Q #97: What is “The Knowing-Doing Gap”?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

Exactly what its name suggests: the gap between knowing what to do and doing it. Although this idea has been around at least since the Garden of Eden, a book written by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action, is generally given credit for applying it to the business world. As they explain, “We wrote this book because we wanted to understand why so many managers know so much about organizational performance, say so many smart things about how to achieve performance, and work so hard, yet are trapped in firms that do so many things they know will undermine performance.” Obviously, knowing what to do is not enough. In order to identify the causes of what they refer to as the “knowing-doing gap,” Pfeffer and Sutton embarked on a four-year research project. These are three of the causes they identified:

1. Gaining new knowledge is much easier than putting it to use.

2. People would much rather talk about it than do it.

3. Applying new knowledge can be expensive, politically dangerous (i.e. a threat to the status quo), and a repudiation of past decisions and experiences.

What to do?

1. View knowing and doing, teaching and learning, as being essentially the same. The most valuable new knowledge is learned by doing. It must be anchored in action. Sharing with others, for example.

2. Encourage effort but only reward measurable results. Gaining new knowledge requires effort and effective application of it may require “deliberate practice.”

3. Make certain everyone understands that failure is the tuition that must be paid for the new knowledge gained from it. An effort is a failure only if and when nothing is learned from it, shared with others, and then applied.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #96: How to reduce (if not eliminate) attrition of valued employees?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

In Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching and Keeping the Best People (Revised and Updated Edition), Bradford Smart explains why the average cost of a mis-hire is 24 times the annual salary. (That’s right: 24 times the annual salary.) I am unaware of what the average total cost of losing a highly-valued employee is but it must certainly be substantial.

Experts on employee attrition (notably Leigh Branham, Beverly Kaye, and Mark Murphy) seem to agree on the most common reasons. Here are six:

1. The job and/or workplace of the company are/is not what was expected

2. There is a lack of confidence in the company’s senior management

3. Performance expectations are unclear or inconsistent.

4. The criteria for measuring performance are also unclear or inconsistent.

5. Little (if any) feedback, mentoring, coaching, etc. is provided by supervisor.

6. Prospects for career advancement at the company are poor.

The most highly-regarded employers are those that avoid making these and other mistakes. They have almost no loss of valued employees. Moreover, they always have far more job applicants (including those currently employed by competitors) than positions available.

Check out Branham’s Keeping the People Who Keep You in Business: 24 Ways to Hang on to Your Most Valuable Talent and his more recent The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave: How to Recognize the Subtle Signs and Act Before It’s Too Late (2005) as well as Kaye’s Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay (4th edition) and Murphy’s The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention: Cutting Edge Strategies for Keeping Your Best People.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #95: Why is “connecting the dots” important?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

This refers to an analytical skill that enables us to recognize relationships such as between a cause and effect or the steps in a sequence. Having this skill is essential, for example, during process improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma and Lean. More often than not, in a business situation especially, people respond to symptoms rather than to root causes. This is generally called “firefighting.” With an early warning system in place, there will usually be “red flags” that suggest either that a problem exists or is imminent. In other situations, the “dots” indicate a possible opportunity. Where might they lead?

This is what Steve Jobs had in mind during a commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005. He recalled that when he attended Reed College, it offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. “Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed…None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them…personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

1. Recognize the dots in the given situation.
2. Connect those that are most important.
3. Trace them as far back as you can into the past.
4. Allow them to suggest what could perhaps (if not probably) lie ahead.

The importance of “connecting the dots” cannot be exaggerated.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #94: Why are many meetings a waste of time?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

Experts on this subject usually cite these reasons:

1. There is no compelling need to meet.

2. The agenda is either improvised on-the-spot or (if provided in advance) abandoned.  Participants pontificate and ventilate rather than contribute.

3. Those present discuss what to discuss, not what to do. There is no bias for action.

4. The discussion is dominated by one or two people.

5. There is little (if any) follow-up.

Most of these are the result of having an ineffective chair. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft’s CEO) observes, “The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come in with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call ‘the long and winding road.’ You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration and you arrive at a conclusion.

“I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s productive. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I come in and say: ‘I’ve got the following four questions Please don’t present the deck.’ That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions abut the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.”

To sum up, set action objectives that are specified in an agenda provided in advance, accompanied by relevant material; begin and end meeting on time; stick to the agenda; before the meeting ends, each action item should have ownership and a deadline;  immediately after the meeting, distribute to all participants a summary of who will do what by when.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob