Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 3/18/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
Gary Keller with Jay Papasan
The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America, Third Edition
Warren Buffett; Edited by Lawrence A. Cunningham
Judgment On the Front Line: Why the Smartest Companies Trust their People to Make Real Decisions
Chris DeRose and Noel Tichy
INTERVIEWS
David Rock (the NeuroLeadership Institute) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
Capturing the Energy of Anese Cavanaugh
Glenn Burr
Inc. Small Giants Community (ISGC )
CONVERSATION AT THE EDGE with Joseph Henrich
Edge.org
Karl Weber
BOB
Exclusive Interview with Author Stan Phelps
Glenn Burr
Inc.
Mark Goulston and John Ullmen
BOB
COMMENTARIES
“Beyond corporate social responsibility: Integrated external engagement”
John Browne and Robin Nuttall
The McKinsey Quarterly
“Why Persuasion Doesn’t Require Manipulation”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“Stop Reinventing Disruption”
Maxwell Wessel
HBR
“Women on the home front: Debate over work-life balance continues”
Bernie D. Jones
From the Square (NYU Press Blog)
“The second step to brain mastery”
Nick Morgan
“Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling”
Emma Coats
“The New Aesthetic Resonates in Ferruccio Laviani’s Good Vibrations”
Janelle Zara
ARTINFO.com
“Some Things You Might Not Know About Sheryl Sandberg…But Lucky Us, We Got the Chance to Ask”
Sara Nelson
Amazon.com
“International Women’s Day 2013: Defining Success”
Accenture Global Research Results
“Why the Publishing Industry Isn’t Doomed: Readers’ Control In the Future of Reading”
Baratunde Thurston
Fast Company
“How to Survive Networking Events by Being Generous”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“Findings of Harvard Business School’s 2012 Survey on U.S. Competitiveness”
Michael E. Porter, Jan W. Rivkin, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter
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Blogging on Business Update: Week of 10/1/12
Here are some recent posts that may be of interest:
BOOK REVIEWs
The Strategy Book
Max Mckeown
Adaptability: The Art of Winning in an Age of Uncertainty
Max Mckeow
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Austin Kleon
Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World
Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche
INTERVIEWs
Max Mckeown (Agility)
John Perry (The Art of Procrastination)
Kevin Allen (The Hidden Agenda)
COMMENTARIES
“How to Make Sure You’re Solving the Right Problem”
HBR‘s Management Tip of the Day
“Why It’s Time to Rethink Recruitment”
Chris Gould
Talent Management
“New Research on Working Parenthood: Men Are More Egalitarian, Women are More Realistic”
Stewart Friedman
Harvard Business Review
“You Don’t Have To Be Loud to Lead”
Erika Andersen
Forbes
“How Business Schools Can Teach ‘Character 101′”
Warren Bennis
BloombergBusinessweek
“Deconstructing Executive Presence”
John Beeson
Harvard Business Review
“How to become more strategic: Three tips for any executive”
Michael Birshan and Jayanti Kar
The McKinsey Quarterly
“The Imperfect Balance Between Work and Life”
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Harvard Business Review
“Organizational health: The ultimate competitive advantage”
Scott Keller and Colin Price
The McKinsey Quarterly
You can check out these and all the other content by clicking here.
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Nine Do’s and Don’ts for Dealing with the Disgruntled
Rosabeth
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter 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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In a volatile world, anxiety and uncertainty make people a little testy.
Cranky people can drag everyone else down by spreading negativity and sowing seeds of doubt just when leaders need commitment. And when everyday crankiness is exacerbated by performance problems, then the merely grumpy can become disgruntled former employees out to do damage to the team.
Early in my career, when sharing a vacation house with a group of friends, I learned an important lesson from a classic book by anthropologist Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: It takes a lot of people cooperating to keep things neat, but it takes only one disgruntled dirt-monger to mess things up. The task for everyone else is not to let them.
This has become a favorite management insight as I advise bosses and boards. In one recent case, the chief financial officer of a small company was fired for possible expense account violations, and he was also seen as a poor strategist and weak team player. The former CFO did not go quietly. He consulted a lawyer, then went to a second and a third when the first one said he didn’t have a case. He rallied friends who sent emails to prominent customers about his grievance. Meanwhile, the CEO and new CFO had to raise capital and revenues to make up for the shortfall, which the disgruntled former CFO blamed on everyone else. His loud voice and tale of mistreatment threatened to topple the entire enterprise.
When faced with cranky, grumpy, or disgruntled people, these Do’s and Don’ts can be helpful.
[Here are five of the nine. To read the complete article, please click here.]
1. Don’t give them power. Don’t let their claims occupy disproportionate time and management attention. Have one person manage so that everyone else can continue the real work.
2. Do keep telling your positive story about the organization’s purpose, mission, goals, and accomplishments. Remind everyone about the big picture.
3. Don’t adopt an angry tone. Stay calm and professional. Don’t stoop to their level by telling juicy stories. Recent studies show that badmouthing makes the tale-teller look bad, in a boomerang effect.
4. Don’t tell their story for them. Don’t start meetings or conversations by rehashing the situation. Stick to a simple statement or two that acknowledges your sorrow that there are complaints. Don’t sound defensive. Don’t lend credibility by providing your answers to things that audiences might not know or care about.
5. Don’t assume that being right is enough. Having the facts on your side might be enough in a court of law, but it is not necessarily enough in the court of public opinion. Other people are convinced by your actions. They need to see that you operate by principles. They will judge your authenticity and consistency.
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Above all, do what’s right for the mission and stakeholders. Even in a volatile world that requires tough decisions, the best way to counter crankiness is through an inspiring, energizing purpose.
[Note: I cannot resist citing again what Herb Kelleher, former chairman and CEO of Southwest Airlines, said when explaining the airline’s spectacular success: "We take great care of our people, our people take great care of our customers, and our customers take great care of our shareholders."]
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Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Confidence and SuperCorp. Connect with her on Facebook or at Twitter.com/RosabethKanter.
Management Tips from Harvard Business Review: A book review by Bob Morris
Management Tips from Harvard Business Review
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (2011)
150 “tips”…almost unlimited “icebergs”
Here are 150 “Management Tips of the Day” that have been featured by the Harvard Business Review blog (http://blogs.hbr.org/). On average, each has a total word count of about 50 and is best viewed as a reminder rather than as a definitive answer to a business question or a definitive solution to a business problem.
Their primary sources are HBR articles and books published by HBR Press. Therefore, it is correct to assume that these sources are consistently of the highest quality in terms of the information, insights, and advice (usually three specific action steps to take) that are provided by world-class authorities in the given subject area.
The material is organized within three sections, each featuring 50 “tips”: Managing Yourself (listed on Pages 195-198), Managing Your Team (198-201), and Managing Your Business (202-205). I include the page references because those who read this brief commentary and have a specific management need (self, team, or business) will need them to locate the most relevant tip(s) by checking out what is available.
I hasten to add that all of the advice is practical, anchored in real-world experience, and of value to almost any manager, whatever her or his given circumstances may be. The “icebergs” to which the title of this review refers are, of course, the aforementioned primary sources. For example:
“Top Ten Ways to Find Joy at Work,” Rosabeth Moss Kanter
“Six Ways to Supercharge Your Productivity,” Tony Schwartz
“Learn to Embrace the Tension of Diversity,” Marshall Goldsmith
“How to Identify Your Employees’ Hidden Talents,” Steven DeMaio
“Why Most CEOs Are Bad at Strategy,” Roger Martin
“Innovate Like Chris Rock,” Peter Sims
I strongly recommend signing up for a free online subscription to the “Management Tips of the Day” series (http://blogs.hbr.org/). Each “tip” includes a link to its primary source.
Five Tips for Coping with Uncertainty — and Finding Opportunity
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter 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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Clouds of uncertainty hover over the Western world. The consequences are stalling action. Companies are sitting on piles of cash, several CEOs have told me, as they wait for a resolution to the U.S. debt crisis before deciding what and where to invest or whether to hire. Job creation is slow and unemployment high, leaving millions uncertain about their futures. Europeans wait for a resolution to financial woes from the south affecting the north, and in a safe, sane Nordic country, Norway, fear rises from a seemingly insane terrorist shooting that cost nearly a hundred lives. Safe harbors have uncertainty, too.Companies can make strategic choices once they know what conditions will apply — will laws change, will taxes be raised or lowered, will interest rates go up or down? You could be a CEO weighing factory location decisions in the U.S. or abroad, or a retail entrepreneur deciding where and when to open more stores. Waiting for decisions that provide a direction, any direction, can be paralyzing. Motivating people to try something new, or to get on with innovation, is tough when the rules of the game are up in the air. Uncertainty is one of the primary reasons that people resist change. People are relatively adaptable once they know what the situation is, like it or not.
Perfect clarity is not always possible, and leaders are not always in control of events. But that doesn’t mean all the action must stop. Here are five tips for managing under uncertainty.
[Actually, here are three. To read the complete article, please click here]
Provide certainty of process. Even if we can’t tell people what the outcome will be, we can provide clarity about when information will be provided. A calendar filled in with communication dates can reduce some of the anxiety of uncertainty. It’s good leadership to overcome reluctance to say “I don’t know,” and instead to engage people in discussion about the situation, letting them know when they’ll know. Emphasizing meaningful rituals is another tactic. To have some things that the community or family does together regularly, no matter what, increases the ability to get on with the action even if situations aren’t yet fully resolved.
Tackle maintenance and repair. Uncertain times, when some things are on hold, provide a good opportunity for fix-ups and clean-ups. Uncertainty makes it tempting to let things deteriorate (maybe we won’t keep this office going or live in this place any longer). But fixing things that can be improved represents productive action. For example, for job-seekers, embarking on a fitness regiment can add energy, lift spirits, and potentially make the person more attractive to a potential employer.
Let ideas flow. Opening the brainstorming faucet washes away some uncertainty. Since uncertainty leads to rampant gossip and speculation anyway, it can be a good time to harness imagination toward productive ends. Big companies have equally big planning departments, undoubtedly spewing out data files of alternative scenarios, but average workers and ordinary people can play, too. Brainstorming about possible futures stimulates imagination about what to do under nearly any circumstance. Will they or won’t they raise the debt ceiling? Will there be a law favoring green investments, or not — or should there be a push for one? Which newspapers are better weathering the digital revolution? How will retailing look different with or without lower unemployment? Seeds of innovation could sprout.
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Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Confidence and SuperCorp. Connect with her on Facebook or at Twitter.com/RosabethKanter.
3 Signs You Need to Broaden Your Focus
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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The lens through which leaders view the world can help or hinder their ability to make good decisions.
If your lens is too narrow, you risk making everything all about yourself or your team. While it can be helpful to see the fine points, you might be missing the big picture.
Here are three signs it might be time to zoom out:
You’re overwhelmed by details. Being too focused on small things can be overpowering. Ask yourself what really matters most and focus on that.
You put yourself first. A tight focus doesn’t leave room for others. Consider the needs of those around you.
You treat every situation as unique. Narrowly focused leaders tend to reinvent many wheels because they treat every project or issue separately. Look for similar situations to use as analogies and make your job easier.
Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Zoom In, Zoom Out” by Rosabeth Moss Kanter.
To read that article and join the discussion, please click here:
Business lessons to be learned from a video game, Angry Birds
Here is another excellent article featured online by the Drucker Exchange (DX) within the Drucker Institute at Claremont Business University.
To check out all the Institute’s resources and sign up for a free online newsletter, please click here.
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Peter Drucker liked to call himself a “social ecologist,” so perhaps he’d have been intrigued by the research now being conducted into a flock of angry birds.
Actually, what IT analyst Daniel Rasmus has been exploring is how lessons from the hugely popular video game Angry Birds can be applied to organizations.
Writing this week for CIO magazine, Rasmus came up with a list of 10 things that executives can learn from Angry Birds, including the need to recognize unique staff talents, develop varying tools for responding to diverse challenges and understand the value of innovation.
But we were taken, in particular, by Rasmus’s first lesson: “You have to play to figure out the rules.”
“The only way one learns how to defeat a level in Angry Birds is to play,” he writes. “The same is true of technology. CIOs need to keep in mind that if they don’t engage with emerging technology and allow people to use it in the context of actual work, no one will learn its limitations, its risks or the opportunities it presents.”
This notion stood out to us because here at the Drucker Institute one of our driving principles is to stimulate companies, nonprofits and government agencies to get beyond ideas and good intentions, and move on to action. As Drucker wrote in his 1973 book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices: “Unless objectives are converted into action, they are not objectives; they are dreams.”
[Note: More than a century ago, Thomas Edison observed, “Vision without execution is hallucination.”]
Rosabeth Moss Kanter echoed the concept in her Harvard Business Review blog post this week, where she listed compelling reasons why action always trumps inertia. “Companies heading downhill have passive cultures,” she says. “Unmade decisions pile up. Opportunities are lost. No one wants to risk making a mistake. It becomes easier to sit out than get into the game.”
Kanter’s ideas are rooted in her study of businesses and sports teams. These principles, she concludes, “reflect a can-do philosophy that is essential for any entrepreneur…The only way to activate potential is to support action.”
The trouble is, Drucker explained in The Effective Executive, “many policy statements, especially of business . . . contain no action commitment.”
What about the organizations you see: Which are good at moving beyond the drawing board, and which seem to routinely get paralyzed? What accounts for this difference?
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To check out all the resources at the Drucker Institute and sign up for its free online newsletter, please click here.
Cultivate a Culture of Confidence
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter for the Harvard Business Review‘s “The Conversation” series. 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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Even for the best companies and most-accomplished professionals, long track records of success are punctuated by slips, slides, and mini-turnarounds. Even the team that wins the game might make mistakes, fumble, and lag behind for part of it. That’s why the ability to recover quickly and get back on course is so important.
Troubles are ubiquitous. Surprises can fall from the sky like volcanic ash and appear to change everything. New ventures can begin with great promise and still face unexpected obstacles, unanticipated delays, and critics that pop up at the wrong moment. That’s why I coined Kanter’s Law: “Anything can look like a failure in the middle.”
Nothing succeeds for long without considerable effort and constant vigilance. Winning streaks end for predictable reasons: Strategies run their course. New competition emerges to take on the industry leader. Ideas get dusty. Technology marches on. Complacency sets in, making people feel entitled to success rather than motivated to work for it.
Thus, a key factor in high achievement is bouncing back from the low points. Long-term winners often face the same problems as long-term losers, but they respond differently, as I found in the research for my book Confidence.
I compared companies and sports teams with long winning streaks and long losing streaks, and then looked at how leaders led turnarounds from low to high performance.
Consider first the pathologies of losing. Losing produces temptations to behave in ways that make it hard to recover fast enough—and could even make the situation worse. For example, panicking and throwing out the game plan. Scrambling for self-protection and abandoning the rest of the group. Hiding the facts and hoping that things will get better by themselves before anyone notices. Denying that there is anything to learn or change. Using decline as an excuse to let facilities or investments deteriorate.
The culture and support system that surrounds high performers helps them avoid these temptations. They can put troubles in perspective because they are ready for them. They rehearse through diligent practice and preparation; they remain disciplined and professional. Their leaders put facts on the table and review what went right or wrong in the last round, in order to shore up strengths and pinpoint weaknesses and to encourage personal responsibility for actions. They stress collaboration and teamwork—common goals; commitment to a joint vision; respect and support for team members, so when someone drops the ball, someone else is there to pick it up—and responsibility for mentoring, so the best performers lift everyone’s capabilities. They seek creative ideas for improvement and innovation, favoring widespread dialogue and brainstorming.
Resilience is not simply an individual characteristic or a psychological phenomenon. It is helped or hindered by the surrounding system. Teams that are immersed in a culture of accountability, collaboration, and initiative are more likely to believe that they can weather any storm. Self-confidence, combined with confidence in one another and in the organization, motivates winners to make the extra push that can provide the margin of victory.
The lesson for leaders is clear: Build the cornerstones of confidence—accountability, collaboration, and initiative—when times are good and achievement comes easily. Maintain a culture of confidence as insurance against the inevitable downturns. And while no one should deliberately seek failure, remember that performance under pressure—the ability to stay calm, learn, adapt, and keep on going—separates winners from losers.
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Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds Harvard Business School’s Arbuckle Professorship and specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership. Her latest book is SuperCorp (Crown, 2009)
Four Reasons Any Action Is Better than None
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Rosabeth Moss Kanter for the Harvard Business Review blog (March 28, 2011). To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.
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Of course, sitting still can be a good thing if it involves renewal, reflection, and focused attention (or having meals with the family). But sitting still can be a bad thing if it involves procrastination, indecision, and passivity.
Companies heading downhill have passive cultures. Unmade decisions pile up. Opportunities are lost. No one wants to risk making a mistake. It becomes easier to sit it out than get into the game. One of my favorite examples involves the backwater bank in which employees would send customers who had complicated problems to the rival bank across the street, rather than try to do anything.
In contrast, in companies with high levels of innovation, people take initiative. They start new things. They don’t wait to be told. They get routine work done efficiently in order to free up the time to get involved in something new. Here are some of the reasons.
Small wins matter. Small wins pave the way for bigger wins. A nudge in the right direction, as Cass Sunstein and the new behavioral economists tell us, can lead to major tipping points (per Malcolm Gladwell) when you achieve critical mass. As I saw in my study of business turnarounds and sports teams, confidence — the expectation of a positive outcome that motivates high levels of effort — is built on one win at a time.
Accomplishments come in pieces. A journey of a thousand miles is daunting. The single step with which the journey begins is manageable. Every step you take now adds up by getting that much closer to a goal. Busy people in high-productivity environments tend to take just one more action, return one more phone call, set one more thing in motion before calling it quits for the day. By tomorrow, new demands will start piling up. Mental tricks like dividing big tasks into numerous small steps make it possible to identify immediate actions to get big things off the ground.
Perfection is unattainable anyway. Forget perfection. Just do it. So what if you’re wrong? You can always try again. In an uncertain world of rapid change, business strategy includes room for improvisation. Live by some classic slogans: Best is the enemy of good. (Don’t wait for perfect conditions.) Nothing ventured, nothing gained. (It takes a little risk to get rewards.)
Actions produce energy and momentum. It simply feels better to take action than sitting around navel-gazing and getting sluggish. Overwork can bring stress, but, in fact, many studies show that the important factor in work stress is lack of control. Identifying a positive action is a way to feel in control. Getting moving doesn’t drain energy; it tends to build energy. For people trying to solve the national obesity epidemic, or just to lose a few pounds, exercise is more fun than dieting.
These principles represent more than management tips. They reflect a can-do philosophy that is essential for any entrepreneur or any place that wants more entrepreneurs. The only way to activate potential is to support action.
Sometimes it doesn’t seem easy. Organizational cultures, autocratic bosses, uncooperative co-workers, long losing streaks, the uncertainty of shifting industry conditions, and big world events like natural disasters and revolutions can stop people in their tracks. But those who emerge triumphant, and get the most done anyway, are the people who would rather take action, any action, than wait around.
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Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Confidence and SuperCorp.
Connect with her on Facebook or at Twitter.com/RosabethKanter.
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