomas J DeLong and Sara De Long.

High achievers often undermine their leadership by being afraid to show their limitations. Long term goals can withstand minor setbacks, so look at the big picture and give yourself the latitude to make some missteps along the way. (what comes to my mind here is the military and the dominant military the last 70 years has been the US. Even when it is obvious that an undertaking is flawed and unwinnable, the military will never admit that anything is beyond their ability – with known tragic and financially ruining consequences)

Notes by [e-mail] 26.05.2011
From ’How Good Do We Have to Be’ by Harold S. Kushner
People like you more when you are less perfect, less obsessed with perfection and more human. What we should seek is not perfection but integrity. When you compromise your integrity, you lose everything. Being human can never mean being perfect, but it should always mean struggling to be as good as we can and never letting our failures be a reason for giving up the struggle. To be whole means to rise beyond the need to pretend that we are perfect, to rise above the fear that we will be rejected for not being perfect. And it means having the integrity not to let the inevitable moments of weakness and selfishness become permanent parts of our character. The challenge of being human is so great so no one gets it right all the time.

Harvard Business Review May 2011

The May issue of HBR is about how to get more done; i.e. productivity. There is an article ‘The Wise Leader’ by two Japanese authors which I found excellent. This article together with ‘How Will You Measure Your Life’ from July August 2010 and ‘How to Reinvent Capitalism‘ from January-February 2011 provide convincing evidence that to be run well and sustainably, business need to be based on good values and be obsessed with serving the community and making the world a better place to live. Please find below a few notes from the May issue. (my notes from the two previous two articles mentioned are available on request.)
The Wise Leader by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi

Discontinuity is the only constant in our times. Above all, in these times, leaders find it tough to ensure their people adhere to values and ethics. Rather than ask what’s in it for me, employees need to ask ‘What’s good, right and just for everyone?’ The purpose for business is business, many believe, and greed is good so long as SEC doesn’t find out.

The gulf between the theory and practice of ethics exists in business for several reasons: There is a big difference between what top management preaches and what front line people do. There is a philosophical tendency in the West, following Plato, to conclude that if a theory isn’t working, there must be something wrong with reality. People behave less ethically when they are part of organizations and groups. Individuals who may do the right thing in normal situations behave differently under stress.
Wall Street firms thought they could manage greater risk by using numbers, data, and scientific formulas, instead of making judgments about loans, one at a time. The same holds for the US automotive industry, which relies on offering financial incentives, rather than understanding customer needs.
All social phenomena – including business – are context dependent, and analyzing them is meaningless unless you consider people’s goals, values and interests along with the power relationships between them.
Creating the future must extend beyond the company; it must be about pursuing the common good. CEOs need to ask if decisions are good for society as well as for their companies; management must serve a higher purpose.
No company will survive over the long run if it doesn’t offer value to customers, create a future that rivals can’t, and maintain the common good.
Maximizing shareholder wealth can lead to goodness as can making a profit. But the sight must be set higher: Your actions should also have a moral purpose. The former president of Toyota Eji Toyoda said: “To do what you believe is right, to do what you believe is good. Doing the right things, when required, is a calling from on high. Do it boldly, do as you believe, do as you are.”

Management must make judgments for the common good, not for profits and not for advantage. Says Tadashi Yanai, CEO of Fast Retailing. Not only does a company need to live in harmony with society but it must contribute to society.

Wise leaders can grasp the essence and create shared contexts. Mitsui’s president started kurumaza or sitting in a circle meetings open to any employee.
Wise leaders communicate the essence in a way that everyone can understand. To succeed here you must use stories and metaphors and other figurative language. Everyone at Cannon has to back up the numbers with a narrative. ‘That’s how skills are cultivated and our people grow.’ To use metaphors and stories effectively, leaders must learn to see the relationships between one thing and another, between themselves and someone else, or between the present and either the past or future. The best way to do that is to read as many novels as possible in all genres including romance, satire, comedy, and tragedy and to attend theatre. Effective communication touches people’s hearts and minds. Communication is critical to bringing dreams to life.
Good leaders also need to understand all the contradictions in human nature – good and bad, civility and incivility, optimism and pessimism, diligence and laziness – and synthesize them as situations arise. As F Scott Fitzgerald pointed out, ‘The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’ In these days of discontinuity, these qualities matter more than ever.
Doing the same thing year after year is synonymous with falling behind.
Today’s knowledge-creating company, we believe, must metamorphose into the wisdom practicing company of tomorrow. That demands a new kind of leader – a CEO who is many things at the same time: a philosopher who grasps the essence of a problem and draws general conclusions from random observations; a master craftsman who understands the key issues of the moment and acts on them immediately; an idealist who will do what he or she believes is right and good for the company and society; a politician who can spur people to action; a novelist who uses metaphors, stories, and rhetoric; a teacher with good values and strong principles, from whom others want to learn.
CEOs cannot be content to analyze situations using empirical data and deductive reasoning; they must also make inductive jumps according to their ideals and dreams.
Capitalism for The Long Term

The Anglo-American model of capitalism is due for an enormous shake out. We should look at the European model (seen in the Scandinavian countries, Germany, France and the Netherlands) where the strength of society is maintained through a degree of social mobility based on merit, social cohesion, and social services that help smooth out the differences between those who have and those who have not. / Kenneth Arimitage/

The idea that growth can be infinitely sustainable is the mathematical and physical impossibility upon which our entire economic system is based. Nature has no system that can support this kind of growth; the closest example of something that can is cancer. Unfortunately, once the host has been devoured, the cancer is also destined to perish. / Richard Chrenko/
Trying to convince companies to do what is right is the same as saying they can continue to choose between being good and being bad. And to claim that tough regulations would stifle entrepreneurship is to argue that entrepreneurial companies thrive only in sleazy environments. If that is true, then capitalism deserves to perish.

/ Shivakumar Kunapuli/

Customers don’t mind so much waiting if you keep them abreast of where things are.
The Power of Small Wins by Teresa M Amabile and Steven J Kramer

Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a work day, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. The power of progress is fundamental to human nature, but few managers understand it or know how to leverage progress to boost motivation.

A central driver of creative, productive performance is the quality of a person’s inner work life – the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions over the course of a work day. How happy workers feel; how motivated they are by an intrinsic interest in the work; how positively they view their organization, their management, their team, their work, and themselves – all these combine either to push them to higher levels of achievement or drag them down.

The most common event triggering a best day experience was any progress in the work by the individual or the team. Catalysts for motivation include setting clear goals, allowing autonomy, providing sufficient resources and time, helping with the work, openly learning from problems and success, and allowing a free exchange of ideas.

If you facilitate staff’s steady progress in meaningful work, make the progress salient to them, and treat them well, great performance will follow. And they will love their jobs.
Being More Productive interview of David Allen and Tony Swartz

To perform at our best we need positive emotions, gaining control of our attention, and, at the spiritual level, it is about defining purpose. We need to manage our work/ rest ratios. After 90 minutes of focused work we need a break.

The Cosmopolitan Corporation by Pankaj Ghemawat

Global firms must adopt a cosmopolitan approach of understanding and working with differences rather than against them. Sympathy is much fainter than our concern for ourselves, and sympathy with persons remote from us much fainter than with persons near and contiguous. Management needs to have a global mindset but local business adaptation is key for success.

The Frontline Advantage by Fred Hassan

Frontline management is typically 50 – 60% of a company’s management and they control 80% of the work force. This critically important group needs to be communicated directly to, in person, by the CEO. They need to understand the strategy as they are the ones carrying it out. It is important to expose senior management to frontline perspectives, to define a higher purpose, and also in the process not undermine the middle. Never use the information you learn from frontline managers to discipline of punish the bosses.

Notes by [e-mail] May 7^th 2011

Harvard Business Review April 2011

The HBR April issue is all about failure, how to understand it, learn from it and recover from it. The theme is that anyone who ventures into the unknown is likely to meet with failure at some stage. Failure tends to sharpen the senses more than anything else and thus failure provides opportunity for fast and valuable learning. How fast you recover from failure is very much an issue of attitude and preservation of self confidence and esteem in the face of adversity. A few notes from the issue;
Cultivate a Culture of Confidence by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

One difference between winners and losers is how they handle losing. The ability to recover quickly and get back on course is crucial. Nothing succeeds for long without considerable effort and vigilance. Winning streaks end for predictable reasons: Strategies run their course. New competitors emerge to take on the industry leader. Ideas get dusty. Technology marches on. Complacency sets in, making people feel entitled to success rather than motivated to work for it. Losing produces temptations to behave in ways that make it hard to recover fast.

Entrepreneurs and the culture of failure by Daniel Isenberg

Anxiety is dysfunctional, but fear can be good. It helps protect us from things that are dangerous – such as risk taking. It is important to train entrepreneurs to fail small, fast and cheaply. Failure is a normal aspect of venturing into new business.

Ethical Breakdowns by Max H Bazerman and Ann E Tenbrunsel

Many practices serve to derail even the best-intentioned managers.

Goals that reward unethical behavior; Conflicts of interest that motivate people to ignore bad behavior; Overlooking dirty work that’s been outsourced to others; An inability to notice when behavior deteriorated gradually; A tendency to overlook unethical decisions when the outcome is good. Beware as a leader of your own blind spots, which may permit, or even encourage, the unethical behaviors you are trying to extinguish.