Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 4/8/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet
Ramez Naam
World Changers: 25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It
John A. Byrne
HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Communication
Editors of Harvard Business Review
StoryBranding: Creating Stand-Out Brands Through The Power of Story
Jim Signorelli
Talent Leadership: A Proven Method for Identifying and Developing High-Potential Employees
John Mattone with Luiz Xavier
Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent
Nolan Bushnell with Gene Stone
Rain: What a Paperboy Learned About Business
Jeffrey J. Fox
Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence
Amy Jen Su and Muriel Maignan Wilkins
INTERVIEWS
Marcus Ryu (Guidewire Software) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
Chip Heath and Olivier Sibony on “Making great decisions”
The McKinsey Quarterly
Karen Wright
BOB
George Kohlhieser
BOB
COMMENTARIES
“The Art and Science of Delivery: In honor of the 10th anniversary of the Skoll World Forum”
Volume 5 , Voices on Society series
The McKinsey Quarterly
“Evolution of the networked enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey results”
Contributors include Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui
The McKinsey Quarterly
“The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete”
Chris Anderson
Inc.
“The Hidden Biases in Big Data”
Kate Crawford
HBR
“The Rise of Executive Feminism”
Joan C. Williams andRachel W. Dempsey
HBR
“4 Ways to Be a Leader Who Matters”
Les McKeown
Inc.
“The Psychology of the Creative Class: Not as Creative as You Think”
Richey Piiparinen
“How to ‘dance in the rain’”
BOB
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Women on the home front: Debate over work-life balance continues
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Bernie D. Jones for From the Square, the official blog of NYU Press, an academic book publisher based one block south of Union Square, NYC. “With a focus on sharing the ideas and opinions of our authors, From the Square also features news, updates, and all things digital from the NYU Press community. We encourage you to join the conversation with us and our authors by commenting on our posts!”
To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about NYU Press, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.
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It has been fifty years since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystiquein 1963—and twenty years since the Family Medical Leave Actwas signed into law by President Clinton in 1993. Thus, the month of February saw several notable events in the world of work-family balance: those two anniversaries, plus the announcement by Marissa Mayer, a mother and the CEO of Yahoo, Inc., of a new ban against employees working from home. This policy change only reinforced the significance of the two anniversaries.
The Feminine Mystique has been credited with spearheading the modern feminist movement that pushed more women to seek highly paid jobs and professional careers, where before they had been forced by traditional conventions to remain at home. Articulating “the problem that had no name,” Friedan explained that highly educated wives were consumed by the drudgery of housework while their skills remained unused.
Yet, the question remained, once women went into the workplace, either because of personal preference or because of economic necessity, how would they manage their responsibilities at home? The answer came twenty years later in the form of unpaid family medical leave that would become available to working parents, men and women who gained up to twelve months unpaid leave for the birth of a child.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Bernie D. Jones is Associate Professor of Law at the Suffolk University Law School and editor of Women Who Opt Out: The Debate over Working Mothers and Work-Family Balance (NYU Press, 2013).
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 from Bob Morris (Week of 3/4/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
REVIEWS
Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life
Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
Finding Keepers: The Monster Guide to Hiring and Holding the World’s Best Employees
Steve Pogorzelski and Jesse Harriott with Doug Hardy
Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life
Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior Across Cultures without Losing Yourself in the Process
Andy Molinsky
Leadership: A Master Class
Daniel Goleman, Host
Success Under Stress: Powerful Tools for Staying Calm, Confident, and Productive When the Pressure’s On
Sharon Melnick
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Innovation
Various Contributors with Editors of Harvard Business Review
Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
John Ratey with Eric Hagerman
BrandingPays: The Five-Step System to Reinvent Your Personal Brand
Karen Kang
The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Steven Johnson
INTERVIEWS
Kris Duggan (Badgeville) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
COMMENTARIES
“Business Insights from Abraham Lincoln”
BOB
“7 Secrets to asking effective questions”
Shane Snow
Fast Company
“Pragmatic Pathways to Fundamental, Long-Term Change”
John Hagel II, John Seely Brown, Christopher Gong, Stacey Wang, and Travis Lehman
Deloitte Center for the Edge
“5 ways to use brain science to create persuasive presentations”
Susan Weinschenk
Business Insider
“Big data in the age of the telegraph”
Caitlin Rosenthal
The McKinsey Quarterly
“How to Keep Your Star Employees”
Kasey Wehrum
Inc.
“Focus on the problem, not the person”
Daniel Goleman
LinkedIn
“Narcissism: The problem with ‘bold’ leadership”
Margaret Heffernan
CBS MoneyWatch
“12 Ways to Be the Leader Everyone Wants to Work For
Jeff Schmitt
Forbes
“One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education”
Michael Noer
Forbes
“Embrace Work-Life Imbalance”
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
HBR
“Global Tilt and the Dexterity That Cross-Cultural Management Now Requires
From Global Tilt: Leading Your Business Through the Great Economic Power Shift
Ram Charan
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Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 2/4/13)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
Creative Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration
Leigh Thompson
This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
John Brockman, Editor
Unrelenting Innovation: How to Build a Culture for Market Dominance
Gerard J. Tellis
Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
Chris Brown
Lincoln: A President for the Ages
Karl Weber, Editor and Contributor
The Architecture of Innovation: The Economics of Creative Organizations
Josh Lerner
INTERVIEWS
Robert LoCascio (LivePerson) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
TALES FROM THE WORLD BEFORE YESTERDAY: A Conversation with Jared Diamond
John Brockman
Edge
Terry Leahy (Tesco) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
COMMENTARIES
Why “Management Is (Still) Not Leadership”
John Kotter
HBR
“How to Successfully Manage Opposing Strategies”
Roger Martin
HBR
“New Research on The Innovation Bottom Line”
David Kiron, Nina Kruschwitz, Knut Haanaes, Martin Reeves and Eugene Goh
MIT Sloan Management Review
“Here’s an easy IQ test for really intelligent people”
BOB
“Silicon Valley’s most important document ever”
Janko Roettgers
GigaOM
“How to battle-test your innovation strategy”
Marla M. Capozzi, John Horn, and Ari Kellen
The McKinsey Quarterly
“How Do Innovators Think?”
Bronwyn Fryer
HBR
“5 Biggest Leadership Lessons From 2012″
Les McKeown
Inc.
“The Skills Most Leaders Don’t Have”
Brian Evje
Inc.
“How to Proactively Manage Your Digital Reputation”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“Lincoln’s School of Management”
Nancy F. Koehn
The New York Times
“How To Make Your Employees Happier”
Anne Kreamer
Fast Company
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Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 1/7/13)
BOOK REVIEWS
Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing
Dave Kerpen
Taking Flight! Master the DISC Styles to Transform Your Career, Your Relationships…Your Life
Merrick Rosenberg and Daniel Silvert
Infectious: How to Connect Deeply and Unleash the Energetic Leader Within
Achim Nowak
Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More
Jason W. Womack
Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance
Boris Groysberg
INTERVIEWS
Dinesh C. Paliwal (Harman International Industries) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
LEADERSHIP: A Master Class
Daniel Goleman, Host
Joey Reiman: Part 2 of an interview
Bob Morris
Marty Neumeier, The Second Interview (Part 2)
Bob Morris
Todd L. Pittinsky
Bob Morris
COMMENTARIES
“How to achieve large-scale transformation in a series of smaller pragmatic steps”
probably co-authored by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison
Deloitte’s Center for the Edge
“How to formulate a ‘balanced scorecard’”?
BOB
“The Crucible in the Middle”
Kris Routch
Talent Management
“Good and Bad ‘Multipliers’ in the Workplace Environment
Liz Wiseman on
from Multipliers, written with Greg McKeown,
“Managing conflict”
Jason Fried
Inc.
“How to Keep Top Talent”
from Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down
Sylvia Ann Hewett
“How to Write a Novel [or Almost Anything Else] Using the Snowflake Method”
Maryelser Kinmore
eHow
“The Competing Black Swans of Sustainability”
Andrew Winston
HBR
“4 Big Reasons Why Your Resolutions Will Fail”
Josh Linkner
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Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris: 11/5/12
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field
Mike Michalowicz
HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations
Nancy Duarte
Freedom, Inc.: Free Your Employees and Let Them Lead Your Business to Higher Productivity, Profits, and Growth
Brian Carney and Isaac Getz
The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
Michael Mauboussin
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win
Steven Gary BlanK
Enterprise Games: Using Game Mechanics to Build a Better Business
Michael Hugos
The Leader’s Pocket Guide: 101 Indispensable Tools, Tips, and Techniques for Any Situation
John Baldoni
The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation
John C. Bogle
INTERVIEWS
Linda Sharkey
Blogging on Business
Peter B. Vaill
Conducted by Kerry A. Bunker and Laura Curnutt Santana
Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development
Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn) in “The Corner Office”
Conducted by Adam Bryant
The New York Times
COMMENTARIES
“Accelerate!”
John P. Kotter
HBR
“On cleaning up messes”
Russell L. Ackoff
From Redesigning the Future: Systems Approach to Societal Problems
“And the winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2012 is….”
Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Press Release
“It Don’t Cost Nuthin’ to be Nice”
Paul (Bear) Bryant
“Designing Products for Value”
Ananth Narayanan, Asutosh Padhi, and Jim Williams
The McKinsey Quarterly
“How To Apply the 80/20 Rule At Work”
Nate Steere
mint.com
“What Women Know about Leadership that Men Don’t”
Tony Schwartz
HBR
“How to Build a Better Innovation Team”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“The True Measures of Success”
Michael J. Mauboussin on
HBR
“Business Leadership Lessons from the Military”
Editors of Harvard Business Review
“Ten Ways to Get People to Change”
Morten T. Hansen
HBR
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Arlene Johnson on why even a dynamite strategy without effective execution fizzles
Arlene Johnson has just launched a new online resource, The Connector, that combines her own material with material contributed by others. I urge you to check it out and sign up for a subscription by clicking here.
Meanwhile, here is a brief excerpt from one of her articles.
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When challenged to earn a coveted promotion, succeed with an important business project or to win a quota busting business opportunity, we get charged. With a vision for what the change can bring, our energy kicks in and our mind gets focused on mapping a strategy to accomplish what we want.
So, let’s say you have a new business opportunity that if won not only makes your year but also has significant strategic value to your company – a much needed win for everyone. As you assess and develop your win-strategy, you ask yourself: Which decisions and actions give us a competitive advantage and best ensures our winning this important customer relationship?
With input from others, questions answered and a dynamite strategy in hand, you’re ready to take action. It’s time to conduct a brilliant execution of your strategy. STOP. Before moving forward, you, and any team member, should know the answers to this question: With each planned customer conversation in my win-strategy, how do I get the information and gain the customer agreements to strengthen relationships and differentiate myself and our solutions?
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Arlene Johnson, founder and president of Sinequanon Group, Inc. (SGI), is an internationally known speaker, author and consultant with more than two decades of experience in executive leadership, change management and performance coaching. Through her efforts, major corporations as well as small and mid-sized companies create a results-oriented and competitive difference in demanding, radically-changing business environments. She has advised Fortune 500 clients such as Arco Pipeline (Corporate and Jakarta, Indonesia), American Express (Mexico), Hewlett-Packard, (Hong-Kong), Hill-Rom, Southern Methodist University, Bombardier Aerospace, Fidelity Investment, Equifax (Canada), Blue Cross and Blue Shield, BDO Seidman, Koch Chemical Group, Alcatel-Lucent, Lockheed Martin and numerous other fast-growing, entrepreneurial companies. Arlene has just published the second edition of her brilliant book, Success Mapping: Achieve What You Want . . . Right Now!
Paul J.H. Schoemaker: A second interview by Bob Morris
Paul J.H. Schoemaker is a pioneer in the field of decision sciences, among the first to combine the practical ideas of decision theory, behavioral economics, scenario planning, and risk management into a set of strategic decision-making tools for managers. He is co-author of a landmark book on the subject, Winning Decisions: Getting It Right the First Time. He has written nine books, the latest of which is Brilliant Mistake: Findings Success on the Far Side of Failure (Wharton Digital Press 2012). In addition, he has written over 100 academic and applied papers, which have appeared in such diverse journals as the Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Brain and Behavioral Sciences, and The Journal of Economic Literature. Given their global applicability, his writings appear in at least 14 languages. His scholarly work ranks in the top one percent in academic citations globally as measured by the International Science Index (www.ISIHighlyCited.com). He is also an entrepreneur: he is founder and executive chairman of Decision Strategies International, Inc. Finally, Paul is a dedicated educator: he is research director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, served for five years as a director of the Decision Education Foundation, conducted hundreds of lectures and executive seminars around the world. A native of the Netherlands, Paul lives on the East Coast with his wife; they have two children.
Here is my interview of Paul. To read the complete interview, please click here.
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Morris: When and why did you decide to Brilliant Mistakes?
Schoemaker: Two issues have always intrigued me. First, when the founder of Honda claims that success is 99% failure, I wonder why we label the necessary steps toward success in such a negative way? Failure and its twin sister “mistake” too often get a bad rap. Second, when executives tell me that they learned the most in their careers from mistakes, I wonder why they don’t make a few more. In the book, I suggest that we should make more mistakes (given how valuable they often are), but most people deeply reject that seemingly silly notion. I was also fascinated with Thomas Watson’s counter-intuitive advice, as founder and Chairman of IBM, that if you want to succeed faster, you need to make more mistakes. Our ambivalence about mistakes in business seemed an underdeveloped topic to me, especially the paradoxical notion that some errors will prove to be brilliant over time.
To learn maximally from mistakes, we need to commit more errors than we deem optimal as judged within the bounds of our limited rationality. This idea may be hard to swallow. Yet, it is the quintessential insight of this book. To my way of thinking, mistakes can be brilliant in two ways. The first is to learn from an unexpected setback so much that it starts to dwarf the cost of the mistake. The second way, which is more difficult to achieve, is to create strategies, organizations or cultures where people can make the types if mistakes where the learning benefits far exceeds the cost of the mistake.
Morris: Were there any head-snapping revelations while writing it? Please explain.
Schoemaker: Hardly any “head-snapping revelations,” but certainly a few surprises. Successful people tend to have a different view about mistakes than most ordinary people. Not only are they more tolerant of them (in themselves and others), but they often embrace them. Notable examples are Steve Jobs who celebrated his mistakes during a commencement speech at Stanford, or C.K. Rowling who argued that she could not have produced the astoundingly successful Harry Potter series (books, movies, accessories) without having hit rock bottom first.
In the arts and humanities, people embrace mistakes more readily than in business, I feel. As trumpet great Wynton Marsalis put it so well, if you are not making mistakes, you are not playing jazz – you are not trying. I believe the same applies to life, since that requires a great deal of improvisation as well. I don’t think that perfectionists, or people who eschew mistakes for other reasons, realize their full potential as human beings, either for themselves or others
A surprising conclusion is that people who are more risk-averse should make more deliberate mistakes, since they can be used as hedges. This was counter-intuitive to me at first. A strong portfolio case can be made for investing in mistakes. For a risk-averse decision maker, it may be worth putting some money in a project expected to yield a loss provided this investment offers a sufficient hedge in case other investments sour. Even though that seemingly inferior project will not raise profit expectations, it can help reduce losses in case bad scenarios happen. Similarly, a deliberate mistake can be viewed as a hedge against conventional wisdom, one that will have a high payoff when the majority view of the crowd happens to be wrong (but a loss otherwise in all likelihood).
Morris: Please explain the approach you take in the book to establish a case for making brilliant mistakes.
Schoemaker: In the book, I draw more on behavioral decision theory and its close cousin, behavioral economics, than portfolio theory or options thinking. Because humans suffer from bounded rationality and furthermore don’t know what they don’t know, the only way to overcome myopic frames, overconfidence, and incremental career progress is to innovate beyond the bounds of our self-limiting world views. I describe a long list of past business mistakes – as judged by the conventional wisdom at the time – that proved to be brilliant. These include personal copiers, selling via pet stores, ATM machines, credit cards for students, organic food, fractional jet ownership, and tobacco-free cigarettes. Just as these ideas were ridiculed at the time, there are many silly ideas floating around today in business that will prove to be brilliant in the future. The challenge for managers is to recognize them, and this can only happen if leaders create sufficient space for productive mistakes to occur. In most companies, brilliant mistake may already have been made, but the brilliant part lies dormant because there is little appetite or capacity to mine the mistake. Since the tuition was paid, why not extract the lesson?
Morris: All of your previous books are research-driven. Is that also true of Brilliant Mistakes?
Schoemaker: I build on the strong foundation of decades of research in behavioral economics and decision psychology. I offer a practical plan for separating destructive from constructive mistakes, for learning to make more of the brilliant kind. I encourage leaders to embrace this quality, to milk it for all of its evolutionary and learning potential. For those rationalists who deem the notion of a Brilliant Mistake to be an oxymoron, I would recommend that they take a portfolio view. A strong case can be made for investing in projects that are expected to yield a negative return. For a risk-averse decision maker, it may be worth putting some money in a project expected to yield a loss provided this investment offers a sufficient hedge in case other investments sour. Even though that seemingly inferior project will not raise profit expectations, it can help reduce losses in case bad scenarios happen. Similarly, a deliberate mistake can be viewed as a hedge against conventional wisdom, one that will have a high payoff when the majority view of the crowd happens to be wrong (but a loss otherwise in all likelihood). My book provides the formal argument for those interested.
Morris: Mistakes can either be intentional or unintentional. Please cite a few examples of mistakes (i.e. those that are deliberate and purposeful) can be beneficial.
Schoemaker: Mistakes have been the cause of great discoveries and revolutionary new insights. It was bad judgment that led the Wright brothers to try to fly: everybody knew at the time that humans couldn’t fly and never would. In 1895, just eight years before their fragile construct took to the air, Lord Kelvin, the esteemed British mathematician, physicist and president of the British Royal Society, had unambiguously declared that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
It was relative ignorance that prompted Albert Einstein, a lowly patent clerk in a Swiss law office, to pose some silly questions about the nature of time, space and energy. Albert Einstein made at least 23 mistakes in his published (and refereed) scientific publications. Some of these were necessary to achieve his monumental insights about the deeper forces of nature.
At a more mundane level, I describe a young woman deciding to date any person asking her out and in the end marrying someone she wouldn’t have given a second look. She was willing to test her preconceived notions about Mr. Right and companies should perhaps do likewise when hiring new talent. Hiring in your own image is seldom the best approach.
Morris: In the Preface to Brilliant Mistakes, you observe, “For most people, the problem is not that they make too many mistakes but too few.” Are there any examples of that in your own experiences thus far?
Schoemaker: Although there has not been that much brilliance in my own life, there are several personal examples that I would consider “brilliant” mistakes at my own level. One concerns my decision to take a two-year sabbatical with Royal Dutch/Shell’s planning group in London just after having been promoted to associate professor at the University of Chicago. Many colleagues deemed this a mistake since my academic career was going well and leaving the world of scholarship might cast doubt on my commitment to research etc. This risk was indeed real, and my two-year absence from publishing probably did not help my academic career. But it also opened up new vistas about life beyond academia and led me to found Decision Strategies International, which for 20 years now has served leading companies around the world in the fields of strategy and decision making.
The second mistake concerned our family’s move from Chicago to Philadelphia without there being any single compelling reason to do so. We were quite happy in Chicago but I left nonetheless to be closer to family, friends and colleagues I had worked with in academia and business. It turned out to be a great move, without regrets and many new experiences that Chicago would probably not have offered.
In the book I describe a third example, where our company decided – against its better judgment – to respond to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that came in over the transom. We had good reasons to believe it would be a waste of time to pursue such RFPs, but then decided to challenge this key assumption. It turned out that we were wrong; some of these random RFPs proved quite valuable to us in terms of new clients and growth.
Morris: Which factors have the greatest impact on a decision’s outcome? Which of them seems to have the greatest impact? Why?
Schoemaker: Companies that want to compete on innovation are well-advised to become more error-tolerant in practice and develop better methods for capturing the lessons from mistakes. Such companies should also emphasize that managers (especially younger ones) who are involved in project failures, are to be viewed as being on a fast learning track, rather than an exit track. Given the significance of failures and mistakes that have led to success, there is potential value from the lessons learned if they are documented, captured and shared. Career development benefits should follow for those involved in the right kinds of failure, assuming they learn and apply the lessons to avoid mistakes in the future. This can be tested via performance reviews as well as actual on-the-job behavior.
The deeper challenge in all this is that leaders must learn how to celebrate the egg that people invariably have on their face, award. This president of an Ann Arbor business decided to institute a Golden Egg to make sure his organization would extract as much learning as possible from past failures. This story is detailed in the book. His viewpoint was that mistakes are valuable assets that belong to the organization. To hide them and not share the lessons would amount to destroying shareholder wealth. At first, few managers wanted to receive the Golden Egg award, but after a while it became much sought after. Winners would proudly regale visitors in their office with the tale of their failed venture and proudly share its lessons. The president created a true learning culture.
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To read the complete interview, please click here.
Paul cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:
Home Page: please click here.
Wharton’s Mack Center: please click here.
His Amazon page: please click here.
His Wikipedia page: please click here.
A video: please click here.
The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan: A book review by Bob Morris
The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results
George B. Bradt, Jayme A. Check, and Jorge E. Pedraza
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2009)
“Finis origine pendet” (The end depends on the beginning.)
The aphorism offered by Latin poet Marcus Manilius would be an appropriate core concept on which George B. Bradt, Jayme A. Check, and Jorge E. Pedraza could establish a foundation for the onboarding process they introduce in this book, an expanded Second Edition. In fact, what they present involves more than a process; it is, in fact, a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective system for anyone who is considering or who has just accepted a position that involves increased leadership and management responsibilities.
For either an internal promotion or for an external hire, the primary objective is the same: Get everyone involved “on board” as quickly and as smoothly as possible. The co-authors include some rock-solid advice on how to have a complete onboarding system already in place before there is (a) an internal promotion within a department, (b) an internal promotion or reassignment from elsewhere within the given organization, or (c) a new hire from outside that organization. Bradt and co-author Mary Vonnegut cover all of that much more thoroughly in Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time.
Specifically, in Parts I and II of The New Leader’s 100 Day Action Plan, the co-authors explain how an individual should
• Position one’s self for a new leadership role or promotion
• Negotiate the terms and condition
• Avoid the most common “land mines”
• Complete due diligence
• Handle an internal promotion
• Embrace the “fuzzy front end” (i.e. first 100 days on the job)
• Decide how to engage the new culture
• Drive action with an ongoing communication campaign
• Take control immediately (i.e. on Day One)
Then in Part III, they introduce and thoroughly explain how their reader can formulate and then implement a “100 Day Action Plan.” They offer an abundance of resources that include five appendices and several dozen downloadable “tools” with worksheets. Appendix III, for example, focuses on the most important communication issues such as Context or Frame, Timing, Style, Body Language, Actions, Inaction and Silence, Rhythm and Repetition, Visuals, and Second- and Third-Hand Channels; downloadable tools include “”Culture Change Management,” “Communication Planning,” and “Crisis Management Checklist.”
Whereas in Onboarding, Bradt and Mary Vonnegut focus primarily on what an organization can do – indeed must do – to enrich as well as expedite the process, in this volume, he and his co-authors focus primarily on the process from the new leader’s perspective. For that reason, if your organization has devoted relatively little (if any) serious attention to the process (as is true, regrettably, of most organizations), I urge you to purchase both books. Yes, there are some redundancies but so what? They reinforce key points, one of them stressing that those who “come aboard” as well as their new associates deserve better preparation and more considerate than is usually the case. That is not only dumb, it’s wasteful.
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