#2. Accept Your Friends Mistakes

Continuing the journey of applying Dragos Roua's 100 Ways to Live a Better Life to my life. Number 2: Accept Your Friends Mistakes.  Dragos says: Maybe you got hurt by somebody. Happens. Just accept it and deal with it. People are making mistakes and if you can accept that for yourself, accept it for your friends too. In the end, all you need from them is their love.

It has taken me a few days to get to this post because I've had to do a lot of thinking about this recommendation. Here's why.


One of the traits I've had to work on my whole life is that I'm an "avoider". I think my parents were really successful in training me to avoid fights rather than get into them. The "bigger person" is the one who walks away must have really stuck with me because that has been my prefered strategy all my life.


Now, there are times when that is ok, even a good thing. But avoiding is not usually the best approach when it comes to mistakes - whether they are made by friends or employees. Avoiding means the mistake is never used as a teachable moment. It means that wounds are left open when they might be easily closed. It means that there is an unsettled sense of dissatisfaction underlying your relationship.


So I'm translating Dragos #2 to say "Accept, but don't avoid, your friends mistakes." My plan is to be mindful of my own actions and to be sure I confront mistakes and accept them. That way the opportunity to make those mistakes will not only benefit my friends it will benefit me.

1. Accept Your Mistakes

Beginning the journey of applying Dragos Roua's 100 Ways to Live a Better Life to my life. Number 1: Accept Your Mistakes.  Dragos says:
You’re human. We, humans, are making mistakes. Accept what you did wrong and try to do better next time. No need to punish yourself forever. In fact, accepting your mistakes is the only way to make them disappear.

Mike King had a really good post on Leadership:Accepting Mistakes in January. I like his use of the quote "Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom." (Phyllis Therous) Mike also includes a couple really great lists that make his ideas easy to apply.

I'm of an age where I've had the opportunity to learn from lots of mistakes. I don't feel wise yet...more like I'm still on the bridge. I do want to share the one mistake I made that might help others the most.

My post before last was about trust, and it is interesting what role trust played in my mistake. As one more step in living up to Item 1. I'm even going to give you a link to the New York Times version of what happened. I was senior vice president at a charity that was hit with a multi-million dollar embezzlement. I could argue about where the responsibility lay for the theft but I'd rather point out how you might prevent it in your organization.

The person who engaged in the theft had been with the company for 20 years. That's where trust came in. It was not possible for us to imagine that she would steal from us. The result was that no one was watching closely enough. Procedures were unassigned or slipping. Simple safeguards weren't in place. Advisors weren't making sure that we understood their recommendations and weren't being persistent in demanding that we address them.

The point is that this could happen anywhere. We think of embezzlers as creative but the more I learned about the crime the more I came to realize that they are just opportunists. Accounting procedures work - if you follow them. But laxness is born of comfort and comfort is born of trust.

So I learned. I learned that the gravest danger to any business is in the smallest details. I work hard now to see that they are attended to. But I still miss some. Mistakes are always out there. Use mine if you can to avoid yours.

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!

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
  

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.

The Future of Collaboration

Cisco has just completed a five part series on their vision of the future of collaboration. Here are their predictions:

1. Collaborative networks will be to Enterprises what social networks are to Consumers. The rigidly structured silos will give way to more fluid, ad-hoc communities of experts. Companies will rely on "collaboration networks" that bring together "clusters of experts" to get critical projects completed. The groups will form dynamically to achieve the shared outcome. The cycle is self-organizing. Experts are drawn to projects, rather than assigned, and thus are motivated.
2. It is not about "on-premise" versus "on-demand", it will be all about the user experience. Ultimately, user experience is what matters. Going forward the "where" in collaboration will become less important
3. Innovation will be redefined by Operational Excellence. Traditionally it was assumed that long term success was driven by either innovation or operational excellence. Today organizations need to do both and collaboration is a critical element that allows that to happen.
4. Organizations without boundaries will drive the next wave of productivity. Business processes must encompass people outside the organization as readily as they do people inside.
5. Information technology will evolve into information fabric. Too much unsorted information is worse than having no information at all. People need to have the right information at the right time, connecting communities that can improve the relevance, and accelerating decisions to drive value for the business. Business architecture must be seamlessly merged with technology architecture.

Obviously in identifying these predictions Cisco has focused on technology. Do they apply beyond technology? Absolutely.

Unfortunately, old habits are hard to break. Look at any organization that has recently gone through a "restructuring." Did the restructuring build the foundation for collaboration networks or did it create new silos? What would an organization look like that would build that foundation.

Could such an organization incorporate employees and non-employees? Or, is the employee the concept that is outdated. Could businesses be redefined to be small centers of mission and principle ready to draw people in who might earn their living being the expert on multiple projects. Could organizations grow and shrink in moments to meet changing demands without creating devastation in the community?

Its an exciting world, isn't it?

Three Assumptions Leaders Should Question

John Baldoni, HarvardBusiness.org, wrote in response to Gary Hamel's "Moon Shots for Management" that he felt it was appropriate to question some underlying management assumptions. He identifies three:

1. It is important for organizations to set firm goals. Unreached goals can frustrate an organization rather than helping it to succeed. Maurice Schweitzer
2. Quick wins are essential to managers in transition. This has been demonstrated in a study by Mark Van Burren and Todd Salferstone to do more harm than good.
3. Senior leaders believe in their CEOs. A study by Booz & Company found that 46% of senior managers surveyed doubted their CEOs ability to navigate the current crisis.

I believe organizations operating in today's environment need to have a clear understanding of what business they are in and beyond that a simple set of guiding principles can be enough to move day-to-day decisions.

Its interesting how often the winner of a race is not in the lead during the early stages. To me that relates to quick wins. You can use up your resources and capacity focusing on early wins when you will need them for the end run.

The lack of belief in senior managers comes from the lack of collaborative leadership, even though it has been shown to be effective. There is still an overwhelming tendency of CEOs to think they can be the hero leader, guiding their troops out of harms way. Information is hidden. Authority is withheld. The easiest way to see this in an organization is to watch what happens when the CEO is not available. If the organization stalls it will be because no one but the CEO is able to make the decisions that would keep it moving forward. Can an organization like that be successful in today's environment?

Words and phrases that I like

During all my reading I come across new phrases or word connections that really make a connection for me. Sometimes it is the name of a process that I was unaware of - like "Open Space". Sometimes it is just a way of stating something - like "Collective Creativity" (Ed Catmull, Pixar Animation). I've decided to start saving them here. When I run across a new one I will come back and edit this post and add it.

These are the triggers that often start me down a path of exploration. Future blogs cover what I learn along the way.

1. Open Space. Harrison Owen. A way of encouraging and supporting self-organizing.
2. Appreciative Inquiry. Asset based assessment.
3. Collective Creativity. Ed Catmull. A continuous process of small and constant change involving a large number of diverse people working together to respond to multiple opportunities.
4. Systemic inventive thinking. Genrich Altschuller. Brainstorming doesn't work because people withhold their best ideas. Instead, break down successful products and processes into components, study the parts and find other potential uses.
5. Open Innovation. Authentically involving all aspects of an organization in the innovation process and ensuring that the process is shared in an open and accessible way.
6. Disruptive uncertainty. Jeanne Liedtke. Organizations deal with disruptive uncertainty to a large extent through collaboration - collaboration among organizations.
7. Black Swans. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Unanticipated events.
8. Disruptive innovation. Dr. Clayton Christensen. A business model that brings to market a much more affordable product or service that is much simpler to use.
9. Predictably irrational (Dan Ariely)
   
10. More to come.

Focus = Simplify (An analogy)

In a discussion with a colleague she gave a simple analogy for maintaining focus that I really like. When you start a project you have a goal in mind - you are like a bus with the destination posted on the front. If it is an exciting and innovative project, as it evolves, people come along and want to bring their project or ideas and join yours.

Some of these projects and ideas have the same destination as yours and some have one that is different. For the ones with the same destination, invite them onto the bus and look for the ways that you can grow each others capacity. For the ones with a different destination, acknowledge the different destination and encourage them to proceed and look for other partners.

Don't change your destination without overwhelming justification and don't turn your bus into a boat. If you do, you will generally find that you don't reach either destination.

Notes from March MLab Management 2.0 LabNotes

Tim Brown, CEI, IDEO

• At IDEO – management is tolerated insofar as it is a means to the end of facilitating what people want to do, rather than the other way around.
• Key to our culture is an absolutely incessant interest in doing things that are new.
• Choose employees with deep craft who are also keenly curious about the context surrounding it.
• The pattern of innovation in emergent, not planned
• Creative culture has a deep reservoir of trust in its DNA
• The real question about scale is not about sharing information – it is about sharing inspiration.

Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies

• The higher the quality of employee you have, in terms of capability, enablement, engagement, the better value gets created in the interface between the employee and the customer.
• Reverse accountability – managers are accountable to their employees
• For any complaint or query an employee opens a service ticket on a portal to which the department is obliged to respond. Crucially, it is only the employee who can close the ticket.

Jeffrey Hollender, CEO, Seventh Generation

• In every deliberation, it behoves to consider the impact of the decision on the next seven generations.
• Extreme transparency. That inspired us to look at everything we were doing and put on our website anything critical that might be missing that anyone would want to know.

The World Beyond Budgeting, Robin Fraser and Franz Roosli

• Radical decentralization is the underlying concept. The organization revolves around the customer. Principles of the beyond budgeting model:
• Devolved Leadership principles

1. Focus everyone on their customers, not on hierarchical relationships
2. Organize as a lean network of accountable teams, not as centralized functions
3. Give teams the freedom and capability to act, don’t micro-manage them
4. Create a high responsibility culture at every level, not just at the top
5. Promote open information for self management; don’t restrict it hierarchically
6. Adopt a few clear values, goals, and boundaries, not detailed regulations
   

Adaptive Process Principles

1. Set relative goals for continuous improvement, don’t negotiate contracts
2. Reward shared success based on relative performance, not fixed targets
3. Make planning a continuous and inclusive process, not a top down annual event
4. Base controls on relative indicators and trends, not variances against plan
5. Make resources available as needed, not through annual budget allocations
6. Coordinate interactions dynamically, not through annual planning cycles

Engaged Innovation Roundtable, London Business School

• Tim Thorne, Royal Bank of Scotland: Five days of innovation training for employees. Develop ideas some of which then receive funding. 50% of those that received funding have entered the marketplace.
• Amanda West of ThomsonReuters: A supporting online toolkit and series of webinars about innovation enable staff globally across the business to build their own skills on a self serve basis
• Tod Bedilion, Roche: Put internal problems on an internal system and waited for solutions. Our hope that our internal technology-oriented people would gravitate to using this type of tool was completely unfounded… We really had to push people (via an electronic marketing campaign) to involve them in suggesting solutions. Had to offer incentives in the end.
• Thought triggered for MSU: Could alumni be involved in “innovative engagement” through technology? Would this create an institutional value for alumni. By innovative engagement I’m thinking of a system that would enable alums to post challenges that other alums could suggest solutions for? What would the incentives be? Access to knowledge?

Seven Rules for Radical Innovators, Lessons from Barack Obama’s campaign, Umar Haque, Director, Havas Media Lab

1. Have a self organizing design. Obama’s organization blew past orthodoxies for structure to use the power of self-organizing
2. Minimize strategy. Obama’s campaign realized that strategy, too often, kills a deeply-lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning.
3. Maximize purpose. Yesterday we built huge corporations to do tiny incremental things – tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.
4. Broaden unity. Marketers typically segment and target, Obama succeeded through unification, not through division.
5. Thicken power. True power is the power to inspire, lead, and engender belief.
6. There is nothing more asymmetrical – more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative - than the world changing power of an ideal.
7. Rule six is the starting point for tomorrow’s radical innovators. Where are the ideals in your organization? What ideals are missing? What ideals will you fight and struggle for

Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 Book List

• Creative Experience, Mary Parker Follett, 1924
• Out of Control, Kevin Kelly, 1994
• The Age of Heretics, Art Kleiner, 1996
• Manufacturing the Employee, Roy Jacques, 1996
• Competing on the Edge, Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt, 1998
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond, 1999
• Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, David Weinberger, 2002
• The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, 2002
• The Future of Work, Thomas Malone, 2004
• The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, 2004
• Firms of Endearment, Raj Sisodia, Jag Sheth, and David Wolfe, 2007
• Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky, 2008

If you are inspired to read all of any of the articles go to www.managementlab.org

The Urgency Challenge

I've been thinking lately about what makes something urgent. Why do we prioritize? How do we pick what we work day and night to get done versus what we let slide on our to-do list? I've been thinking about it because there are so many things that I think should be urgent that others apparently don't. My conclusion so far - pleasure and pain. We either apply ourselves with urgency to something because that will result in us achieving greater rewards, or we do it because failing to do so will cause us some sort of pain. Urgency can be applied at the personal level and at the organizational level. An organization will have an expectation of urgency if those in charge believe that applying the resources of the company to its products with urgency will result in greater rewards or not will result in greater loss or pain. Urgency and power are interrelated.