Harvard Business Review 5 years 2004 – 2009

How Many Women Do Boards Need? by Alison Konrad and Vicki W. Kramer.

Only about 15% of Fortune 500 board members are women – a conspicuously low figure. There are many reasons why this matter. Women directors make three contributions that men are less likely to make; they broaden discussions to better represent the concerns of wider stakeholders, including employees, customers, and the community at large. They can be more dogged than men in pursuing answers to difficult questions possibly because men feel a gender obligation to act as if they understand everything. And they tend to bring a more collaborative approach to leadership, which improves communication among directors and between the board and management.

Reaping the value of these contributions depend of having the right number of women. Solo women on boards often feel isolated and marginalized. A clear shift occurs when boards have three or more women. At that critical mass women tend to be regarded by other board members not as ‘female directors’ but simply as directors, and they don’t report feeling isolated or ignored. Three women or more can change the dynamic on an average size board.

Extreme Jobs – The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce

This article points out that in some businesses extreme work weeks is a pride. Those who work those hours are normally well paid and love their work. But over time that may change as such focus comes with a lot of social draw backs.

The culture that celebrates the extreme ethos today may tire of it – quite literally – tomorrow. At a minimum, senior executives should think carefully about the work behaviour they are rewarding, encouraging or requiring. More than anything, the signals they send will determine whether jobs become extreme – and if so, whether those jobs remain exhilarating or simply become exhausting.

Managing the Right Tension by Dominic Dodd and ken Favaro

Three pairs of conflicting parameters stand out; profitability vs. growth, short term vs. long term, and the whole organization vs. the parts. Often too much focus is given one of these pairs when all have to be taken into account. No matter how difficult it is to do, working hard to strengthen the common bond in your company’s lead tension is the only truly reliable route to improving performance for all your stakeholders.

Harvard Business Review November 2006

This issue is about innovation. I didn’t find too much new said about this topic which is perhaps one that by its very nature doesn’t easily lend itself to academic analysis. It is a matter of experimenting and doing and to ensure that the climate is such that fear or bureaucracy doesn’t hinder free flow of ideas and experimentation. One article points out that many small changes and improvements can be just as useful as something more unique and major.

As affluence and educational levels go up, and corporate ‘fear’ declines, the rate of innovation should go up. I am pretty sure that is the case. Customer communities i.e. closer and more intensive interaction with customers is good for innovation.

In an interesting brief article it is demonstrated (through thorough research) that new moon creates better share markets than full moon. See http://ssrn.com/abstract=281665.

One article, ‘How Well Run Boards Make Decisions’ by Michael Useem, gives some advice on how to bring more structure to board work. It suggests that it is useful to make a Board’s Annual Calendar such that every board meeting has a theme and deals with one key issue besides inevitable ‘routine matters.’ It is also useful to be very specific about what the board is expected to decide on.

And finally an article on IT says that management can’t afford to treat IT as some technical network aside from the business but it must be viewed as reflecting and promoting the core of what the company is and does. Muddled thinking and organization cannot be sorted out by IT. Once structures and business methods and ideas are clear, IT can help in making delivery and organizations function more effectively.

Harvard Business Review October 2006

Sleazeball and privateering ghouls! Is that what business is about? Or is it about earning a legitimate (even a great) reward for legitimate work? Is it about ‘what’s in it for me?’ Or is it about the value we create for one another, our customers, and communities? Is it about greed or about ambition?

Two great articles in this issue – please find a few notes from them below.

Sleep Deficit: The Performance Killer. A conversation with Harvard Medical School Professor Charles A Czeisler

In the past five years driver fatigue has accounted for more than 1.35 million automobile accidents in the United States alone, according to the National Highway Traffic safety Administration. The general effect of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance is well known: Stay awake longer than 18 consecutive hours, and your reaction speed, short term and long-term memory, ability to focus, decision making capacity, math processing, cognitive speed, and spatial orientation all start to suffer. Cut sleep back to five or six hours a night for several days in a row, and the accumulated sleep deficit magnifies these negative effects. Sleep deprivation is implicated in all kinds of physical maladies too, from high blood pressure to obesity.

Encouraging a culture of sleepless machismo is worse than nonsensical; it is downright dangerous and the antithesis of intelligent management. While corporations have all sorts of policies designed to prevent employee endangerment – rules against smoking, drinking, drugs, sex harassment, and so on – they sometimes push employees to the brink of self destruction. Being ‘on’ pretty much around the clock includes a level of impairment every bit as risky as intoxication.

We know that 24 hours without sleep or a week of sleeping four or five hours a night induces an impairment equal to a blood alcohol level of 0.1 %. We would never say: this is a great worker; he is drunk all the time! And yet we continue to celebrate people who sacrifice sleep. The analogy to drunkenness is real because, like a drunk, a person who is sleep deprived has no idea how functionally impaired he or she truly is. Their efficiency at work will suffer substantially, contributing to the phenomenon of ‘presenteeism’ – being there in body but not in spirit.

A good sleep policy is smart business strategy. People think they are saving time and being more productive by not sleeping, but in fact they are cutting their productivity drastically.

Ideas as Art, an interview with James G March

You liked to begin your classes at Stanford each year saying’ ‘I am not now, nor have I ever been relevant.’ What did you mean?

It was a signal to students that it would not be fruitful to ask me about the immediate usefulness of what I had to say. If there is relevance to my ideas, then it is for the people who contemplate the ideas to see, not for the person who produces them. For me, a feature of scholarship that is generally more significant than relevance is the beauty of the ideas. I care that ideas have some form of elegance or surprise – all the things that beauty gives you.

For trust to be anything truly meaningful, you have to trust somebody who isn’t trustworthy. Otherwise it is just a standard rational transaction.

You have written about the importance of a ‘technology of foolishness.’ What does it mean?

That paper focused on how you make interesting value systems. It seemed to me that one of the important things for any person interested in understanding or improving behavior was to know where preferences come from rather than simply to take them as given.

So for example, I used to ask students to explain the factual anomaly that there are more interesting women than interesting men in the world. They were not allowed to question the fact. The key notion was a developmental one: when a woman is born, she is usually a girl, and girls are told that because they are girls they can do things for no good reason. They can be unpredictable, inconsistent, illogical. But then a girl goes to school, and she is told she is an educated person. Because she is an educated person, a woman must do things consistently, analytically, and so on. So she goes through life doing things for no good reason and then figuring out the reasons, and in the process, she develops very complicated values system – one that adapts very much to context. It is such a value system that permitted a woman who was once sitting in a meeting I was chairing to look at the men and say, ‘As nearly as I can tell, your assumptions are correct. And as nearly as I can tell, your conclusions follow from the assumptions. But your conclusions are wrong.’ And she was right... Men, though, are usually boys at birth. They are taught that, as boys, they are straightforward, consistent, and analytic. Then they go to school and are told that they’re straightforward, consistent and analytic. So men go through life being straightforward, consistent, and analytic – with the goals of a two-year-old. And that’s why men are both less interesting and more predictable than women. They do not combine their analysis with foolishness.

Temporary foolishness gives you experiences with a possible new you – but before you can make the change permanent, you have to provide reasons.

A lot of happiness comes from dealing with complexity.

The rhetoric of management requires managers to pretend that things are clear, that everything is straightforward. Often they know that managerial life is more ambiguous and contradictory than that, but they can’t say it. They see their roles as relieving people of ambiguities and uncertainties.

In the end we are very minor blips in cosmic history. Aspirations for importance or significance are the illusions of the ignorant. All our hopes are minor, except to us; but some things matter because we choose to make them matter. What might make a difference to us, I think, is whether in our tiny roles, in our brief time, we inhabit life gently and add more beauty than ugliness.

Harvard Business Review September 2006

Although I didn’t find too much in this issue, I made a few notes as per below:

Marketing in an unpredictable world by Duncan J Watts and Steve Hasker.

1. Increase the number of bets and decrease their size. 2. Focus on detection, measurement and feed back. 3. Follow up with flexible marketing budgets. 4. Exploit naturally emerging social influence. 5. Build flexibility into supply chains and contracts.

What Men think they know about executive women by Dawn s Carlson, Michelle Kacmar and Dwayne Whitten

Overall attitude toward women management is favorable. 1965 women 80%, men 30%; 2005 women 82% men 82%

I would feel comfortable working for a woman. 1965 women 80%, men 25%; 2005 women 80 % and men 75%

The Business Community will never wholly accept Female Executives. 1965 women 45%, men 62%; 2005 women 38%, men 18%

A woman has to be exceptional to succeed in business today. 1965 women 90%, men 90%; 2005 women 70% men 30%

Executive men may be saying the right things, but if the gender composition of the typical boardroom is any indication, they’re probably not behaving accordingly.

The Decision to Trust by Robert f Hurley

Working environments characterized by low levels of trust are stressful, threatening, divisive, unproductive, and tense. High levels of trust environments are fun, supportive, motivating, productive, and comfortable. Clearly companies that foster a trusting culture will have a competitive advantage in the war of talent: Who would choose to stay in a stressful, divisive atmosphere if offered a productive supportive one?

10 Ways to create Shareholder Value by Alfred Rappaport

1. Do not manage earnings or provide earnings guidance. 2. Make strategic decisions that maximize expected value, even at the expense of lowering near-term earnings. 3. Make acquisitions that maximize expected value, even at the expense of lowering near term value. 4. Carry only assets that maximize value. 5. Return cash to shareholders when there are no credible value-creating opportunities to invest in the business. 6. Reward CEO and other senior executives for delivering superior long-term returns. 7. Reward operating-unit executives for adding value superior multiyear value. 8. Reward middle-management and front line employees for delivering superior performance on the key value drivers that they influence directly. 9. Require senior executives to bear the risks of ownership just as shareholders do. 10. Provide investors with value-relevant information.

Notes by [e-mail] 8^th October 2006

Harvard Business Review July – August 2006

This particular double issue of HBR is focused on Sales. It points out that it is through sales that it all happens. Too often top management is expert on everything but sales. This issue tries to help readers understand sales a little better. I think sales is simple and complex at the same time and that it is hard to generalize to cover all sorts of products and services and customers, i.e. my belief and experience is that it is as much an art as it is science.

One article points out that buyers often are so much more informed than they used to be because of the Internet. Another dynamic is that decisions more often are committee based rather than by one individual. One of the best salesmen ever, quoted in the magazine, says that he relies on love. I like that. It is not as corny as it sounds. If you love getting up in the morning, if you love the opportunity to meet people, if you love making new friends, if you love to try to help, if you love a satisfied customer, and if you look like you love life, people will seek out you, helping you make a difference. Wanting to make a difference for the people you interact with is one very useful ingredient in sales success.

I think that as a successful sales person you need to credibly convince the customer that your first, second and third priorities are to exceed his expectations/ make him happy. And if you are managing a sales force you have to credibly make each individual team member believe that your first, second and third priorities are his/ her personal success and growth. There are other requirements as well but this is in my experience the cornerstone to success. We have all read about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and I think it is important to establish where your customer is (personally) in the hierarchy and adjust your approach accordingly.

Below, please find a few comments from the issue.

Love your customer by Joe Girard

When you bought a car from me you didn’t just get a car. You got me. I would break my back to service a customer; I’d rather service a customer than sell another car. After a few years, there was a pandemonium outside my office, there were so many people waiting to see me. So I started seeing people by appointment only. And the reason people were willing to wait a week for an appointment rather than go buy from someone else right away is because they knew that if they got a lemon, I would turn it into a peach.

Look after all those people (service people) in the organization that help form the customer experience. Draw on care and generosity (love) to ensure you are the kind of person people want to talk to and want to help.

Leveraging the Psychology of the sales person; A conversation with Psychologist and anthropologist G. Clotaire Rapaille

Whatever your culture you cannot be a sales person without losing most of the time, so the successful ones have to be those who are happy when they lose. They don’t develop low self-esteem or lose hope or get destroyed by the losses.

Understanding what your sales manager is up against by Barry Trailer and Jim Dickie.

For a sales person, a steady stream of worthy leads is practically nirvana. About 20 % of sales people’s time is spent prospecting. The value of freeing up some of that time for pursuing already defined opportunities is obvious. Also, when the flow of leads is more robust, the qualification of those leads tends to be more rigorous; the candidates that do make it into the sale pipeline tend to have shorter sales cycles, higher contributions to profits, fewer complications, and higher customer satisfaction ratings.

Early efforts focused primarily on efficiency improvements – doing things faster. Today’s efforts focus more on effectiveness – doing things better.

Leading change from the top line; Fred Hassan interviewed by Thomas Stewart and David Champion.

We have adjusted the salary and bonus ratio in the compensation package to give a relatively high salary component, which reduces the kind of hyperactive selling that undermines long-term trust building.

The Ultimate Accountable Job, Leading today’s Sales Organization by Jerome A Colletti and Mary S Fiss.

After a certain period of time, a customer stops buying your product and starts buying your strategy. Instead of selling simple products or services, companies should sell ‘solutions.’ If the solutions selling process from start to finish are not right, then profit margins are likely to suffer.

Low Pressure Selling by Edward C Bursk

This article essentially suggests that by positioning the sales process right and not rushing it, you can make the customer want to buy rather than trying to sell him something. (I have used this by saying to customers: In a similar situation as you, this is how I would reason, this would seem to make sense to me – inviting the customer to see the merits of your reasoning (with his/her interests at heart) or not make the trade. This all makes more sense if you have actually had the role the customer is in, which in my case was true when trying to sell banking services to CFO’s.)

What makes a good salesman by David Mayer and Herbert M Greenberg suggests that the two key qualities are empathy (with the customer) and drive to achieve a sale.

Harvard Business Review June 2006

Tell a manager to cut costs by 10% and he‘ll know exactly what to do. Tell him to grow the business by 10 % and he will be on alien ground. / Thomas Stewart, Editor. /

One article in this edition particularly attracted my interest: Leadership Run Amok by Scott W. Sprier, Mary H. Fontaine and Ruth. L. Malloy. (I liked this article and think it aligns with Bertrand Russell’s saying – ‘excess virtue is a vice.’ Driving any issue or goal too far, i.e. being too singular in our pursuits, always leads to opportunity costs. There is also a risk of outstanding performance by individuals without due consideration to or with disregard of how it affects the whole. Incentive systems are often loop sided and reward people who may not be in the company’s long term interest to retain. Overall balance and diversity are essential for sustainable success – and these concepts are often sidelined in the relentless pursuit of that marginal extra dollar revenue.) I recommend that this article be read in its entirety. Here are a few extracts.

If you believe too many executives think, “It’s all abut me,” you’re right: Research shows that an ethos celebrating individual achievement has been shoving aside other motivations, such as the drive to empower people, that are essential for successful leadership.

In the short term, through sheer drive and determination, overachieving leaders may be very successful, but there’s a dark side to the achievement motive. By relentlessly focusing on tasks and goals - revenue or sales targets, say – an executive or company can, over time, damage performance. Overachievers tend to command and coerce, rather than coach and collaborate, thus stifling subordinates. They take frequent shortcuts and forget to communicate crucial information, and they may be oblivious to the concern for others. Their team’s performance begins to suffer, and they risk missing the very goals that initially triggered the achievement-oriented behaviour.

While profits and innovation have risen during the past decade, public trust in big business has slid. In our executive coaching practice, we’ve seen very talented leaders crash and burn as they put ever more pressure on their employees and themselves to produce. At the extreme leaders like Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling, a classic overachiever by most accounts, driven by results regardless of how they were achieved. He pitted manager against manager. For every Skilling, there are dozens of overachieving managers who don’t make headlines but do cause significant harm.

Be less coercive and more collaborative. Influence rather than direct. Focus more on people and less on numbers and results. The most effective leaders are primarily motivated by socialized power. They channelled their efforts into helping others be successful.

In our research we have identified six styles of leadership that managers and executives use to motivate, reward, direct, and develop others. These are directive, which entails strong, sometimes coercive behaviour; visionary, which focuses on clarity and communication; affiliative, which emphasizes harmony and relationships; participative, which is collaborative and democratic; pacesetting, which is characterized by personal heroics; and coaching, which focuses on long-term development and mentoring.

There is no best style of leadership. Each has its strengths and limits. The directive approach, for instance, is useful in crises or when a leader must manage a poor performer, but overuse stifles initiative and innovation. The affiliative approach is appropriate in certain high-stress situations or when employees are beset by personal crisis, but is most effective when used in conjunction with the visionary, participative, or coaching styles. Pacesetting can get results in the short term, but it’s demoralizing to employees and exhausting for everyone over the long haul. The most effective leaders are adept at all six leadership styles and use each when appropriate. Typically, however, a manager defaults to the styles he or she is most comfortable using, a preference that reflects the person’s dominant motive combined with the level of pressure in the work place. People motivated mainly by achievement tend to favour pace-setting in low pressure situations but to become directive when the pressure is on.

What are conferences for by Richard Saul Wurman. Have stories about passion, ideas and failures. Don’t spoon-feed information and talk down to audiences. Put people in a receptive mood and ask unrehearsed questions. I don’t want agendas. I want to be surprised. And hopefully the participants will talk about it for years afterward.

Growth as a process. Interview with Jeff Immelt CEO of GE. The interview focuses on GEs goal to grow 8 % per annum or twice the growth of the economy. A couple of tool kits useful for achieving this are attached. I liked this line from Immelt: “I tell people: Start your career tomorrow. If you had a bad year, learn from it and do better. If you had a good year I have already forgotten about it.”

There is also an article titled ‘Building the Green Way’ by Charles Lockwood. In summing up it says: The green future is here. Like the dramatic, occasionally unsettling, and ultimately beneficial transformations wrought by the introduction of electric lights, telephones, elevators, and air-conditioning, green building principles are changing how we construct and use our workplaces. Armed with the ten rules discussed above, corporations no longer have an excuse for eschewing sustainability – they have tools that are proven to lower overhead costs, improve productivity, and strengthen the bottom line.