LEADERSHIP: A Master Class

I have just learned about a new series of DVD programs, produced by More Than Sound, and hosted by Daniel Goleman. The video collection also includes a bonus interview with Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

“Leadership: A Master Class allows individuals and organizations alike access to top-level training on developing emotionally intelligent management skills from world-class experts,” says Goleman. “Executives, HR directors and leadership coaches now have at their fingertips a comprehensive, easy-to-use library of proven-effective techniques from these masters in their respective fields.”

The series includes:

HIGH PERFORMANCE LEADERSHIP with George Kohlrieser, professor of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour at IMD, and author of the internationally bestselling book, Hostage At The Table: How Leaders Can Overcome Conflict, Influence Others, and Raise Performance. His most recent book is Care to Dare: Unleashing Astonishing Potential Through Secure Base Leadership.

THE SOCIALLY INTELLIGENT LEADER with Warren Bennis, pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies, university professor and founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California.

AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP with Bill George, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, and former chairman and chief executive officer of Medtronic.

TODAY’S LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVE with Howard Gardner, the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and was named one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world.

THE LEADER’S MIND with Daniel J. Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute.

TALENT STRATEGY with Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a top global expert on hiring and promotion decisions, and senior adviser of the leading executive search firm Egon Zehnder International.

CREATE TO INNOVATE with Teresa Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and director of research in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School.

GETTING BEYOND YES with Erica Ariel Fox, lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, and part of the internationally acclaimed Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON).

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To obtain more information about the series, please click here.

Daniel Goleman is the author of the international bestsellers Emotional Intelligence, Working with Emotional Intelligence, and Social Intelligence, and the co-author of the acclaimed business bestseller Primal Leadership. He was a science reporter for the New York Times, was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and received the American Psychological Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his media writing. His latest book is The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights, published by More Than Sound (2011). He lives in the Berkshires.

DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: A book review by Bob Morris

DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation
Edgar H. Schein
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (2003)

Note: I recently re-read this book and was amazed by how relevant its author’s insights continue to be.

MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Edgar Schein does a marvelous job telling the story of the rise and fall of Digital Equipment Corporation, the former #2 computer maker in the world behind IBM. The business reasons behind DEC’s economic failure have been widely reported (missing the advent of the PC, having too many projects going at once, failure to market products effectively, etc.) However, the big question to be answered is why did these failures occur? To quote one passage, “Why did an organization that was wildly successful for thirty-five years, filled with intelligent, articulate powerful engineers and managers, fail to act effectively to deal with problems that were highly visible to everyone, both inside and outside the organization?”

Schein looks at DEC’s failure through the lens of its corporate culture, and how it prohibited their executives from making the decisions, and taking the actions necessary to survive. Fans of Ed Schein will know his famous “Three Cultures of Management” paper, in which he describes the “Executive”, “Line Manager” and “Engineering” cultures, all of which must exist and be balanced against one another for an organization to survive. Schein argues that DEC was dominated by the engineering culture, which valued innovation and “elegant” design, over profits and operational efficiency. This engineering culture dominated even the top levels of DEC, where proposals to build PCs out of off the shelf parts that were readily available in the marketplace, were shot down because the machines were thought to be junk compared to the ones DEC could build themselves.

That DEC was able to survive for as long as it did was largely attributable to its ability to innovate in a field that was so new it had not yet coalesced around certain standard systems, software and networks. However, as the computer industry became in effect a commodity market, and the buyers began to value price over innovation, DEC found itself increasingly unable, and in fact, unwilling to compete. The engineering culture which valued innovation and required creative freedom, did not want to subject itself to the requirements of being a commodity player which demanded autocratic operational efficiency and control over how resources were allocated.

Although DEC is now long gone, even readers who were too young to use computers at the time of its demise will find familiar truths in this book. As the old saying goes, the fish in the tank does not see the water it is in. Neither do we often see the cultures in which we are ourselves embedded. The real lesson of this wonderful book is to show us how our corporate cultures often prohibit us from doing the right things, even when we can see them clearly. Sometimes culture is most easily visible in the things you need to discuss, but that are simply “not on the table” for discussion.

There are many lessons here too, for companies that seek to innovate new products and services, and how to balance the creative freedom desired by the engineering culture with the “money gene” culture of sound executive management. The names of companies that have failed to realize the full financial benefits of their technical innovations is too long to list here. But the DEC story is a must read for anyone who seeks to balance innovation with sustainable economic success in any organization.

A vast treasure of intellectual capital awaits you….

Many people are unaware that among the invaluable resources Harvard Business Review makes available at no cost online are more than 100 videos — each about five minutes in length –  that have been excerpted from conversations during which eminent thought leaders share their insights.

Here’s a partial list.

FYI, I am using a format that enables you to click on any title that you wish to see.

The Power of Progress
Teresa Amabile, Harvard Business School professor and co-author of The Progress Principle, explains the importance of small wins at work.

The Future of Work 2.0
Tom Malone, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of the HBR article “The Age of Hyperspecialization,” explains why breaking jobs into tiny pieces yields better, faster, cheaper work—and greater flexibility for employees.

Better Protection for U.S. Consumers
Peter Tufano, dean of the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, offers advice for financial services regulators

Think Like an Innovator
Jeff Dyer, professor at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management and coauthor of The Innovator’s DNA, outlines the four ways leaders come up with their great ideas

Inside P&G’s Growth Factory
Scott Anthony, managing director of Innosight and author of the HBR article “How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate,” outlines a proven model for new business creation.

Wise Leadership
Hirotaka Takeuchi, Harvard Business School professor, and Ikujiro Nonaka, professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University, explain how the best executives strive for the common good. They are the authors of the HBR article “The Wise Leader.”

Dancing into a Turnaround
Jack Meyer, chairman of the Boston Ballet, on bringing financial discipline to a creative organization.

The Secret Weapon of Great Leaders
Melba Duncan, author of the HBR article “The Case for Executive Assistants,” explains why technology can’t replace personal support

What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL
Roger Martin, author of Fixing the Game and dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, explains why linking CEO compensation to share price performance is like letting quarterbacks bet on their own teams.

Productivity Tips from Bob Pozen
Bob Pozen, author of the May HBR article “Extreme Productivity,” has worked as a top mutual fund executive, an attorney, a government official, a law school professor, a business school professor and a prolific author—often doing several jobs at once. Here he presents a few practical tips for getting more done.

How Top CEOs Cope with Constant Stress
Justin Menkes, author of Better Under Pressure, explains why today’s leaders need realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, and the ability to find order in chaos.

Ellen Seidler on Piracy in the Digital Age
The future of creativity will only be bright if independent artists are rewarded for the immense intellectual and financial investment they make in their work. Unfortunately, in the digital age, many are struggling to do this because of increasingly sophisticated online piracy. Ellen Seidler, a California-based film maker and journalist, invested three years and $250,000 in an independent comic movie called And Then Came Lola. Although the movie was critically well received and shown.

The Business of Humor
Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger Network, explains how his crowd-sourced websites stay agile and creative.

Lessons from New Product Launches—Cell Zone to iPad
Joan Schneider and Julie Hall of Schneider Associates, coauthors of the HBR article “Why Most Product Launches Fail,” explain how to attract and maintain consumers’ attention.

Boost Power Through Body Language
Amy Cuddy, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, describes a simple way to raise confidence and reduce stress.

To repeat, these and other video excerpts — each about five minutes in length — can be viewed by clicking here.

They can also be viewed at HBR’s YouTube channel.

William C. Taylor: An interview by Bob Morris

Bill Taylor

Bill Taylor is a writer, a speaker, and entrepreneur who has shaped the global conversation about the best ways to compete, innovate, and succeed. As a cofounder and founding editor of Fast Company, he launched a magazine that won countless awards, and earned a passionate following among executives and entrepreneurs around the world. Taylor wrote a regular business column for The New York Times as well as a monthly column for London’s Guardian newspaper. He now writes a popular management blog for Harvard Business Review. His previous book, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, and was named a “Business Book of the Year” by The Economist and Financial Times. His new book, Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Company, and Challenge Yourself, was published on January 4, 2011 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. A graduate of Princeton University and the MIT Sloan School of Management, Taylor lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.

Morris: Before discussing any of your specific books, a few general questions. First, when and why did you decide to commit yourself to a career in business journalism?

Taylor: I’ve never thought of myself as a “journalist” per se. I am someone who loves the power of new ideas, loves to find people and organizations who are having an impact on the world around them, loves to bring those ideas to life by telling the stories of these innovators in ways that other people find inspiring and instructive. Short answer: I think I am in the “thought leadership” business rather than the “journalism” business.

Morris: Please explain the founding of Fast Company. What was its original mission? To what extent (if any) has that mission since changed?

Taylor: My cofounder Alan Webber and I were at the Harvard Business Review when we had the idea to start Fast Company. We didn’t have a plan for a “business” as much as we had a set of ideas about the future of work, leadership, and progress—ideas about which we were passionate and that we wanted to share with others.

I’ve always thought of Fast Company as a magazine about ambition and success–in the best sense of both those words. Not money and power, but meaning and impact. Fast Company is a magazine for leaders at every level and in any field who want to think big about their work–the kind of organization they want to build, the kind of impact they want to have, the kinds of products and services they want to launch. It’s also a magazine for people who are extremely competitive, but who don’t use money as the only measure of whether they win or lose. They worry more about the contribution they make, the legacy they leave, the impact they have.

Way back at the outset of the magazine, we convened a small gathering of Fast Company allies called the “Fast Pack.” Harriet Rubin, who was the founder of Doubleday Currency, the game-changing book imprint, said something that has stuck with me: “Freedom is a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.” Fast Company has been and will always be a magazine for leaders who worry more about what they can unleash rather than what they can control.

Morris: As I survey the current state of the magazine world, I am reminded of the first line in Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Do you agree?

Taylor: With respect to the magazine world, I’d say it’s much more the worst of times than the best of times. The business model for print magazines really is broken. Fast Company continues to do great relative to the competition. In fact, we just learned that our 2010 increase in ad pages (26.5 percent) was greater than any other business magazine in the country. So that’s great!

But we started Fast Company 15 years ago, and it’s hard to capture just how different the economic environment is today. Costs are going up so fast—paper, postage, all that boring stuff that adds real dollars—and the advertising environment is just so tough on the print side.

Readers still love it—we literally have more subscribers than at any time in our history, and the energy on the Web is amazing. But magazines are no different from any other business. The “mainstream” part of the business is getting tougher much more quickly than the “up-and-coming” part of the business is getting easier.

Morris: I have read several dozen of your articles for various publications. You discuss perspectives on subjects that most other journalists either neglect or ignore. For example, you seem to be intrigued by counterintuitive thinking, presumably because you are a counterintuitive thinker. Is that a fair assessment?

Taylor: I love people and organizations that win big because they think different. That’s what gets me pumped up, that’s what gets my creative and competitive juices flowing. There’s just something exhilarating about getting to know a company that’s rewriting the rules of competition in its industry, a public official who has reimagined how to deliver a product or service to his or her constituents, a change agent inside a big organization that is trying to transform how that organization works.

That sense of not just out-hustling the competition but out-thinking the competition—that’s the fuel behind Fast Company, Mavericks at Work, and now Practically Radical. The settings and mood of the times for each of these projects may be different, but the spirit is the same.

Morris: Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations. Why?

Taylor: As the cofounder of Fast Company, I’ve always been struck by the slow-going rate of change inside most organizations. In the earliest days of the magazine, after we had a business plan but before we published the premiere issue, we convened a conference around the theme, “How Do You Overthrow a Successful Company?” It wasn’t a gathering of hotshots eager to take on the corporate establishment. It was a gathering of big-picture thinkers and change agents from illustrious big companies who sensed that there were massive shifts on the horizon, but that there wasn’t a commitment among their colleagues to reckon with what was coming.

It was a great conversation, ahead of its time in many ways (this was 1995), and the outlook was grim. Roger Martin, now dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, warned that “the role of big companies is to turn great people into mediocre organizations.” Mort Meyerson, the much-admired CEO and philanthropist, then at the helm of Perot Systems, compared leading an organization in fast-changing times to “floating in lava in a wooden boat.” His plea to the group: “We need a new model to reach the future.”

What a difference 15 years don’t make. Are those misgivings any less relevant today than they were back then—or the prospects for genuine transformation any less bleak? This is the hardest work there is.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Bill Taylor cordially invites to visit these websites:

http://www.practicallyradical.com

http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/

http://www.bnet.com/blog/innovator

http://www.fastcompany.com/

How Sustainability Fuels Design Innovation

Steven D. Eppinger

Here is an excerpt from an interview of Steven D. Eppinger by Michael S. Hopkins that appears in the MIT Sloan Management Review, September 14 2010. To read the complete interview, please vlick here.

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The link between sustainability and innovation is commonly mentioned, but not commonly made. Here, new-product design guru Steven Eppinger describes the practice that breeds discovery.

THERE’S AN ALARMIST VIEW of sustainable design that tilts toward the black and white. Industrial product life cycle: bad. Biological life cycle: good. Want to redesign things so they don’t poison the environment? Then complete the comprehensive life cycle analysis of the product’s impacts — all of them — before you think of lifting a design tool.

And fair enough; all-or-nothing reinvention is one fine path to creating something new.

It’s not the best path, though, says new-product design expert Steven Eppinger. Eppinger is no less alarmed than the alarmists, but when it comes to the practice of what he calls “design for environment,” he rejects the radical and argues for the incremental. For one thing, all-or-nothing isn’t an approach businesses are especially good at; it takes too long, and fails too often. For another, the sum of continuous incrementalism is likely, he says, to carry designs further toward the no-impact outcomes everyone desires. Plus, there’s a method to it. It can be learned. The secret is to focus on materials.

Eppinger, an engineer by training, is professor of management science and innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he also has spent stints helping run the school as a deputy dean. He is co-author, with Karl Ulrich, of the popular textbook Product Design and Development. (Its fifth edition, out next summer, contains a chapter titled “Design for Environment.”) In person, the word Eppinger calls to mind is crisp. His manner is disciplined, his speech direct; the ideas that interest him tend toward the actionable.

All of which make him a perfect commentator about the sometimes abstract management notions that connect sustainability to innovation. Eppinger has seen the connection in the field — one clear step at a time.

He spoke with Michael S. Hopkins, editor-in-chief of MIT Sloan Management Review.

Hopkins: We’re going to get to innovation, design and new product development — your specialties — but first I wonder if you could do some temperature-taking for us. As you’ve worked with executives and organizations over the past few years, how has their thinking about sustainability changed?

Eppinger: I think there’s been a key transformation. The thinking first went from, “This is a bad thing” to “This is an OK thing” — and maybe we’re getting to the point now where it’s even, “This is a really good thing.” Let me draw an analogy with quality management. When quality management became a big emphasis of management education and practice in the 1980s, I think the initial attitude of managers was, “Well, we could improve quality, but it will cost more.”

And then after implementing it for a while, we realized that was wrong, that in fact good implementations of quality management also improved cost. It was bad implementations of quality management that worsened costs. This is the transformation that we’re now beginning to experience with sustainability. At first people said, “If I’m going to reduce the environmental impact of my product or service or business, cost will suffer, of course.” It was just an assumption — a gut reaction — with lots of bad examples to support it.

So it’s the bad implementations of sustainability that will affect cost in a bad way. But the good implementations — and there are plenty of examples today — save money.

Hopkins: So far, the most common way that companies attack sustainability is by making a pure operations play: identifying cost savings in cutting down on waste, improving on energy use. It’s what lots of sustainability people call the early win, low-hanging fruit that every company could gain from doing. Is that kind of resource-efficiency thinking related to what you call “design for environment”?

Eppinger: No, not really. The way to think of environmental sustainability when it comes to design and product innovation is by framing it as a materials problem. It’s about the materials that we use in the products and the materials that are used to run the processes that make the products. The reason that product design has a big impact is that’s where the materials decisions are made.

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Findings that caught my eye:

• Frame design and product innovation for environmental sustainability as a materials problem.
• How much material is used is less important than what material is used.
•  Don’t try to eliminate environmental impacts all at once. Try to get a little better each time you design any product.

Barbara Bund on the healthy signs of outside-in behavior

Barbara Bund

In the Preface to The Outside-In Corporation: How to Build a Customer-centric Organization for Breakthrough Results published by 
McGraw-Hill (2005), Barbara Bund explains,  “The primary objective of this book is to help business managers use [her various] insights effectively in practice. It is to share the outside-in discipline — to provide a road map for managers to follow in creating and leading outside-in corporations, even in organizations where the unfortunate inside-out perspective has prevailed in the past.”
In essence, “outside-in” means that the most important decisions that a company’s leaders make are customer-centric and take into full account the realities of the given competitive marketplace.

Bund recommends checking your organization for the following healthy signs 
of outside-in behavior:

• Employees throughout the organization have clear ideas of who are customers are and, broadly, what we do for them.

• Although employees in different roles and at different organizational levels have different depths of understanding of customers, the employees’ views of customers are generally consistent with one another.

• We have clear, explicit, understandable “pictures” of customers.

• Those customer pictures provide clear, explicit reasons for our marketplace strategies and actions.

• Our top managers have lots of contact with customers — and they know how to listen.

• Lots of other employees have substantial contact with customers — and they learn from their contacts.

• We capture the learning about customers and incorporate it into our evolving strategies and actions.

Credited by Philip Kotler with popularizing the term “relationship marketing,” Bund specializes in marketing strategy, as a consultant and Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. As explained in her most recent book, The Outside-in Corporation, she focuses on the challenge of driving an organization’s marketplace strategy and tactics clearly and explicitly from the perspective of the customer — from the outside in. While acknowledging that the outside-in perspective is often difficult to achieve and maintain, she argues that it is also critical to marketplace success.

Interview: Barbara Bund

Barbara Bund

Credited by Philip Kotler with popularizing the term “relationship marketing,” Bund specializes in marketing strategy, as a consultant and Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. As explained in her most recent book, The Outside-in Corporation, she focuses on the challenge of driving an organization’s marketplace strategy and tactics clearly and explicitly from the perspective of the customer — from the outside in. While acknowledging that the outside-in perspective is often difficult to achieve and maintain, she argues that it is also critical to marketplace success.

Here is a brief excerpt from my interview of Bund.

Morris: What prompted you to write The Outside-in Corporation?

Bund: I had two reasons. First, in my work with companies I kept being surprised – or, more accurately, shocked -– at how few managers stated strong customer-based strategies. Different people in a single organization often expressed markedly different views about customer needs and behaviors. Implementation suffered. Plans for new or existing businesses rarely explained clearly how the organization would satisfy customer needs and accommodate customer behaviors. At the same time, I saw how real customer focus brought success to businesses that achieved it.

My second motivation came from my graduate students. I wanted to teach them skills that would be especially helpful to them in their careers. I decided it would be especially useful to teach my students how to focus on customers in a realistic and effective way.

So, I spent quite a number of years developing and teaching courses in which my students learned and practiced good outside-in thinking. I then decided it was time to write a book to share the outside-in approach with a wider business audience.

Morris: You say that your objective in the book is to share that “outside-in discipline.” What does this discipline require of managers?

Bund: The outside-in discipline requires that you have an explicit customer-based reason for everything you do in the marketplace.

There are really two parts to this requirement. First, managers need to be explicit about what they believe about customers. They need to create what I call “customer pictures,” verbal descriptions of customers that highlight the key customer characteristics and make those customers come alive. Although managers never know as much about customers as they want and need to know, the outside-in discipline requires that they construct customer pictures anyway, basing the pictures on whatever hard data they have plus hypotheses and intuition – often a lot of hypotheses and intuition.

The second part of the requirement is to make sure that the organization’s strategies and actions in the marketplace match the customer pictures and that they are understood by the people who implement them. It involves updating the customer pictures, strategies and actions as the managers learn more and as customers change. And it involves communicating the pictures, strategies and actions so that people throughout the organization understand what they are doing and why.

If you wish to read the entire Bund interview, please click here.