Interview: Michael Beer

Michael Beer

Beer is Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus, Chairman of TruePoint, and author of nine books, including High Commitment, High Performance. Drawing on his 40-year career helping senior business leaders build organizations that are highly committed and high performing, Beer can analyze the strategies of Corporate America’s business leaders to rebuild their broken firms in the aftermath of an economic recession that left some of the world’s leading companies in shambles. Beer’s research shows that companies will only rebound from near-collapse if senior leaders refuse to choose between people and profits. He’s found that sustained financial performance will only follow from the development of strong emotional attachments to the firm by the top team, board of directors, employees, investor, and customers. Beer can analyze how current business leaders are building such widespread commitment to corporate goals and offer a proven method for achieving it. He can also analyze how well they are managing the six “silent killers” of high commitment – conflicting priorities, ineffective senior teams, top-down leadership, poor horizontal coordination and communication, inadequate leadership development, and poor vertical communication. Through this framework, he can therefore predict which companies are most likely to return to the front of the market – and weather the next storm.

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

Morris: For those who have not as yet read High Commitment, High Performance, you discuss two archetypal strategies for change in Chapter 11, Theory E and Theory O. What are they and why is each necessary and must be integrated in each of various dimensions of change?

Beer: Theory E focuses on creating more economic value while, usually through restricting of the business and organization. Theory O focuses on developing organization capabilities and culture. While each change theory has validity and can help senior executives achieve some important goals, neither strategy is sufficient to achieve both commitment and timely and sustainable performance improvements. CEOs must implement both E & O through an integrative strategy that occurs in eight dimensions of change:

1. Goals: An integrated E/O strategy will drive the rapid improvements in shareholder value needed to survive in the short run while simultaneously building the organizational capabilities and culture needed for long-term success.

2. People: An integrated E/O strategy actively incorporates replacement and development to allow the company to move forward effectively.

3. Focus: An integrated E/O strategy focuses on both hard and soft aspects of the organizational system to allow for a total system change.

4. Process: An integrated E/O strategy allows change to be planned at the top to achieve speed and consistency but led in the subunits to manage complexity and build commitment.

5. Motivation: An integrated E/O strategy uses goals and involvement to motivate and rewards to recognize

6. Consulting Resources: An integrated E/O strategy forms partnerships between experts and employees to solve problems.

7. Pace: An integrated E/O strategy moves forward at a deliberate pace to bring rapid, sustainable change.

8. Leadership: An integrated E/O strategy requires CEOs to lead the change from the top early on in the transformation and slowly increase the degree of lower-level involvement and decision-making.

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Michael Beer invites those who read this interview to check out the wealth of resources provided at www.truepoint.com or www.hchp.truepoint.com.

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

How to manage your time like Jim Collins does

Jim Collins

Manage Your Time Like Jim Collins
Bronwyn Fryer

[A brief excerpt follows.]

Jim Collins is all about discipline. The man who described Level 5 Leadership not only understands the inner fortitude of the best-performing companies and leaders; he’s famously disciplined and enormously productive, as you can tell from his website (jimcollins.com). A runner and mountain-climber, he is the picture of fitness.

How does he manage his time? “I use a stopwatch,” he says.

Does that mean that like any excessively busy, highly successful business researcher, author and consultant, he runs from meeting to meeting, tethered to his Blackberry calendar, measuring out his work life in minutes and seconds? When I sat down with Jim at the annual CIPD conference and asked him, among other things, about his working style, I was surprised to find that rather than filling up his time, he intentionally empties it.

When he says he uses a stopwatch, he means that he tracks his time to make sure he gets the most from his waking hours. He divides his life into blocks — 50% creative time, 30% teaching time, and 20% other stuff (“random things that just need to get done”).

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

How to Get the Right Information to Improve Performance

Steven Spear

How to Get the Right Information to Improve Performance
Steven Spear

[A brief excerpt follows.]

Many organizations are pressured to do the seemingly impossible: Increase quality and affordability, and expand their customer base — all while keeping tight control on costs. These would seem irreconcilable tradeoffs.

Not so, judging by a high-flying subset. They see their competitive predicaments not as being imposed by the limits of physics and chemistry, but rather by the limits of their current understanding. Call it improvement, innovation, or discovery, their self-imposed challenge is recognizing where they are not good enough and learning how to get better. They understand what customers truly need, configure products and services to meet those needs, and design and operate systems that produce and deliver those offerings.

Some organizations undercut their ability to discover their way to greatness by confusing the information needed to see problems with the information needed to solve them. So, they overburden staff with establishing the former and then underarm them in tackling the latter.

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Steven Spear is an award-winning author of Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition, and is an expert on leadership and competing through high-velocity innovation, improvement, and invention. He is a visiting senior lecturer at MIT and a senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. With deep roots in industry and in health care, he is well known for publications in Harvard Business Review as well as The New York Times, the Boston Globe, Annals of Internal Medicine, and other medical journals.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

Stop Innovating, Start Minnovating

Babson College Center for Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs: Stop Innovating, Start Minnovating
Daniel Isenberg

[A brief excerpt follows.]

If we want more entrepreneurs, stop worrying about jumpstarting innovation. Focus on “minnovation.”

In reality, the vast majority of real-life entrepreneurs around the world aren’t innovators. They’re minnovators — mixing small parts of novelty and creativity with huge helpings of flexibility scrappiness and a generous portion of hard-driving execution…When latent entrepreneurs I talk to hear success stories of minnovators, the inevitable email hastens to follow: “I was always afraid to set up my own venture because I don’t have any great ideas, but having seen these normal people succeeding, I know I can do it too.”

So move over Schumpeter and creative destruction. You had your sound bite — but now it’s time for a generation of minnovators to emerge.

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Daniel Isenberg is a professor of management practice at Babson College. He has an important leadership role in special Babson projects to foster entrepreneurship internationally as well as to teach and develop executive education programs. Previously, he taught at Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, Reykjavik University, Insead, and the Technion.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

My favorite Gladwell Essay – “In the Air: Annals of Innovation”

Malcolm Gladwell

If you have not discovered Malcolm Gladwell’s essays yet (from The New Yorker), then check out his own web site for the archived essays.  They are rich, valuable, and absolutely engaging.  (yes, many of them have been put in his new book, What the Dog Saw:  And Other Adventures.  Read Bob Morris’ review of this book here).

Although it seems an impossible task to choose a favorite, I think my favorite essay is:  In the Air:  Annals of Innovation.  In it, Gladwell chronicles how, on many occasions, a “discovery” is not made by “one person” – the discovery is “in the air.”  It is as though the idea is floating around, waiting to be grabbed.  And frequently, it is “grabbed,” by more than one person – people working far apart (geographically, and in every way), not knowing of the work of the others.

In the essay, he talks about a legendary/repeated brainstorming session led by Nathan Myhrvold, which includes a group of very, very smart people.  And the entire essay is an investigation into the simple but profound question, “where do ideas come from?”

Here’s a favorite quote from the essay:
Invention has its own algorithm: genius, obsession, serendipity, and epiphany in some unknowable combination. How can you put that in a bottle?

Check this one out – and his others.  They are great, short reads, that will get your creative and thinking and learning juices flowing.

“Every minute of the day is selling time” — Mark Cuban on selling

Here’s one I found while preparing to move… (you know, one of those scraps of paper, long forgotten)  It is actually a tweet, published in a sidebar on an airline magazine, ripped out for some later use), from Mark Cuban, owner of the Mavericks, a maverick, and a very sharp business mind:

“Every minute of the work day is selling time.  Thinking is for night time.  7am to 7pm + is selling time.”

So – I think he is telling us, we all need to get out there and sell!

President Obama and his “argument-based organization as learning organization” – insight from David Brooks

I intentionally avoid political topics and themes on this blog.  I realize that in this very volatile, divided era, once a name or a postition is named, some cheer, others condemn, and people want to argue.  (See my earlier post on The Argument Culture, and how Deborah Tannen predicted the coming argument wars).

But this was too good to pass up.  Whether you agree with the assessment or not, it provides for serious thought and discussion regarding leadership and decision making.  The thought comes from David Brooks, one of the conservative columnists for the New York Times.  In his column The Analytic Mode, December 3, 2009, he reflects on President Obama’s approach to his Afghanistan strategy and troop decision.  This is what he wrote:

The advantage of the Obama governing style is that his argument-based organization is a learning organization. Amid the torrent of memos and evidence and dispute, the Obama administration is able to adjust and respond more quickly than, say, the Bush administration ever did.

Brooks pictures the Obama approach as that of a learning organization.  Here’s the definition (from Wikipedia): A Learning Organization is the term given to a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself.

Though there are five identified traits of a learning organization — Systems Thinking, Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Shared Vision, and Team Learning — I think we can identify the  following as critical to a learning organization’s success as a learning organization.  A learning organization is an organization where the following is true:

1)            Teaching and learning are at the center of the organization.
2)            Everyone, from the leaders throughout the organization, values learning.
3)            Disagreement and dissent are valued, because if there is no disagreement, learning does not happen.  Instead, perpetuating frozen, possibly wrong, viewpoints becomes dominant – and the organization finds itself left behind in a hurry.

This the second time that an author has put modern day business labels on President Obama’s approach to governing.  (at least, the second one that I am aware of).  The earlier was an author calling President Obama our first GTD President.  (see my post here).  I’m a fan of the learning organization approach, and Brook’s observation gives me hope.