Interview: Ric Merrifield

Merrifield spent nearly 15 years in various consulting roles helping organizations define and achieve their goals. Since joining Microsoft, Merrifield has spent more than 10,000 hours as a business architect and has filed twelve patent applications, all of which share the same goal: to help companies rethink their operating models and get out of the “how” trap described in the pages of his book, Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation. Merrifield is also a co-author of The Next Revolution in Productivity, an article that appeared in the June 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review, which focuses on case studies that highlight needs of the organization and the opportunity to rethink business operating models before making major technology changes. Merrifield is an alumnus of Lakeside School in Seattle and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Here is an excerpt from my interview of Merrifield. The complete interview is also available.

Morris: Most change initiatives fail and several fail because of cultural barriers that could not be overcome. James O’Toole suggests they are the result of “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.” In your opinion, what are the best strategies and tactics to overcome such barriers?

Merrifield: It wasn’t so long ago that I did a blog entry on this out at the rethinkbook.com site where I offered thoughts for intrapreneurs. Too often people think that just having a great idea is enough. Culture always plays a factor, and especially in bigger companies people tend to take fewer risks, and change is always hard. So beyond needing to flesh out the idea and really think through the business implications, here are my thoughts on what else initiatives need to succeed:

1) Sponsorship. There will always be someone who thinks your idea isn’t good or shouldn’t be a priority. And then there will be people who say they like the idea, but won’t do anything to help you move it forward. Getting someone more powerful than you are to protect you from the naysayers, but also champion the idea is critical

2) Evidence. Anyone can put together some PowerPoint slides with projections and forecast of just how successful an idea is, there has to be evidence that the idea has merit and that customers will want it.

3) Budget. When you go to someone for support of the idea, make sure they control funds that would be needed to advance the idea. The idea has to get the support of someone who can pay for it.

4) Timing. Last year Microsoft didn’t release much in the way of core products, so it was a great time for ideas about how to do different things with those products, and that’s what people talked about at the conferences we do. This year, every major product is getting a new release, so there’s only room to talk about the basics of who needs them and how to install and integrate them. Most companies have some sort of cycle like that. Since so much of its business is around the holidays, I would guess that December is a particularly bad time to promote a new idea at amazon.com. Timing is like the weather, it’s often a factor and there’s not a lot you can do about it (though with an idea, you can wait for a better time, or collect more evidence or support, or funding, or something).

5) A Thick Skin. As much as we would love everyone to slap their forehead and say, “why didn’t I think of that?!” it doesn’t usually work that way, and you just have to keep pushing. It took over two years for the Harvard Business Review to get that this incredibly simple concept is a new and important idea. Some of that was that I was not good at describing it, but it also took time for them to get it.

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If you wish to read the complete interview, please contact me at interllect@mindspring.com.

You are invited to check out the resources at http://ricmerrifield.com/.

Book Review: High Commitment, High Performance

High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build A Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage
Michael Beer
Jossey-Bass (2009)

Achieving a competitive advantage is nowhere near as difficult as sustaining one. Therein is a paradox that serves as the title of Marshall Goldsmith’s book: what got you here won’t get you there. Even more ominous, what got you here won’t keep you here. Hence the appropriateness of the subtitle selected for Beer’s book. What he shares is an abundance of observations, questions, issues, suggestions, and recommendations that are anchored in more than 40 years of real-world experience. In the Introduction, he refers to his quest to study and build high commitment, high performance (HCHP) organizations. What he provides is what he has learned about what works, what doesn’t, and the reasons why.

Written in collaboration with Russell Eisenstat and Nathaniel Foote, this volume provides a number of different perspectives and knowledge concerning several key disciplines that include strategic management, organization design, human resource management, culture and organization development, enterprise learning, and change initiatives. Beer observes, “Employing these diverse perspectives, I propose three paradoxical organizational outcomes needed to achieve sustained high performance [i.e. performance alignment, psychological alignment, and the capacity for learning and change], articulate five management levers for designing an organization to achieve these outcomes [i.e. leadership at all levels and in all areas, an effective learning and governance system, a strategic performance management system, an organizing system, and an HR system], and present a framework for change and its transformation.”

Here’s a key point: Obviously, there must be high and sustained commitment at the senior executive level. Much more importantly, C-level executives and other supervisors must also demonstrate – not only affirm — consistently high performance. Otherwise, they cannot expect those for whom they are responsible to do so and their organization will not survive in its competitive marketplace, much less dominate it. Moreover, as Beer explains in the Epilogue, “CEOs and their top teams will have to engage their hands to design very different management practices, particularly with regard to the firm’s performance management and compensation systems. The former must enable hard-hitting, fact-based reviews of the business to achieve essential shirt-term profits in a way that does not compromise the firm’s larger purpose and its long-term performance. With regard to the latter, surely a shift away from incentives for annual profits to incentives tied to long-term performance (five to seven years) is in order.”

Interview: Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. magazine in January 1983 as a senior editor and became executive editor six months later, a position he held for the next seven years. In 1990, he resigned and became editor-at-large. He subsequently wrote two books with Jack Stack, the co-founder and CEO of Springfield Remanufacturing Corp. and the pioneer of open-book management. One of the books, The Great Game of Business, has sold more than 300,000 copies. Another, A Stake in the Outcome, has also done well and gotten great reviews. Burlingham is currently an editor-at-large of Inc. magazine, co-founder of the Small Giant Community with Paul Spiegelman, author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big, and co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up.

Here is an excerpt from my interview of Burlingham. The complete interview is also available.

Morris: You suggest that all of the 14 companies have “the magic of mojo.” What does that mean and how is it evident?

Burlingham: I define mojo as the organizational equivalent of charisma. When a leader has charisma, you want to follow him or her. When a business has mojo, you want to be associated with the company. You want to buy from it, sell to it, work for it, wear its t-shirts and caps, read articles and books about it, go hear its leaders speak, and so on. I think of it as the feeling you get when you’re in presence of greatness in business. But I admit it’s a little like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography: It’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

Morris: Several large companies, Southwest Airlines for example, also seem to have “mojo.” Is it the same? Please explain.

Burlingham: Well, yes and no. There’s no question that large companies can have mojo as I’ve defined it—the organizational equivalent of charisma. But a company inevitably winds up having to make trade-offs as it grows. I know people who worked at Whole Foods when it was still relatively small, and CEO John Mackey was someone they actually ran into from time to time. There was a tremendous esprit de corps and a fanatical commitment to the quality of the products the company sold—especially the prepared products. People felt very close to one another, to the company’s leaders, and to customers and suppliers. You clearly can’t have that kind of intimacy in a company the size of Whole Foods today. But does it have mojo? I think so, although it probably varies from store to store.

I suspect the same is true of Southwest Airlines. What it had when it was a small airline flying out of Love Field is different from what it has now. Not necessarily better or worse. Just different. Of course, Southwest and Whole Foods also have a lot more influence now than they had when they were very small. Southwest has revolutionized the airline industry and set a new standard for excellence in commercial aviation. Whole Foods has helped change the eating habits of millions of people, not to mention the way our food is produced. Could it have done that if Mackey had decided to keep it a small giant, with one fabulous store in Austin, rather than expand to 275 locations? Probably not.

Morris: Once a company has “mojo” (however defined), what must it do to keep it?

Burlingham: Well, it must protect its gross margins, as the Reell example shows. Beyond that, it must focus on the relationships it has with all the groups of people it comes in contact with. If you think about it, that’s the overriding message of the small giants: They have great relationships with customers, suppliers, employees, neighbors, and other community members. If you want to hold onto your mojo, you need to keep nurturing those relationships, doing all the things you did to build them in the first place.

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If you wish to read the complete interview, please click here.

Burlingham invites you to check out these Web sites:

http://www.smallgiantsbook.com/

http://www.smallgiantscommunity.com/default.aspx

http://www.theknack.info/