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Remember the Cube

James M. Kouzes is co-author (with Barry Z. Posner) of The Leadership Challenge. In the brief article that follows, featured  by Booz & Company’s strategy+business magazine, he introduces a passage on the importance of remembering where you started that appears in From Values to Action: The Four Principles of Values-Based Leadership, by Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr.

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As a leader, you quickly learn what it feels like to be squeezed between lofty expectations and your own limitations. No leader’s performance is flawless. You can’t see around every corner, and despite your best efforts, your initiatives sometimes miss the mark. No leader is faultless. Sometimes you get angry and short, and you don’t always listen as carefully as you should. Sometimes you need to be reminded to treat everyone with dignity and respect and to recognize and thank others. In other words, you’re human.

The words human and humble both derive from the Latin humus, meaning earth. To be human and humble is to be down-to-earth, with your feet planted firmly on the ground. Interesting, isn’t it, how as you climb the ranks you also climb to a higher floor in the building, getting farther and farther away from the ground? Is it any wonder that the higher you go, the harder it gets to stay grounded?

That’s why it’s so important to think back to the beginning of your career. As Harry Kraemer explains in the following excerpt, that’s the place where leaders can find some of the most important lessons they’ll ever learn. We should all remember where we started. It would also serve us well to have the humility and grace to acknowledge that the amazing people who reside in the cubicles (“cubes”) are the ones who are responsible for most of our successes.

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To read the excerpt from Chapter 4 of From Values to Action, please click here.

 

 

Andrew C. Boynton: An interview by Bob Morris

Andrew C. Boynton

Andy Boynton is Dean of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. At Boston College, he works with terrific faculty and staff to build a business school that creates knowledge and shapes leaders for the future. Prior to joining Boston College, Boynton was a professor of strategy and leadership at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland and on the faculty of the business schools at the University of Virginia and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Andy is passionate about how expertise  – perhaps the most important (but squandered) asset in most firms today — is deployed at all levels in organizations to help seize competitive advantage. His books and articles have frequently addressed issues of managing and leading expertise. His latest book, The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen (Jossey-Bass), is co-authored with Bill Fischer and William Bole. His previous books include Virtuoso Teams: Lessons from Teams That Changed Their Worlds (Financial Times-Prentice Hall) and Invented Here: Maximizing Your Organization’s Internal Growth and Profitability (Harvard Business School Press). 

He is a 1978 graduate of Boston College. Boynton earned his MBA and PhD at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has served on the MBA faculty at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business and at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia. In addition to his publishing career and role as Dean of the Carroll School of Management, Boynton has over twenty years of experience speaking and designing powerful executive education sessions and seminars for firms around the world.

Here is an excerpt from my interview of Andy.

To read the complete interview, please click here.

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Morris: Before discussing The Idea Hunter, a few general questions. First, other than a family member, who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth?

Boynton: That’s a tough one. My life is very family-centric and I gravitate to the family members who all influenced me along the way. How’s this for an answer!? I’ll say -– St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order in the Catholic Church. I went to Boston College as an undergrad. I’m not even Catholic, but it was love at first site. I knew it was the right place for me when I was 18 (I’m a proud alum) and now that I’m back, it still is the right place. I think many of the Jesuit ideals that spill into daily life at Boston College influenced my whole person when I was young and still do so today. Without Ignatius, there would be no Jesuit order, and without a Jesuit order, there would be no Boston College! How’s that for circuitous? But without Boston College, I wouldn’t be who I am today. So Ignatius really is the right answer, for me.

Morris: Greatest impact on your professional development?

Boynton: My friend, colleague, and co-author, Bill Fischer. Of course, this isn’t something I want anyone (much less Bill) to know about! I’m certainly not the most influential person in his life and he drives me crazy at times, but here’s the story. When I was an MBA student, there was Bill Fischer. A Ph.D. student, there was Bill Fischer. When I got to Switzerland, soon after …there was Bill Fischer. Bill’s a guy who has more energy, is more global (he lived in China with his family in the 1980’s!), more curious, and more talented than anyone I know. He loves ideas. I love ideas. We were like combustible fuel in the classroom for over 15 years together —team designing and teaching terrific executive education and workshop experiences.  What a team! That has now translated to two books we’ve written. We learned from each other all the time. At the end of executive workshops in Europe (they had no idea what we were showing!) we’d show a video of the Abbott and Costello “who’s on first?” routine in the room to everyone. The executives got it! That video was us. We just clicked in the classroom and with our idea development.  I was constantly learning, and having fun. Of course all the great ideas we had were mine!

Morris: Was there a turning-point (if not an epiphany) earlier in your life that set you on the course you continue to follow? Please explain.

Boynton: When I was earning my MBA at UNC Chapel Hill, I got to know faculty members. We ran together. I’d hang out in their offices. We had beers on Friday afternoon at the end of a long week.  I was just interested in the stuff they did. It fascinated me-the research, writing, reading, teaching.  I met several that turned the wheel on my life. One was Dick Blackburn. A terrific organizational behavior professor at UNC Chapel Hill. Here’s what happened–I was working on my dissertation. I was sort of the PhD student “all star” in some ways. Dick took my first draft of my dissertation and ripped it to shreds sitting with me at a table. I saw a year of my life go up in flames. He did it publicly to boot. The room was full of students and professors. He wasn’t malicious but he was point blank with me. No holds barred. And, he was right. It stunk. That one event taught me much about standards and what’s good, and what’s not. It was sort of an electric shock in a positive way. The other professor was Bob Zmud, information systems. We were co-authors when I was a graduate student. Bob loved working with ideas and treated me like a colleague. We had a great time thinking and writing and did some pretty innovative research together. Collaborating with Bob gave me a real jump-start to my career. He let me soar and never lorded over me. I was lucky to have mentors like that.

Morris: To what extent has your formal education proven invaluable to your career and, more specifically, to what you do now?

Boynton: Very valuable! At Boston College and UNC Chapel Hill I learned to think! (or at least think better!). I also got exposed to a wide range of disciplines, concepts, theories, and topics; from the world of management, and the arts and sciences. And both places were rigorous. I never sailed through and it was tough sledding. Fast forward: As a dean who leads a school. As an author. As someone who consults occasionally with leading firms. On all fronts, I see threads back to my formal education. I was very lucky to land in the places like BC and UNC Chapel Hill!

Morris: Here’s a two-part question. What is DeepDive™ and what differentiates it most significantly from other methodologies that share the same objective, helping executives harness the power of teams to significantly improve problem-solving speed, innovation and results?

Boynton: It is the ultimate in flexibility and simplicity, yet deceptively so. From a dozen executives in a planning session to hundreds of managers at an offsite or conference, DeepDive works to shape breakthrough ideas and actionable results that any organization needs and it does it through focused teamwork.  DeepDive takes an important problem and first defines a “design challenge” which bounds the focus for the conversations and problem solving. The DeepDive helps organizations create solutions, prototypes fast — often in hours instead of weeks. The DeepDive is a combination of brainstorming, prototyping, testing and feedback merged into a carefully choreographed experience for managers.

With the DeepDive, a firm gets the most from the expertise and experience its talent has to offer and will derive the maximum ideas from the people — all focused like a laser beam on the specific design challenge. It just works great for a host of reasons. It can take half a day or a day. The process can be completed anywhere. No special technology is needed.

The DeepDive methodology creates a lively marketplace where the best ideas that address your business challenge will thrive while ideas of lesser value fall by the wayside. Teams will expand their ideas and solutions, and then narrow the window — resulting in a convergence of solutions and a few valuable prototypes that will shine at the end. This powerful idea solution shaping exercise will accelerate any organization towards a solution that gets it 90% of the way to its destination.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

 

Joe’s Journal: On Work and Human Nature

Here is the latest post by Joseph A. Maciariello featured in the Joe’s Journal series at the Drucker Exchange (Dx) sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Drucker Exchange (the Dx) is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.

To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.

“Management always lives, works, and practices in and for an institution, which is a human community held together by a bond: the work bond. And precisely because the object of management is a human community held together by the work bond for a common purpose, management always deals with the nature of Man and (as all of us with any practical experience have learned) with Good and Evil, as well. I have learned more theology as a practicing management consultant than when I taught religion.”

– Peter F. Drucker

At a social event for students in Claremont, Peter Drucker once asked me what I was working on. I told him, “Work and Human Nature,” and to my surprise it seemed to stun him. Drucker had the tendency to promote the work of other faculty members. So, it was it was not unusual for him to ask. But his response to my answer seemed to strike something very deep in his life. Little did I know just how deep it was.

As I later learned, Peter Drucker told his friend Bob Buford at Estes Park, Colo., in the summer of 1993 that “What we have now is not an economic problem but an existential problem.” What did he mean? Czeslaw Milosz, one of Drucker’s contemporaries and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980,sheds light on what Drucker might have had in mind with this comment about our “existential problem.” I quote from his Nobel Lecture as he struggles with the fascist ideas of his youth in Lithuania and Poland, where people were treated as “objects of dominion” rather than as beings created with dignity who yearn to be nourished:

“And yet perhaps our most precious acquisition is not an understanding of those ideas, which we touched in their most tangible shape, but respect and gratitude for certain things which protect people from internal disintegration and from yielding to tyranny. Precisely for that reason some ways of life, some institutions became a target for the fury of evil forces, above all, the bonds between people that exist organically, as if by themselves, sustained by family, religion, neighborhood, common heritage.”

Drucker’s discouragement with the breakdown of community within business organizations, and the ineffectiveness of government in delivering on its promises, led him to place more faith in social sector institutions where personhood could be realized. He was looking forward not only to the Post-Capitalist Society but to the Post-Business Society. As our attention is focused on America’s current economic problems, it might be useful to reflect on our existential needs for personhood and try to re-capture what we have lost as a society. The opportunities presented by this crisis should not be discounted.

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Joseph A. Maciariello is the Horton Professor of Management & Director of Research and Education, The Drucker Institute. You can contact him directly at joseph.maciariello@cgu.edu.

 

 

The Toyota Way: A book review by Bob Morris

The Toyota Way
Jeffrey Liker
McGraw-Hill (2003)

To understand Toyota’s success, first understand its DNA

I read this book when it was first published in 2004 and recently re-read it, curious to know how well Jeffrey Liker’s explanation of Toyota’s management principles and lean production values have held up. My conclusion? Very well.  However, since this book was published, Toyota’s reputation for almost flawless operational performance has been somewhat tarnished. Liker discusses that in his latest book, The Toyota Way to Continuous Improvement: Linking Strategy and Operational Excellence to Achieve Superior Performance, co-authored with James K. Franz and also published by McGraw-Hill (2011). Is is so often the case these days, scandal-mongering usually dominates the daily headlines.

No good purpose would be served by merely listing the 14 management principles, out of context. Liker devotes a separate chapter to each, carefully explaining not only what each of the 14 is but also how it guides and informs everyone at all levels and in all areas of the Toyota organization. What Liker also accomplishes, and what cannot be adequately summarized in a review such as this, is to explain how all 14 principles are interdependent. Together, they serve as the company’s DNA. In the Preface, he recalls asking Fujio Cho (President of Toyota Motor Company) what was unique about his company’s remarkable success. His answer was quite simple: “The key to the Toyota Way and what makes Toyota stand out is not any of the individual elements…But what is important is having all the elements together as a system. It must be practiced every day in a very consistent manner.” To understand Toyota’s success, therefore, it is important to understand that lean production is not a methodology; it is literally a way of life.

The 14 principles are divided into four thematic categories:

• Having a long-term philosophy that drives a long-term approach to building a learning organization
• Absolute faith that the right process will produce the right results
• Adding value to the organization by developing its people and partners
• Continuously solving root problems to drive organizational learning

As Liker points out, it is important to understand that the Toyota Production System is not the Toyota Way. TPS is the most systematic and highly developed example of what the principles of the Toyota Way can accomplish. The Toyota Way consists of the foundational principles of the Toyota culture, which allows the TPS to function so effectively.

Note: Those who have a special interest in the evolution of the Toyota culture are urged to check out Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way, co-authored by Liker, Michael Hoseus, and the Center for Quality People & Organization, and also published by McGraw-Hill (2008).

How does lean improvement differ from traditional process improvement? “Briefly, whereas the traditional approach to process improvement focuses on local efficiencies, in a lean improvement initiative, most of the progress comes from a large number of non-value steps being squeezed out. For example, overproduction, delays, and wasted motion. In fact, the ultimate goal of lean manufacturing is to apply the ideal of one-piece flow to all business operations, from product design to launch, order taking, physical production, and shipment.” Some of the differences are subtle but no less significant.

To repeat, anyone can read this book and then understand what the Toyota Way is. Possessing a gourmet chef’s recipe, however, does not ensure that a gourmet meal will be prepared. Toyota has its own way. Other companies must develop theirs based on their own “roots.” In other words, lead from their traditional strengths but not be limited by them. In fact, companies may need to re-invent themselves, not once but several times. That is what Toyota did…and continues to do. Use operational excellence as a strategic weapon and the rewards and results will far outweigh the great effort required.

It remains for each person who reads this book to determine which of the 14 management principles are most relevant to her or his own enterprise, and then to determine how to translate each into effective action. Presumably Liker agrees with me that most companies have 3-5 areas in which “lean” initiatives are urgently needed. Developing an execution plan can be tricky, however, because all business transactions involve a process of some kind and improvement of one process inevitably has a direct impact on several others. Here’s one possibility, suggested to me by a COO to whom I gave a copy of this book: Read the final chapter, Chapter 22, first. Its title is “Build Your Own Lean Learning Enterprise, Borrowing from the Toyota Way.” He thinks that will provide an appropriate framework within which to proceed from Gary Convis’ Foreword and Liker’s Preface to the conclusion of Chapter 21. That suggestion is worth consideration.