Interview: William Seidman

William ("Bill") Seidman

William Seidman, a recognized thought leader and expert on management decision-making in high-performing organizations, is co-founder, chief executive officer and president of Cerebyte. Seidman contributes an in-depth understanding of the processes required to discover and use expert wisdom to create extraordinary organizational performance. As the CEO of Cerebyte, Seidman has led engagements for Hewlett-Packard, Jack in the Box, Intel, Sears and many others. Seidman received a doctorate from Stanford University, where he spent eight years studying management decision-making. As part of his doctoral dissertation, he developed a groundbreaking technique for analyzing management attitudes, cognitive process and behavioral patterns. He can be reached via email at William.Seidman@Cerebyte.com.

Morris: Before discussing Strategy in Action in 10 Days, a book you co-authored with Michael McCauley, a few general questions. First, please explain the path that led the two of you to the founding of Cerebyte in 1997.

Seidman: We were consultants in project management. One of our clients wanted help with a major project. We discovered that the problem was not really one of project planning but one of knowledge. Specifically, there were 650 people working on this project, with six expert product designers. These six experts were completely overloaded and to some degree the 644 other people were sitting around waiting for the six.

The client asked us to find a way to get the knowledge from the “expert six” to the other 644, without having any consultants involved. They specified that it had to be done with software and they were willing to lend us some of their personnel to help define the process and technology.

Our consulting company wasn’t interested in the idea, but we were. It ended up taking us 2 years to figure out how to get the expert knowledge from the experts and nearly 5 years to figure out how to get everyone else to consistently embrace the new knowledge. It was a long, slow learning process.

Morris: What was the company’s original mission and to what extent (if any) has that mission changed during the past 13 years?

Seidman: Originally, we wanted to provide managers with a set of tools that would help them manage their business. Although we have interpreted this differently over the years, we still are pretty close to the original mission. We are focused more on improving performance, which is usually the primary benefit of improved management, but, overall, we are still pretty much doing what we started out to do.

Morris: What do you know now that you wish you knew when you founded Cerebyte?

Seidman: Our most valuable insight is this: how hard it is to establish an innovative product and process even if everyone says they want it and even if it has incredibly strong proof points to support it. More specifically, we thought there would be an openness to innovation in the area of performance improvement because almost every organization talked about the need to improve performance and there was widespread agreement about the ineffectiveness of the available approaches (e.g. training classes) at improving performance. However, there was actually a tremendous amount of resistance to change, even if everyone thought it was a good thing to do. It was only when the science actually caught up with what we had been doing, and became widely accepted that the resistance to change decreased.

Morris: Although there is great diversity among Cerebyte clients, in terms of both size and nature of business, which major challenge do all of them face? How specifically does Cerebyte help them to respond effectively to that challenge?

Seidman: They are serious about making the changes in their organization required to significantly improve performance, usually in a particular focus area. In many cases, it is a “change or die” situation for them so motivation and disillusionment with traditional approaches are high. We help organizations improve performance, faster, more completely, more predictably and at less expense than has previously been possible.

Morris: Over the years, you have no doubt interviewed hundreds of candidates for positions in your firm. What are you most eager to learn about each candidate and which questions have been most helpful in accomplishing that?

Seidman: Actually, we have hardly interviewed anyone. From the very beginning, our goal was to grow revenue and revenue per person, not headcount, so we have worked very hard to automate and outsource everything not specifically in our core strength. There are three of us, and have been for quite a while. We can handle all functions, including effectively supporting a large number of customers, and we can do so with only our network of people and companies.

Morris: Do you differentiate leadership from management? Please explain.

Seidman: Yes, though primarily in the leadership programs we develop for our customers. To us, leadership is much more about creating a compelling vision and providing the support and resources that enable the team to achieve the vision (in our terminology, it is about guiding “transformation”) while management is much more about the administration of the business (i.e. “transactions”). We find that this difference is most important when there are significant challenges to the organization. Managers retreat from performance improvements to a survival mode – Did I make my numbers today? –whereas leaders look at the challenges as an opportunity to drive the organization forward, even if it means taking some significant risks.

In addition, we know that “operational excellence,” which is the focus of management is a subset of leadership so if you have great leadership, you get the best of both worlds. It doesn’t work the other way though. Managers, even good ones, literally think differently than great leaders and need extensive education to become leaders.

Quoted Without Comment – On Choosing What To Read

When parents, publishers, and J.K. Rowling suggested gleefully that the Harry Potter craze was having the positive effect of luring kids away from the Xbox and towards literature, Yale University professor Harold Bloom grumbled that there was rather significant difference between reading and reading. “Harry Potter,” Bloom wrote in The Boston Globe, “will not lead our children on to Kipling’s Just So Stories or his Jungle Book. It will not lead them to Thurber’s Thirteen Clocks or Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows or Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

It would be easy to dismiss Bloom as engaging in literary snobbery, though he is surely right that reading the right books is more important than merely reading books.

(from Michael C. Moyhnihan, here).

Navigating the Social Networking Era

It is hard to keep up.  It may be harder by the day.  (On the other hand, it may get easier.  I can only hope!)

But, the more there is to keep up with, the more flitting we become.  We flit from fad to trend to web site to social networking venue to…

In Groundsell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Charlene LI and Josh Bernoff tell us that the one thing all of these trends/fads/sites have in common is that it takes the power away from companies and corporations and “established power” and puts it into the hands/thumbs of individuals.  Here’s a key quote:

Thousands of corporate executives are now dealing with a trend we call the groundswell, a spontaneous movement of people using online tools to connect, take charge of their own experience, and get what they need – information, support, ideas, products, and bargaining power – from each other.  The groundswell is broad, ever shifting, and ever growing.  It encompasses blogs and wikis; podcasts and YouTube; and consumers who rate products, buy and sell from each other, write their own news, and find their own deals.  It’s global.  It’s unstoppable.  It affects every industry – those that sell to consumers and those that sell to businesses – in media, retail, financial services, technology, and health care.  And it’s utterly foreign to the powerful companies and institutions – and their leaderships – that run things now.

Simply put, the groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies.  If you’re in a company, this is a challenge.

(By the way, Karl is presenting his synopsis of the new Charlene Li book, Open Leadership:  How social technology can transform the way you lead, tomorrow morning at the First Friday Book Synopsis).

So – here is the challenge.  For those of us who do not take to all of these social networking sites so naturally, we have to learn how to use them and take advantage of them.  But the folks growing up on them make those adaptations a little easier than we do.

{In one sense, it is a true reversal of the natural order of things.  For all of history, the older folks knew more than the younger folks.  We used words like novices and journeymen.  Now, the novices are the older folks, and the journeymen are the younger folks.  I remember in the dominant days of Nokia in an earlier chapter — the “cell phone era” instead of the current “smart phone era” — reading that Nokia executives learned about cell phone usage by watching their young children use the cell phones.  Such is this strange new world that we live in…}

So, Good News!  Here is a quick read to help us all out.  It is a top most e-mailed article from the NY Times at the moment: STATE OF THE ART:  For Those Facebook Left Behind, by David Pogue.  It is a quick guide to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a few other social networking sites.  It is accessible, readable, understandable.

Here are a couple of important excerpts:

As a public service, therefore, I’m offering a handy clip-’n’-save guide to the social networking services you’re most likely to hear about at this summer’s barbecues. (Warning: This is an extremely basic overview. If you’re already someone who, you know, tweets, this will all seem like old news. But it’s not intended for you.)

These services all have a few things in common. They’re all free. They’re all confusing at first. They all require time to understand and exploit. You can interact with them from your cellphone, which is part of why they’re so popular.

And he ends his article with this:

THE BOTTOM LINE
These sites all derive their power the same way: We, the people, provide the information — not the Web site owner. Some of these services establish lines of communication between people who might otherwise never meet, joining them by interest rather than geography. Others connect you with people you do know, or once knew, so that you can help each other out.
You may find absolutely nothing of value to you in these sites, and that’s fine. But isn’t it better to make that decision now that you know what you’re ignoring?
Happy tweeting!

For some of us, we feel awash in an ocean that seems strange, almost unnavigable.  For many others, they are a little more at ease – and the advantages are enormous.

Here’s the sad thing. For people like me, we need to have Charlene Li and David Pogue explain all of this to us.  For those who swim in this ocean so naturally, they don’t need Charlene Li at all.  I envy those folks.