How David Beats Goliath

I highly recommend the New Yorker article on May 6, 2009 by Malcolm Gladwell, "How David Beats Goliath"

The sub-title is "When underdogs break the rules" but I think it is more appropriately "When underdogs break with existing conventions." Often people give these conventions the weight of rules, but they aren't breaking any rules by doing it. Gladwell talks about the basketball team that plays the full court press for the whole game and wins on legs instead of arms. They didn't break any rules they went against the convention.

We seem to want rules so bad that we create them in our minds to cover the way we want to approach situations. There's no rule that says a Walmart can't build stores in rural areas but that doesn't stop us from vilifying them. From the barber who opens on Sunday to the medical clinic that opens in a drug store...David beats Goliath by going against convention. Gladwell calls it being "socially horrifying".

What does that mean for you? Are you David or Goliath? If you're Goliath, what can you do to create the urgency that will keep you moving forward?

What C.K. Prahalad has Learned

There was a May 5, 2009 article on fastcompany.com about C.K. Prahalad. It ended with a sidebar: What the Teacher has Learned:

1. When the going is roughest, leadership matters. In times of trouble leaders must act like emotional and intellectual anchors. Authenticity is the most important trait.
2. Successful managers embrace discomfort. Discomfort can push you to a new level of achievement.
3. Great leaders stay on message. Nothing is more important than reminding people what the company stands for.
4. It's not one person. It's not the team. It's both. One unique person makes a difference, but you need teamwork to make things happen.
5. Think? Act? Balance the two. Sometimes not acting is smart. But if you get the feeling that everybody's becoming so thoughtful that nobody's doing anything, I wanna go light some fires somewhere.

Me: I could get along with Prahalad just fine!

The Management Myth

Matthew Stewart, writing in The Atlantic, is my kind of guy. He says most of management theory is inane and if you want to succeed in business you should study philosophy not get an MBA. Of course, he is a philosophy graduate. He makes the case in this well written article that the need for the MBA is a myth. New fads are promoted with maddening papal infallibility and lack of empirical data.

He points back to Mary Parker Follett in the 1920's for attacking "departmentalized" thinking and advocating the "integrative" organization. Rosabeth Moss Kanter picked up the torch in 1983.

"Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master the dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey these are people we're talking about! And the debate goes on."

He calls MBAs a way for businesses to outsource hiring.

In the end he has three recommendations for academic philosophy departments that he says will bring them back to be the educators of management - their "rightful" place:

• Expand the domain of your analysis! Why so many studies of Wittgenstein and none of Taylor, the man who invented the social class that now rules the world?
• Hire people with greater diversity of experience! Not just someone from another university, someone with another world view.
• Remember the three Cs: communication, communication and communication! Remember Plato: Its all about dialogue!

My comment: I have to agree that organizational leadership demands a broad range of skills and backgrounds and there really is no common set of tools for getting there. It would be interesting to put the requirements for an MBA up against the list of skills of innovators from the previous post. I think you would find that there are many, many places where they do not relate.

The People Focus in Innovation

Paul Williams wrote a post for innovation tools on May 8, 2009 about the people focus of innovation. This was a response to Stefan Lindegaard's challenge on why leaders don't talk more about the people who drive innovation. Williams does a great job of synthesizing the people focus:

Ideas have many sources:

• Employees
• Research and development teams
• Customers
• Vendors
• Marketing/sales team
• Competitors
• Leadership
• Patent Searches
• Academic Institutions
• Business partnerships
• Best/next practice reviews
• Association memberships
• Conferences

What all of those sources have in common is that each and every idea starts with one person. Those who excel at developing ideas and solving problems have many common skill sets and traits. They are:

• Skilled at alternative thinking styles
• Excel at individual problem solving
• Able to participate in or facilitate group ideation settings
• Able to see weak signals of future trends
• Able to identify root causation of problems
• Comfortable with taking calculated risks
• Not bothered by fear of failure (or success)
• Able to maintain an imaginative and creative approach to problems and/or opportunities
• Able to analyze and learn from failures
• Able to assume leadership responsibility
• Able to translate ideas into objects (physical, visual, etc.)

Then there are the roles that are important for moving ideas from concept to reality:

• Idea generator - The origination point of an idea
• Idea champion - The person responsible for shaping the idea, building a business case and keeping it moving forward
• Idea sponsor - The person who secures the resources (money, human, time) to explore the idea and who provides "cover" for the idea to keep it safe
• Process manager - The person who manages the innovation/idea process to ensure ideas have an easy to access and repeatable path to follow
• Engineer or prototype builder - The person who brings the idea to life (on a drawing board, in a lab, virtually, physically, etc.)
• Project manager and implementation team - The people who manage the process and create/implement an actual object, business process and/or service based on the idea
• Sales and marketing teams - The people who convince others to purchase the output of the new idea, thus making it an official innovation

But how do you protect these people and help them stay connected?

• Look for the mavericks who feel constrained by your current processes and procedures and who develop alternative methods
• Reward those who challenge the status quo
• Encourage self-organizing teams
• Mandate cross-functional teams
• Implement collaboration tools like conference rooms/idea centers, blogs, message boards, wikis, groupware, etc.
• Provide training on expanding their natural innovative/creative skills
• Provide cover and support and appreciation for fast failures
• Demonstrate that risk taking is okay

And what about keeping people motivated to keep the idea pipeline full?

• Public recognition
• Money
• Idea lottery
• Frequent idea point program
• Calls, notes or personal visits from senior leadership
• Ice cream socials
• Promotions within the innovation management group
• Temporary assignment to work on the idea
• Award ceremony for the best failure
• Great idea awards banquet

My comment: I find most of what Williams says right on target. The one place I'd differ is this last section on keeping these people motivated. I, for one, would be turned off by anything public - so eliminate the public recognition, ice cream socials, award ceremony and banquet. The things that I want are freedom with support - for myself and my people, enough resources to develop and test the new ideas we come up with, and the ability to get the project out of our hands once it becomes mundane and ordinary. Give me those things and you'll get more production than you could ever imagine!

A refresher Course in the Basics of PR

Jonah Bloom in Ad Age.

1. Earned media isn't paid media - any place that will take cash for editorial credit isn't credible.
2. Earned media requires being interesting and open - you have to have a real, meaningful story to tell.
3. Listen to the people you paid to help you - don't hire a PR person or agency and then ignore them when they tell you your story is boring, or a lie, or a lie that will be found out.
4. You can't control the message - PR helps you communicate something demonstrably true.
5. PR isn't cheaper than advertising, or more expensive, just different.
6. PR doesn't replace advertising - sometimes you need one, sometimes you need the other.

Judging from the comments to the post it appears Mr. Bloom hit the spot.

Louis Gray's 10 Rules for Real Time Consumers

1. We want access to your product as quickly as possible
2. We expect the product to work on any platform in any location
3. We want to see that you allow for feedback, positive and negative
4. We expect that you respond to your customers quickly
5. We expect that you join and lead the conversation
6. We want to see that you continually improve your product
7. We expect you to use your product and be visible
8. We expect that you will embrace or lead standards
9. We expect you are driven by more than money alone
10. We want you to treat us as informed consumers and partners.

Enough said!

Take Your Community to the Next Level

Stuart Foster at The Lost Jacket.com had a worthwhile recent post about taking your community to the next level. Despite everything you are doing not enough discussions are happening, people aren't engaging with each other and your community is spinning towards irrelevance. I like Foster's five recommendations:

1. Incite. Take a stand. Do something interesting.
2. Invite new people, with new and exciting voices, to the discussion.
3. Take your content to another community. Grow your community by exposing new people to your voice, product or service.
4. Inject your personality into the mix. To succeed you need a distinctive and real voice. People can sense passion and you should be sweating from every pore.
5. Be everywhere. Hit every place you can think of and own it.
   

No Sense of Urgency

Dan Ciampa wrote a piece for The Conference Board Review on "No Sense of Urgency." It paralleled my thoughts on so many things that I wanted to address.

He talks about lack of urgency from the perspective of a new CEO, but you don't have to be CEO to recognize this feeling in your organization. Ciampa suggests that urgency fades away as people lose confidence about having any impact on the problems they face. Also, he states that success can work against urgency - as the employees without the "entitlement mentality" give up on urging changes and improvements and leave. Innovation slows down as organizational structures expand.

Ciampa points to some fundamental principles underlying any change in organizational urgency:

• Become a student of behavior change - for a new sense of urgency you need a critical mass of people willing to change comfortable habits.
• The top group must be of one mind on the diagnosis and the cure.
• Don't avoid making changes at the top - some senior-level people, who are blocking the ability of the organization to move on, may have to be replaced in order for things to improve.
• Find examples from which to learn. Hold up examples in your own organization.
• Identify learning needs and barriers to learning early in the process.
• Eliminate the fear of making mistakes and encourage experimenting.
• Get the right help and use it wisely. Be discriminating in seeking help and define precisely the types of advice needed and kinds of advisers best suited to these needs.
• Become "That kind of place".
  Make it evident to everyone in the organization that urgency is a real priority. Be prepared to clearly visualize what an "urgent organization" looks like.

Based on my experience I would add a few points:

• Identify the false assumptions on which the complacency is built. Will the funding stream continue indefinitely? Will customers continue to purchase more and more products?
• In education and non-profit organizations it is often impossible to have one culture around urgency that fits every program embedded in the organization. How will you deal with varying demands for urgency from varying programs?
• Funders - taxpayers, grantmakers, customers - have not yet learned how to effectively demand urgency for their investment...but they will.

I believe we are past time for opening a wide discussion on urgency and we should do it now.

Evaluation 1

We should be evaluating our ability/capacity/hope, rather than our past performance.

People are convinced evaluation is worthwhile but don't know how to use it.

We need to stop evaluating practice and start evaluating potential.

How can you bring evaluation to "scale" so it is useful as a measure for community?

Organizational direction results from the intersect between audit/obligatory/rules and assumptions/guidelines.

Organizations have incredible inertia.

1. What exactly are we trying to accomplish?
2. How will we assess progress?
3. How will we know when we get there?
4. How will we respond to the areas where we don't meet goals?
5. What's the best way to proceed?

Evaluations are measured by

• utility - are they useful
• feasibility
• validity, accuracy
• propriety
  

Cision - Ten Tips on Reaching Out to "Mom Blogs"

1. Thou shalt not spam.
   Bloggers dislike canned pitches sent to generic lists. Authors of mommy blogs often get their start by sharing their most personal thoughts and stories. An impersonal approach won't be the best approach for them.
2. Read first - a lot. Pitch Later.
   Get to know the blogger and the kinds of things she writes about before you make an approach.
3. Research the "influentials."
   Learn which blogs are truly influential versus those that are popular. Many blogs that don't have as much traffic have customers that are highly targeted and provide you with a very desirable niche.
4. Personalize your pitch.
   A carefully worded e-mail touching on something the blogger has written about is the best way to share your information with the blogger.
5. Cultivate relationships
   Know the community and join it if you can. Positive word-of-mouth is the strongest influencer of product choices and brand loyalty.
6. Call your own mom
   Relate your own personal experiences to help you understand what is worthwhile and interesting to a mommy blogger.
7. Go easy on the "m" word.
   Don't stereotype every mommy blogger as a "mom" and nothing else. Mommy bloggers are intelligent adults with many interests.
8. Don't attach strings to samples
   Its fine to send samples in hopes the blogger will write about it but make it clear there is no prid-quo-pro, obligation, or expectation attached.
9. Follow-up
   Failing to follow-up after a writer has done a post on your product is a cardinal sin. A brief note thanking the blogger for the post and offering to be of help in the future is best.
10. Have a sense of humor.
    Loosen up and have some fun. Being a mommy is stressful. Mommy bloggers want to have fun and relieve their stress. Don't ever add to it.

What a great set of suggestions. Many apply to all bloggers.

Are You Micro-Managing Yourself?

Thanks to Steven DeMaio for putting this in the Harvard Business Review. It's a good tool for some self assessment. Here's what he says:

• Don't lose sight of the big picture, even when doing grunt work. The classic micro manager tends to zero in on details right away. Doing that in your own work will make it feel like drudgery. Don't lose sight of your tasks larger purpose.
• Avoid mid-stream self-correction, especially on the first run through. Your first session on a project should be your longest. Give yourself the chance to experience the full arc of the endeavor. Don't start tidying up a little corner before you've built the entire structure.
• When you can't delegate entire tasks, delegate micro decisions. Micro managers have trouble delegating. But there are times when a quick consult with a colleague can help you move forward on something that would otherwise bog you down. "Am I on the right track here?" is a good question.
• Recognize that micro work has its place. Not micromanaging doesn't give you permission to embed your work with small mistakes or imperfections. Continue to be fastidious about the details. The bad type of micromanagement is often the result of impatience, but the good type requires patience.

I find that the mid-stream self correction often leads to loosing focus on the goal. The project gets muddled and, without correction, often fails.

What Women Know

Rachel Happe, Principle in The Community Roundtable, wrote a recent piece on "What Women Know and How it Drives Profitability". She makes the case that businesses with more women in senior leadership positions are more profitable and innovative. Here what she says about how what a woman knows translates into business success.

Women know high risk comes with high potential upsides and high potential downsides. She says that means women focus less on what could be and more on what can be today.

Women know relationships and know that the more open and transparent we are the closer the relationships are that we can foster. Rachel claims this allows women to form more enduring relationships that aren't built on weak links, like money and rewards.

Women know how valuable communication is - at all levels. According to Rachel that means people around her are better informed and therefore more trusting and open.

Women know how to navigate emotional conflict better and have an easier time discussion deep rooted differences of opinion between colleagues in a friendly way. This allow for early conflict resolution.

Women know how to identify subtle social ques and can tell when someone is being open. This allow more accurate assessment of customers and others.

Women know that telling people what to do is not the most effective way to lead.

Women know complexity. We can never focus on just work, or just money, or just family. It is always about the best decision for everyone rather than the best decision for just one constituent.

For me, a man, I find these as better descriptions of those rare people who make good leaders than any unique set of skills that a person has due to their gender. I've worked with too many women who were none of these... women who went on for months with "strategic planning" processes but couldn't decide to approve my order for lunch for tomorrow's training...women who whisper and close doors and hide plans until implementation is far more difficult...women who hold grudges that impact their business decisions for years, and years, and...women who leave a trail of devastated employees in their path. In short, women who are bad leaders.

I, for one, cherish the opportunity to work in an environment with diversity of ideas, where people are respected and trusted to be part of the team and where they show their commitment through their focus and accomplishments and not through their hours. The situation needs to include men and women and, for me, I value both.