The Art of Admitting Failure

Charlene Li

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Charlene Li for the Harvard Business Review blog. 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 it comes to business, we are incredibly unaccepting and fearful of making mistakes. And forget about admitting to our mistakes, as that may be construed as a sign of weakness.

But business and leadership is all about relationships. And in any relationship, things go wrong, mistakes are made, ups are followed by downs. The strength of a relationship is not how perfect it is, but how resiliently it deals with the inevitable failures.

In a world filled with real-time, tell-all social media, your ability to hide from your failures is, well, non-existent. You are much better off admitting that something is wrong and addressing it in as authentic and transparent a way as possible.

That’s what Domino’s Pizza CEO Patrick Doyle did in national television ads this past year. Domino’s is known for primarily one thing — delivering pizza to your door in 30 minutes. Domino’s gutsy move was to acknowledge that its pizza was far from stellar. In the ads, the company flashed quotes from customers like “Domino’s pizza crust is like cardboard” and “Microwave pizza is far superior.” One customer suggested, “I think Domino’s pizza should start over.”

That’s what Domino’s did. The company reconfigured its core product, testing combinations of dozens of cheeses, 15 sauces, and nearly 50 crust seasonings to find one that satisfied customers. In the ads, Domino’s admitted that its pizzas were terrible, explained that it redesigned them, and asked people to give them a try.

Viewers of these ads described them as “bold” and “refreshing,” and gave the company credit for acknowledging what everyone already knew. More important, people tried the pizza and found they liked it. The result: store sales rose and quarterly profits doubled.

Domino’s took a failure point — its horrible pizzas — and made it a rallying point. The company saw negative comments as a gift from customers, an opportunity to improve the product, rather than a liability.

How To Fail Successfully

Dealing with failure is part of being a leader. Rather than expend enormous energy to avoid it, you should build an organization that is resilient in the face of inevitable failures. Here are [two of] three steps that you can take:

1. Create a culture of sharing failures as well as success. When then-new Ford CEO Alan Mulally held his first staff meeting, he asked members of his team to give an assessment of their businesses as a “green,” “yellow,” or “red” light. They all gave their businesses a green light — and Mulally challenged each of them to come back the next week with a more realistic assessment of their businesses. The first executive to stand up and say “I have a red light” received a standing ovation from the CEO. They then sat down to tackle the problem as a team. Mulally had to create a new culture that could admit when something was going wrong, and do so early enough so that the organization could still have an impact on the outcome. Creating this culture has to come from the top. As a leader, you have to think about how you will set the stage for failures to come forward.

2. Reward the act of risk-taking. How many times have you heard a leader exhort, “We have to take more risks!” and then walk off the stage? In one organization, the executives decided that words had to be backed by action. They started highlighting when risks were being taken and showcased people who were sticking out their necks. They then came back and celebrated the results — regardless of whether it was a success or a failure. Without this, no one is going to take a risk that is meaningful — people will act only if they think there is a high chance of success.

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To read the  complete article, please click here.

Charlene Li is founder and partner at Altimeter Group, author of Open Leadership, and co-author of Groundswell.

 

 

Five Ways to Hold the Right Kind of Attention

John Seely Brown & John Hagel III

Here is an excerpt from an article written by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown for the Harvard Business Review blog. 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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No matter how talented or accomplished you are, you cannot always count on attracting and retaining the attention of others.

Too many options compete for everyone’s attention, and they multiply with each passing day. It will be more and more challenging to rise above the noise and hold onto the attention of those who matter to you.

Attention provides leverage. The more people we can attract and motivate to join us on a challenging quest or initiative, the more impact we are likely to achieve. So, what are effective ways to attract and retain the kind of attention that helps us to address the challenges we face? Here are five steps that build on each other.

1.    Embrace mystery: Frame really gnarly problems that are relevant to you and need to be solved. Help people to understand why these are such significant problems and why so many people have stumbled in trying to solve these problems. It probably will not attract the people looking for easy answers or silver bullets, but it can attract those who are naturally curious and looking for stimulating challenges.

2.    Focus inquiry: Don’t try to suggest answers. Frame interesting questions instead. Help people gain a foothold by posing questions that intrigue and motivate them to start investigating the mysteries that lie ahead.

3.    Excite the imagination: Provide some “what if?” scenarios to illustrate the possibilities that await those who manage to come up with creative answers. Paint the pictures but make it clear these are only pictures. Stimulate people to pursue the questions with a lot of energy and creativity.

4.    Limit availability: Lots of people will seek you out if you are successful in exciting the imagination. If you try to connect with everyone, the conversations can spread you way too thin. Be more selective in your availability – you will often provide even greater incentive to tackle the problems, rather than simply engaging in conversations.

5.    Be authentic: If you try to game this, you will be found out and the backlash will be significant. So, here is the catch – if you are not genuinely engaged in addressing these problems yourself, you will not be able to sustain the attention and effort of others to come up with creative solutions. On the other hand, if you are on a quest yourself, leading by example, you could have a contagious effect and the encounters you have can help both sides to learn from each other.

Do these techniques actually work? Well, think of how Martin Luther King, Jr. excited and mobilized a broad group of people to tackle some very challenging social problems. On a completely different level, one leading tech company in Silicon Valley regularly attracts the attention of the venture capital community by sharing its most difficult technology problems and suggesting that they would buy the start-ups that come up with creative solutions to these problems. Or look at the way professional astronomers have mobilized a global network of passionately engaged amateurs to learn more about the vast universe beyond this one planet.

This kind of attention is priceless and powerful. We will all need to find ways to generate it and harness it. This is not just an opportunity, but increasingly an imperative. We are all experiencing increasing economic pressure as individuals and institutions. In this kind of environment, we not only need leverage, we also need to more rapidly improve our performance. We all get better faster by working with others. To do this, we first need to attract the attention of others. If we fail to attract that attention, we will not get better faster in an increasingly competitive global economy, and we could be marginalized. That is why attention is becoming more valuable at the same time that it is becoming scarcer.

[Note: You may also wish to check out Guy Kwasaki's latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, published by Portfolio/The Penguin Group (2011).]

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John Hagel III and John Seely Brown are co-chairmen of the Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge, and have written several books focused on technology and innovation. Their most recent book is The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, co-authored with Lang Davison, and published by Basic Books (2010).

The 4 Types of Teams All Leaders Need to Understand

Here is an article written by Thomas A. Stewart for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. 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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You saw it last night: UConn’s Kemba Walker is the best college basketball player in America. More than a star, he’s a sun around which the other players orbit.

Two generations ago, Bill Bradley, similarly solar, led Princeton to the NCAA’s Final Four; he was a prodigious scorer but also a promiscuous passer, shovelling the ball to other (less talented) players, who rebuffed his false modesty by passing it back. His pro career, though, was different. The New York Knicks were a team of near-equals; four of its five starters made the NBA’s hall of fame. Bradley himself scored, on average, about half as many points as he did in college. Like UConn’s Huskies, Bradley’s Tigers were a lead singer with a doo-wop chorus; his Knicks were a quintet.

So which was the better team?

Judging by the motivational posters you see on HR department walls, there are two kinds of teamwork. In one, everybody holds hands in a circle. We’re in this together, they seem to say. The handholders are often skydiving, but even a mile high you can smell the campfire and hear the voices singing “Kumbaya.” The other common poster shows someone reaching out to give someone a helping hand-up a hill, across a gorge. In these pictures, the strong help the weak; Indiana Jones races back into the temple to save the arthritic old-timer and plucky girl with the twisted ankle before the roof falls in. It’s the opposite of UConn’s hoopsters, where the team exists to feed the best player.

Actually, there are four different kinds of teams, none of which has anything to do with sentimentality. They’re organized in different ways; they’re suited to different purposes; and if you understand the taxonomy of teamwork you’ll be a better leader and a better player.

Problem solvers. One reason to team up is to crack a tough problem, because when it comes to banging against a wall, two heads are better than one, and seven or eight are better still. Juries are problem-solvers. So are teams of analysts. These teams need a clear goal–a problem and a deadline. They want diversity of sex, background, and cognition, and not just tokenism, as studies by Lynda Gratton of London Business School show. Some of the best, teams of virtuosos, can be cantankerous and quarrelsome. That’s why they need a galvanizing goal: without one, their very diversity may tear them apart. American World War II movies depict problem-solving teams: Iowa farm-boy, West Virginia miner, Brooklyn stick-ball player, and preppie musician call on their disparate skills to improvise a way to destroy the impregnable German pillbox.

Loyal followers. In British movies about the Second World War, the emphasis is on banding together to serve the charismatic leader. The greatest of those films was Laurence Olivier’s production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, where the young king summoned his knights and common soldiers once more into the breach, having earlier called them

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be ne’re so base.”

(In Shakespeare’s text, “base” is “vile,” from villein, meaning commoner.) A team of loyal followers needs not a problem but a cause — someone or something worth putting yourself on the line for. That’s not usually shareholder value, incidentally.

Ragtag bands of merry men. These teams exist outside an organization’s power structure and are often purposefully subversive of it. They may be true outlaws like Robin Hood and his Sherwood Forest buddies or Castro and his cadre in the Sierra Maestra mountains. In business, ragtag bands may be start-ups, some of which have it in for the establishment. (Remember Macintosh’s “1984″ Super Bowl commercial?)

Sometimes they’re employees set up as the loyal opposition, like Lockheed’s Skunk Works and its imitators-special groups protected from hierarchs and budget hawks so as to disrupt the existing order from within. These teams usually have an official leader responsible for placating the authorities, but are highly democratic and improvisatory internally.

Protective cordons. Every good team protects its members, but some are designed specifically for the purpose. For the most part these aren’t high-performing teams; their purpose is protection, not production. At their worst, these teams obscure accountability, tolerate mediocre performance, and cover up each other’s sins. That happens when bureaucratic companies want to hide from customers, for example. In these teams, everyone’s responsible, so no one’s responsible. That’s not always a bad thing. At their best, these teams protect decent people so from capricious or arbitrary bosses. “They can’t fire all of us” is their motto — the corporate version of “I’m Spartacus.”

A smart leader suits the team to the task and vice versa. That’s not easy. In my experience, most organizations have teams of all four kinds, but one style dominates. (If your organization has a lot of protective teams, you should ask why.)  I don’t think individual teams change much. Outlaws don’t come indoors, put on cardigans, and sip sherry; protectors don’t suddenly congregate in the team room, open their laptops, and start problem-solving. Which type of team is better? That depends on the job.

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Thomas A. Stewart

Thomas A. Stewart is the chief marketing and knowledge officer of Booz & Company, a leading global management consulting firm. Opinions expressed in this blog are his and may not be those of the firm. Formerly the editor and managing director of Harvard Business Review, Stewart is the author of Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations and The Wealth of Knowledge; Intellectual Capital and the 21st Century Organization. Follow him on Twitter @thomasastewart

 

How to Get the Best Results From Remote Brainstorming

Here is an article written by Wayne Turmel for BNET (March 28, 2011), The CBS Interactive Business Network. 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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One thing you always hear about remote teams is how hard it is to generate good ideas and brainstorm when you work remotely.

I disagree. It’s pretty easy to brainstorm remotely. What’s really tough is actually turning the results of that brainstorm into the best solution to whatever problem you’re trying to solve.

I’ve seen groups reach great answers with a conference call and some scratch paper. Other teams have the latest brainstorming tools and video conferencing gimmicks and still couldn’t solve the TV Guide crossword puzzle. The problem isn’t getting people to contribute ideas, necessarily, it’s putting the process in place to get the best possible input.

Here are some of the ground rules and processes to establish if you want to get the best input and (more importantly) output from your team’s collective wisdom:

Does everyone understand the problem to be solved or desired outcome? Great ideas are fun to generate, but what is it you’re trying accomplish? Solving a problem for your team that IT can’t support won’t get the job done any easier. Before generating lots of ideas establish what the parameters of a good solution are. Make sure people understand (and question) what the gatekeepers are.  The quality of your ideas will go up. Also, do they understand how you’re going to make a final decision? will it be a simple majority vote? Will you be making a recommendation to a decision making committee? Many people won’t contribute if they don’t think their ideas will be discounted by others.

What’s the time frame for making a final decision–really? Just because you kick up a lot of dust in a meeting, doesn’t mean those are the best ideas you can come up with. A lot of teams find that by giving themselves time to think about, fine tune, and build on ideas that come up in the actual brain-storm session they do better work. Here’s where the ability to post ideas to a shared file or internal blog can be very helpful. Sometimes you want to sleep on an idea before acting. It’s also a great way to get input from those quiet, thoughtful types who don’t jump up and down to speak on conference calls.

What tools do you have at your disposal and how will you use them? Brainstorming requires visually looking at the input (it helps kickstart other ideas and tangential concepts) as well as getting input both verbally and in writing. There are plenty of tools like Mindjet, Mindmeister, Brainreactions, Grouputer and many, many others. but don’t forget things like the chat feature and white board in your webmeeting platform. The best tool is your own ears. Listen not just to what people say, but how they say it. Are they sure that’s what they want to say? Is there something else they want to add? Leaders have to facilitate the discussion, not just transcribe what people say.

How will you get input and from whom? One of the best ways to get results is to involve the right people in the decision process. If everyone comes from the same team, or the same discipline, you’re going to get ideas that sound a lot the same as the old ones. Don’t be afraid to invite people who might have a stake in the outcome to participate early. If you have people on the team whose first language isn’t English, consider taking ideas both in writing as well as verbally. Sometimes these folks aren’t the first ones to pipe up in a meeting. Don’t let a strong accent or uncertainty about their language skills be the reason you miss out on great ideas.

What’s going on with your team that might help or hinder your efforts? Are all your team members playing nicely together? Will people in the remote offices give you their best efforts if they feel they’ll only be overruled by the bunch of lunatics at the Home Office? Listen closely to who is contributing–and who isn’t. Is one group or individual cutting others off at the knees or are people really giving a fair hearing to all ideas. If you’re not aware of the team dynamics, you can seriously cripple your group’s efforts and limit the quality of the results.

What’s important to remember, is that technology is merely the medium through which the information flows. Setting the right parameters, encouraging input and truly facilitating the discussion (as opposed to merely playing host and emcee) is the real work of brainstorming and leading your team to great decisions and problem solving.

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Wayne Turmel is obsessed with helping organizations and their managers communicate better, even across cyberspace. He’s a writer, a speaker, the president of Greatwebmeetings.com, and the host of one of the world’s most successful business podcasts, The Cranky Middle Manager Show, where he helps listeners worldwide deal with the million little challenges and indignities of being a modern manager. His book 6 Weeks to a Great Webinar: Generate Leads and Tell Your Story to the World is the leading web presentation book on Amazon.com. Follow him on Twitter @greatwebmeeting.

Disciplined Dreaming: A book review by Bob Morris

Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity
Josh Linkner
Jossey-Bass (2011)

Dreaming on “the other side of complexity”

The title of this book refers to what its subtitle promises to provide: “a proven system to drive breakthrough creativity,” one that requires highly- developed mental and emotional discipline. Josh Linkner introduces a methodology, a five-step process, that he calls “Disciplined Dreaming.” He interviewed more than 200 people who have apparently whose creativity has driven their success. What he learned is shared in this book. After making the case for creativity in the first chapter and then explaining the Disciplined Dreaming system, Linkner organizes his material within a sequence of five steps: Ask (Chapters 3&4), Prepare (5&6), Discover (7), Ignite (8&9), and then Launch (Chapter 10). He adds an Epilogue, followed by two appendices. In the first, he invalidates “six common myths that inhibit creativity”; in the second, he provides “Additional Warm-Up Exercises to Jump Star Creativity.”

Back to Disciplined Dreaming. Consider the differences between (a) allowing your mind to wander aimlessly and (b) filling your mind with a wealth of information relevant to answering a question or solving a problem and then allowing it to absorb and digest the information. (I call the latter “mulling” and it can either be active and aggressive or passive and patient. In this book, Linkner explains how to

• Define a “creativity challenge” (e.g. answering an important question, solving a serious problem or taking full advantage of a major opportunity)

• Prepare (mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and environmentally) for the process by which to create or reveal a correct answer or effective solution

• Discover various “avenues” by which to reach that answer or solution

• Ignite forces (i.e. ”juices”) with various techniques to generate an abundance of creative ideas

• Launch the process by which to realize (literally, to make a reality of) each of the best ideas within a framework provided in Chapter Ten.

Those who are curious to know the nature and extent of their readiness to embark on the Disciplined Dreaming process will be delighted to know that Linkner includes “Building Your Creativity Chops: The Self-Assessment on Pages 31-38, an exercise that includes detailed explanations of the results. I also commend him on his eloquent as well as rigorous examination of immensely complicated issues associated with terms such as creativity, innovation, co-creation, integrative thinking, and inspiration. Whenever possible, he anchors information, insights, and even recommendations in a real-world context with which most readers can identify.

Readers will also appreciate what he calls “The Eight Commandments of Ideation” (Pages 164-166) as well as the aforementioned invalidation of “six common myths that inhibit creativity” and “Additional Warm-Up Exercises to Jump Star Creativity” in the two appendices. Josh Linkner brilliantly integrates what he learned from more than 200 interviews with what he has learned his own observations and (yes) disciplined dreaming. He has prepared his reader well for a journey only the reader can take. I join with him in expressing “Bon voyage!” to those who embark on it.

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Note: I wish to acknowledge my debt to Oliver Wendell Holmes who inspired the title of my review. Long ago, he observed, “I would not give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

Turn Your Competitors into Allies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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When a colleague’s agenda is seemingly opposed to your own, it can be tempting to demonize him.

Distorting other people is a common response to conflict, but not a particularly productive one.

In fact, doing so undermines your ability to exert influence. Instead of deciding that everything about a colleague you don’t get along with is hateful, get to know him better. Sit down and talk about what he cares and is concerned about.

You may find that the source of your conflict is actually an area of mutual interest and rather than being enemies, you are natural allies.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Managing Yourself: Stop Holding Yourself Back” by Anne Morriss, Robin J. Ely, and Frances X. Frei.

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