I heard of the following rules from Dorothy Bowman who was my HR director years ago. Dorothy had experience in the federal bureaucratic wars (Navy if I recall correctly), but the rules work almost anywhere:

1. If it doesn’t say you can’t, you can.


2. It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.


3. Proceed until apprehended!

The rules work beautifully, but there may be hell to pay if (when??) you get caught. So, good luck!

Let’s be careful out there!

“Once a company gets really big, they are always second-guessing themselves. Only very ordinary ideas survive that process.”— Dave Winer.

Second-guessing (and worse) happens at almost all established organizations. Once you get to a certain level, a certain age, things are expected to be done a certain way. It’s damn-near impossible to break the cycle, even if you’re in what a good friend calls the “death spiral.”

The good news is companies die and new ones are invented to replace them. There’s constant, but messy, fermentation. But what about public enterprises (got water?), that can’t go out of business (got security?), but face incredible barriers to change? Got Katrina??

Dave’s right when he suggests young entrepreneurs go find a hill to camp out on. Highly unlikely to create change walking through the front door. Unless you’re the rare CEO…

In Bureaucracy = Death, Seth Godin talks about bureaucracy related to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and presents a nice, but unworkable, idea to bust bureacuracy.

Seth’s Analysis: “Very little remarkable comes out of bureaucracies for a simple reason. The members of the bureaucracy seek to be beyond reproach. Reproach is their nightmare, their enemy, the thing to avoid at all costs. And the remarkable feels like a risk.”

Seth’s Idea: “Appoint a CNO—chief no officer. No longer can someone say no to an idea and leave it at that. If you want to turn something down, you’ve got to pass it on to your boss. Then either he says yes or gives it to his boss. For a ‘no’ to be official, it’s got to be approved by the chief no officer and countersigned by every manager along the way.”

Unfortunately, it’s hard to bust bureaucracy with more, umm, bureaucracy. Better to empower people with ideas to “just do it!” Encourage them. Back them up. Eliminate approvals. Create many Chief Yes Officers!

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.”

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)

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