Are you a good boss — or a great one?

I am among those asked to participate in surveys sponsored by Harvard Business Review.

In gratitude, the editors then offer us a choice of one article reprint at no cost.

Although I am a longtime subscriber to HBR and have read the January/February 2011 issue, I selected one in it co-authored by Linda Hill and Kent Lineback so that I could share it with FFBS members, as I now do.

Hill and Lineback also co-authored Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader published by Harvard Business Review Press (2011).

Please click here to read and/or download the article.

Please click here to read my interview of Linda Hill.

 

“Different – and Better” is the Best Kind of Different

Here are the options:  Things can stay the same.  Or, things can be different.

If they are different, here are the options:  They can be different – and worse. (this can be bad, or it can be good).  They can be different – and just different (this might be good; it could be bad).  Or things can be different – better. (this is almost always good).

I would like to make the case that they can all be good.

If things are different – and worse – then you can say, “we gave it a shot, and it didn’t work; so, let’s go back to what we were doing, and good for us for giving it a try.”

If things are different– and just different – this can be good because it gets people into the habit of experiencing “different.”  And since we live in a very fast-paced era of change, the more we get accustomed to the experience of different, the more we “practice” different, the better we are at handling more that is different. And, rest assured, more different, rather than less different, will be the norm.

If things are different—and better — this is almost always good.  Better is good!

Are you seeing different in your work, in your life?  I hope your different is different – and better.

And, what can you do different – and better?

Start — now.  It is always a good time to do different – and better.

Choose One:

different – worse	can be good, can be bad
different – and just different	more likely to be good than bad
different – and better	most likely to be better

Writing to Persuade — Author Ross Guberman on What Professionals Need to Know

Ross Guberman

Here is a mini-interview of Ross Guberman conducted by Nell Minow for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network (March 21, 2011). To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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The most important quality in an employee is integrity, but the most important ability is effective communications.

Ross Guberman’s new book Point Made is directed at lawyers, but is essential reading for anyone who wants to create written or oral presentations that are clear and persuasive. Guberman shares his thoughts on making writing vivid, phrases and constructions to avoid, and what you can learn about writing from Barack Obama.
Many of your techniques are designed to make written communications more vivid and concrete, even when they deal with abstract policy or legal issues.  Why is that important?

The best writers know that even the most pressing policy matters can daze and confuse: “important” doesn’t always translate into “interesting.”

Great writers know that, and so they do whatever they can to evoke concrete images reactions in their readers’ minds. I hate to quote Stalin here, but he was on to something when he said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” That insight is why the crack writers at the Wall Street Journal often start complex business or policy stories with a vivid anecdote or a catchy turn of phrase.

Let me share a quick legal example with you. In a nasty dispute over Calvin Klein jeans, a team led by Brendan Sullivan (lawyer for Lt. Col. Ollie North and for the late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens), claimed in a brief that Calvin Klein had for a long time been content to profit from royalties it had earned from sales of its jeans at Sam’s Club and other discount retailers.

In Sullivan’s rendition, Calvin Klein “was only too happy to pocket” those royalties. Through just that one word “pocket,” the star-studded Sullivan team conjured up an image that made an abstract accounting move sound suspect or worse.

Are those sorts of choices what people mean by “punchy” writing?

Yes. Punchy writing, legal or otherwise, is long on vivid verbs, parallel constructions, varied sentence structure, sharp contrasts, one-syllable sentence openers, smooth transitions, concrete examples, and evocative analogies, and other techniques that great nonfiction writers have used for centuries.

So when is it appropriate to use vernacular in written communications?  How do we balance enough formality to be respectable and credible with enough informality to be engaging?

Pick up the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, or the Economist. Those publications get the balance just right. The writers and editors meet twin goals: to appeal to busy and impatient readers with fresh prose — but without dumbing down the language or condescending to their audience.

As I always tell lawyers, if you want to find the gold standard in professional writing, look at what your busy clients are reading on the airplane. When those clients want to know the latest in derivatives regulation, they pick up the Wall Street Journal, not some big law firm’s latest Client Alert.

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You may also wish to check out Why good lawyers are bad writers.

Nell Minow

Nell Minow, a member of the board of GovernanceMetrics International and founder of The Corporate Library, writes about corporate governance issues, focusing especially on CEO pay, executive compensation, shareholder rights and best business practices.You can follow her on Twitter at @nminow.

Five Tips to Facilitate Strategic Onboarding

George Bradt

Here is an article written by George Bradt for the “Talent Management Perspectives” series featured online by Talent Management magazine (March 2011). To check out all the website’s resources and sign up for a free subscription to TM and/or Chief Learning Officer magazine, please click here.

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Your company is celebrating a great new hire – someone whose skills, experience and reputation precede him.

Now what? No one had fully expected him to say yes. No one was exactly sure what his responsibilities should be.

Now it’s time to figure that out. But now is way too late.

It’s not just about landing the best candidate. Part of hiring and onboarding employees is strategic planning. Attention must be paid to onboarding new employees so that they can deliver results that move the organization forward in line with its purpose and priorities.

To that end, here are some guidelines for talent leaders to bear in mind:

Start by stopping. Onboarding begins with business objectives. Start by getting managers to stop and figure out what they want to accomplish and how they expect their future new employees to deliver or contribute to target results.

Think business strategy. The company risks leaving a lot on the table if the people doing the hiring treat it as a transactional event as opposed to a strategic opportunity.

Here are three common phrases hiring managers should never accept without following up:

•    “Just fill the position.” Hang on. Will the positions as defined deliver the results the managers need? If not, this is a great time to push them to re-craft the jobs to further their business strategies.

•    “Find me the best candidate.” The best at what, precisely? Do they need the best skill set, or will the individual’s inherent behaviors and motivators be more important to delivery of business results than skills and experience?

Push senior leadership hard to complete their thinking before implementing anything, even a broad search initiative.

•    “I know what I need…” They may know what they need, but do they know what their stakeholders and their new employees’ stakeholders need? Without stakeholder alignment, they will never make the right hire because their new employees — no matter how great they are — will be burdened with incompatible expectations.

Onboarding is a strategic exercise in that it’s about building capabilities and capacity for the future. Thus no one can begin to recruit anyone until they understand how the new recruit’s role is going to help deliver results.

Clarify purpose and priorities. Begin with the organization’s general purpose and main priorities. That’s the big picture destination. Next, drill down to the specific destination for this onboarding. When managers onboard new employees, they are implementing strategies to achieve business objectives and should therefore treat new employee onboarding as they would any other investment. Define the business objective: Did they hire to replace, change the culture or add capabilities? What is their expected return on investment? How will they measure their return?

Check onboarding track record. Look back at any given manager’s onboarding track record to make sure he or she retains the tactics that proved successful in the past and work to enhance areas that need improvement.

Make sure everyone follows through. Push managers to lay out their messages so everyone understands purpose, priorities, responsibilities, required strengths and organizational values.

Managers oftentimes communicate with candidates more than they expect to during recruiting, interviewing and every subsequent step of onboarding. Intentional and inadvertent actions and inactions leave candidates or new hires with strong impressions, which is why it’s important for everyone to be on the same page – from before.

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After his education at Harvard and Wharton, George Bradt progressed through sales, marketing and general management roles around the world at Fortune 500 companies including Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and then J.D. Power and Associates as chief executive of its Power Information Network spin off. Today, he is managing director of PrimeGenesis, a consultancy focused on transition acceleration and executive onboarding. He is the author of The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results as well as the co-author of Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time. He can be reached at editor@talentmgt.com.

Wikibrands: A book review by Bob Morris

Wikibrands: Reinventing Your Company in a Custiner-Driven Marketplace
Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover
McGraw-Hill (2011)

How the new levers of brand development achieve customer participation

What is the meaning of the noun wikibrand(s)? According to Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover, it refers to a “progressive set of organizations, products, services, ideas, and causes that tap the powers of customer participation, social influence, and collaboration to drive the business value.” They go on to suggest, “Derived from the Hawaiian word wiki, traditionally meaning `quick’ but more currently meaning `tribal knowledge’ and `a collaborative website,’ and the Middle English word torch, whose current business meaning is `a distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer.’”

My take is that the most powerful brands, wikibrands, are those that create multi-dimensional participation and multi-sensory experience in co-creation with an organization’s most loyal and most engaged customers. “In a connected world and cluttered marketplace,” Moffitt and Dover note, “brands are tapping into the instinctual human need for genuine participation, peer-to-peer dialogue, and shared media to survive and thrive.” They explain how to “get true brand engagement, customer experience, and social collaboration into the very nucleus of an organization and not leaving them hanging out on the periphery.” They make it crystal clear that this is not a marketing opportunity; rather, this is a business opportunity. “It’s a big, cultural driving force…a pragmatic road map for winning in the current marketplace.”

As I worked my way through the lively and eloquent narrative, these are among the portions that attracted my attention in Chapters 3-8.

• “The Seven Divides: Compelling Reasons to Change” (Pages 21, 23, 25-30)

• “Top Factors in the Changing Importance of Social Media, Word of Mouth, and Community Building (Figure 2.1, Page 22)

• “Eight Customer Experience Norms” (Table 2.2, Page 24)

• “The Six Benefits of Wikibrands” (Pages 50-62)

• “Seven Key Language Principles” (Pages 107-112)

• “Community Participation Motivations” (Table 8.1, Page 132)

• “Six Classes of Influencer” (Pages 136-138)

Note: An influencer is someone who has significant influence on the values, opinions, preferences, and consumer behavior of others.

It is important to keep in mind that the information, insights, observations, caveats, and recommendations provided by Moffitt and Dover were revealed during wide and deep research and are anchored in real-world situations, many of which involve global “wikibranders” such as Accenture, Best Buy, Cisco, Disney, FedEx, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nokia, and Procter & Gamble.

That said, I presume to suggest that the core principles as well as the most effective strategies, and tactics of wikibranding can also be of substantial value to much smaller companies such as family-owned retail franchises. Those who doubt that are urged to check out “Eleven Ways to Develop a Wikibrand” (Pages 278-286) and “Fifty-Question Assessment: Readiness for Brand Community” (Pages 286-2388) in which Sean Moffitt and Nike Dover provide material that, all by itself, is worth far more than the cost of several copies of this book. Is it that valuable? Read it and judge for yourself.

Uniting the Religions of Process Improvement

Brad Power

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Brad Power for the Harvard Business Review blog (March 7, 2011). To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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When they set out to turn around processes that have become woefully inefficient or ineffective, most companies choose one of four process improvement “religions”: Lean, Six Sigma, Business Reengineering or Business Process Management (BPM).

After hearing about its success at another organization, many companies choose just one. For example, several companies embarked on Six Sigma programs after their CEO heard about GE’s success with the approach, and many other companies have adopted Lean because of Toyota’s success.

It’s like adopting a diet or exercise program that a friend has used and lost 50 pounds.

But some companies realize they need to go beyond making episodic improvements. They try to institutionalize process improvement — that is, put in place the right mechanisms in their management systems so that their business processes don’t become grossly unproductive in the future. That is, they try to build continuous improvement into their DNA. It’s like the difference between going on crash diets every two years and fundamentally changing one’s eating and exercise habits.

But moving from episodic process improvements to having the wherewithal to improve processes continually is a tall order because of five key challenges I highlighted in a previous post: competing demands for attention, competing mindsets and behaviors, strategic irrelevance, traditional management processes, and the pain of disruption.

If an organization tries to institutionalize process improvement based on the tenets of just one process religion, it will run into trouble because no single religion has all the approaches for sustaining organizational attention to improvement. Lean has the most complete set of approaches for continuous improvement among the four religions. But a company that embeds Lean thinking into its DNA may occasionally need the hard financial results that Six Sigma can produce. In addition, Lean converts have a predisposition against adopting large, centralized IT solutions, which may cause them to ignore useful approaches from the BPM religion.

The result: Organizations need to consider every possible approach, not just those offered by one religion. To stay with the diet and exercise analogy, being aware of multiple diet programs will help you pull out common themes and arrive at a tailored program that works best for you.

Consider this example. Many companies adopted Six Sigma in the late 1990s. They trained experts in improvement projects (“Black Belts“) who then drove initiatives that achieved large financial results. In some of these companies, senior managers were dubious about the claims. They suspected there was some backsliding or double counting because the results were almost too good to be true. Many of those organizations then embraced Lean for different set of tools for improvement projects, tools that helped them connect project results to key strategic measures. They also stressed organizational learning (meaning, capturing the methods of Lean so that other parts of the organizations could adopt them). Adding another religion helped these companies embed continuous improvement into their DNA.

If organizations want to keep their processes up to date continually, they need to be able to use many approaches to embedding improvement in their management systems. Let’s review the distinguishing features of what each religion has to say about sustaining improvement.

1. Six Sigma zealots say “Belts,” lots of training, and performance measures are what matter.

Motorola pioneered the Six Sigma statistical tools, but it was GE that built the training programs and the hierarchy of accreditations or “Belts” (Green, Black, Master Black) with which it is so strongly associated. People who have earned these belts drive projects with clear financial targets set at the top organization, with progress monitored by the CFO. Six Sigma zealots argue that if you train enough people, you get a cultural transformation. You instill process improvement into the corporate DNA.

2. Business Reengineering’s high priest said core process owners, process maturity, and performance measures are what count.

Reengineering focuses on radical changes in core, end-to-end processes. In addition to laying out an approach for making one-time improvements, Reengineering’s high priest (the late Michael Hammer) had advice for organizations wanting to sustain improvement. He implored their leaders to create and track end-to-end process performance and establish an organization — including process owners and councils — to support the processes. He also advised them to continually assess their processes against a model of process maturity — PEMM for short — which he unveiled in an HBR article.

3. Lean “senseis” (teachers) say strategy deployment, executives as coaches, and front-line problem-solving sustain improvement.

Followers of Lean, which is based on the Toyota manufacturing approach that made it the leader in automobile quality (the Toyota Production System), believe top executives need to break down strategic objectives into implications for process improvements to get everyone moving in the same direction. For example, to improve customer satisfaction, an insurance company decided to focus on reducing the number of service requests over 30 days old from 40% to below 5%, which translated into activities in 30 departments. All organizational levels must identify and solve problems, but senior managers must tell front-line workers why efficiency is critical at all times, and then help them remove waste and improve service to customers.

4. BPM missionaries say processes and process knowledge embedded in software, an enterprise architecture, and a central process management organization sustain improvement.

Most missionaries of the BPM religion come from a heritage in information technology. They believe companies can sustain process improvements if their people use a company-wide software system (such as an ERP application), which has standard processes embedded in the software. They also advise companies to use business process management software to map and document process flows and how work should be executed and to monitor performance. They also believe in building a BPM “Book of Knowledge” (a codification of process improvement “best practices”) and a BPM “Center of Excellence” (a central organization where process experts reside and develop guidelines and procedures for documenting and analyzing business processes).

A few companies that lead in sustained process improvement have drawn from the best of each religion to embed continuous improvement in their organization.

Shell Oil’s downstream (refining and retail) businesses have rolled out a global implementation of enterprise software SAP with standard global processes (as the missionaries of BPM would preach). The company has trained its people to be Shell Sigma Belts (following the precepts of Six Sigma), and appointed process owners and established an elaborate process governance structure (as Hammer would have recommended). What’s more, the company helped develop Hammer’s PEMM concept and is now training Lean managers.

Chemical company Air Products has adopted nearly every approach for sustaining improvement from all four religions. Sloan Valve appointed core process owners several years ago following the Reengineering playbook. The manufacturer has since introduced quality techniques (“kaizen” events), as well as Lean strategy deployment methods and tools.

There is no reason that organizations wishing to sustain process improvement should not draw on all these ideas, becoming “Unitarian Universalists” and bringing together the best of each religion.

Request: What approaches have you seen companies adopt that have kept their attention on process improvement? Have any of these companies combined the approaches of different process religions?

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Brad Power is a consultant and researcher in process innovation. His current research is on sustaining attention to process management — making improvement and adaptation a habit (even fun?). He is currently conducting research with the Lean Enterprise Institute.

 

Traction: A book review by Bob Morris

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
Gino Wickman
Virtual CEO (2011)

Without traction, no individual or organization accomplishes anything.

As I began to read this book, I was reminded of a book co-authored by Chip and Dan Heath in which they explain why a few ideas “stick” but most don’t. It can also be said about business initiatives in that some have “traction” but most don’t. That is Gino Wickman’s core thesis. As he explains, most entrepreneurs experience one or (probably) more of five common frustrations: lack of control, underperforming workers, insufficient (if any) profits, limited growth potential, and dysfunctional operations. In a phrase, they can’t “get a grip” on their business. What they need is what Wickman characterizes as a “holistic, self-sustaining system that addresses the six aspects of a business”: Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process, and Traction. What he offers is the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) that, if “mastered” (i.e. installed and then maintained properly), will enable business leaders to integrate the six components of their business “into a powerful framework that will help [them] gain traction and realize the vision [they've] always had for [their] company.”

In addition to a “Summary” of key points at the conclusion of

Chapters 3-8, here’s what caught my eye:

• An “Organizational Checkup” that enables each reader to complete an audit of the its strength in terms of each of the six components and related activities (Pages 10-12)

• The Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO) used by leaders to sharpen focus on what is most important (Pages 4, 31-75)

• The “Ten Commandments of Solving Issues” (Pages 141-144)

• Documentation of core processes (Pages 151-161)

• A second “Organizational Checkup” (Pages 204-206) that enables leaders to gain at least some measurement of what has been accomplished since the first “Organizational Checkup” (Pages 10-12)

Presumably Wickman would be the first to suggest that it would be a fool’s errand for any reader to attempt to apply everything that recommended in his book. However, he would insist (and I wholly agree) that an organization should have only one operating system, albeit one that is flexible, resilient, and (yes) durable as well as comprehensive, cohesive, and cost-effective.

For some organizations, the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) – after appropriate modification – will be a significant improvement over how they have operated until now. For other organizations, the EOS offers some attractive possibilities for strengthening even more an operating system now in place and functioning well. Kaizen (i.e. continuous improvement) is a process, not a destination. What Gino Wickman has learned and so generously shares in this book can be of substantial value to almost all business leaders in almost all organizations for whom continuous improvement is more than a laminated affirmation on a wall; it is a way of achieving operational excellence at all levels and in all areas.

Get your team to produce results, not reports

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription, to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

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Cross-functional teams can be notorious for generating reports, recommendations, and suggestions for implementation — but no actual results.

Next time you manage a team of people from different parts of the organization, focus them on making change, not proposing it.

The first step is to alter the nature of the task. Don’t ask your team to “look at” or “study” a certain issue. Challenge them to solve it: reduce costs by 10% or improve the speed of a process two-fold.

Then, authorize them to experiment. Encourage them to try possible improvements to see which work.

Not all will, of course, but the team will build momentum for implementation and prepare the organization for change.

You may still want a report, but it should cover “what’s been done,” not “what can be done.”

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Do Your Teams Produce Reports or Results?” by Ron Ashkenas.

To read the full post and join the discussion, please click here.