Malcolm Gladwell’s “greatest triumph”

Although I have never met Malcolm Gladwell, I have exchanged quite a few emails with him over the years, during which time I have read and reviewed all of his books. I have also read most of his arricles for The New Yorker, many of them reprinted in his books.

Here is a blog post that offers an insight or two into the man, not the author of bestsellers.

*     *     *

Gladwell on the right

Sorry. I can’t resist. John Carson, a fellow runner from Canada, unearthed this photo from the archives of the Toronto Star. It’s the finals of the 1500 meters at the Ontario 14-year-old championships, many many years ago. The runner on the left is Dave Reid, who was the greatest Canadian miler of his generation. I will only say this: in this particular race, Reid placed second. I “retired” from competitive running a year later, in large part because I realized that the particular statistical fluke represented by me beating Dave Reid was unlikely to ever be repeated. (For the runners out there, I believe I ran something like 4:05.)

*     *     *

Author’s Bio: I’m a writer for The New Yorker magazine, and the author of four books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and Outliers: The Story of Success. My latest book, What the Dog Saw is a compilation of stories published in The New Yorker. I was born in England, and raised in southwestern Ontario in Canada. Now I live in New York City.

My great claim to fame is that I’m from the town where they invented the BlackBerry. My family also believes (with some justification) that we are distantly related to Colin Powell. I invite you to look closely at the photograph above and draw your own conclusions.

Sharon Daniels on how to retain a workforce that wants to quit

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Sharon Daniels for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

*     *     *

In each of the past three months, more employees quit their jobs than were terminated, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics [click here]. This is good news for the economy but bad for individual businesses: when jobs become more plentiful, the first to exit are often the business’s most ambitious employees — the innovators, the risk-takers, the future leaders. The cost of replacing an employee is estimated at up to 250 percent of annual salary [click here].

An AchieveGlobal survey [click here] of 738 managers revealed that about one in four employees planned to leave their jobs within a year. A study reported in the May issue of Harvard Business Review [click here] revealed that 12% of high-potential employees were actively searching for a new job.

Why are employees walking away from their jobs, even with unemployment still hovering near 10 percent? Our studies show that the three biggest reasons are a lack of growth opportunities, dissatisfaction with compensation, and employees feeling their contributions aren’t being recognized. Growth and recognition are particularly important to younger workers, who have higher expectations of their employers than others do and are defecting in large numbers.

Regrettably, too many managers unwittingly encourage employees to walk out because they regard them as replaceable cogs in a wheel. The key to retaining valued employees is to manage them person-to-person rather than with one-size-fits-all management. Every employee marches to a different drummer; successful managers don’t make them parade in lockstep. Here are two keys for managing person-to-person:

•    Personalize the position. Not everybody wants to manage people. Don’t force a brilliant solo performer to do it. Let those with bean counter personalities count the beans and let free spirits become free of boring tasks. Not everybody likes to travel. Don’t put those employees into sales or service jobs that cover large territories. Understand employees’ preferences before you create a team.

When you set up training programs, ask employees to identify the strengths they want to develop and weaknesses to shore up. Ask employees to suggest special projects they’ll find interesting; they can provide valuable ideas for the business. All this is increasingly possible as work becomes more specialized and there’s less need for can-do-everything employees.

•    Personalize the rewards. Businesses are giving Christmas turkeys to employees who don’t have an oven. They’ll do much better by learning what each of their valued employees wants most and providing it. Young parents often put flextime at the top of their wants list. Many young people expect a collegial environment and lots of mentoring and encouragement [click here].

Across-the-board perks eventually become seen as entitlements, anyway. Witness what happened in April at the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen: It allowed the brewers unlimited beer drinking at lunch and gave each brewer two cases of free beer monthly — but when it eliminated drinking during working hours strike.

The most common reason why managers are recognition misers is lack of time, our studies show. But it takes little effort to make a commendation that has impact. Be specific with your praise: A perfunctory “You did a nice job” isn’t nearly as strong as “I want to thank you for what you did on this project because it increased output by 24 percent and our department’s number one in the company.”

*     *     *

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.

Sharon Daniels is chief executive of AchieveGlobal, which provides performance improvement consulting and solutions in leadership, sales, and customer service. With offices in 42 countries, the company offers customized learning in 30 languages and dialects. Contact Ms. Daniels at sharon.daniels@achieveglobal.com.

Roger Martin suggests five questions that will help build a strategy

Roger Martin

Here is an excerpt from article written by Roger Martin for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

* * *

People make strategy much harder than it needs to be. For some, the problem is that they focus too much on the tools: environmental scans, SWOT analyses, customer analyses, competitor analyses, financial modeling, and so on. Other people get into trouble because they think it’s all about the broad, conceptual, future-oriented, big picture stuff — not to be confused with tactics. Still other times, people think that strategy is what happens when we think about changing directions.

The reality is that strategy is at some level about all those things, and you can’t do a satisfactory job with your analysis alone, or your big picture alone, or your changes alone. You have to do a bit of work on all of them.

That’s actually a lot easier that it sounds. My preferred approach is to treat strategy-making as developing a set of answers to five interlinked questions. The questions — which cascade logically from the first to the last — are as follows:

• What are our broad aspirations for our organization & the concrete goals against which we can measure our progress?

• Across the potential field available to us, where will we choose to play and not play?

• In our chosen place to play, how will we choose to win against the competitors there?

• What capabilities are necessary to build and maintain to win in our chosen manner?

• What management systems are necessary to operate to build and maintain the key capabilities?

The trick is to have five answers that are consistent with one another and actually reinforce one another. Aspirations & Goals to be a great international player and a Where to Play response that is domestic doesn’t match well with a How to Win on the basis of proprietary R&D — because the competitors with global aspirations will almost certainly out-invest and outflank you. Winning on the basis of superior distribution is unlikely to happen if you don’t have a concrete plan to build the capabilities and a management system to maintain them.

* * *
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 visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

Roger Martin (www.rogerlmartin.com) is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada. He is the author of four books, including The Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking and then The Design of Business: How Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, both published by Harvard Business Press.

Roger Martin on the “eureka moment” with strategy

Roger Martin

Here is an excerpt from article written by Roger Martin for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

* * *

Do you find that company strategy meetings often descend into adversarial position-taking? Many people complain to me that it’s the single biggest block to strategy-making that they encounter. But getting around that block is a lot easier than you might think. The solution lies simply in posing a single question, which I believe is the most important question in strategy.

I discovered the question about 15 years ago in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, a town of 7,500 inhabitants equidistant from Green Bay, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota. We had a group of about 10 executives from a mining company in a conference room, split evenly between mine management and executives from head office in Toronto. Everybody had an opinion — i.e. what was true — but given the wide array of experiences, technical knowledge, and organizational interests, those opinions were all over the map. We quickly descended into adversarial position-taking and I could tell it was going nowhere.

Then an idea popped into my head. Rather than have them talk about what they thought was true, ask them to specify what would have to be true for the option on the table to be a fantastic choice. It was magic. Clashing views turned into collaboration on really understanding the logic of the options.

For all the options, the participants were perfectly happy to contribute to laying out the logic of what would have to be true in a cooperative way, instead of insisting on what was true in an adversarial way. By the end of the day, we had the group’s agreement on what had to be true for each of the five options for it to be the very best choice. And we had a plan for analyzing the items that were most important to hold true, but about which the group had the most reservations. The group was game to have those specific items analyzed and then come back and make the decision based on the structuring of the choices we had just carried out.

I was so struck by how well the group worked together when I didn’t let them dwell on what they thought to be true and asked them to focus on what would have to be true that from that moment on, that question became the single most important in my strategy work.

Why is it so important? The central reason is that it allows managers to step back from their beliefs and contemplate the possibility that they might not be entirely correct.

If you think an idea is the wrong way to approach a problem and someone asks you if you think it’s the right way, you’ll reply “no” and defend that answer against all comers. But if someone asks you to figure out what would have to be true for that approach to work, your frame of thinking changes. No one is asking you to take a stand on the idea, just to focus on what would have to be true for that idea to work. This subtle shift gives people a way to back away from their beliefs and allow exploration by which they give themselves the opportunity to learn something new.

* * *

To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

Roger Martin (www.rogerlmartin.com) is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada. He is the author of The Design of Business: How Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009).

Language Matters!

Cheryl offers: I’ve been reading the newspaper a lot more carefully ever since Sara blogged about the Fort Hood incident. Remember the strapping brunette? I don’t watch TV so I haven’t seen any of the Olympics; instead I occasionally check the sports section of the newspaper.  What grabbed me today was the tremendous success of the US Women’s hockey team. They have now moved to the gold medal finals on Thursday of this week against old rival, Canada. Yesterday they beat Sweden 9-1. This added to their fantastic record in 2010 of outscoring their rivals 40-2. Holy smoke! Did I find this on the front page of the Sports Section as was the men’s win against Canada which only moved them to the quarter finals? No, it was on page 5. That isn’t what grabbed me though. It was the writer’s comment “A scrapbooking party couldn’t have been more competitive.” Say that about the men’s team and see what happens. This type of comment, from a female writer by the way, takes me back to Pat Heim’s book Hardball for Women. She shares “Men respond to strength and a part of your capacity to ultimately lead is a capacity for you to demonstrate your strength.”  There are players on this women’s team with degrees from Harvard and job offers from Donald Trump. These women are strong leaders, athletes, and role models for young women. What made me laugh was the image in my head of the ever competitive Donald at a scrapbooking party! Now that’s a LOL.

...not for the faint of heart and rarely mentioned by the sports guys.

Sara adds: I do watch television and saw some of women’s hockey…nothing wimpy about those women!!  What Cheryl points out,  makes me more than a little sad.  Kristen Kaufman of The Dallas Morning News is quoted in She wins, You Win by Gail Evans as saying, “Women… are not helping one another to achieve power in the work world – and they may even be putting one another at a disadvantage….”  I wonder what it will take for media in the US and Canada to become gender-neutral?

Management by Imagination

Roger Martin

Here is an excerpt of an article written by Roger Martin for the Harvard Business blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

Management by Imagination
Roger Martin

The perception that good management is closely linked to good measurement runs deep. How often do you hear these old saws repeated: “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count”; “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”; “If you can’t measure it, it won’t happen”? We like these sayings because they’re comforting. The act of measurement provides security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost certainly have some control over it.

But however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of expunging something really important. What’s more, we won’t see what we’re missing because we don’t know what it is that we don’t know. By sticking simply to what we can measure, we come to imagine a small and constrained world in which we are prisoners of a “reality” that is in fact an edifice we’ve unknowingly constructed around ourselves.

The late 19th and early 20th century American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was the first to point out that no new idea in the world was ever produced by inductive or deductive logic. Analyzing the past, crunching the existing numbers to produce the future can do nothing more than extrapolate the future from the past. So if you stick to measuring what you can already measure, you cannot create a future that is different than the past.

* * *

We need to get away from all those old sayings about measurement and management, and in that spirit I’d like to propose a new wisdom: “If you can’t imagine it, you will never create it.” The future is about imagination, not measurement. To imagine a future, one has to look beyond the measurable variables, beyond what can be proven with past data. While Motorola was projecting future sales volumes of “feature phones,” Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research in Motion, was imagining what executive life would be like if you could receive your emails on a handheld device. How compelling would an ordinary phone be if you could have a BlackBerry attached to your belt? He couldn’t “prove” that this would be a good idea. There was no data on the demand patterns for smartphones, because smartphones existed only in his imagination. But a mere 11 years after the launch of the product of his imagination, RIM leads Motorola by an ever-accelerating margin in sales, market share and profitability.

* * *

To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

Roger Martin is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada and the author of The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009). His website is: www.rogerlmartin.com.