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July 26, 2005

Using Consultants for Credibility

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on July 26, 2005
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In “Where do you get your advice?,” Seth Godin talks about how companies buy credibility from consultants:

“If McKinsey said to close the plant, then it’s a lot easier to sell your board. If you had gotten precisely the same advice from precisely the same 26-year-old Harvard MBA but she’d been in your strategy group instead of at McKinsey, they’d ignore her.”

The truth is third-party validation is frequently important, especially when you need the approval of your board, the financial markets or other important stakeholders. When seeking approval for a $3.6 billion infrastructure program in San Francisco, the utility faced a major credibility problem. Critical to our eventual success was an independent review of the program by RW Beck and an additional review by an independent panel of utility experts. Beck’s reputation for independence and track record were essential.

Of course, their review was conducted by experts, not a newly-minted MBA. While it can be painful to the organization’s staff when they’re not trusted as credible, that can’t be changed overnight. In fact, in many cases, skepticism by governing boards is required. In these cases, having testimonials from credible third-parties is essential. That’s one reason financial advisors, bond counsel and credit rating agencies are part of the debt issuance process. Transparency is required.

Seth also states:

“I think most organizations don’t buy nearly enough advice. They go 97% of the way, do 97% of the work, make all the investments… but then they get too tired and too stuck to actually do the high leverage stuff that works.”

Organizations buy plenty of advice. They also generate plenty of ideas from internal experts. Turning advice and ideas into action — execution — that’s where many organizations are “stuck.”

July 13, 2005

Give up control to get control

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on July 13, 2005
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Years ago I attended the Aviara Golf Academy trying to improve my game. Well, I’m still not a good golfer, though it’s not their fault. They taught me a lot.

One lesson had to do with control. We all want to hit the ball far and we all want to hit it straight. As a relatively new golfer, I tried to control my golf swing by holding on firmly and using my arms to make the club hit the ball.

And it wasn’t working. So they gave me the following tip: You have to give up control to get control.

They explained how holding on to the club tightly, having tense arms and working so hard to control my swing was counterproductive. These actions actually made me hit the ball inconsistently. Some went left and some were slices to the right. Some 7 irons went 180 yards. Some didn’t get beyond 120 yards.

All that control didn’t work.

Instead, they counseled a relaxed grip, barely holding on to the club. Relaxed arms. A proper takeaway but then turning through my swing to completion without any thought about controlling the swing. Just think about the target.

And you know what? It worked.

Sometimes. As I said, I’m still a poor golfer — as my fellow club members witnessed just this past weekend! But it was the right idea.

Give up control to get control.

And the funny thing is, this idea works in business too.

Are you a controller? Is it working for you?

Try giving up control, relaxing your grip a little. Your team will appreciate the freedom and use it to help you accomplish more.

How about it?

July 1, 2005

Why Do CEOs Get Fired?

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on July 1, 2005
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LeadershipIQ.com recently announced the results of its four-year study of why CEOs are fired or forced out. The study, based on interviews with 1,087 board members from 286 public, private, business and healthcare organizations, found that chief executives were fired, or otherwise forced out as a result of:

  • Mismanaging change (31%)
  • Ignoring customers (28%)
  • Tolerating low performers (27%)
  • Denying reality (23%)
  • Too much talk, not enough action (22%)

The report says virtually every organization it interviewed has undergone change initiatives, noting:

“half of board members said that their change initiative did not go well. Most pointed to a failure on the CEO’s part to properly motivate employees and managers, and more specifically, to adequately sell the need to change course. Another group identified the CEO’s inability to follow-through and solidify the gains as the cause of failure.”

Other studies have shown that 70 percent of organizational change initiatives fail, often because the CEO isn’t committed to the change, doesn’t sell the need for the change or fails to follow through with execution. Similarly, up to 90 percent of strategic plans are never effectively implemented for the same reasons.
(Thanks to Lisa Haneberg for the link)

June 30, 2005

Looking for an Up-tick…

Published
on June 30, 2005
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James Hoagland of the Washington Post was part of a panel of reporters on the 6/28/05 edition of PBS’s Charlie Rose show discussing President Bush’s nationally televised speech of the same evening.

Hoagland said, the White House has a “different sense of timing” with respect to the Iraq war. “They lay back fror a long time saying very little. They begin to get into trouble, they begin to fall behind. Then they mobilize. They send the President out to make this kind of speech as if they have all the time in the world.”

Saying the White House sees it differently, he continued, “One of the things that is happening is the public beginning to to say the statements we’re hearing from the White House don’t resemble what we believe is actually happening there (in Iraq).” Hoagland called this “The Famous Credibility Gap,” adding that the President is “trying to buy time.”

Earlier in the day, Bill Schneider of CNN discussed recent poll results on the network’s Inside Politics show. He showed a graph that depicted deteriorating poll numbers over the course of the Iraq war. He noted there were “two upticks” on the graph. Public support for the war went up briefly after the capture of Sadaam Hussein, and again when Iraq held it’s elections. I believe the latest poll showed support is now down to about 40 percent.

Why is this interesting to me? Well it pretty closely matches some thoughts I’ve had about the problem with government. While I’m interested in national politics and such, my career has focused on government enterprises that provide critical fee-based services to the public. You can include many water and sewer systems, transportation systems, electric utilities and the like in this category. They don’t prosecute wars, but they are critical to our well being and livelihoods.

Years ago, a colleague and I used to debate which was better, the public sector or the private sector. Conventional wisdom says the private sector is more efficient, more effective, etc., but we’ve had enough evidence of corruption and malfeasance by both sectors to keep the question in doubt.

So what separates government from business: it’s accountability…

June 23, 2005

Them vs. Us vs. Them

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on June 23, 2005
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In My money, your cause, what now?, Seth Godin writes about the growing conflict between corporate practices and the values of individual consumers:

“I have a valued business partner that creates products I’m ashamed of. What do I do now? Do I have an ethical obligation to change how I work in order to make my feelings clear? Do I have a marketing obligation?

What happens when consumers use the power of their money to make their feelings clear? What happens to Chick-fil-A or Bennetton when every purchase becomes a political act?”

Seth thinks the “disconnect between what we spend and what we believe” is about to change.

Well, it has changed in the past. For example, the Montgomery bus boycott was an example of citizens using their purchasing power to protest governmental policy in 1955. But the times have changed. Corporations have much more power today, and that power is increasing. With the internet, cell phones and other world-flattening technologies, citizen-consumers have more power too.

June 17, 2005

On Standards

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on June 17, 2005
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Lisa Haneberg on standards for managers, including:

Managers ought to have the courage to make tough decisions and solve difficult problems.

I agree, but consider this story. During a meeting to discuss our strategic plan, one of my colleagues asked, “What’s the biggest problem for managers around here?”

Before any of us could respond, he went to the whiteboard and wrote his answer:

C R U C I F I X I O N

He was right.

Lisa correctly focuses her attention on middle managers, but if we’ve learned anything from Enron it’s that a company’s culture can require heroic efforts from employees to simply do the right thing. And the cultural environment, while impacted by middle managers and employees, is really determined at the top.

Standards are good. We need them for managers and we really need them for leaders.

June 16, 2005

Tech Changes Things

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on June 16, 2005
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Dan Gillmor on Ray Ozzie’s talk at the Tech Awards:

One of the people he worked with rarely came into the office, but communicated via the era’s equivalent of instant messaging. The colleague’s insights were brilliant but he typed incredibly slowly, Ozzie recalled.

Then they met, and the colleague was a quadraplegic who typed by holding a stick in his teeth and punching the keys one by one. Ozzie realized several things that day. First, technology was removing physical barriers in a more profound way than he’d understood. Second, he undoubtedly would have pre-judged his colleague (who recently died) had he seen him first in his wheelchair.

Source: Silicon Valley Tech Awards | Bayosphere

June 11, 2005

When You’ve Hired the Wrong Person…

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on June 11, 2005
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I’ve been searching for an article written by Jim Collins in the April 1999 issue of Inc. Magazine. The title was “When good managers manage too much.” What grabbed my attention was the tease on the cover, “How to know when you’ve hired the wrong person,” and the subtitle should have been, “And what to do about it!” The answer is, you get rid of them

Today, I came across an interesting entry on Don Blohowiak’s Leadership Now blog:

“What are the most pressing problems facing your business today?” That’s a question my good friend Michael Hudson, Ph.D., put to managers in a wide variety of businesses across the USA.

“Surprisingly,” Michael writes, “the most frequent answer is not recruiting or retaining people. It is, in fact, the exact opposite: How to get rid of the people who don’t belong.”


Blohowiak cites Hudson’s plan for “making sure you have the right people on the bus.” It’s a good approach, but very difficult to implement anywhere, especially in public enterprises. I wonder how Hudson and Blohowiak think about evaluating your team members for performance and values?

June 10, 2005

Embrace and Extend

Published
on June 10, 2005
in Noteworthy and StratBlog
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A few years ago, a colleague and I were in a conference room discussing Jack Welch’s Values vs. Production model. I drew the following diagram on the white board and explained how the model worked:

Employee Values vs. Production Chart

We talked about how to apply this model in our company. We discussed the performance of each of our top managers (“did they make their numbers?”), and how each lived the values. And of course, we started filling in the grid. It looked something like this, with each “X” representing a manager: Continue reading ‘Embrace and Extend’

June 8, 2005

Management by Values

Published
on June 8, 2005
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A few years ago, I happened upon a Jack Welch interview on C-Span while flipping channels. Jack was asked, “How do you evaluate people at GE?” Note that this was before publication of his autobiography (Jack, Straight From The Gut). Before I knew much more about him than his role as CEO of one of the world’s largest companies. I also knew of his reputation as a leader, but none of the details.

Jack explained that he always asks two questions about each person: Continue reading ‘Management by Values’