^∞Fouroboros

One of the cruelest things about organizations today is that they hold executives to standards of rationality, clarity, and foresight that are unobtainable. Most leaders can't meet such standards because they're only human, facing a huge amount of unpredictability and all the fallible analyses that we have in this world. Unfortunately, the result is that many executives feel they just can't measure up. That triggers a vicious psychological circle: Managers have rotten experiences because they keep coming up short, which reinforces low self-esteem. In the end, they get completely demoralized and don't contribute what they actually could - and otherwise would.

Karl E. Weick,
University of Michigan Business School at Ann Arbor
Managing the Unexpected (2001)

SELF-DEVELOPMENT. Not just skills, but the whole range of our own potentialities for sensing, wondering, learning, understanding and aspiring. Gardner points out that this does not happen until one gets over the odd notion that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE. By midlife we are accomplished fugitives from ourselves. Our lives are filled with diversions; our heads stuffed with knowledge; we are involved with people. Result: weve never taken time to probe our inner selves. We dont want to know ourselves. We dont want to depend upon ourselves. We cant stand to live with ourselves. A better way is to develop a more comfortable view of who you are. It is the true basis of inner strength.

COURAGE TO FAIL. By the time we reach middle age, we carry in our heads a long list of things well never try again because we tried once and failed. Mature people learn less because they are willing to risk less. Theres no learning without difficulty and fumbling, but if you want to keep on learning, you must keep risking failure.

LOVE. Develop the ability to have mutually fruitful relations with others. Be capable of accepting love and giving it; of depending upon others and of being depended upon. Develop the ability to see life through anothers eyes and reach out to others.

MOTIVATION. A self-renewing person is highly motivated. The author points out that motivation isnt a fuel that gets injected into your system (motivation speakers wont do it); its partly inner energy and partly the result of the social forces in your life. Gardner makes the point that we live in an over-verbalized civilization. Words have become more real than the things they signify and we need to return to the solid earth of direct experience because we are drowning in meaningless word tonnage.

Even the strongest and most successful brands occasionally need to be refocused, refreshed, and revitalized. The Fast Company team has developed a list of aging brands that could use reinvention -- as well as some successful brands that could still improve further.

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Full rules and entry information are available online.

Barbie
Brooks Brothers
Fast Company
Kmart
Martha Stewart
McDonald's
Microsoft
Office Depot
Old Navy
Radio Shack
Starbucks
Tide
Tiffany's
The United States of America
Virgin

"Survival is very uncertain in an environment filled with risk, the unexpected, and competition. Therefore, a company must have the commitment of the minds of all of its employees to survive.... We know that the intelligence of a few technocrats - even very bright ones - has become totally inadequate to face these challenges."

-Konosuke Matsushita

For years, American business was dominated by a central-planning paradigm credited to Frederick Taylor. Taylor argued that management is a science that can be taught. In search of higher productivity, Taylor advocated systematic study to improve upon the best prevailing production practices of his day. Aided by time-and-motion studies, managers would ascertain the best way to perform each task, select the best people for each task, and teach them the one best way. Taylor laudably sought to increase business productivity so that both wages and profits would rise. Thus, he sought to replace labor-management confrontation with a harmony of interests founded on greater productivity.

In Taylor's view, managerial direction was key to enhancing productivity, because manual laborers were generally incapable of understanding the best way of doing their jobs.

...Taylor's methods generated significant productivity increases when applied to uneducated workers doing repetitive tasks. But followers tried to develop his ideas into a universal approach to be used in contexts quite different from the ones Taylor originally studied. A school of thought, "Scientific Management," emphasized that management's job is to give orders, while labor should follow these orders. This worldview has shaped labor-management relations for most of the twentieth century.

Advocates of Scientific Socialism also cited Scientific Management in support of their grand vision for society. In the Soviet Union, both Lenin and Trotsky admired Scientific Management and thought it was one of the important features of capitalism that socialists should imitate. In their view, centralized planning of the entire economy was just a logical extension of centralized planning within the factory.

...Though motivated by humanitarian concern, Scientific Management possessed a major blind spot: it ignored the importance of dispersed and tacit knowledge. In an organization of any significant size, authoritarian managers can be little more effective than central economic planners, because they lack the requisite knowledge. Much relevant knowledge is dispersed in the heads of many people in the organization, and much of it cannot be communicated to a central point for processing. Firms built on the central-planning model suffer from the same "fatal conceit" that afflicts centrally planned economies.

Market Incentives and Motivation

Entrepreneurs earn profits by thinking up new ways to create value for others. No one orders them to be creative; they simply find that they can make themselves better off by making their customers better off as well.

In business, though, employees frequently get raises and promotions for following orders, building political skills, attaining a specific rank, or simply hanging around for a long time. Some of this occurs because of union contracts, but such incentives are also widespread in managerial compensation schemes. As one corporate executive noted, "There must be better reasons for giving raises than the fact that the earth went all the way around the sun again."

Nucor Corporation has found a better way. At Nucor, substantial employee bonuses, paid weekly, are tied to production results that specific teams of employees can directly affect. Higher output leads to higher bonuses, and bonuses can easily exceed a worker's base pay. As a result, workers show up for work early to ask the previous shift how the equipment is running. They take extra care in maintenance and discourage each other from taking unnecessary sick days. In short, the incentives of Nucor's work teams are so well aligned with the corporate mission that little "management" of employees is required.

Free Flow Ideas and the Use of Knowledge

Freedom of action and freedom of exchange are critical elements of a market economy, and so is freedom of speech. Prices summarize a great deal of information, but because real-world markets are disequilibrium markets, prices do not summarize everything entrepreneurs and customers need to know. As a result, individuals need the freedom to exchange ideas, debate new suggestions, and advertise their products and services to potential customers.

Most corporations today espouse these ideals, but many would do well to ask themselves questions like the following.

* Do operating units supply detailed operating data to headquarters?

* Are employees directed because they lack access to information they need to make business decisions?

* Are accounting systems designed for management control instead of furnishing information to operating personnel?

Do performance evaluations include only the views of the boss, instead of information from all of an employee's major "customers"?

An organization that can answer "yes" to these questions is fundamentally channeling information to the decision-makers; at the top of a pyramid, instead of letting employees make decisions based on their own local knowledge....

Since many founders spend the early years of their careers struggling to build their businesses, few have the kind of ethics training that is now a part of most professional managers’ corporate upbringing, Schweitzer points out. Companies, he suggests, should appoint a corporate ethics officer to help guide employees who find themselves in sticky ethical situations....

Founders who build a major company up from nothing often have a “blurred sense of boundaries,” says Schweitzer. Because start-ups usually require huge investments of both money and time, “there is no distinction between a founder’s personal life and company life. In some regard he or she is more likely to use the company as a vehicle for personal desires,” he says. A wayward founder may also be more prone to bypass a company’s normal checks and balances. “Founders in some sense are given more leeway because everyone at the company owes their position to them.”

“Irrespective of what happens [legal appeals, PR rehabilitation, etc], her personality is past its prime,” suggests Hoch. “Maybe she can make a comeback, but I’m not sure whether she would see it as worth” the effort.

It is mostly that the "hows" get drowned by the "whats"...which is where 'strategic planning' eclipses 'engaging the people' and what that results in is that the 'plan' remains in bound folders and nobody cares what it says!

This echoes my own mantra of relationships before ideas. Many organisations fixate on their explicit strategy, usually encapsulated in formidable documents. The more detailed they make it, the more likely that people won't really digest it and they mistake a tired acquiescence for consent. Generally, the author(s) of the strategy get an illusory sense of control from their document, but that may be all.[My emphasis]

"Today's junior officers are not afraid to lead in ambiguous conditions. They can execute a mission with minimal guidance. They are an incredibly valuable resource to a transforming Army that has desired and sought adaptive capacity in its leaders. The crucible of OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] has delivered to the Army a cohort of adaptive leaders. The challenge for the Army is to encourage and leverage this priceless potential." Source: Developing Adaptive Leaders: The Crucible of Operation Iraqi Freedom

The challenge for the Army is to encourage and leverage this priceless potential.

The spot opens on something tan and out of focus with the sound of wind and crows squawking under. As we pullback, we see it's dirt we're looking at as the camera begins to pan and tilt up to reveal a post--it's a post in the dirt. The camera reverses direction, still tilting, and we see sky, then another reverse and another piece of wood, only it's horizontal this time. We pan along and see fingertips, and slowly pull back to reveal fingers, and a palm, and a big honking nail through the palm. The company logo comes up and a booming biblical voiceover says: "Try...Hobson's...Nails."

Open on an aerial shot, moving high over a shimmering desert. On the ridge of a huge sand dune in the distance, we see a dust trail. As the shot moves in, we see tiny figures running; closer still we see it's 2 people chasing somebody. Still moving in, we see the guy in front has white, flowing robes and a beard just as he runs out of frame. Closer still and we see the two chasers are wearing .... dresses? ....no, they're Roman soldiers. Camera cuts to the two, now stopped and exhausted, hands on knees trying to catch their breath. One soldier turns to the other and says: "Should have used... -WHEEZE- ... Hobson's Nails."

Credentials and committees don't make you ethical. Principles do. Those principles have to make sense. You have to apply them consistently or rethink them if you can't stomach their implications. And the easier you make them, the less they matter. The slickest way to make yourself look ethical is to narrow the definition of ethics so that it won't interfere with what you want to do. But that won't make you ethical. It'll just make you an ethicist.

In discussing Culture and strategy issues, one is often reflected in the other. I meet organizations who want a Cultural Change and after long discussion we find out they actually were looking for a 'corporate remote control' to change others, not themselves. I also meet organizations that present their corporate behaviour as 'culture' while they basically are speaking about how they make things happen.

So I think it is most interesting to look at how culture (a particular belief system) shows up in strategy and how strategy shows up in a culture.

Their cultural mix dictates that Intrinsic Goods, rather than instrumental ones, are the product they offer. Their auto insurance claims process is built around the fact that smashing into another person is a psychological trauma for many people. Their claims response people are there, on scene whenever possible or necessary, ASAP with a calming demeanor, your sanity in mind, a blanket, a hot cup of coffee--a guide in the situation.

Spell that COMPASSION, not I-N-S-U-R-A-N-C-E.

That big C is a huge Intrinsic Good like Love or Faith--rare, but you can't live without them. Progressive knows this and knows their rarity makes them all the more leverageable as a business purpose.

To me, this is not crass: I need insurance, I desire compassion in my life and for my loved ones. When do I want both? When I need them most.

That is how corporate culture moves from flavor of the month buzzword, to real, meaningful and--GASP--sustainable, competititve advantage.

They get it. They make buckets of money at it. And they aren't embarrassed to tell their mothers what they do.

"...a song of light that changes with each cloud, sun angle and surrounding shadow."

"...integrates detailed functionality with an ever-changing symphony of color, line and form."

"A truly rational building will not look rational," Ramus [one of the building's architects] says. Seattle's library "is large but not monumental," he goes on. "The spaces are designed not to intimidate but to accommodate."