AbleBrains

Hire Me Every Day!

Ok, now that I've got your attention, no, I have no plans to leave SAP.  But I thought it was an attention grabbing opener.  So why open with such a flagrant gambit for attention?  Because I think its important during periods of economic uncertainty, heck economic crisis, to continue to invest in innovation.

"Yeah, Steve we get that, you've talked about investing in innovation before, what does that have to do with hiring practices?"

Let me ask you a question.  How long do you think your organization can remain competitive, remain innovative without investing in your Human Capital?  Investing in the folks who you are depending on to deliver that innovation?  Innovation doesn't grow on trees (damm I wish it did but it doesn't).  It grows out of the minds of those working to make your company successful, whether it be on the product side, marketing, customer experience, social media, you name it... it all grows out of the fertile and creative minds of your employees.

So why the battle cry "Hire Me Every Day!"?

Each employee has to deliver in uncertain times. And companies in return have to invest in those employees, to make them feel they way they did on that first day of work at a new job -- excited, nervous, invigorated, motivated, ready to take on the world and do wonderful things.  That's the way I felt my first day of work and I strive to make my teams feel that way every day. 

I know, its a lofty goal. One that isn't reached every day for sure. But I think its a goal worth pursuing on a daily basis.

The Elements of Style

When I was in College and Graduate School, I used to carry around Strunk & Whites Elements of Style. In this nifty little manual, all my obtuse and not so obtuse questions regarding the writing style and grammar were answered. I carried my dog-eared, coffee-stained copy everywhere because, well my undergraduate and graduate days were filled with reading but even more writing.  When I left graduate school and ventured into business, I devoured business books but few of them stood out as "nifty little manuals" in the same way that Strunk had served me. 

So its with a smile on my face and a bit of amusement that I find Culture Change discussions and manualesque rules and bullet lists of do's and don'ts when attempting to alter corporate culture. 

Over on the Hill & Knowlton community today  I came across a blog by David Ferrabee entitled "Culture Change" in which the author states (emphasis mine):

I believe that there are a few commonly held misconceptions about organisational culture:

1. Its all about  relationships and behaviour: more often than not [culture change] it is process driven: new systems, changing business conditions, new leadership.  To make people 'do' things differently, you need to change the way they do things. 

While I agree that new leadership and new ways of thinking are critically important to driving cultural change and that systems and disciplines are also important, without a vision of where the company needs to go, without leadership that can inspire both the vision AND the loyalty to do the hard work to get there, all the new systems and discipline won't amount to a hill of beans unless the organization knows where its headed. In other words, in many corporate cultures, especially those with deep, intricate informal networks, change is all about relationships and behavior.

2. It's heavily influenced by national culture, diversity and geography: Two businesses in the same field can be widely different.  But managers in France and managers in Iceland will tend to approach things in broadly similar ways.

I'm sorry but I must respectfully disagree with spirit of this remark.  Although managers may be "trained" to manage employees in a similar fashion. It has been my experience as an American manager, having the opportunity to manage Americans, Germans, Indians, Russians, citiizens of Eastern Europe and the UK and people of all races and creeds that each nationality demands a fundamentally different approach to management. For instance, when I speak in Germany I used to get up and call out the great work that so and so employee did.  NO NO NO. While this flies in the US, it certainly doesn't fly in Germany.  And my employees told me so in no uncertain terms. The consensus, team oriented mentality drives differentiation. Same for India. There are vast differences stemming from culture that alter the way one manages a team.

3. Certain business sectors will always have certain cultures: There are many examples of sectors that are deemed to be one way acting the other.  If you visit Abbey in their London HQ or Nationwide in Swindon you will see that banks don't act or look like we expect them to.

Now interesting enough, although national culture, language and other societal norms driving behavior modify  corporate cultures, I believe that fundamentally a bank is a bank is a bank. Yes, SOX compliance reigns in the US while Basel II in the EU but again, I think the author misses the mark.  I believe there is more consistency among sectors than difference regardless of geography.  Its the underlying corporate culture drives differentiation and that's where the "sector" issues come from.  Lets be focused on root causes shall we?

4. A culture change programme will need to touch every part of your business: Culture change programmes can be quite small and discrete.  You can change the way work is done in one part of the business.  We do it all the time.  A manager or employee will suggest a change it will alter the culture of that part of the company.

Of course one can compartmentalize change and in some limited cases that's warranted. But most often is the case, the interdependencies among even silo'd organizations minimize the effectiveness of discrete change management initiatives.  While boiling the ocean is never a valid business strategy, comprehensive change, where dependencies among functional units are factored into the change equatoin is a must. 

So its a nice little Elements of Style type approach to culture change, only in this instance I'd be tempted to rewrite the manual.

Damaging Talent Acqusition Prospects: Over-Assessment

Been thinking a lot lately about effective methods for assessing the quality and fit of talent.  I've also been doing a lot of reading on the subject as the ability to attract and retain great talent is not only critical to the health and welfare of the organization but is one of those foundational skills that every leader needs.  What I've come to realize is that many organizations over assess their potential talent and in so doing, actually lose the very people they are trying to attract.

If you or your team members are doing the following, the wrong criteria for talent assessment may be in play at your organization:

• Are your talent assessors hypercritical of others? Are they unwilling to alter initial perceptions based further evidence?
• Do they miss on slow starters or on folks that are at first less expressive than others?
• Do they select primarily on surface characteristics?
• Do they tend to focus on current needs and expectations without factoring in future growth needs?
• Does the interview cycle take overly long? 

To this last point. Each organization has to find its right water level regarding length of time but DON'T over extend the cycle. Make it long enough so that everyone can vet the candidate but not so long as to drive down interest in the position.  I always wonder if we lose quality candidates because of the length of time it takes to vet a candidate. I assume some organizations use the "interview marathon" as a vetting process in and of its own right but I think that's wrong.  Especially in today's economy.  There's great talent out there and there's a lot of competition for that talent - moving too slowly, no matter what the level doesn't give candidates a good feeling about the speed and agility with which that particular organization moves.

Sharing Your Corporate Bed With Millennials

The Millennials joining your workforce now are employees born between 1980 and 2000.   There are about 76 million of them - children of boomers like me who will have to co-exist with three other generations in the same workplace.

• Traditionalists (born before 1945)
• Baby Boomers (1946-1964)
• Gen Xers (1965-1977)
• and Millennials (alternately known as gen-Y, echo boomers, Net gen)

According to Claire Schooley @ Forrester:

[Millennials] have an innate ability to use technology, are comfortable multitasking while using a diverse range of digital media, and literally demand interactivity as they construct knowledge. Millennials lack the workaholic drive of their burned-out predecessors, but they compensate by using many technologies — often simultaneously — to get the job done quickly and have a personal life as well. They don't have the skills and experience of the many retirees they are replacing, but they look to technology to help fill this gap.

Hence, my question.  If you're a old style traditionally organized enterprise - vertically silo'd, how are you going to adapt to manage these digital natives, individuals who expect a collaborative and networked work environment? (lets not forget the four generational styles that must be accounted for).

I place my bet firmly on the Millennials.  These workers will not stay long with companies that don't adapt.  They expect and in fact demand that things change.  Need an  example?  From FastCompany:

A 22-year-old pharmaceutical employee learned that he was not getting the promotion he had been eyeing. His boss told him he needed to work on his weaknesses first. The Harvard grad had excelled at everything he had ever done, so he was crushed by the news. He told his parents about the performance review, and they were convinced there was some misunderstanding, some way they could fix it, as they'd been able to fix everything before. His mother called the human-resources department the next day. Seventeen times. She left increasingly frustrated messages: "You're purposely ignoring us"; "you fudged the evaluation"; "you have it in for my son." She demanded a mediation session with her, her son, his boss, and HR--and got it. At one point, the 22-year-old reprimanded the HR rep for being "rude to my mom."

Now, I wouldn't expect to have my mother call my HR department if I were dissatisfied, but I've seen Millennials have their parents intercede on their behalf in a number of companies in much the same way outlined above.  I can tell you it happens!  So all you vertically organized enterprises, how are you going to adapt? Need help figuring this out? Well then...

1. Get help - hire intergenerational experts who can (1) educate you on the intricacies of intergenerational differences, (2) help construct the appropriate educational plans to inform and educate your executives and (3) guide you on tone, process and policy.  Learn before doing.
2. Employ Social Media and Social Networking internally and allow for access to external social networking sites - give Millennials the digital tools to which they are so accustomed.  Its an expectation that they be available for their life, both professional and personal!  According to Joseph Gibbons, the research director at the Future Work Institute,  "These values don't change over time." So if companies want to attract, retain, manage, and motivate the next generation of workers, they're going to have to adapt."
3. Train your Managers to Lead Differently - Managers must be managers, leaders, guide posts - people that are looked up to, as well as  therapist. Millennials require a more passive listening and teaching management style. Further you have to work hard to set their expectations. Especially since they believe strongly in themselves, demand advancement (see above) before having paid their dues (as us boomers believe)  and expect to be heard in all situations. Finally you will need to explore ways of providing constructive criticism because profiles of this generation indicate that they are not very good at accepting criticism in a meaningful way.

A lot has been written on how to manage Millennials so I wont go into this topic here.  This is meant to be a wake up call for all vertically organized enterprises. Your workforce and customers are changing.  Are you going to change with them?

Nussbaum: Apple Isn't Cutting In The Face of Recession -- Should You?

From Bruce Nussbaum's BW Innovation Blog:

Todd Walker posted a comment that is very important. He pointed to the fact that some Silicon Valley companies are not cutting back but adding to their talent pool to innovate their way of the downturn. In the last recession, Apple worked on iTunes and the iPod.

According to the SFGate.com, this is what Jobs said at that time: “Apple has maintained its workforce at about 11,000 throughout the year. In a meeting with analysts, Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said: “Almost every single competitor has been doing massive layoffs and retrenching and restructuring, but we’re doing quite the opposite. We’re not laying off boatloads of people. We’re taking those talented people and saying that if we’re going to get out of this, we’re going to get out of it by innovating our way out of it.”

  Think about that.

Failure Is An Option, Part II

Last week I wrote on failure as a critical component of Innovation and the fact that there are many organization's both large and small which fear failure so much that they automatically relegate their market position to the 2nd or 3rd tier because of their inability to experiment - fail - experiment again - succeed! So the question begs itself, how can firms begin to create a culture that embrace failure as an integral component of success?

A caveat first. It ain't going to be easy. Companies have been cutting costs and employees for years, resulting in growing job insecurity.  So many EE's don't feel like putting themselves in a position to fail and subsequently lose their jobs.   Couple that with increased expectations as to employee job performance and you have a perfect storm keeping employees tied up in the play it safe harbor.

So here are a few tactics that can be leveraged to build a "good failure" culture:

1. Leadership - place leaders in the trenches who not only foster an environment where it is safe to fail but who have failed themselves - and can turn failure into eventual success by enabling the team to learn from it and try again.  This may mean bringing in new blood from outside the team or outside the organization to deliver that new perspective and new methods of doing things.
2. Recognize and Rationalize Performance and Learning based cultures.  Lets face it, if you are bonused on discrete MBO's, there is no way in hell you want to fail, your livliehood is resting on it. But then how do you ever get a chance to learn from your mistakes?  Systems need to be put in place that don't put these two cultural imperatives on a collision course.  At IBM Research for instance, there are two performance and review cycles. A standard one year cycle which accounts for an employee's bonus in that year and a 3 year cycle for performance on salary and rank.  In this way, if a researcher has a year of failures, his rank and salary in the corporation is not affected.  This is especially important as any of us researchers can tell you,  as more often than not the beginning of a project has many more failure points or get results you didn't expect than later in a project. These failures though can take you in completely different yet very serendipitous directions... can you say rubber?
3. Celebrate your failures.  Most companies bury their failures under the rug, move the manager of the team to some insignificant role as a hand slap or pretend the whole thing never happened.  You want to ingrain in your teams that its ok to fail? Celebrate them!  Recount your failures as a team and even party around them, but don't sweep them under the rug. 
4. Examine your past. Where else can you find a wealth of information on your organization's successes and failures. Set up learning sessions for managers and employees to look at projects and initiatives that did not meet internal and or external expectations.  Its the the only way to learn!
5. Co-create with Customers and Partners Early.  Co-creation is one of the key ways in which you can afford to fail early and often because when the rubber meets the road, its your customers and partners who use the solutions you create.  If you bring them into the innovation cycle from the beginning you are more likely to develop services and solutions that meet their needs... from the beginning
6. Hire employees who have failed and learned from their past.  Managers who have failed and failed hard AND have learned from them should be hugely prized. These are individuals who are able to learn from their mistakes and put practices in to place that exploit them for good.

There's a lot of good reading on Innovation that you should digest.   Initial recommendations  include:

• Dealing with Darwin, Geoffrey Moore
• The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christenson
• The Innovator's Solution, Clayton, Christenson
• 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators, Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble
• What Customer's Want, Anthony Ulwick

Failure Is An Option (Or Should Be!)

I've been reflecting back over my last few posts regarding innovation and the thought occurs to me, why don't more companies - large and small -  encourage failure?  My mother used to tell me that I will learn more from failing than by succeeding and I've repeated that mantra to my kids.  I've always felt, hey, lets go for it and if we fail we'll try again.   So what is it with failure and why are companies so anathema to it?

At the end of the day, I think many companies face tremendous internal inertia.  As Geoffrey Moore says:

... as more and more processes in an establishment become context [versus core - that which creates sustainable competitive advantages for a company, contextual items are everything else a company does] the total population of risk averse mangers beings to exceed that of risk-taking management. Now the ability of the organization to change strategy [innovate!] by embracing the next set of changes becomes seriously impaired.

Large enterprises may feel they don't have the luxury to fail because their categories have become so competitive and shareholders so demanding, that failure can result in lost market share or Wall Street confidence.  Let's be clear here, its not that these companies can't innovate, can't afford to fail...they can, but there is so much inertia built up in the organization that there is no way for the company to experiment, fail, innovate (shampoo, rinse repeat!). Why?  Because the company has the majority of its resources tied up in just keeping the lights on... couple this with risk aversion in the culture and you have a powerful anti-innovation anti-failure culture.

Small companies on the other hand may feel they don't have the luxury of failure because they are constrained from a human and financial capital perspective. Failure is deemed a waste.  Folks who have spent any time with startups though, know that they fail every day and that as my friend Charlie Federman likes to say, those startups that face their crises and failures and successfully navigate them tend to succeed, while those that ignore them will later fail because that crisis or failure magnifies over time if not dealt with quickly.

So does failure play a role in Market success? You betcha! Lets look at the market leaders.  From the Washington Post:

While Google places a premium on success, it appears to shrug off failure. The resulting culture of fearlessness permeates the 24-hour Googleplex...  Google employees are encouraged to propose wild, ambitious ideas often. Supervisors assign small teams to see if the ideas work. Nearly everyone at Google carries a generic job title, such as "product manager." All engineers are allotted 20 percent of their time to work on their own ideas. Many of the personal projects yield public offerings, such as the social networking Web site Orkut and Google News, a collection of headlines and news links.

Philip Remek, an analyst who follows Google for Guzman and Co., sees the many initiatives as a series of lottery cards. "A lot of them aren't going to work," Remek said. "Maybe there will be a few that take off spectacularly. And maybe they're smart enough to realize no one is smart enough to tell which lottery card is the winner five years out."

Google's success is clearly a result of failure being an option at Google. In fact, its expected.  Many of the ideas that employees work on never make it to market but with such a broad innovation base to draw from, its clear that they will continue to drive many innovative products to market in the years to come.  But many folks point to Google so lets look a formerly small company acquired by a large organization.

Linksys' (a leader in home networking, acquired by Cisco) product development model was to take a volume operations approach to product innovation.  Product development was completely out-sourced, thereby lowering the cost of product innovation but allowing the company to test many new ideas in multiple categories simultaneously.  When they failed, and they did many times, the strategy was to simply discard the idea and start again.  When they hit it, as they did with home networking, they quickly ramped up their sales channels to get product to market as quickly as possible.

Ok, one more.. this time from the medical device space.  Medtronic - the folks who gave me my insulin pump!  Medtronic is the world leader in the medical device market. And the company goes a long way to foster innovation and encourages failure as part of the outcome. The company even offers grants to employees who want to chase ideas. Winners get up to $50,000 for whatever they decide they need, including hiring outside experts or contracting with research universities, and they can devote part of their regular workdays to their project - very similar to Google's approach.

Those are three quick but powerful examples of embracing failure to drive innovation and ultimately category leadership. What we'll discuss in a follow on post are the practical steps that organizations large and small can take to move in the Failure Breeds Success direction.

Why We Bemoan the Lack of Corporate Innovation

Susan Popper, SAP's SVP of Marketing Communications knows I'm an innovation hound.  I love trying to drive in directions that will grow the business.  So she handed me the latest McKinsey Quarterly entitled, "How companies approach innovation: a McKinsey Global Survey."

The abstract of which says:

...executives say innovation is a top priority for driving growth... but respondents point out flaws in how their companies manage and govern innovation.  Most companies don't focus on innovations they say will have the greatest effect on performance, for example, and innovation is seldom a part of leadership agendas.

Although 70% of leaders tap innovation as a lever for driving growth,  the above is depressing, at least for an innovation hound like me because...

...[these] leaders lack confidence in their innovation decisions. 

But companies, which talk the talk around innovation tend not to put in place management and governance structures which enable innovation.  According to the survey, companies tend to focus on product and service innovation, NOT breakthrough or  institutional innovation.

Again from the survey:

Top managers and other executives agree the the more important drivers of innovation are culture and people -- and that companies face significant challenges with both

This is another area for concern because as we all know, culture is a tough nut to crack.  Its so difficult to change because its coded in the DNA of the organization.  So if you work at an organization that doesn't have a culture that (1) values innovation and (2) places governance, budget and resources around innovation - not that it never will but it may be a cold day in hell before Innovation becomes mainstream.  Further, many top managers agree that corporate policy actually tends to offer limited incentives to innovation or limits it by placing an innovation team in a risk averse organization or business unit or having no plan to deal with failure other than to junk the team and start over.  Some say this is a talent issue, other execs say its a cultural issue.  The answer is "yes."

Another key point made by the survey is that many companies seem to "isolate innovation projects within business units, even when they see bigger opportunities."  Don't do this!!!  Don't isolate your innovation teams.  Your innovation teams should be allowed to embed in multiple functional groups, be encouraged to experiment and fail, experiment and succeed and ensure innovation has both formal and informal ways to express itself and influence multiple lines of business.

I am not surprised by any of these findings. I'm not surprised that many large companies face challenges in the innovation arena. And that only a small percentage of organizations have "figured it out. "   According to McKinsey,

The key organizational difference is the use of innovation related metrics in performance reviews.... only 29 percent of all companies include these metrics in reviews of C-level executives and business unit heads... whereas... 47 percent do so at organizations where innovation is a top priority and 50 percent at organizations where executive are confident in their innovation decisions.

Talking the talk is not enough these days.  If companies say they use innovation to drive performance, you should be seeing the metrics around innovation being put in place, you should see reliance on and corporate reporting of customer satisfaction or net promotion and you should be seeing talent and organizational shifts to embrace and drive innovation.  If you don't, then its all just lipstick on a bulldog.

Is Less email more?

The Journal (publicly available piece) had an article today on a re-emerging trend - limiting employee access to email on Fridays and weekends:

A growing number of employers, including U.S. Cellular, Deloitte & Touche and Intel, are imposing or trying out "no email" Fridays or weekends. While the bans typically allow emailing clients and customers or responding to urgent matters, the normal flow of routine internal email is halted. Violators are hit with token fines, or just called out by the boss.

The limits aim to encourage more face-to-face and phone contact with customers and co-workers, raise productivity or just give employees a reprieve from the ever-rising email tide. Emails sent by individual corporate users are projected to increase 27% this year, to an average of 47 a day, up from 37 in 2006, says Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, Calif., research and consulting firm. And one-third of users feel stressed by heavy email volume, according to a 2007 study of 177 people by the University of Glasgow and Paisley University in Scotland. Many check email as often as 30 to 40 times an hour, the study showed.

Its an old new idea again.  Back in 1996, I was interviewed by the BBC or The Guardian (can't remember, nor can I for the life of me find the original story online - if any one can, please forward) about CA's policy of shutting down email for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon to boost productivity and interpersonal contact.  Here's the only reference I could find.

From what I remember, and remember this is '96 so email was still relatively new, relatively... it was a good policy while it lasted.  It did promote more face to face meetings and in person social networking... but as the business became more reliant on email for communication with customers and partners (although one could make the argument that CA was never reliant on partners let alone customers -- Sorry Charlie) the business retired the policy and was never heard of again. 

I'd say that it was one of the smarter things Charles Wang did, although I don't think there was any altruism behind the decision. It was purely to drive the business - no reprieve from the email tide - at that point email was more a Great Lake than an ocean. So the question is, is less email more?  I for one think so. I spend so much time (calculate about 20 minutes per email,  reviewing, thinking about and answering a given message that it feels like I am paid to answer email at times -- at any one time I have about 130 unread messages) that I would love to be able to get away from it.. .do more phone and in person conversations.

What say you?
 

Balancing Action v. Analysis

I was reading this post over at grokdotcom on the balance between using executive gunslingers to solve problems vs. internally asking the hard strategic questions and working on the answers before taking action, even though its ACTION we love and want...especially us North American based executives... forgive the generalization but most NA based companies I have had the pleasure of working with, have the "say... that's a good idea, lets act on it" approach to business. 

Einstein's quote from the grokdotcom post succinctly encapsulates how I view SAP's approach to business:

If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.

While the company loves action and appreciates the fulfillment of execution, it also appreciates the value of precise analysis around the problem before moving into execution.  Since Einstein is from that European neck of the woods, I wonder how much of his attitude (and ours) is intrinsic to his brilliance or the social milieu he was brought up in?