The Client-Patient Checkup: Ten Questions the Doctor Would Ask You

Here is an especially clever as well as valuable article that Andrew Sobel posted at his website. To read the complete article, check out other resources, and sign up for his free monthly newsletter, please click here.

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A client of mine, a Fortune-100 company, had a longstanding relationship with IBM for the provision of a variety of technology services. They told me that IBM’s then-CEO Sam Palmisano decided to visit my client’s CEO.

A week ahead of the visit, my client’s relationship manager for IBM called his counterpart to discuss the upcoming CEO summit between their companies. Apparently he did not get a return phone call during that week! The story goes that when Palmisano met with their CEO, he opened by saying “My people tell me we have an ‘A’ relationship with your organization.” My client’s CEO responded, “Well, my team tells me your relationship with us is a ‘C.’”

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for the ensuing conversation!

The story ends well—they don’t always—and apparently this was a wakeup call for the IBM team to dramatically improve the relationship. Within a year, my client tells me, the relationship was indeed an “A,” and today they view IBM as a key trusted partner in operating their business.

IBM is a great company that has been quite innovative in the way it builds long-term client relationships. But as this story illustrates, even well-managed firms can dramatically misread the health of a key client relationship!

In the medical profession, there is continual debate about the value of the annual health “checkup.” Most doctors, however, firmly believe that certain types of regular screening tests are essential and help save lives. As the IBM anecdote illustrates, similar “screenings” are necessary when managing client relationships.

In fact, you should absolutely review the “health” of your cient relationships on a regular basis. Here’s why. Most clients simply vote with their feet. They don’t tell you they are unhappy—they simply start to give their business to your competitors.  The successful firms I work with all have some type of process in place to determine the health and strength of their most important client relationships. Often, they have multiple layers of feedback that they seek. These sometimes include periodic but structured conversations held by the relationship manager, senior executive visits, independent surveys, and client forums (virtual and in-person).

Here [is the first of] ten questions the Relationship Doctor would ask about each of your clients:

1. Do you have access?

If there were such a figure as a “client relationship doctor,” Lloyds Banking Group Chairman Sir Winfried Bischoff would be the archetype. The former Schroder’s CEO and Citigroup Chairman is a renowned trusted advisor who has calmly and wisely guided hundreds of CEOs through bet-the-company transactions and deals. Last year I asked Sir Win, “How do you know when a relationship is not going well?” His first response was, “If it’s taking a very long time to set up a meeting, that’s usually a bad sign!”

Can you actually get in to see important executives in your client’s organization? Some leaders are notoriously busy, and it does take time to get on their schedule. But if you don’t have access, you may not be considered relevant! PS: If you think you have a good relationship, but the client says “There’s nothing going on, it doesn’t make sense to meet,” that’s still a bad sign. It means they don’t really value your ongoing insight and perspective.
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Andrew Sobel (www.andrewsobel.com) helps companies and individuals build clients for life. He is the most widely published author in the world on the topic of business relationships, and his bestselling books include Power Questions, All for One, Making Rain, and Clients for Life. All for One was recently voted one of the top 10 sales and marketing books of the decade by a major marketing publication. His clients include many of the world’s leading companies such as Citigroup, Hess, Cognizant, Ernst & Young, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, Experian, Lloyds Banking Group, and many others. Andrew’s articles and work have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, USA Today, strategy+business, and the Harvard Business Review. He spent 15 years at Gemini Consulting where he was a Senior Vice President and country Chief Executive Officer, and for the last 15 years he has led his own consulting firm, Andrew Sobel Advisors. Andrew has been married for 30 years and has three children. He can be reached at www.andrewsobel.com.

To read my reviews of two of Andrew’s books, All for One and Power Questions, please click here.

Why it is imperative to hire for attitude

Mark Murphy

Here is an excerpt from an article by Dan Schawbel and featured online at the Forbes website. In it, Mark Murphy explains why a job candidate’s attitude is more important than talent, skills, and experience.  To read the complete article, please click here.

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Mark Murphy is the author Hiring for Attitude, as well as the bestsellers Hundred Percenters and HARD Goals. The founder and CEO of Leadership IQ, a top-rated provider of cutting-edge research and leadership training, Mark has personally provided guidance to more than 100,000 leaders from virtually every industry and half the Fortune 500. His public leadership seminars, custom corporate training, and online training programs have yielded remarkable results for companies including Microsoft, IBM, GE, MasterCard, Merck, AstraZeneca, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Johns Hopkins.

In this interview, Mark talks about why so many new hires fail so quickly, why soft skills are so important now, how the hiring landscape is changing, and more.

Why do so many fail within the first 18 months of taking a job?

When our research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament.

Are technical and soft skills less important than attitude? Why?

It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but they’re much easier to assess (that’s why attitude, not skills, is the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure). Virtually every job (from neurosurgeon to engineer to cashier) has tests that can assess technical proficiency. But what those tests don’t assess is attitude; whether a candidate is motivated to learn new skills, think innovatively, cope with failure, assimilate feedback and coaching, collaborate with teammates, and so forth.

Soft skills are the capabilities that attitude can enhance or undermine. For example, a newly hired executive may have the intelligence, business experience and financial acumen to fit well in a new role. But if that same executive has an authoritarian, hard-driving style, and they’re being hired into a social culture where happiness and camaraderie are paramount, that combination is unlikely to work. Additionally, many training programs have demonstrated success with increasing and improving skills—especially on the technical side. But these same programs are notoriously weak when it comes to creating attitudinal change. As Herb Kelleher, former Southwest Airlines CEO used to say, “we can change skill levels through training, but we can’t change attitude.”

How will the hiring landscape be different in 2012 and beyond?

Between the labor pool from China and India and the fact that there are so many workers sitting out there unemployed, we can find the skills we need. The lack of sharp wage increases in most job categories is further evidence of the abundant supply of skills. Technical proficiency, once a guarantee of lifetime employment, is a commodity in today’s job market. Attitude is what today’s companies are hiring for. And not just any attitude; companies want attitudes that perfectly match their unique culture. Google and Apple are both great companies, but their cultures are as different as night and day.

As the focus on hiring has shifted away from technical proficiency and onto attitude, it’s precipitated a lot of tactical changes in how job interviews are conducted. For example, the new kinds of interview questions being asked are providing real information about attitude instead of the vague or canned answers hiring managers used to get. Smarter companies are less likely to rely on the old standby questions like “tell me about yourself” and “what are your weaknesses?” Companies now have answer keys by which to accurately rate candidate’s answers. Interviewers can listen to candidates’ verb tense and other grammar choices and make accurate determinations about someone’s future performance potential.

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Dan Schawbel, recognized as a “personal branding guru” by The New York Times, is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, and the author of the #1 international bestselling book, Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future (Kaplan, October 2010). Dan is the founder of the Personal Branding Blog, the publisher of Personal Branding Magazine, the youngest columnist at Bloomberg Businessweek, and has been featured in over 450 media outlets, such as The New York Times and ELLE magazine. He’s spoken at Harvard Business School, MIT, Time Warner, IBM, and CitiGroup. Dan was named to the Inc. magazine 30 Under 30 List in 2010, and Bloomberg Businessweek cites him as someone entrepreneurs should follow on Twitter (@DanSchawbel).

Paths to Power: A book review by Bob Morris

Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership Anthony J. Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Laura G. Singleton Harvard Business Press (2007) I recently re-read In Their Time, co-authored by Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria, in combination with this book whose subtitle correctly indicates what Mayo, Nohria, and Laura Singleton set out to explain: how “insiders” and “outsiders” of big business (as Michael Useem explains in an insightful Foreword) presided “over our dominant organizations” and, in process, examine “which pathways lead to the apex – or which do not” for those who would also achieve such dominance.

Rather than limiting their attention to a set number of exemplary leaders – in chronological order — and then devoting a separate chapter to each, taking a linear approach to the material, the co-authors chose to examine the evolution of 20th century business leadership in terms of the ten decades, assigning to each following the first chapter an appropriate component (birthplace, nationality, religion, education, class, gender and race, etc.) while frequently cross-referencing throughout the entire century. For example, they juxtapose comparable individuals such as James Stillman’s presidency of National City Bank (1891-1909) and Sanford “Sandy” Weill’s of Citigroup (that National City Bank eventually became) a century later.

Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton’s role in Paths to Power is more that of cultural anthropologists than as biographers or even business historians. They create a rich and nuanced social and economic context within a 100-year framework as they examine what separated outsiders from insiders in business leadership in the 20th century. In the city where I live, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts from a book to help those who red my review to get a “taste.” Here is a representative selection from the material that Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton provide.

On birthplace: “As a starting point in our examination of twentieth-century leader backgrounds, we thus come away with the decisive conclusion that even in the United States, the great land of opportunity, not every birthplace was created equal…While mobility between regions tended to increase later in the century, people with more prosperous family origins – origins that typically stemmed from birth in a similarly prosperous region of the country -retained an advantage when entering business in a new area. The distinguishing features of each of the country’s major regions, both as sources of and sites for leaders, will constitute an important backdrop for further discussions about leader characteristics.” (Page 54)

On education: “Yale’s popularity among business leaders like the Weyerhaeusers vaulted it to a preeminent position in the early part of the century: it was the most popular school for all of our leaders prior to 1950, educating thirty-two of them (about 15 percent of all that era’s college graduates). With twenty-seven leaders, Harvard came next, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ranked a distant third with fourteen graduates. Yale was a perfect fit for the era of the dominant Protestant establishment, to which the Weyerhaeusers, steadfast Presbyterians, belonged. Yale was seen as a bastion of conservative, faith-oriented values during this period, in contrast to the more intellectual and individualistic attitudes at Harvard. (Page 124)

On class: “With nearly 30 percent of the leaders consistently coming from relatively poor backgrounds and, because of their success, passing on wealthy or at least quite comfortably middle-class upbringings to their own children, genuine upward mobility is undoubtedly represented by almost one in three of these leaders. Still, countermeasures such as the GI Bill and trends toward professional management, rather than improving the chances of those from poorer backgrounds, appear to have only held the line against an inexorable advantage of those with advantages.” (Page 184)

In his Foreword, Useem explains this book’s unique importance. “Studies of the social origins of America’s business elite have been a long-standing research tradition, dating to such classics as W. Lloyd Warner and James Abegglen’s Big Business Leaders in America and Mabel Newcomer’s The Big Business Executive, both published in 1955. We have not had the benefit of a truly comprehensive portrait since those works of more than fifty years ago; now Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton have not only updated the picture but also produced the definitive portrait of our time.”

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out the aforementioned In Their Time as well as Stuart Crainer’s The Management Century and Stewart H. Holbrook’s The Age of the Moguls: The Story of the Robber Barons and the Great Tycoons. (Obtaining a copy of it is well worth the effort.) In it, Holbrook examines a number of “lords of capital” who, in his words, “made `deals’ purchased immunity, and did other things which in 1860, or 1880, or even 1900, were considered no more than `smart’ by their fellow Americans, but which today would give pause to the most conscientiously dishonest promoter….They were a motley crew, yet taken together they fashioned a savage and gaudy age as distinctively purple as that of imperial Rome, and infinitely more entertaining.” Holbrook’s account of 19th century robber barons and great tycoons “sets the table” for the “feast” of information and analysis that Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria with Laura Singleton so skillfully provide.

Paths to Power: A book review by Bob Morris

Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership
Anthony J. Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Laura G. Singleton
Harvard Business Press (2007)

I recently re-read In Their Time, co-authored by Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria, in combination with this book whose subtitle correctly indicates what Mayo, Nohria, and Laura Singleton set out to explain: how “insiders” and “outsiders” of big business (as Michael Useem explains in an insightful Foreword) presided “over our dominant organizations” and, in process, examine “which pathways lead to the apex – or which do not” for those who would also achieve such dominance.

Rather than limiting their attention to a set number of exemplary leaders – in chronological order — and then devoting a separate chapter to each, taking a linear approach to the material, the co-authors chose to examine the evolution of 20th century business leadership in terms of the ten decades, assigning to each following the first chapter an appropriate component (birthplace, nationality, religion, education, class, gender and race, etc.) while frequently cross-referencing throughout the entire century. For example, they juxtapose comparable individuals such as James Stillman’s presidency of National City Bank (1891-1909) and Sanford “Sandy” Weill’s of Citigroup (that National City Bank eventually became) a century later.

Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton’s role in Paths to Power is more that of cultural anthropologists than as biographers or even business historians. They create a social and economic context within a 100-year framework as they examine what separated outsiders from insiders in business leadership in the 20th century. In the city where I live, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts from a book to help those who red my review to get a “taste.” Here is a representative selection from the material that Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton provide.

On birthplace: “As a starting point in our examination of twentieth-century leader backgrounds, we thus come away with the decisive conclusion that even in the United States, the great land of opportunity, not every birthplace was created equal…While mobility between regions tended to increase later in the century, people with more prosperous family origins – origins that typically stemmed from birth in a similarly prosperous region of the country -retained an advantage when entering business in a new area. The distinguishing features of each of the country’s major regions, both as sources of and sites for leaders, will constitute an important backdrop for further discussions about leader characteristics.” (Page 54)

On education: “Yale’s popularity among business leaders like the Weyerhaeusers vaulted it to a preeminent position in the early part of the century: it was the most popular school for all of our leaders prior to 1950, educating thirty-two of them (about 15 percent of all that era’s college graduates). With twenty-seven leaders, Harvard came next, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ranked a distant third with fourteen graduates. Yale was a perfect fit for the era of the dominant Protestant establishment, to which the Weyerhaeusers, steadfast Presbyterians, belonged. Yale was seen as a bastion of conservative, faith-oriented values during this period, in contrast to the more intellectual and individualistic attitudes at Harvard. (Page 124)

On class: “With nearly 30 percent of the leaders consistently coming from relatively poor backgrounds and, because of their success, passing on wealthy or at least quite comfortably middle-class upbringings to their own children, genuine upward mobility is undoubtedly represented by almost one in three of these leaders. Still, countermeasures such as the GI Bill and trends toward professional management, rather than improving the chances of those from poorer backgrounds, appear to have only held the line against an inexorable advantage of those with advantages.” (Page 184)

In his Foreword, Useem explains this book’s unique importance. “Studies of the social origins of America’s business elite have been a long-standing research tradition, dating to such classics as W. Lloyd Warner and James Abegglen’s Big Business Leaders in America and Mabel Newcomer’s The Big Business Executive, both published in 1955. We have not had the benefit of a truly comprehensive portrait since those works of more than fifty years ago; now Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton have not only updated the picture but also produced the definitive portrait of our time.”

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out the aforementioned In Their Time as well as Stuart Crainer’s The Management Century and Stewart H. Holbrook’s The Age of the Moguls: The Story of the Robber Barons and the Great Tycoons. (Obtaining a copy of it is well worth the effort.) In it, Holbrook examines a number of “lords of capital” who, in his words, “made `deals’ purchased immunity, and did other things which in 1860, or 1880, or even 1900, were considered no more than `smart’ by their fellow Americans, but which today would give pause to the most conscientiously dishonest promoter….They were a motley crew, yet taken together they fashioned a savage and gaudy age as distinctively purple as that of imperial Rome, and infinitely more entertaining.”

Holbrook’s account of 19th century robber barons and great tycoons “sets the table” for the “feast” of information and analysis that Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria with Laura Singleton so skillfully provide.

Expect the Unexpected (or You Won’t Find It): A book review by Bob Morris

Expect the Unexpected (or You Won’t Find It): A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus

Roger von Oech
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (2002)

The fact that von Oech draws heavily upon the “ancient wisdom of Heraclitus” in this book correctly suggests what a creative mind such as von Oech’s can accomplish when seeing direct and useful correlations between an ancient Greek philosopher (other than Plato and Aristotle) and intellectual challenges in the 21st century. Von Oech describes Heraclitus as “the world’s first creative teacher.” He recalls being “infected” (happily) with the Heraclitean “bug” while studying in Germany 30 years ago. Now von Oech has written a book in which he brilliantly and entertainingly examines concepts such as symbol, paradox, and ambiguity in relation to creative thought. He offers 30 “Creative Insights” of Heraclitus which include, for example, these five:

#2. “Expect the unexpected or you won’t find it.”
#4 “You can’t step into the same river twice.”
#12 “Many fail to grasp what’s right in the palm of their hand.”
#26 “Donkeys prefer garbage to gold.”
#29 “Your character is your destiny.”

Individually and even when clustered with the other 25, these “Creative Insights” may incorrectly seem unworthy of careful consideration. In fact, von Oech provides a brief but insightful analysis of each which effectively demonstrates the wisdom of #12. Truly creative thinkers are always alert to what I call “the invisibility of the obvious.” They are not threatened by or even uncomfortable with symbol, paradox, and ambiguity. On the contrary, their minds are stimulated by them.

Throughout his book, von Oech inserts a number of brief puzzles for the reader to solve. (The correct answers are included and explained within the “Final Thoughts” section.) These puzzles are fun to grapple with, of course, and presumably most readers will solve them of them. My point is, the answers to the unsolved puzzles are no less obvious than the answers to the others, no matter which specific puzzles the reader is unable to solve.

Frankly, when I began to read this book, I really did not know what to expect. What of value could I possibly learn from a relatively obscure Greek philosopher? However, von Oech had already convinced me of the value of an occasional “whack on the side of the head” and “kick in the seat of the pants” so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. (See #12.) As always, von Oech is immensely entertaining. He has superb writing skills. And of course, he is an immensely creative thinker in his own right. I strongly recommend this little (in length) book to literally anyone who wants to put white caps on her or his gray matter. Those who share my high regard for this book are strongly urged to read all of von Oech’s previous books as well as those written by Guy Claxton, Edward de Bono, Lynne Levesque, and Michael Michalko.

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Roger von Oech is the founder and president of Creative Think, a California-based consulting firm that specializes in stimulating creativity and innovation. He has given seminars and presentations to corporations worldwide, including Coca-Cola, GE, Disney, Intel, MTV, Microsoft, NASA, Apple, Citigroup, and the United States Olympic Committee. He is the author of two previous creative-thinking books, A Whack on the Side of the Head and A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, as well as the popular Creative Whack Pack card deck. He lives with his wife and children in Atherton, California.

A Kick in the Seat of the Pants: A book review by Bob Morris

A Kick in the Seat of the Pants:
Using Your Explorer, Artist, Judge & Warrior to Be More Creative
Roger von Oech
Harper Paperbacks (1988)

This book should be read in combination with A Whack on the Side of the Head…preferably after you have read that book. At least that’s my suggestion. In Kick, first published in 1986, von Oech introduces four stereotypes: The Explorer, The Artist, The Judge, and The Warrior.

Von Oech devotes a separate chapter to each. Also, he assigns to each quite different values, priorities, mindsets, predispositions, and parameters relative to creative thinking. This is a brilliant conceit. In varying proportions, each of us is (simultaneously) an Explorer, an Artist, a Judge, and a Warrior. Each plays an important role in the creative process. Von Oech explains how and why.

As in A Whack on the Side of the Head, he provides various exercises in combination with a rigorous analysis of each of the four stereotypes. As is true of Whack, Kick will be immensely valuable to executives in any organization that needs a culture within which to generate and then nourish fresh ideas and new perspectives. The same is true of all self-employed people (especially independent consultants) whose customers or clients expect them to address the same need. Finally, I think that school, college, and university classroom teachers can devise all manner of appropriate applications of von Oech’s ideas.

I strongly recommend both Whack and Kick. Also von Oech’s Creative Whack Pack card deck and the more recently published Expect the Unexpected (or You Won’t Find It): A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus. Read and then re-read all three. Absorb and digest the material. Let the ideas percolate for a while. (The material in all three is remarkably cohesive…and intellectually combustible.) Then try this experiment the next time you and others in your organization get together to brainstorm. Whoever chairs the discussion is designated the Judge. Depending on the size of the group, designate one or two others to be (respectively) the Explorer, the Artist, and the Warrior. Require everyone to think and comment ONLY within the strict limits of each assigned role. After about 15-20 minutes of brainstorming, re-assign all roles. Same requirement: each must think and comment only within the strict limits of her or his role. No exceptions.(Once you read Kick, you’ll know exactly what I am suggesting…also why.) I’ll bet you a beverage of your choice that the results will surprise and delight everyone involved. Also, and more to the point, it will prove to be the most productive brainstorm session that anyone in the group had as yet participated in. Just think (creatively, of course) how much more will be accomplished at the next session!

In addition to von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head, there are other excellent books also worthy of your consideration. They include those written by Edward De Bono, Guy Claxton, Michael Michalko, and Joey Reiman.

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Roger von Oech is the founder and president of Creative Think, a California-based consulting firm that specializes in stimulating creativity and innovation. He has given seminars and presentations to corporations worldwide, including Coca-Cola, GE, Disney, Intel, MTV, Microsoft, NASA, Apple, Citigroup, and the United States Olympic Committee. He is the author of two previous creative-thinking books, A Whack on the Side of the Head and A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, as well as the popular Creative Whack Pack card deck. He lives with his wife and children in Atherton, California.

 

A Whack on the Side of the Head: A book review by Bob Morris

A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative

Roger von Oech
Business Plus, 25th Anniversary Edition  (2008)

Note: When preparing for some interviews, I re-read several books on the creative process and remain convinced that all are still among the best. This  one is indeed a business classic.

This book should be read in combination with A Kick in the Seat of the Pants…and preferably read first. Just a suggestion. Von Oech demonstrates in his thinking and in his writing the same principles he advocates so eloquently. In Whack, first published in 1983, he identifies ten “locks” which that (if not preclude) creative thinking:

 

• The Right Answer
• That’s Not Logical
• Follow the Rules
• Be Practical
• Play Is Frivolous
• That’s Not My Area
• Avoid Ambiguity
• Don’t Be Foolish
• To Err Is Wrong
• I’m Not Creative

How does each limit (if not preclude) creative thinking? How can each be “unlocked”? To what extent are these barriers interdependent? Von Oech devotes a separate chapter to each of the ten, answering these and other questions while providing various exercises in support of his explanations.

Whack will be immensely valuable to executives in any organization which needs a culture within which to generate and then nourish fresh ideas and new perspectives. The same is true of all self-employed people (especially independent consultants) whose customers or clients expect them to address the same need. Finally, I think that school, college, and university classroom teachers can devise all manner of appropriate applications of von Oech’s ideas. When you listen to Richard Feyman’s lectures on physics (now available on CDs and videos), you suspect that he has read all of von Oech’s books. He probably didn’t. Nonetheless, he and von Oech are kindred spirits.

In addition to von Oech’s A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, there are other excellent books also worthy of your consideration. They include those written by Edward De Bono, Guy Claxton, Michael Michalko, and Joey Reiman.

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Roger von Oech is the founder and president of Creative Think, a California-based consulting firm that specializes in stimulating creativity and innovation. He has given seminars and presentations to corporations worldwide, including Coca-Cola, GE, Disney, Intel, MTV, Microsoft, NASA, Apple, Citigroup, and the United States Olympic Committee. As indicated, he is the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head and A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, as well as the popular Creative Whack Pack card deck. He lives with his wife and children in Atherton, California.

Col. Bernard Banks on “How Companies Can Develop Critical Thinkers and Creative Leaders”

Col. Bernard Banks

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Col. Bernard Banks 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.

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This post is part of an HBR Spotlight examining leadership lessons from the military.

Today’s leaders are continually cajoled to act as “outside-the-box” thinkers. Such pronouncements give the impression the only sound solutions are ones never previously conceived. However, what industry and the military really strive to produce are leaders possessing strong critical and creative thinking skills. Both implicitly eschew the notion that a box even exists. What can industry learn from the military about how to advance the development of such leaders? One tangible example is how to construct and execute experiential training while continuing to meet the needs of customers and stakeholders.

Today’s organizations operate in what the U.S. Army War College defines as a VUCA environment. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are constant realities in the 21st century. The military seeks to prepare for the challenges it will inevitably face by crafting realistic training scenarios and routinely integrating such activities into its ongoing operations. The goal is not to teach them what to think, but to enhance their ability to think critically and creatively about the myriad of contingencies posed by a fluid environment — in essence to teach them how to think.

In industry, 90% of time is typically devoted to executing business actions, and less than 10% is allocated for increasing organizational and individual capabilities through training. The military, on the other hand, spends as much time training as it does executing — even in the midst of high stress/high risk operations. A unit in Afghanistan or Iraq will not suspend its experiential training program while involved in combat operations, because its ability to cogently and creatively address future challenges is enhanced by an enduring commitment to improving people’s competence and adaptability through experiential exercises, as well as actual experiences. But the real lesson for industry leaders is not simply that training is important. What’s really valuable is how the military crafts its training opportunities.

The Army defines leadership as both accomplishing the mission and improving the organization. Permanently improving the organization requires the development of its human capital. The military believes you substantively improve people by improving their ability to adroitly address challenges in their environment. Therefore, we do not seek to confine people’s thinking by restricting the solutions available to them, unless the proposed action violates any of these criteria: is it immoral, unsafe, unethical, or illegal?

In order to have people wrestle with what it takes to conceive of action plans where the aforementioned criteria constitute their only boundaries, the military structures its experiential training activities with wide parameters. Events are constructed to reflect ambiguity in the operating environment (while also targeting specific organization needs). Leaders are responsible for setting the conditions in every training event and resourcing them appropriately, as well as for reminding participants throughout the exercises that there are a myriad of potentially elegant solutions to each ill-defined challenge.

Two other things are important to take away from the military practice of engaging in routine experiential training. First, feedback is crucial. The military practice of conducting intermediate and final after-action reviews (AARs) — in which all participants examine the planning, preparation, execution, and follow-up of any significant organizational initiative — fosters a learning culture. Second, coaching is required to translate feedback into behavioral changes. Research has demonstrated that feedback without coaching rarely results in behavioral changes. So, all leaders must develop their capacity to coach others. Reflection and dialog lie at the heart of development. Experiential training creates the impetus for both to occur.

If you wait for the right time to train it’ll rarely occur. Today is the opportunity to prepare for tomorrow, regardless of how much else is going on.

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Bernard (Bernie) Banks is a faculty member in the Department of Behavioral Sciences & Leadership at West Point and a Colonel in the United States Army. He has presented on the topic of leadership at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and consulted or provided training to companies including GE, IBM, Citigroup, Best Buy, and Procter & Gamble. He is a graduate of West Point and holds graduate degrees from Harvard, Northwestern, Columbia, and the U.S. Army War College.

The Other Side of Innovation: A book review by Bob Morris

The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge
Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble
Harvard Business Press (2010)

As I began to read this book, I was reminded of Thomas Edison’s observation, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” Also of a statement by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: “I don’t care a fig about simplicity on this side of complexity but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Now consider what Govindarajan and Trimble observe in their Introduction: “There is a Rainier-like summit in the innovation journey. It is the moment a company says yes! That’s a great idea! Let’s take it to the market! Let’s make it happen!…Getting to the summit can seem like the fulfillment of a dream, but it is not enough. After the summit comes the other side of innovation – the challenges beyond the idea. Execution. Like Rainier, it is the other side of the adventure that is actually more difficult. It is the other side that holds hidden dangers. But because the summit itself has such strong appeal, the other side is usually an afterthought. It is humdrum. It is behind the scenes. It is dirty work.”

The “journey” metaphor is appropriate because Govindarajan and Trimble embarked (like Odysseus) on a ten-year journey during which they completed research on a number of well-known and well-respected companies (e.g. Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, The New York Times, and Unilever) and interviewed dozens of senior-level executives at dozens of other companies that include Aetna, Allstate, Ben & Jerry’s, BMW, Citigroup, GE, Harley-Davidson, Mattel, Procter & Gamble, Sony, and Timberland. What they learned about what works, what doesn’t, and why during efforts to reach “the other side of innovation” is shared in abundance in this book.

The challenge for leaders of innovation initiatives (whatever the scope and nature of those initiatives may be) must help their organization to achieve and then sustain an appropriate balance between “foundational” operations that are on-going and repeatable, and, experimental operations that non-routine and often disruptive. To help prepare leaders to meet this challenge, Govindarajan and Trimble explain how to

• Build a dedicated team
• Define a partnership of the team with the “Performance Engine”
• Obtain support from senior-level executives
• Anticipate and prepare for resistance and conflict
• Achieve buy-in
• Devise and conduct a “disciplined” experiment
• o Focus on learning when evaluating results
• Achieve transparency through effective communication
• Create a framework for accountability

These are worthy objectives, to be sure, but by no means easy to achieve. It is important to keep in mind that all organizations are works in progress and the same is true of those who are involved with them. Credit Govindarajan and Trimble with providing a wealth of valuable information, accompanied by rock-solid advice that isanchored in real-world situations. It is not necessary but, in my opinion, highly desirable to read their earlier book, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution, first before reading this one.

CEO Insights: Joseph J. Plumeri (Willis Group Holdings)

Joseph J. Plumeri

In previous posts, I shared brief excerpts from interviews of CEOs conducted by Adam Bryant that appear in his “Corner Office” column that appears in the BusinessSunday section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided by Joseph J. Plumeri, chairman and CEO of the insurance broker, Willis Group Holdings:

Bryant: What’s your best career advice?

Plumeri: Everything that I have done I’ve done because I went out and played in traffic and something happened.

Bryant: What do you mean?

Plumeri: If you push yourself out here and you see people and get involved, something happens. My first job was at Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt. It had four names, so I thought it was a law firm. I was going to law school. My last class was over at noon, and so I thought I’d go over on Wall Street and find a job with a law firm.

So I go knock on doors. I go up and see the receptionist, and she says go down the hall and see Mr. Weill. I don’t know who Sandy Weill was. This was 1968. I gave him the spiel about law school in the morning, learning the practical part in the afternoon.

He says that’s a great idea, but what makes you think you’ll be learning law here? I said, this is a law firm. He said no, this is a brokerage firm. I trued to find a hole to climb into. I’m not easily embarrassed, and he laughed. He gave me a job working part-time, and that firm turned into Citigroup.

When I left Citigroup after all those years, I was walking down a street in Paris, and I ran into Henry Kravis. He said, what are you doing? I said, I’m looking for my next adventure. And he said, I’ve got this company we just bought: Willis. You know the rest of the story. So I tell people, just show up, get in the game, go play in traffic. Something good will come of it.

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Note: Woody Allen agrees with Plumeri. He once observed, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”

To read a longer version of this interview and of several others of prominent CEOs, please visit nytimes.com/business.