Simply Effective: A book review by Bob Morris

Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done
Ron Ashkenas
Harvard Business School Press (2009)

“Make it as simple as possible…but no simpler.” Albert Einstein

Ron Ashkenas is one of my intellectual heroes. I have read, reviewed, and highly-admire his countless HBR articles as well as his previous books, notably The Boundaryless Organization, The GE Work-Out, and Rapid Results, and thus was eager to read his latest which, he explains, “is meant as a resource for managers, consultants, and others who want to engage in [an] ongoing and never-ending quest [to] engage their colleagues in an ongoing dialogue about the sources of complexity and their implications, and experiment with different approaches until they figure out what works”…or at least what will probably work for them and their organization.

Others have their reasons for praising this book. Here are three of mine. First, Ashkenas follows Einstein’s admonition (quoted in the title of this review) by explaining how to complete the immensely difficult transition to what Oliver Wendell Holmes once characterized as “the other side of complexity.” For example, he provides Assessment 1-1 (Pages 21-25) so that his reader can complete a self-audit by which to determine the major sources of complexity in her or his organization. He also identifies the four sources of complexity (i.e. structure, products, processes, and management behavior) and the major complexity-traps and explains how to avoid or escape from them.

I also admire how skillfully Ashkenas inserts statements throughout his narrative from those who have extensive first-hand experience with simplicity initiatives. For example, here is what a former vice chairman of GE, Floyd Trotter, has to say about the thought process that can be built into an entire culture. “We teach managers that they need to start with the `answer,’ which is that their business needs double-digit earnings improvement every quarter and every year. They quickly realize that sales growth without leverage won’t do it. So they have to figure out how to drive growth while increasing productivity. We don’t complicate it: Material comes in the front door and products go out the back door. We have to get rid of any waste in the middle while also figuring out how to have the products or services be more valuable for our customers.”

Finally, I appreciate Ashkenas’ brilliant use of specificity rather than merely recycling aphorisms, bromides, and prescriptions. In Table 7-1, he provides a “Roadmap for simplicity” that specifies the causes of complexity and the approaches for increasing simplicity in four separate but interdependent areas: structural mitosis, product proliferation, process, evolution, and managerial behavior.

For individuals as well as for organizations, getting to “the other side of complexity” is a continuous process rather than achieving an ultimate objective. Ashkenas clearly agrees with Thomas Edison who once observed, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” For those who are results-driven, cutting through complexity never ends. Fortunately, he offers to them an abundance of insights, observations, and suggestions that can immediately be put to use.

I presume to conclude with two suggestions of my own: First, concentrate primarily on complexity that causes the most serious problems. When doing so, practice ruthless elimination of whatever is wasteful, redundant, obsolete, and/or irrelevant.

The Art of Asking Questions

Ron Ashkenas

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Ron Ashkenas for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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How well do you ask questions?

From my experience, most managers don’t think about this issue. After all, you don’t usually find “the ability to ask questions” on any list of managerial competencies; nor is it an explicit part of the curriculum of business schools or executive education programs. But asking questions effectively is a major underlying part of a manager’s job — which suggests that it might be worth giving this skill a little more focus.

We’ve all experienced times when we’ve failed at being good questioners, perhaps without realizing it. For example, not long ago I sat in on a meeting where a project team was reviewing its progress with a senior executive sponsor. During the presentation it was clear from his body language that the executive was uncomfortable with the direction that the team was taking. As a result, without any realquestioning of the team, he deferred approval of the next steps until he could have a further discussion with the team leader. When he met with the team leader later, he ripped into him for allowing the team to go off-course. Eventually the team leader was able to explain the thinking behind the plan, convinced the executive that they would indeed achieve their objectives, and was given the go-ahead to proceed. But in the meantime the team had lost its momentum (and a week of productivity), and began to focus more on pleasing the sponsor rather than doing the project in the best way.

This is not an isolated incident. Many managers don’t know how to probe the thought process of their subordinates, colleagues, and bosses — and instead make assumptions about the basis of their actions. And when those assumptions are wrong, all sorts of dysfunctional patterns can be created. In a financial services firm, for example, a major product upgrade was delayed by months because the product and IT managers had different assumptions about what was to be delivered by when, and kept blaming each other for delays. When a third party finally helped them to ask the right questions, they were able to come up with a plan that satisfied both, and quickly produced incremental revenue for the product.

There are three areas where improved “questioning” can strengthen managerial effectiveness; and it might be worth considering how you can improve your skills in each one.

First is the ability to ask questions about yourself. All of us fall into unproductive habits, sometimes unconsciously. Good managers therefore are always asking themselves and others about what they could do better or differently. Finding the right time and approach for asking these questions in a way that invites constructive and candid responses is critical.

Second is the ability to ask questions about plans and projects. The examples mentioned above both fall into this category. The challenge with questioning projects is to do so in a way that not only advances the work, but that also builds relationships and helps the people involved to learn and develop. This doesn’t mean that your questions can’t be tough and direct, but the probing needs to be in the spirit of accelerating progress, illuminating unconscious assumptions and solving problems. This is in contrast to some managers who (perhaps out of their own insecurity) ask review questions either to prove that they are the smartest one in the room, or to make someone squirm. On the other hand, many of the best managers I’ve seen have an uncanny ability to engage in Socratic dialogue that helps people reach their own conclusions about what can be done to improve a plan or project, which of course leads to much more ownership and learning.

Finally, practice asking questions about the organization. Although usually unspoken, managers have an obligation to always look for ways that the organization as a whole can function more effectively. To do this, they need to ask questions about practices, processes, and structures: Why do we do things this way? Is there a better approach? Asking these questions in a way that does not trigger defensiveness and that is seen as constructive is an important skill for managers.

Most of us never think about how to frame our questions. Giving this process some explicit thought however might not only make you a better manager; it might also help others improve their inquiry skills as well.

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Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done.

 

3 Ways to Encourage Risk-Taking

Ron Ashkenas

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription, to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

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Good bosses strike a careful balance between telling people what to do and empowering them to do things on their own.

Struggling with this balancing act is common, especially for new managers. Here are three ways to let others take ownership, while giving them what they need:

1.    Make goals clear. Your job is to make sure the team understands its objectives. But, leave it up to team members to decide how to achieve those goals.

2.    Share leadership. Identify informal leaders among the group who can take on roles such as heading up ad hoc task forces and arranging off-site meetings.

3.    Ask for solutions, not problems. When your team members encounter an obstacle, ask them to come to you to explain the problem and present a proposed solution. Encourage them to problem solve before asking for your perspective.

To read other “Tips” and join the discussion, please click here.

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

This Management Tip was adapted from the Harvard ManageMentor Online Module, “Team Management.”

To buy the full module to learn more about successfully managing a team, please click here.

Ron Ashkenas asks, “Do you have too much on your plate?”

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

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The most common complaint that I hear from managers these days is that they simply have too much to do — and can’t get everything done without stretching and stressing themselves and their people. One explanation, of course, is that downsizing done over the past eighteen months has left many companies without the resources to support increasing levels of business. Another factor is that now, in the aftermath of the recession, many firms are rethinking how they do business, and driving these changes also requires extra effort.
While in some cases new hires or the use of consultants or temporary staff will relieve the pressure, the reality is that most organizations want to hold the line on expenses, and not add substantial resources. If that’s your situation, then you need to think about alternative ways to manage the overload. Here are a few options to consider:

[Here are two.]

• Review the workload across strategic priorities. If you have many projects going on simultaneously, all of which are considered high priority, take a hard and holistic look at the subinitiatives that flow out of these projects. Most projects are like trees — with branches of various sizes sprouting from the trunk of the project. This means that even if you have only five or six key strategic projects, you still might have dozens of subinitiatives, many of which call upon or affect the same people. Often managers look at each strategic project in isolation. Instead, take a more comprehensive view, perhaps with the help of a centralized project management organization (PMO), to identify opportunities for combining, deferring, or resequencing the subinitiatives.

• Eliminate zombie projects. In large organizations, it is very common for people to keep working on projects that have been “killed” or have not been officially commissioned — and that are not currently priorities. These “below the radar screen” efforts often stem either from an emotional connection to a cancelled project (and not wanting to let it go) or a well-meaning attempt to get out in front of an issue that hasn’t yet risen to a strategic level. Whatever the case, these projects drain resources and need to be nailed back in their coffins.

In the current economic environment, almost all managers will probably feel that they have too much on their plates at some point. Since additional resources may not be forthcoming, the best approach will be to focus not only on reducing the volume of work but also on recalibrating the process we use to get that work done.

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Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

Book Review: Simply Effective

Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done
Ron Ashkenas
Harvard Business Press (2010)

Ron Ashkenas is one of my intellectual heroes. I have read, reviewed, and highly-admire his previous books, notably The Boundaryless Organization, The GE Work-Out, and Rapid Results, and thus was eager to read his latest which, he explains, “is meant as a resource for managers, consultants, and others who want to engage in [an] ongoing and never-ending quest [to] engage their colleagues in an ongoing dialogue about the sources of complexity and their implications, and experiment with different approaches until they figure out what works”…or at least what will probably work for them and their organization.

Others have their reasons for praising this book. Here are three of mine. First, Ashkenas follows Albert Einstein’s admonition (“Make it as simple as possible…but no simpler.”) by explaining how to complete the immensely difficult transition to what Oliver Wendell Holmes once characterized as “the other side of complexity.” For example, he provides Assessment 1-1 (Pages 21-25) so that his reader can complete a self-audit by which to determine the major sources of complexity in her or his organization. He also identifies the four sources of complexity (i.e. structure, products, processes, and management behavior) and the major complexity-traps and explains how to avoid or escape from them.

I also admire how skillfully Ashkenas inserts statements throughout his narrative from those who have extensive first-hand experience with simplicity initiatives. For example, here is what a former vice chairman of GE, Floyd Trotter, has to say about the thought process that can be built into an entire culture. “We teach managers that they need to start with the `answer,’ which is that their business needs double-digit earnings improvement every quarter and every year. They quickly realize that sales growth without leverage won’t do it. So they have to figure out how to drive growth while increasing productivity. We don’t complicate it: Material comes in the front door and products go out the back door. We have to get rid of any waste in the middle while also figuring out how to have the products or services be more valuable for our customers.”

Finally, I appreciate Ashkenas’ brilliant use of specificity rather than merely recycling aphorisms, bromides, and prescriptions. In Table 7-1, he provides a “Roadmap for simplicity” that identifies the causes of complexity and the approaches for increasing simplicity in four separate but interdependent areas: structural mitosis, product proliferation, process, evolution, and managerial behavior. For individuals as well as for organizations, getting to “the other side of complexity” is a continuous process rather than achieving an ultimate objective. Ashkenas clearly agrees with Thomas Edison who once observed, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” For those who are results-driven, cutting through complexity never ends. Fortunately, Ron Ashkenas offers to them an abundance of insights, observations, and suggestions that can immediately be put to use.

I presume to conclude with two suggestions of my own: First, concentrate on complexity that causes the most serious problems. When doing so, practice ruthless elimination of whatever is wasteful, redundant, obsolete, or irrelevant.

Ron Ashkenas on “rapid disruption’s next victim”

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

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Over the last two decades a number of new technologies have become so ubiquitous that we now take them for granted and don’t realize how much they have changed our lives and our world. Consider, for example, the Internet and our ability to search for information easily and quickly; the use of GPS for personal navigation; and handheld devices that can store music and video.

What’s common with all of these technologies is that they have created “solutions” that are fast, inexpensive, and relatively simple to use — while quickly outmoding and disrupting long-standing industries that provided “old” and suddenly less competitive solutions. And it’s happened in the blink of an eye. Witness the struggles of postal services, newspapers, publishing companies, broadcast networks, retail video outlets, music producers, and many more.

One of the next candidates for rapid disruption is the airline industry. Everyone knows that airlines are under siege these days — from fluctuating fuel prices, security concerns, and an economic downturn that has reduced business travel. But what we (and industry executives) may not realize is that the biggest threat to the airlines is a disruptive set of solutions that will dramatically reduce the need for air travel altogether.

The “solutions” I’m referring to are virtual meetings — including teleconferences; web-based meetings attended on personal computers and handheld devices; and videoconferences. The problem that these solutions solve is how to get people together in real time in a way that they can interact naturally, build relationships, solve problems, and share information — without having to travel.

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Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

Ron Ashkenas on “The Problem with Priorities”

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

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Everyone knows the problems that arise when kids walk into a candy store: Everything looks so good they want it all, and they end up overdoing it. Unfortunately, practicing self-control doesn’t get any easier with age, which might explain why setting a limited number of priorities, and sticking to them, is one of the most difficult challenges facing managers today.

Here’s a quick example: The head of a large hospital brought together her direct reports and asked them to create a separate card for each major project or initiative underway. They then placed all of these cards on the wall and realized that, between the ten of them, they had over 150 active projects, many of which were drawing upon the same resources or impacting the same groups. It was no wonder, the team realized, that they were behind schedule and that their people felt overloaded.

Despite the realization that they had too much on their plates (and too many cards on the wall), this leadership team still struggled with narrowing their focus. Many felt that everything was important and nothing could be dropped without serious consequences. But if everything is called a priority, then nothing is. In fact, what’s worse is that people at lower levels, faced with the impossible task of trying to respond to everything, end up deciding what is important based on their more limited sense of the company’s strategy and their ability to get things done. By not clarifying the few key priorities, leadership teams unintentionally delegate priority-setting to their people. And then they wonder why everyone isn’t on the same page.

If you and your team want to do a better job with setting priorities here are four simple — but not easy — steps that you can take:

[Here’s one. To read the complete article, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.]

1. Use your current portfolio to deduce your real
priorities. Most every organization spells out its stated priorities as part of its strategic plan. Over time, however, the clarity of these priorities dissipates as they are translated into actions — and as other projects and initiatives are added for various reasons (e.g. competitive threats, operational problems, customer opportunities).

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Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

Ron Ashkenas on “A Dangerous Pattern: Rewarding Failure”

Ron Ashkenas

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

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Over the past few months there has been growing anger and frustration about outsized Wall Street bonuses awarded by institutions that were rescued by taxpayer funds. At the core of this anger is the feeling that the pursuit of big payoffs caused bankers to develop complex products and take big risks which ultimately caused the financial system to crash — and if this dynamic is not curbed, it will happen again. At the same time, there is also a feeling, reinforced by President Obama, that Wall Street bankers have not really been held accountable for their risky actions and, in fact, are being unduly rewarded while everyone else continues to suffer.

Unfortunately, the focus on Wall Street masks a more dangerous pattern of rewarding failure that is deeply embedded in the highest levels of corporate and governmental culture. For example, President Obama’s point person for reforming Wall Street is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. But somehow Geithner himself has not been held accountable for the financial crisis. This is despite the fact that as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Geithner was responsible for the supervision of Wall Street banks. His reward for allowing these banks to create unsustainable balance sheets: He was made Treasury Secretary.

Similarly Geithner’s boss in the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, was not held accountable for the interest rate and regulatory policies that some say caused the crisis. Instead, he was confirmed for a second term by a wide margin in the Senate. And to complete the failure trifecta, Lawrence Summers, who supported many of the policies that caused the financial crisis and resigned from his position as President of Harvard after making unfortunate statements about the capabilities of women, was given a senior role as a White House economic policy advisor.

But this culture of rewarding failure is not limited to the highest levels of government. Virtually every senior corporate leader of a failed institution walks away with millions of dollars. Many move on to other senior corporate jobs or board positions. Take Robert Nardelli as an example. After not getting the top job at GE in 2001, Nardelli became the CEO of Home Depot where he made a series of strategic missteps and displayed an arrogance that alienated employees and customers. After being ousted from that job (with millions of dollars) he was hired by Cerberus to turn around Chrysler — another failure which ultimately resulted in its acquisition by Fiat. And while thousands of Chrysler employees and dealers lost their jobs and their incomes, again Nardelli walked away with his fortune intact and enhanced.

None of this is to blame Geithner, Bernanke, Summers or Nardelli. The point of this argument is that at the highest levels of government and corporations, we have accepted a culture of rewarding failure. That is why perhaps the best job in America is to be a failed CEO. You receive millions in severance and are once more given opportunities to either try it again, or serve on a board of directors where you can again escape accountability for failure. In fact, while President Obama calls for “clawbacks” of banker’s bonuses, nobody seems to be calling for directors to return the compensation that they received for poorly “supervising” financial institutions and other corporations that struggle or fail.

Steve Kerr, former chief learning officer of GE and Goldman Sachs, notes that the biggest problem with compensation is what he calls “asking for A while rewarding B.” If we are serious about asking for excellent performance, then we have to stop rewarding failure. It’s a simple equation — and until we get it right, the President’s calls for greater accountability will have a hollow ring.

What do you think?

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Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

Do Your Controls Create Complexity?

Ron Ashkenas

Do Your Controls Create Complexity?

Ron Ashkenas responds to that question in an article written for the Harvard Business blog. Here is an excerpt.

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Have you ever noticed that organizations are great at creating controls and policies to prevent incidents that have already happened? Once the proverbial cow escapes the barn, they adeptly make sure it won’t happen again by, say, authorizing only certain people to man the exit and constructing barn-door status reports.

While this kind of organizational response does indeed prevent the recurrence of the exact same negative instance (they won’t lose the same cow in the same way again), the accumulation of these “reactive” controls often creates complexity, confusion, and unnecessary cost. Even worse, the new controls usually don’t prevent future incidents of a different kind from occurring.

To be better prepared, organizations should periodically step back and check their operations for these common problems arising from after-the-fact solutions:

[Note: Here is the first of three that Ashkenas discusses.]

1. Static controls for dynamic issues. Anyone who has flown lately — particularly on flights to the United States — has seen the continued accretion of security controls at the airports and on the planes. For example, upon returning to the U.S. from Canada recently, I went through three newly created screenings in three different staging areas. The TSA created these procedures — along with previous ones such as fortifying cockpit doors and not allowing carry-on liquids — to prevent repeats of past attacks, and so far they have worked. However, the continued accumulation of more and more security procedures is not sustainable — and does nothing to prevent new and different attacks. At some point the various security services, along with technology experts and the airlines, will need to come together to develop more preventative, proactive, and streamlined security controls. The only other alternative will be to have nobody fly.

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Every organization has control procedures and policies, many of them created after the fact with the perfectly logical intention of preventing problems from happening again. But unless you periodically step back and assess the cost and benefit of these procedures, you run the danger of creating more complexity than competitive advantage.

So take a look at your organization’s controls. Could they benefit from an update?

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

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Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.