Rich business reads: “Separating the wheat from a mountain of chaff”

 

Opinions are divided — often sharply divided — about which are the best business books this year, all-time, to store within an electronic reading device, to take on vacation…yada yada yada.

Check out this video featured online by The Economist.

“Separating the wheat from a mountain of chaff, our literary and management editors discuss some of the best business books ever written.”

To add to the controversy and confusion, please click here.

 

Who Moved My Cube?

Artwork: Geoffrey Cottenceau and Romain Rousset, Vide-carton, 2006

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Anne-Laure Fayard and John Weeks for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Managers once discouraged, even forbade, casual interactions among employees. To many bosses, chitchat at the watercooler was just a noisy distraction from work. Today we know that chance encounters and conversations on the job promote cooperation and innovation, and companies craft their floor plans and cultures with this in mind. The results have been surprising—and often disappointing.

Consider the experience of Scandinavian Airlines (SAS). In 1987 the company redesigned its headquarters around a central “street” that linked a café, shopping, and medical, sports, and other facilities, including several “multirooms” containing comfortable furniture, coffeemakers, fax and photocopying machines, and office supplies. The new design was explicitly intended to promote informal interactions, and management broadcast the message that employees should find opportunities in the new space for “impromptu meetings” and “creative encounters.”

What happened as a result? Very little. A study of employee interactions revealed that just 9% were occurring in the street and the café, and just 27% in all the other public spaces combined. In spite of the thoughtfulness and good intentions informing the new design, two-thirds of interactions were still confined to private offices. What went wrong?

Common sense, it turns out, is a poor guide when it comes to designing for interaction. Take the growing enthusiasm for replacing private offices with open floor plans in order to encourage community and collaboration. More than a dozen studies have examined the behavioral effects of such redesigns. There’s some evidence that removing physical barriers and bringing people closer to one another does promote casual interactions. But there’s a roughly equal amount of evidence that because open spaces reduce privacy, they don’t foster informal exchanges and may actually inhibit them. Some studies show that employees in open-plan spaces, knowing that they may be overheard or interrupted, have shorter and more-superficial discussions than they otherwise would.

Both sets of findings are correct. Open floor plans, or indeed any type of design, can either encourage or discourage informal interactions, depending on a complex interplay of physical and social cues. Over the past 12 years we have conducted nine studies of the effects of design on interaction, looking at organizations in the United States, Europe, and Asia. We surveyed the extensive literature on the subject and interviewed dozens of managers about their office redesigns. The sum of our research reveals that a space may or may not encourage interaction depending on how it balances three dimensions, or “affordances,” that have both physical and social aspects: proximity, privacy, and permission. (For more on affordances, see the sidebar “The Signals Design Can Send.”)

The most effective spaces bring people together and remove barriers while also providing sufficient privacy that people don’t fear being overheard or interrupted. In addition, they reinforce permission to convene and speak freely. These requirements, we’ve found, apply just as readily to virtual spaces as to physical ones, although their virtual manifestations may be quite different. In either setting, getting the balance wrong can turn a well-meant effort to foster creative collaboration into a frustrating lesson in unintended consequences. Although no formal studies of the reasons for the design failure at SAS were done, it has all the earmarks of such an imbalance—and should serve as a cautionary tale for any company contemplating a redesign.

The Properties of Proximity

People often assume that proximity is purely a function of physical factors: how far employees are from one another or how close they are to a break room. And distance is important. The MIT organizational psychology professor Thomas Allen famously discovered that the frequency of workers’ interactions in an R&D complex he studied declined exponentially with the distance between their offices—an effect popularly known as the Allen curve. Even when they were in the same building, researchers on different floors almost never interacted informally, he found.

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Anne-Laure Fayard is an assistant professor of management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. John Weeks is a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at IMD in Lausanne.

Blurring Face-to-Face and Virtual Encounters

John Weeks and Anne-Laure Fayard

Here is an excerpt from an article written by John Weeks and Anne-Laure Fayard for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Here’s a puzzle: Technology connects us more completely than ever before (we can call, text, email, and Skype practically anyone anywhere, and we do) and yet the face-to-face conference business is robust, we’re flying more miles than ever to interact with others, the brightest minds still converge on innovation hubs like Silicon Valley, and collaborative spaces in firms are increasingly popular.

How can this be?

Dire predictions that pervasive (and often invasive) communications technologies would bring the end of the “human moment” and the death of communities were wrong. The faulty assumption underlying the hype is that there is a limit to how much people want to connect. If anything, these technologies have revealed that our desire to connect is far from exhausted. Demand is not fixed. Our appetite isn’t sated. And so, as new opportunities to connect emerge, the amount of interaction grows.

These technologies exert this effect, we think, not because they replace existing means of interaction, but because they provide novel environments for interaction. In our research on the factors that influence interaction in both real and virtual spaces, we explore the crucial roles of proximity, privacy, and permission. Proximity describes the likelihood of encountering others in a space; privacy includes being able to not only limit who can “overhear” your conversation, but being able to control who has access to you; and permission describes the sense of being allowed to communicate, and in what ways, in a space. Environments that balance the proximity, privacy, and permission well invite interaction. (For more, see our article “Who Moved My Cube” in the July/August 2011 Harvard Business Review.)

By creating novel types and combinations of proximity, privacy, and permission, new technologies stimulate new types of interaction. We use email to send messages at night to the people we work with during the day, and to contact during the day the people we live with at night. These technologies increase people’s proximity when they are physically distant, and provide permission to interact with colleagues at times that, in predigital days, they couldn’t have. Give us a mobile phone and we will send texts when we are in meetings to people in the same meeting. “Boring meeting!” Texting affords privacy in a setting where speaking out loud would be ill advised. Exchanging instant messages with a friend at work may be permitted (or goes undetected) in contexts where spending time on a personal phone call is not.

The architect Christopher Alexander in his 1977 book A Pattern Language wrote “The simple social intercourse created when people rub shoulders in public is one of the most essential kinds of social glue in society.” At the time, Alexander was writing about physical space. But his observation equally applies to digital interactions — and to an emerging world in which our social interactions are neither totally physical nor totally virtual but an increasingly seamless blend.

This blurring of the physical and virtual creates a new challenge for business. Managers who want people across an organization to share knowledge and spark ideas need to think creatively about how to integrate virtual and physical spaces so that the myriad interactions that take place within them add up to more than the sum of their parts. Don’t view virtual communication as a substitute for face-to-face encounters, and don’t think that co-locating people makes virtual communications less relevant. Experiment with the mix of communications channels in your organization. Fine-tune the balance of proximity, privacy, and permission so that people don’t just interact more, they interact more fully.

To read the complete article, please click here.

To read more blog posts by Weeks and Fayard, please click here.

John Weeks is professor of leadership and organizational behavior at IMD in Lausanne. Anne-Laure Fayard is an assistant professor of management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

Repeat It Until they Mock You – a Key Task of an Attentive Leader

“Until your people are mocking you, you’ve not repeated your message enough.”
Verne Harnish, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits

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Each semester, I handout copies of the full text of I Have a Dream, the great speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.  I take a fresh copy myself, and I have us work through the speech, circling each phrase that he repeats.  The list is overwhelming:  “now is the time” “100 years later,” “let freedom ring,” “all of God’s children,” “I have a dream,” “one day.”  Over and over and over again, he hammers home these key phrases.  This is part of the reason why the speech is burned so deeply into our collective memory.

We all need to take a lesson from Dr. King – especially at work.

We are so very busy, in our lives, and in our brains.  At work, we always have the incident/task/crisis of the moment demanding our attention.  So, if we want to focus on what is important in the big picture/over the long haul, it has to be front of mind, and put back in front of mind, time and time and time and time again.

In other words, one major job of a leader is to repeat what is important over and over and over and over again.  “until they mock you.”    There is no alternative to this.

Here’s how Mark Aesch, CEO of the Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority (RGRTA) put it, in his book Driving Excellence:  Transform your Organization’s Culture – and Achieve Revolutionary Results:

With an issue this significant, putting it in front of any group of people once is not going to get it done.
You need to come back, time and again, to make people focus on the issue’s importance.
Everyone – bus operators, radio controllers, customer service personnel, up to and including the vice presidents – is nudged to tie our strategies to the most basic task they happen to be performing minute to minute.

How are you doing?  Are you repeating the key elements of your mission and your strategy over and over again to your people?

Are they mocking you yet?  If they are not, you’ve got some more repeating to do.

2 Career-Killing Lessons New Grads Need to Unlearn

Nell Minow

Here is an article written by Nell Minow 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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Managers in cities across the country have told me that they have two big problems with the new college graduates who come to them for jobs and internships:

• First, they don’t understand that they’ve moved from being a buyer to being a seller.

• Second, they don’t appreciate what it means to be a part of a team.

College seniors have had at least 16 years as consumers of what school has to offer. Yes, they had to produce assigned work and pass exams, but the focus to that point has always on their needs and their goals. They have also spent their entire lives as a primary target for marketers who recognized in them not only their willingness to spend money on endless electronic gadgets but their role as trend-setters in the digital age.

Too often, they bring that perspective to job interviews.  They act as though they are meeting with their college advisor, telling prospective employers what the job will do for them instead of what they will bring to the organization.

Bruce Tulgan of Rainmaker Thinking says, “Playing the customer or consumer role is usually Gen Yers’ primary experience in the public sphere prior to arriving for their first day of work as employees. Many have little or no experience on the other side of the marketplace transaction, as vendors.” He says employers should deliver the message in terms they can understand:

Employment is a transactional relationship, just like a customer relationship. This is the ultimate source of your employer’s authority, plain and simple. This is the source of your obligations at work to everyone: your coworkers, your boss, your subordinates, and actual customers. Trumpet this message to Gen Yers: Every person you deal with is your customer—coworkers, employees, managers, suppliers, service people, and actual customers. What makes you valuable to each customer?  Every unmet need is an opportunity to add value. Deliver and go the extra mile; get it done early; add the bells and whistles, and tie a bow on it.

The other complaint I hear the most often is that college promotes individual achievement, not teamwork. Students compete with each other; they have no reason to feel responsible for the success of the group. When they get to the workplace, they wait to be told what to do and don’t seem to have an instinctive understanding of basic notions of professionalism like confidentiality and commitment.

Sometimes they have to be reminded that incidents at work and comments about co-workers are not to be put on Facebook or Twitter. And one manager told me that an intern assigned to cover an event at a remote location called at the last minute to say she could not make it and that he — her boss two layers up — should cover it for her.

Many of the seniors graduating this spring already know all of this, of course. On the other hand, a couple of the managers I spoke to said they actually received the initial phone calls setting up a job interview from the candidates’ mothers, as though they were making a play date. For anyone who thinks that is appropriate, I can’t improve on the advice Mae West gave when she was asked for her message to the youth of America: “Grow up.”

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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.

 

Your Team Needs 3 Essential Characteristics

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.

What makes a team work can feel like a mystery.

While you can’t guarantee success, you can give your team a better chance by being sure it has the following:

1. A common purpose. Most teams form as a result of an outside mandate. To work together effectively, team members need to rally around a meaningful purpose they’ve embraced as their own.

2. A mix of complementary skills. It’s dangerous for everyone on a team to have the same skills and perspective. Look for people with varying technical and functional expertise who bring different approaches to problem-solving and decision-making.

3. Mutual accountability. You cannot coerce commitment. The process of agreeing on a goal together will forge trust and build the team’s accountability to one another.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Guide to Project Management.”

To check it out and join the discussion, please click here.