Monthly Archives: September 2006

File Cabinet #3

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I see the ol’ file cabinet is getting overstuffed again. Alas, there’s just not enough time in the day to write about all the great stuff I’ve collected over the last few weeks. So here are the blogs, articles, etc. I consider “blogworthy”, but never quite made it into print -

Brilliant but cruel

From Bob Sutton, another in the continuing saga of the No Asshole Rule. Despite the fact that no one really LIKES assholes, perhaps being one may actually have some payoff. In an exchange with Kent Blumberg, an interesting, if somewhat disheartening point is made. “But Kent’s dialog reminds me that, if you look at the evidence on the kind of people that we see as powerful and intelligent, that — independently of how smart a person actually is — when they act like an asshole, they are seen as smarter.”

Evaluating your team

Jeffery Phillips says, “As a manager I have the duty – maybe even the honor – of evaluating the people who work with and for me. It’s my role to try to further their development and to acknowledge the good work they’ve done and the areas where they can grow.” He provides 10 thoughtful ways to evalute your team that are perhaps a bit out of the usual HR box.

High performance cultures share five key values

Here’s a great article from William C. Finnie, Adjunct Professor of Strategy at the Olin School of Business on… c’mon, I don’t need to repeat it, do I? Pretty good article, and well worth the read. Just to whet your appetite, the five key values are: openness and candor, collaboration, common shared goals, involvement and feedback.

How to hit a moving target

This is the title of a Business Week article from August 21. “Meet the corporate chameleons. They’re organizations that have learned to adjust to rapid social, economic, and competitive changes with relative ease. The most successful among them don’t settle for hunkering down in soul-depleting market-share wars to protect an increasingly fleeting edge. Instead they zig and zag with the zeitgeist to keep coming up with new ideas.”

How to ask for money (and avoid Chinese Math)

If you’re an entrepreneur seeking funding, here are some really great thoughts from BusinessPundit on properly framing your market segments and cash flow figures. “The name stems from the idea that there are a billion people in China, so if you sell a $1 widget to just 1% of them that is $10 million in revenue. The assumption that is incorrectly applied here is that 1% is easy to get because it is a small number.”

Economic freedom is more valuable than economic aid

From the “Well, duh!” department comes this stupendous conclusion, but it’s still nice to see someone ELSE agree with what in the real world would ordinarily be considered as common sense. If only it were all that common.

Doing it for free

Seth Godin comes to a somewhat radical conclusion that sounds ridiculous until you think about it a bit. But I would like to see it validated somehow. “…the more I think about it, the more it seems that pioneers are almost never in it for the money. The smart ones figure out how to take a remarkable innovation and turn it into a living (or a bigger than big payout) but not the other way around.”

Introducing BizPredict

If you’ve heard about the wisdom of crowds, you’ve probably also heard about prediction markets. If you still don’t know what the heck they’re all about, here’s your chance to join one! Erick Schonfeld of Business 2.0 and David Perry of Consensus Point have set up a new one to help predict future business trends. It’s free, and frankly, learning by doing easily trumps learning by reading about it! Go ahead, sign up and give it at try.

Remembering the art of good conversation

Shawn over at Anecdote has some tips on conducting good conversations, with a list of things to do, and another list of things to don’t – er, avoid. If you’re involved in communities of practice, storytelling, or sensemaking, these should come in handy.

A leader’s character is revealed in everyday situations

Here’s another one from the “Well, duh!” file via George Ambler at The Practice of Leadership. “To live in alignment, to have a strong set of values and to be men and woman of character we need to act from a strong sense of who we are. Failing this we drift, overly influence by what media, resulting in a watered down version of ourselves. Never realizing the potential that lives within us, we live by the expectations of others and fail to lead from who we are.”

Hindsight cannot lead to foresight, but neither is history bunk

From Cognitive Edge comes a reminder and warning about banking on the expectation that the future can be accurately predicted from the past. “To ignore the lessons of history is foolish, but to assume that history can give you a recipe for the future is not just sad, it is plain bloody dangerous. Hindsight informs, but can not determine foresight. Blending the two is insightful and inventive.”

One way to spot a liar

Finally, to round things off here’s some useful information from Bert Webb at Open Loops. If your job requires you to be adept at spotting lies (does ANYONE not need to know this?), this one might be a worthwhile read “Here’s your first tip on how to spot a liar: There is only a 60% chance that someone is telling the truth if they don’t use contractions when they speak to you. In other words, instead of saying, “Hey, I didn’t do that!”, a liar is more apt to say, “Hey, I did not do that!” The rationale is that the liar is trying to convince you by emphasizing the “not” in the phrase. The interesting thing is that when I read that little tidbit of information, I looked up at the television just in time to see President Bill Clinton point his finger, look into the camera and say, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski.” Politics aside, I had just spotted my first lie.”

OK, class, your assignment is to choose any three of the above and write a report analyzing the validity of the arguments and conclusions of the author, with particular attention paid to their source materials.

Or, you could just watch TV.

That’s all for now!

The One In The Mirror

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And here I thought it was just me.

A recent article from Leigh Buchanan at Inc. magazine, The Imposter Syndrome, examines something most people experience at some time or other: feeling like a fake, despite their apparent success. It’s that nagging feeling that you’re not as smart, or as good, as other people think you are. (NOTE: This is not to be confused with the feeling that you’re OK but everyone ELSE is a fake. That’s called arrogance, and you’ve got a real problem there, my friend…)

“People who feel like fakes chalk up their accomplishments to external factors such as luck and timing, or worry they are coasting on charm and personality rather than on talent. Psychological research done in the early 1980s estimated that two out of five successful people consider themselves frauds; other studies have found that 70 percent of all people feel like fakes at one time or another.”

What I find most amazing is the prevalence of this feeling, even among otherwise apparently successful people. It’s most prevalent among high achievers, and stems from an inability to internalize their accomplishments. If you’re reading this and you are, for instance, a successful entrepreneur, academic, or other management type, then chances are you’ve felt it too. Ironically enough, according to the article, research indicates that being an entrepreneur may actually enhance such feelings because of the lack of scrutiny from bosses.

That actually does make sense. When you’re the boss, you’re expected to know everything about everything; to be expert in all facets of your business. Unfortunately, few people are experts in many areas – after all, that’s why you hire other people to run the parts of your business you can’t run yourself. Other peoples’ expectations, combined with little or no upward management scrutiny, contribute to that nagging feeling that sooner or later, someone will find out you’re really NOT the expert they think you are.

A Google search for the phrase “Imposter Syndrome” yields 47,200 hits, including the first hit, Imposter Syndrome, the website of Dr. Valerie Young. Amid other interesting information, there’s a simple quiz you can take, reproduced (with permission) here:

  • Do you secretly worry that others will find out that you’re not as bright and capable as they think you are?
  • Do you sometimes shy away from challenges because of nagging self-doubt?
  • Do you tend to chalk your accomplishments up to being a “fluke,” “no big deal” or the fact that people just “like” you?
  • Do you hate making a mistake, being less than fully prepared or not doing things perfectly?
  • Do you tend to feel crushed by even constructive criticism, seeing it as evidence of your “ineptness?”
  • When you do succeed, do you think, “Phew, I fooled ‘em this time but I may not be so lucky next time.”
  • Do you believe that other people (students, colleagues, competitors) are smarter and more capable than you are?
  • Do you live in fear of being found out, discovered, unmasked?

If you can answer yes to any of these questions, then not only are you NOT alone, but you’ve got some pretty good company (that’s other high achievers like yourself).

I guess never realized just how widespread and how debilitating this could be. Certainly I’ve experienced the feeling many times, despite my own qualifications, abilities, etc. Please, realize that help is available. As Richard Bach once said, “Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but that mark of a fake messiah.”

Sometimes, just knowing you’re not the only one is enough.

Fear of Failure

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Dennis McMullin, Marketing Director at OYO Geospace and a good friend of mine, recently sent me a link to a blog that mentions yet another article about the value of failure, particularly in regard to innovation; this one happens to be from Business Week. As a matter of fact, in the last few months I’ve read dozens like it.

I and many others have blogged about how ideas like this can spread across the blogosphere like ripples on a pond, and that’s as it should be: one of the great wonders of the internet in general, and blogging specifically, is the absolutely awesome ability to communicate and exchange ideas with folks from literally across the planet, in real time.

Even though the idea that failure has value in innovation is not really new, at the moment it’s become the latest, well, fad. (For thoughts on how to determine which “new things” are truly new, I highly recommend Bob Sutton’s ChangeThis Manifesto.) You can almost see it now, can’t you? We’ll have a new crop of consultants, seminars and business school courses coming soon: Fail First, Fail Now, and Fail Often – How to Build a Business by Being a Complete Failure! (No doubt bumper stickers, T-shirts, and other merchandising are soon to follow.)

Now don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with the validity of the concepts being presented – it actually makes sense that to get great innovations, you’re going to have (at least in my case!) great failures, and lots of them. I understand and agree that failure can be a great source of learning. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that lessons learned from failure are, for the most part, far more readily remembered than lessons learned from our successes.

The question I would like to have answered, though, is whether or not the real world is anything like the theory. It all sounds well and good to say that failure is just another process on the road to success, but how many “out there” still operate under the reality that failure is a good way to, shall we say, “manifest negative advancement” at your workplace?

If you believe the articles (and truly, there’s no reason not to), there are many companies out there who have literally built in the means to profit from failure. But what I’d like to see is a survey that distinguishes the types of companies (or in some cases, the divisions within a company) where this is actually true. Where is this most successful? What industries is it most likely to succeed?

When I brought it up, Dennis contributed this opinion:

“There is a “right” way to do things and there is the way things are done. This will NEVER happen in “public” companies on a wide scale until companies can demonstrate to their investors a direct link between failure and increased profits – investors are the most failure-adverse and strongest driver group in the mix. It has a better chance in privately held companies.”

While it’s true that investors tend to drive things in public companies, I do want to offer some other evidence. But before I go on, I’ll give you a little background, and then share a short but true story.

I work for a very large publicly-traded engineering firm, a pragmatic place to work if there ever was one. Now, most people don’t think of the engineering field as a hotbed of innovation, because what we do is mostly based on tried-and-true practices, known quantities, and proven technology. So we’re pretty typically risk-averse in the sense that failure is considered a bad thing.

Like other firms of our type, we have an arrangement with several of our clients in which my company provides the engineering expertise for their small to mid-cap engineering projects. This in turn allows them to avoid having to staff their own engineering department. The arrangement works very well because core competencies are maximized to the benefit of both parties.

Anyway, due to a combination of many events over a period of months, one of the projects I currently manage got into some real problems, to the point where the estimated costs became nearly triple the original estimate. Although we (meaning us AND the client) tried our best to keep things on track, it just got out of hand and finally the client called a halt. After an investigation of root causes, etc., the client redefined the project’s objectives to the point where we pretty much ended up with a completely different project. The project is currently in the process of being restarted.

Now by anyone’s definition, this project was, if not completely failed, then certainly on the road to failure. (Let’s be honest. It was a train wreck!) But here’s the interesting part. Not one time during the troubled last few months, through the investigation, and even today has there been any hint of blame, fault-finding or witch-hunting, neither from the client or my own managers.

We started a project. It failed. We identified the cause(s). We defined the solutions. We started over. Will this equate to project success? Only time will tell, but in this case we are confident it will.

In the real world, failure can be a positive experience or a negative one. What’s the defining factor? Culture. In an engineering firm, where failure can represent considerable lost dollars, or worst of all, people hurt or killed – our culture allows (but does not encourage) people to fail without recrimination. That’s because the ability to demonstrate learning from mistakes is a desired quality. The inability to demonstrate this might still result in “negative career advancement”.

So what’s it like for you? What happens when failure occurs in your workplace?

OOB # 4

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Well, folks, I was preparing to post a serious entry, one that was truly destined for the annals of blogdom. It would have been so full of pith, prose and deep insights as to literally bring tears to your eyes; to make the very blogsphere sit up and take notice. Even Seth Godin himself would have called to congratulate me on my vast intellect, and invite me to join him on the A-list…

But then I checked my calendar and lo and behold! It’s time to take a break.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s that time of the month! The time has come for another exciting edition of… OOB!

This Never Happens to Me Dept.

Thanks to Bad Language for relaying this story about a Russian who deposited 2,000 rubles at an ATM, and got credited for 20,006,699 rubles (about $7 million dollars)! Alas, despite the picture, without real proof this is probably an urban legend. Fun thought, though.

If you’re really interested in something different, put EnglishRussia into your blog aggregator for a continuous stream of entertaining stories, photos, and random odds and ends from Russia, for instance (to pick one at random) the bride who wore a wedding dress made of underwear.

Getting Nailed Dept.

Not long ago I posted about how to get rich. Would you settle for being famous instead? (They don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand, you know.) The way to do it is to say or accomplish something that is at least relatively unique.

Now an Albanian artist has made his mark on the world by creating an 8 square meter portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, executed entirely in industrial nails. If you want to see it in person, though, you’ll have to travel to the International Center of Culture in Tirana, Albania. (Go ahead, tell ‘em Bob sent you.)

One odd thing, though – if you examine the picture at right, Leo does seem to resemble the artist…

The Eyes Have It Dept.

Notwithstanding the obligatory “Big Brother” comments, New Scientist reports that police in the UK are placing posters featuring a large set of eyes on walls all over town in order to reduce crime. The logo: “We’ve got our eyes on criminals.” It’s based on an earlier experiment that found people paid three times as much in an unsupervised coffee room when they were being watched by a pair of eyes on a poster.

OK, let’s see if we can prove it. Focus on the eyes… take out your checkbook… make the check out to…

I’m Not Tall, I’m “Vertically-Enhanced” Dept.

So it turns out taller people definitely have an advantage over the, shall we say, ‘vertically challenged’. A news story from the Houston Chronicle points to research by two Princeton economists who say “Taller people earn more because they are smarter.”

That would explain why some guy 7 feet tall can make millions playing basketball, while at 6 feet 1 inch tall, I’m barely tall enough to scrape by. Now where did I put those lifts?

And The OOB Award Goes To…

Now here’s a proposed solution to crime I bet no one else has thought of! In an effort to convince their men to “give up their guns”, the wives/girlfriends of gang members in Bogota, Columbia, plan to withhold sex from them until they do. Story here.

This, my friends, is what OOB is all about! When old solutions simply don’t work anymore, it’s time to break out of the box and come up with new strategies. Good one, ladies!

So long for now. Stay tuned until next month for your next installment of… OOB!

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To Follow the Herd… or Not

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So here’s the thing. I’m driving across one of our fine Midwest states, and while passing a field I saw one of those really huge hay rolls (the kind that looks like a big jelly roll) you often see in cattle country, and it sparked the memory of a lesson I learned from a… well, a cow. Yep, you read it right. A cow.

Isn’t it funny, sometimes, where revelations come from? I mean, you can be tooling along, minding your own business, and wham! Something in the ol’ grey cells makes a connection, and you’re suddenly struck with a Deep Thought. You know, the kind you might see on a brass plaque somewhere, perhaps even written so Every Word Starts With Capital Letters.

Well, something like that happened to me once while driving from Houston to Austin. For those of you who don’t know, this route (after leaving the flat coastal plain Houston sits on) passes through some beautiful rolling hills. It was a fine summer day, and I was making good time (at the speed limit, of course – really), and as I glanced to my left I happened to see something that has stuck with me ever since.

Back off the hiway, an old pickup truck, carrying one of those big rolls of hay in the back, had just topped a nearby hill and was heading down a dirt track toward a manger at the bottom of the hill. There were about a hundred head of those black-and-white cattle (hey, I’m a city boy) scattered around, and I could tell they were excited about the truck’s appearance because they were all running toward it. They surely knew their dinner was in that truck.

As my eye followed the dirt track downhill to the manger, I noticed one single cow, heading, not toward the truck, but straight toward the manger! Interesting, don’t you think? All those cows headed in one direction, but only one going the other way. Of the entire herd, he (or is it she?) seemed to know exactly where dinner was going to be served: at the manger.

I don’t know why that scene caught my eye, but it has stayed with me all these years. I certainly don’t remember much else about that trip. But for some reason, as I played it back in my mind, something clicked, and I learned something valuable. Are you ready? Here it comes:

“If You Want To Be First In Line For Dinner, You Have To Know Where The Food Is Being Served.”

Not exactly Shakespere, is it? Nevertheless, there’s the germ of a thought here. All the other cows were running around, chasing a moving target, and taking a long roundabout path that would leave them hot, tired, and breathless once they arrived at the manger. Now c’mon, is that any way to enjoy a meal?

But that one cow seemed to recognize that by taking his (or is it her?) time, and going directly to the manger, he (or is it she?) could get there first, and with less effort. This cow would be first in line, so to speak.

All right, so what? So, consider… innovation.

Innovation is defined in the American Heritage dictionary as “the act of introducing something new”. So how does innovation happen? It happens, quite simply, because someone stops following the herd long enough to consider what the real goal is, then finds a way to do it easier, cheaper, faster, more efficiently… to be there first.

Not a bad lesson from a cow, wouldn’t you say?

The Power In Brainstorming

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(P.S. I’m travelling this week with poor Internet opportunities. Sorry if I miss a day or two.)

I recently had an interesting experience with a kind of brainstorming session, specifically designed to help uncover possible process or value improvements in an engineering project.

All our projects start with a rough estimate, generally with a plus or minus factor of 60%. Once through initial engineering, the “final” estimate is produced with the plus or minus factor reduced to 20%. (While that may still seem large, it’s surprisingly hard to forecast engineering projects with better accuracy. Well, perhaps it’s more accurate to say it can be done, but costs too much to do so.)

The history of this particular project has been, shall we say, less than stellar (all right, I’ll be honest – it’s a train wreck.) After experiencing a large amount of “scope creep” (no, that’s not a pet name for our favorite vendor), several changes in project deadlines, and various other forms of excitement, we finally produced a final estimate that was three times greater than the original! Yikes!

After everything came screeching to a halt (you could almost hear the crash from here), a great deal of work went into revisiting everything about the project, from the objectives to the equipment requirements. Finally, we were ready to start over again. So naturally the client wants a brainstorming session to make sure we’ve identified all possible cost savings.

I said to myself, “Self, haven’t we been doing that already?”

So I had to take the time (and spend the money) to get the entire team together (no small feat since the project team members are located in two different states.) I must admit, I was a bit skeptical of the value.

Why? Well, because of the, well, let’s call them challenges, not problems, shall we? – the project had become elevated to a really high profile. (This is rather like being the apple on William Tell’s head. You can feel everyone taking a bead on you.) Also, since all project team members had already spent so much time focusing on revising the objectives, scope, etc., it seemed likely that no stone had been left unturned. With those considerations, I’m afraid I had little faith in our ability to come up with anything new.

I know, I know – you can already tell where this story is going. The bottom line is, we still uncovered some valuable improvements. Once again, brainstorming saved the day. Happy endings all around.

But I learned something valuable. I have personally experienced what it is that makes brainstorming so powerful a tool.

The power is not in the accumulated knowledge or experience of the participants. It’s not in their collective desire to discover the best, to be creative or to unleash innovation. It’s not even the ability to focus every resource on the challenge. Sure, all these things are great elements in a successful session, but that’s not what makes it work.

What makes it work so well is the ability to do all those things face to face. To be in the same room, across the same table, and look into each others eyes – in other words, to have that personal connection – is what fuels the best in a brainstorming session.

I’m a believer now.

Truth or Consequences

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I’m not able to come to the computer today, so instead I’ll just tell you a story. According to the person who told me this story, every word is true and verifiable. Since I’m not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), please make allowances for an incorrect term or two.

A lawyer bought a very rare box of 24 Cuban cigars, paying quite a lot of money for them. His first act upon getting them home was to obtain a comprehensive insurance policy on the purchase, covering everything from flood damage to fire.

After the insurance policy went into effect, he opened the box and proceeded to smoke every single one of the cigars. Here’s the kicker – the next day, before even having made the first payment on the insurance policy, he filed a claim to collect the insurance payment. The claim said they were destroyed by fire!

The insurance company resisted, of course, but it ended up going to trial anyway. The company held this was a frivolous lawsuit and should be dismissed. The claimant held that the insurance policy did not distinguish between large fires and many small fires, and should be paid.

The judge, after deliberation, acknowledged the frivolousness of the lawsuit, but since the policy did not make the required distinction, he had to rule for the claimant. The insurance company paid the lawyer the sum of $24,000 for the cigars.

The next day, the insurance filed a suit against the lawyer, charging him with 24 counts of arson, as well as fraud. The trial went back to the same judge, in fact, who ruled in the insurance company’s favor, mainly on the strength of the defendant’s own testimony from the previous trial. He was fined (I think) $50,000 plus two years in jail.

This story brings to mind a line from an old George C. Scott movie, The Flim-Flam Man: “You can’t cheat an honest man.”