The Decision to Trust: A book review by Bob Morris

The Decision to Trust: How LEADERS Creat High-Trust Organizations
Robert F. Hurley
Jossey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint (2012)

How and why in most (if not all) workplaces, everything of value starts with trust and stops without it.

Obviously, a decision to trust anyone and anything is based on factors that vary from one person to another, from one situation to another. In this book, Robert F. Hurley’s purpose is to explain “why some people, groups, organizations, and institutions have been able to defy the overall trend of declining trust – how they have created trust even in environments where change, uncertainty, and risk exist.” Indeed, given the trend to which Hurley refers, the even greater importance of trustworthiness is good news for those who have earned it and bad news for those who haven’t. Hurley introduces the Decision to Trust Model (DTM) that can be used to make better trust more understandable and manageable and explains how to

o   Make better decisions about who and what to trust
o   Allocate trust-building energy by appreciating how others make trust decisions
o   Identify the root cause of trust issues
o   Offer concrete interventions and reforms that enhance trust
o   Identify in which situations trust can and can’t be developed
o   Establish and enhance trust at different levels and to varying extent

It should be emphasized that, with appropriate modifications, the DTM has almost unlimited applications. Its potential value is incalculable.  Hurley suggests six (6) reasons for the decline of trust (Pages 16-21) and then explains how it manifests itself at different levels: individual (i.e. people don’t trust each other), structural (i.e. departments don’t trust other departments), and cultural (i.e. distrust pervades throughout the given enterprise). “In high-trust collectives, people and groups are invited to move beyond their narrow self-interests and commit to common goals. They aren’t excessively distracted by the need to protect themselves from others’ self-promoting agendas.” It is worth noting that trust is the primary measure by which The Great Place to Work® Institute selects the annual list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” published by Fortune magazine.

In Chapter 2, Hurley identifies and discusses what he characterizes as “Ten Essential Elements of Trust.” There are three trustor factors (i.e. risk tolerance, psychological adjustment, and relative power) that are the result of “a complex mix of personality culture, and experience and account for the fact that building trust takes more time and effort than it does for others.”  There are seven situational factors (i.e. security, similarities, alignment of interests, benevolent concern, capability, predictability and integrity, and communication” that trustees can most effectively address and influence in order to gain the trust the confident reliance – of trustors.”

In most (if not all) workplaces, everything of value begins with trust and goes nowhere without it. Hurley explains both how and why by citing dozens of real-world situations throughout his lively narrative.  We all know that trust is earned over time and must be nourished by behavior worthy of it but trust can be lost in an instant. Hence the importance of the Decision to Trust Model (DTM) that offers two substantial benefits: It provides a structure and methodology by which to make better trust decisions, and, it creates a context, a frame-of-reference within which to determine the nature and impact of those decisions. Readers will also appreciate the Trust Diagnosis Worksheet” in Appendix B as well as Hurley’s review of “Some Trust Interventions to Build Trust” in Appendix C that include strategies to (1) address orientation to trustee, (2) facilitate appropriate risk in relationships, (3) prevent coercion, and (4) redistribute power at the interpersonal and group levels.

Simple. Keep it simple. Know What to Leave Out – (Insight from Tony Bennett & Steve Jobs)

Everywhere we turn, the message of “simple” screams out at us.  And this weekend, I heard and read that message reinforced time and again.

On Saturday, Scott Simon interviewed Tony Bennett.  Here is a great slice of that interview:

SIMON: Who do you think you can put into a song in your 80s that you couldn’t in your 30s or 40s?
BENNETT: The business of knowing what to leave out. That happens with age. Less is more. And it becomes more of a performance. It tugs the listeners’ heart by knowing that it’s just in the right pocket, right in the right groove.

(Read and/or listen to the full interview, Tony Bennett’s Art of Intimacy, here).

The essence of “simple” is knowing “what to leave out.”

The other source, of course, is the ongoing bombardment of insight about and from Steve Jobs, following his death.  The touching read of the weekend was his sister’s eulogy: A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs by Mona Simpson.  In case you have been living under a rock, the accomplished novelist Mona Simpson is the sister Steve Jobs did not know he had for the first part of his life.  They met when she was 25, and according to the new Walter Isaacson book, they bonded deeply, and immediately.

Her eulogy reveals so much about his love and commitment to “simple.”  Here are a few revealing excerpts:

(Steve) was the opposite of absent-minded.
Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With just the right, recently snipped, herb.
I spoke to him every other day or so, but when I opened The New York Times and saw a feature on the company’s patents, I was still surprised and delighted to see a sketch for a perfect staircase.
Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit.
But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.
Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.
Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.
Steve’s final words were:
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

Simple sketches.  Simple designs  Simple words.

We know his work as the triumph of simple design.  You buy a computer from Apple, and the booklet for set-up is all images.  No words.  So simple, even I can do it.

Simple.  Keep it simple.  Know what to leave out.

Lynn Blodgett (ACS, a Xerox company) in “The Corner Office”

Lynn Blodgett (Photo Credit: Librado Romero/NYT)

Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Lynn Blodgett, president and chief executive of ACS, an I.T. services subsidiary of Xerox. He says that even in huge organizations, it’s important to have employees at all levels feel “accountable for profits, revenue and customer satisfaction.”

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

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In a Big Company, Make Everyone an Entrepreneur

Bryant: What were some early lessons for you?

Blodgett: I come from a family of nine kids — six boys and three girls. Because it was a large family, we didn’t have a lot. One of the things that we did every Christmas was that my parents would say we had to earn our Christmas money. And so they were the venture capitalists.  They’d give us $5, and then we would go buy wholesale wrapping paper and take orders and resell them and turn that $5 into $25.

It was a great thing, because you learned about customers, learned about keeping your word, getting the orders delivered on time.

Bryant: What about your first kind of formal management role?

Blodgett: We worked for my parents, and I did kind of supervisory things there, and then worked for the company that bought my parents’ business and actually ended up running that business.

Bryant: What was the company?

Blodgett: My parents started a computer business back in the ’60s and grew that into a nice little regional business.  There’s a story behind that. Earlier, my mother worked for the phone company and worked at night, and she had a baby daughter, her seventh child — her name was Nancy. When she was four months old, her heart stopped. And I was 10 years old. I grabbed her and went to my brother, who was 12, and we got her to this clinic and they got her heart started again.  But she had a lot of brain damage from that, so she had to have somebody taking care of her and feeding her all of the time. [She died at 13 from cardiac arrest.]   My mother wanted to work, but she needed to be at home, and so she leased a key punch machine, put it in my sister’s bedroom and started to do data entry, and that’s where many of the principles that we operate on today were formed — how to compensate people, data controls and process control.

All the kids in our family learned data-entry key punching in my sister’s bedroom, literally at my mom’s knee.  We grew up on a computer farm, as my parents called it, because it was back in the ’60s and it was one of those rare moments when, as key punch machines evolved into computers and our business grew, we were able to associate with these brilliant people from M.I.T. and Harvard. It was a wonderful education.

Bryant: You mentioned that you ran your parents’ business after it was sold. How old were you, and how many employees did you have?

Blodgett: I was 27, and we had close to 1,000.

Bryant: How did you handle that big leap into management?

Blodgett: You know, I just used a lot of the stuff we really kind of formulated back in my sister’s bedroom.  We eventually had a key punch machine in each of our bedrooms, so the trick question was, well, how do you pay the kids?  Because if you pay hourly, you’re going to have to have a lot of verification and that kind of thing.  So they came up with an incentive system that was essentially self-policing.  I believe that a really important management principle is that if you get the incentives aligned, people will motivate themselves far better than you’ll ever motivate them. But, again, you have to get the incentives right.

Bryant: Just the financial incentives?

Blodgett: It’s not only financial.  It’s being able to feel like they have a level of control over their destiny, that they are valued in what they do, that they’re being successful, that they’re contributing.  Those things are actually probably more important than the money.  But you’ve got to get the money right, too.

Bryant: So how did it work in your house with the key punch machines?

Blodgett: I was terrible. I’ve never been a good typist. But all my brothers and one of my sisters were exceptional.  So my brothers resented me for getting paid the same as they did even though they did three times as much. Pretty soon my mom and dad both said: “Well, we have to make this more fair. We have to tie it more to what you do.” And because it’s a computer, it can provide all the evidence of the work — productivity and quality — that’s accomplished.

What happened with that incentive program was that I learned very quickly that that was not for me. I was never going to make any money doing that job. And so this notion of self-nominating is crucial in management. If you can get a person to self-select, that’s a lot better than a supervisor having to come and say “You know, Lynn, you’re just not good.”

So, very early on, I got out of the key punch business because I was no good, and I became the delivery guy. I started to learn how to deal with people. And that’s why management and sales and raising money and all that stuff became something I migrated to. I’m thankful for that, because if I had just been paid the same, I might have stuck in there and been kind of the C performer for a long time.  Instead, I got out of it.  My brothers were A performers.  And they went more of a technical route in their lives, and I ended up taking more of a managerial and finance route.

Bryant: What are some other principles that were set early on that have continued to this day?

Blodgett: Getting everybody’s interests aligned on the same side of the table, including the client’s, is key. Because that’s not normally how it is. You have the client with their objectives.  You have the employee with their objectives.  And then you’re over here trying to make nice with everybody.

Bryant: Other key principles?

Blodgett: I think that the more direct the accountability, the greater the performance. I remember how it was when I was starting out. We had an investor, and we were just teeny. We were doing about $30,000 a month or so in business. ACS is almost $8 billion in annual revenue, so it’s a little more complex. But you know what?  The principle is the same.  When I was responsible for that little business, I had my bar charts, and I’d color them in every day. That’s how I kept track, and I knew that if I didn’t make my number, it was my responsibility. Well, what we’ve done is we’ve said: “O.K, how can we create that entrepreneurial drive deep into a large organization?  How do you do that?” *     *     *

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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his new book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.

Dan Roam: Second Interview, by Bob Morris

Dan Roam

“I believe that any problem can be solved with a picture. And that anybody can draw it.”

Dan Roam is the author of two international bestsellers, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures, both published by Portfolio Trade, a Penguin imprint.  The former was selected as Business Week and Fast Company’s best innovation book of the year, and was Amazon’s #5 selling business book of 2008. The Back of the Napkin has been published in 25 languages and is a bestseller in Japan, South Korea, and China. Portfolio also published his latest book, Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work (November, 2011)

Roam has helped leaders at Microsoft, eBay, Google, Wal-Mart, Boeing, Lucas Fims, Gap, Kraft, Stanford University, The MIT Sloan School of Management, the US Navy, and the United States Senate solve complex problems through visual thinking. Dan and his whiteboard have appeared on CBS, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, Fox News, and NPR. His visual explanation of American health care was selected by BusinessWeek as “The World’s Best Presentation of 2009″. This inspired the White House Office of Communications to invite him in for a discussion on visual problem solving.

Here is an excerpt from my second interview of Dan. To read the complete interview, please click here.

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Morris: Before discussing Blah Blah Blah, a few general questions. First, for those who have not as yet read one or both of the “napkin” books, please explain why using relatively simple drawings can have great impact when we attempt to answer a question, solve a problem, persuade others to agree, or to express the essence of an important concept.

Roam: When we see an idea clearly illustrated right in front of us, much more of our mind lights up than if we were just talking about it. With simple and clear pictures, we see more, understand more, and share more than words alone ever could. As humans, we are essentially walking, talking “vision” machines. Three-quarters of all the sensory neurons in our brain are dedicated to processing vision, and in the first four months after we’re born almost all brain development in takes place in those areas that process vision and movement.

From the time we are infants, we know how important sight is to understanding the world around us and guiding us safely through it. What is a shame is how quickly we forget that once we enter school. We spend years perfecting the tools of spoken but we don’t spend two days learning to understand how we SEE. The essential point is this: if we really want someone to understand what we’re talking about, we should actually talk less – and draw more.

Morris: The hieroglyphics on cave walls pre-date the earliest attempts at a verbal language. So the insights you share in the two Napkin books have been common knowledge for at least several million years?

Roam: The oldest drawings ever found are located deep in the Chauvet Cave in south-central France. These paintings of horses, bison, and bulls date back 32,000 years. In the entire sweep of recorded human history, these beautiful images represent the beginning of the “whoosh.” We don’t know anything about the early humans that created these images, but we do know they could draw extremely well. These are the earliest markings ever made by humanity, and they are sketched more wonderfully than most of us could do today.

Morris: Relatively simple drawings can be a great resource for brain storming sessions because almost anyone can draw without possessing highly-developed drawing skills. However, what Tom Kelley characterizes as “ideation” [begin italics] does [end italics] require them. Don’t people have to have something worth communicating, first?

Roam: We all have ideas we believe are worth communicating, and we have them all the time – which is precisely why so many of us talk so much. Those ideas may not be fully developed, we may be uncertain of them, and they may be complex or controversial, but we typically have no shortage of them. And that is why drawing them out – even in the most crude circles-boxes-and-arrows manner – is such a great idea. Drawing out our thoughts forces us to clarify them, look at them from multiple perspectives, and think them through in a vibrant way.

Morris: Since the publication of the two Napkin books, presumably you have received a blizzard of feedback from those who read one or both of them. Of all that you have learned from what your readers have shared, what do you consider to be most valuable? Why?

Roam: I have received thousands of comments from readers over the past three years. The most frequent involve a reader sharing a moment of pictorial  discovery, either in a meeting that was saved when someone went up to the whiteboard and drew the idea that clarified everything, or when they completed a difficult sale by drawing out the solution for all to see. Without a doubt, I have learned the most from readers who had never drawn and, thanks to my books, decided to give it a try. The sense of discovery and enthusiasm that permeates these notes illuminates visual possibilities that I had never considered myself. I always knew pictures made things clearer to me; it is electrifying to see how common that is even among people who never considered themselves “visual.”

Morris: From which sources did you learn the most about what the mind is and does, in general, and what the verbal and visual minds do, in particular?

Roam: I have read, studied, participated in, and discussed with experts three different approaches to understanding the mind. First, I took an academic approach to understanding the mind: in university I studied biology and I was fascinated with the evolutionary development of the human brain, and more recently I consulted with vision scientists and neurobiologists at leading universities. Second, I took an applied approach: I studied meditation for four weeks in a Thai monastery (including spending one week in silent isolation), I participated in cognitive behavioral therapy sessions to see how my mind reacted to various situations and I participated in extensive psychodynamic therapy sessions to try to see why. Third, I took an intuitive approach: I simply monitored myself in hundreds of business meetings and noted when I and other people seemed to be understanding each other and when we did not – and then noted what we were talking about and how we approached it.

Morris: What are the defining characteristics of “vivid thinking”

Roam: “Vivid Thinking” is a mnemonic. Vi-V-id stands for Visual-Verbal-Interdependent thinking. It is a simple idea that says we haven’t really thought through an idea until we have both talked about it and looked at it, and that we can’t really explain an idea until we can both write about it and draw it. Vivid thinking does not accept that an either/or verbal-vs-visual approach ever fully illuminates an idea; on the contrary Vivid Thinking demands that we must exercise both our verbal and visual minds in concert if we really wish to understand an idea. Talk + look; write +draw = Vivid.

Morris: By what process can vivid thinking be strengthened?

Roam: Like anything we do, Vivid Thinking becomes strengthened through practice. For all its successes, our educational system has in fact allowed us to become lazy thinkers. By relying almost entirely on our verbal mind, we have taught ourselves to shut our visual mind down and to denigrate its importance. My goal in “Blah-Blah-Blah” is to introduce a set of simple tools and rules that reawaken our visual mind and kick it back into gear.

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Here is an excerpt from my second interview of Dan. To read the complete interview, please click here.

He cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:

http://www.danroam.com/

http://www.slideshare.net/danroam

http://www.slideshare.net/danroam

I also urge you to check out these videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri8E8cNf2Bw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuA_yz7aTo0

How to Engage Your People

 

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.

Engaged employees are essential to a manager’s success.

Without subordinates who care about, participate in, and take ownership over the work, even the best boss will flounder.

Here are three ways to win your employees’ engagement:

1. Be modest. Share both your mistakes and your successes. Subordinates will see that you’re both human and don’t have anything to prove.

2. Show that you’re listening. People tune in to body language. Manage where you look and what you do with your hands so that employees know you’re paying attention.

3. Don’t have all the answers. Managers should catalyze problem solving. Be willing to admit that you don’t know what the answer is and invite your team to toss around ideas.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “How to Cultivate Engaged Employees” by Charalambos A. Vlachoutsicos.

To read that article and join the discussion, please click here.

Also, be sure to check out the new book Management Tips from Harvard Business Review, based on HBR’s Management Tip of the Day.

When It Isn’t Just Business

Here is a recent article from the Drucker Exchange (the Dx), an online resource that hosts an ongoing conversation about 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 and build on the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management. To learn more about the Dx and the Institute as well as to check out their resources and sign up for a free subscription to its online newsletter, please click here.

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Ever since Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble partnered up and launched an ill-fated private detective business, negotiating personal relationships within a work setting has proven tricky. The latest evidence comes in the form of a resignation by Liam Fox, Britain’s defense secretary. Fox resigned, according to a recent Wall Street Journal, “amid an intensifying controversy” over a friend who was alleged to have acted as an unofficial adviser.

“Mr. Fox’s relationship with Adam Werritty has been under intense scrutiny in recent days,” the Journal reported, “after the defense minister acknowledged that his former housemate and best man at his wedding attended several official meetings and used a business card that described himself as an adviser—a role he doesn’t hold.” Fox, for his part, conceded that he’d allowed his personal and business interests “to become blurred.”

Peter Drucker well understood the power of workplaces to create a sense of community—and to foster friendship. “Work, since time immemorial, has been the means to satisfy man’s need for belonging to a group and for a meaningful relationship to others of his kind,” Drucker wrote in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Challenges. “A man can work very well with somebody whom he never sees away from the job, and for whom he feels neither friendship nor warmth nor liking. . . . But the fellow worker can also be a close friend with whom one spends as many hours away from work as possible, with whom one goes hunting or fishing, spends one’s vacation, spends one’s evenings, and shares much of one’s life.”

Where Drucker drew the line, however, was in the realm of superiors becoming too chummy with subordinates. “Men who build first-class executive teams are not usually close to their immediate colleagues and subordinates,” Drucker noted in The Effective Executive. “Picking people for what they can do rather than on personal likes or dislikes, they seek performance, not conformance. To insure this outcome, they keep a distance between themselves and their close colleagues.”

The quintessential example of an executive who maintained such a distance was Alfred Sloan, the longtime head of General Motors. “Sloan had no friends within the GM group,” Drucker wrote. “He never invited them to his home. Unless it was a business meeting with a clear business agenda, he did not even sit down to a meal with any of them. He never accepted an invitation to any of their homes, even on business trips to their hometowns.” To be a chief executive, Sloan felt, was “incompatible with friendship and social relations.”

 

 

10 Forces Shaping the Workplace of the Future

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Daniel W. Rasmus for Talent Management magazine. To check out all the resources and sign up for a free subscription to the TM and/or Chief Learning Officer magazines published by MedfiaTec, please click here.

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Tomorrow’s organizations may bear little resemblance to those we are familiar with, as demographic shifts, globalization and technology replace traditional work practices.

Coaching and development are important regardless of geography, but given the dynamics within emerging markets, and the workplace changes organizations can expect in the future, it is even more critical to offer this support to retain employees.

In the future, talent leaders will find themselves managing fewer standardized assumptions and practices that can be benchmarked, as more emergent and fluid models force them to constantly adapt. The traditional, smooth intersecting processes of recruiting, on-boarding, developing and retirement that make up the hire-to-retire cycle will be supplemented by additional entry and exit points. During the next decade, we may find the hire-to-retire cycle itself should be retired, as new models of work and work relationships outpace traditional employment.

Here are [four of] 10 concepts that will shape tomorrow’s organizations.

[To read the complete article, please click here.]

Transparency and trust: As organizations pull out of the Great Recession, they may find their reputations as reliable employers permanently tarnished by layoffs and a slow return to hiring. Boomers may feel it is time to call in promises made against frozen wages and other concessions. Employers that articulate and demonstrate accountability to their promises will be the most likely to attract and retain talent.

“Authenticity and transparency, aka honesty and truthfulness, are the new communication standards for the future,” said Sara Roberts, co-author of Light Their Fire and president/CEO of Roberts Golden, an organizational change consulting firm. “In a WikiLeaks era, privacy is an elusive goal. While it’s always been unbecoming and costly to be caught in a lie, the risk of false or partial disclosure is even greater now. The discovery of the truth can be accomplished in the push of a button. Honesty is a good policy not just because we’re forced to do it in this Internet era, but also because telling the truth demonstrates respect for one’s audience and gains people’s trust.

Out-tasking: Outsourcing is passe, but it will continue. Outsourcing will be joined by out-tasking, which farms out small projects and tasks to specialists and generalists. Budgeting, managing and vetting out-taskers will become a critical skill as options increase, coordination costs rise and the impact on the organization in terms of dollars and people involved escalates. Organizations will need to evaluate risks associated with agreements with individuals who they may never meet. Making sense of online reputations will be a new core competency.

Contracting: Contractors are no longer independent entities. They will be seen as extensions of the firm. Organizations will need to understand their competencies, value-alignment, reputation and other intangible attributes. With social media, association will become more transparent, so managing the relationship between a firm and its contractors may involve public relations and legal, as BP recently discovered with Transocean, its platform operator during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Contract-to-hire: Contract-to-hire may provide the balance between renting talent and filling a role. With knowledge becoming more specialized, contracting makes sense because the contract firm can offer better competency development models, career paths and mentorships than an organization’s occasional need for a particular role. If an organization wants to test a new market, experiment with a new technology or evaluate the difference between insourcing and outsourcing, hiring a contractor may be the best answer. Consider a new “high-touch” retail experience that requires different skills than the existing retail staff possesses. With contract-to-hire, specialists in applying high technology to work-life balance could help people determine not just the functional comparison of devices, but how best to integrate them into their lives. If this idea works, contractors who do it well would be offered jobs. If it doesn’t work, the company has localized and minimized its risk.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Daniel W. Rasmus is a strategist, industry analyst and author of Management by Design.

 

Steve Jobs Took Things Seriously

Serious:  not joking or trifling; being in earnest

————-

Here’s a simple truth about Steve Jobs.  He took things very seriously.

Every task; every word; every presentation; every-thing.  Though he made his presentations fun, you got the distinct impression that they were very important to him.  He took them seriously.

Where did this come from?  Where did this trait, and this practice, come from?

I have read the first couple of chapters of the new Steve Jobs book by Walter Isaacson.  (I hope to present my synopsis at the January First Friday Book Synopsis).  This paragraph grabbed me.  When he was six or seven years old, he told a girl who lived across the street that he was adopted.

“So, does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?”  “Lightning bolts went off in my head, according to Jobs.  “I remember running into the house, crying.  And my parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’  They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye.  They said, “We specifically picked you out.’  Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me.  And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.”  (emphasis added).

We will spend a lot of time, and read a lot of pages, trying to figure out what made Steve Jobs Steve Jobs.  But there is little doubt as to what he was.  He was a serious, curious, creative one-of-a-kind multi-hit wonder.  I’ve long thought that curious and creative were the critical traits.  I think “serious” might be the trait I had not yet grasped, or seen… It might be the true foundation for all the other traits.  (But, I’ve got a lot more to read…).

The Velocity Manifesto: A book review by Bob Morris

The Velocity Manifesto: Harnessing Technology, Vision, and Culture to Future-Proof Your Organization
Scott Klososky
Greenlead Book Group (2011)

Digital plumbing + high-beam strategy + high-velocity culture = business success (however defined)

Almost immediately, Scott Klososky establishes and then sustains a direct, personal, and at times almost confrontational rapport with his reader. Clearly he cares passionately about “harnessing technology, vision, and culture to future-proof” as many organizations as he can. Heaven knows, the challenges that business leaders face today are numerous and daunting: Fewer than 30% of employees (on average) are actively and productively engaged in a U.S. workplace and an even lower percentage of C-level executives with supervisory responsibilities can identify what their organization’s primary strategy is, much less determine the nature and extent of its progress to achieve its ultimate objectives, whatever they may be. There seems to be little doubt that a majority of organizations cannot compete successfully now, much less be well-prepared to compete in years to come. Klososky’s sense of urgency is wholly justified.

He explains that his book addresses three key areas in which business leaders must develop expertise: Digital Plumbing (thoroughly discussed in Part One, Chapters 2-8), High-Beam Strategy (Part Two, Chapters 9-13), and Creating a Culture of Velocity (Part Three, Chapters 14-20). “Fail in the first area and your organization will not be able to compete with companies that have done a better job than you at technology implementation. Fail in the second area, and your organization will wander around, lost. Fail in the third area, and you will nit have the team you need to accomplish your organizational goals.” To help his reader to avoid these failures, Klososky

o  Explains how to develop specific leadership skills
o Introduces new concepts and processes by which to leverage technology (i.e. “digital plumbing”)
o Explains how “trendspotting” can help to predict or at least anticipate the future more accurately
o Also explains how to take full advantage of them with “a portfolio of targeted investments”
o And then in Part Three, he discusses the cultural changes that drive organizations today

In the Introduction, Klososky duly warns his reader, “Get ready for a wild ride.” Although he is probably referring to the high-velocity, zero-BS narrative that awaits, the warning could also apply to the challenges and perils that leaders of all organizations are certain to encounter in months and years to come. Her offers a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective “action plan” and urges his reader to apply – “and apply hard.”

Klososky inserts several excellent quotations throughout the book and one of the most valuable is an observation by Alvin Toffer: “The illiterate of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” With all due respect to the abundance of information, insights, and recommendations in this book, they are essentially worthless if those who read this book (a) don’t get, (b) overcome what James O’Toole characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom” so they can think differently with new perspectives (e.g. how to leverage high technology more effectively), and/or (c) determine how to apply what they have learned from the book. Presumably Klososky agrees with Thomas Edison: “Vision without execution is hallucination.”

10 Funniest Commercials of All Time

"Where's the beef?"

Sure, humor is subjective—but some advertising over the years has been undeniably hilarious. Featured in an article by Tim Nudd in the June 20, 2011, issue of AdWeek magazine, here are its editors’ picks for the 10 funniest mainstream commercials ever made (none of that “banned” European stuff), stretching from the ’80s until  today. Yes, they left out about 17 million other ads, probably including your favorite. Leave your objections and insults—along with your favorite funny ads—in the comments section.

To watch any/all of the commercials, please click here.