Managing through un-bear-able situations

Our story starts at a bridge over a deep lake in northern Nevada. A bear was making its way across the bridge one Saturday in 2007, when some vehicles crossing the bridge scared the bear into jumping over the edge. Somehow the bear caught the ledge and was hanging on for dear life. There it is, hanging on by its fingernails. It manages to pull itself up, but now there’s no way to get off the bridge and back to safety. I guess most of us have felt like that sometimes. We’re startled into making a sudden decision, hoping to find a place of safety, only to find ourselves going over the edge and facing a long, long fall towards certain disaster. We manage, somehow, to cling on and prevent the fall, but now we’re stuck. We can’t see a way out. We have nowhere to go and no route back to security.

Stuck in a dark place

The authorities, alerted to the bear’s plight, decided that nothing could be done to help before nightfall. So there’s the bear. Darkness is coming on. It can’t get off the bridge. It has no food or water.

What would you do?

I suspect many of us would panic and maybe even put ourselves at risk of falling into the ravine below. We would certainly want to do something as quickly as possible to get out of our dilemma.

The next morning

The bear, however, had a better idea. When the authorities returned on Sunday morning, they found the bear sound asleep on the ledge.

In our action-obsessed society, everyone is constantly urging everyone else to “do something” to cure any bad situation. The last option that comes to mind is often the best: to stay patient, retreat, and consider our options.

The current financial mess is a good example. Banks and finance houses got themselves — and us — into this mess by a mixture of greed, limited ethics, and deciding that nothing mattered much except short-term profits. Regulation was ignored or evaded by a mixture of accounting sleight of hand and the creation of novel “investment vehicles” that were outside the regulations, because no one had dreamed them up before. The result was easy profit, followed by the current period of staring into the abyss and knowing that you have no obvious way out.

What do they do? Do they wait patiently to see what occurs, to see which loans are, in reality, good ones and which have to be written off to experience and a hard lesson learned?

No, they yell loud and long for a government safety net. Are those the same folks who despised regulation and “government interference” in the market when times were good? Who loudly proclaimed the idea that “the market is always right” and asked only to be left alone?

Indeed they are. Only now they’re in a mess — entirely of their own contriving — they want the rest of us, the taxpayers, to bail them out.

The bear didn’t yell, but it did get a safety net.

Rescue comes

After securing a net under the bridge, the rescuers tranquilized the bear, which promptly fell into the net. The net was lowered to the ground. After a few minutes, the bear woke up and walked out of the net.

Let’s look at similar situations as they affect individuals. We get into a mess and feel trapped. Maybe we start to panic. There’s no clear way out. And no authorities on hand to bring us a safety net.

What do we do?

Most people start running around, frantically trying to find a solution. If the bear had done this on the ledge of the bridge, the chances are it would have fallen off. The same is true for us.

No one’s mind works clearly when they feel stressed and panicky. That makes managing hard to do. But, if we succumb to the urge to “do something,” it’s very possible that we’ll grab onto the first seemingly viable answer that presents itself..."satisficing ." It may help us out, but it’s much more likely to make the problem worse

Learning the lesson

Like all the best stories, this one has a moral. The bear was panicked by circumstances (the vehicles on the bridge) into making a bad move. It jumped out of the way, over the edge of the bridge, and found it was hanging on by its nails over a drop into disaster.

Somehow it was able to pull itself up onto a narrow ledge. Now it’s safe from instant death, but still in a very bad situation, with no obvious way out.

When you’re confronted with a bad situation, sometimes the best solution of all is to do nothing, sleep on the problem, and carefully assess your alternatives. Patience often succeeds where immediate action may only makes things worse. Leadership through careful consideration of your options frequently works better than action for action's sake — for people and bears.

The top 5 business maxims that have to go

Much well-known business advice is sadly obsolete but can still be found in articles, business books and, not least, in daily use in the workplace. It seems that some companies are still guided by thinking that is sadly out of date - if it was ever true to begin with.

The worst of these old maxims are not only wrong, they’re bad for people and bad for business. Businesses who use them are making their employees unhappy and are harming the bottom line.

Here’s my pick of the top 5 business maxims in serious need of an update - with a suggested replacement for each.

Old maxim #1: Failure is not an option

Meaning: We absolutely, positively must succeed.

Guess what: No matter how many times you repeat this maxim, failure remains an option. Closing your eyes to this fact only makes you more likely to fail. Putting pressure on people to always succeed makes mistakes more likely because:

• People who work under pressure are less effective
• People resist reporting bad news
• People close their eyes to signs of trouble

This is especially true when it’s backed up with punishment of those who make mistakes. Peter Drucker provocatively suggested that businesses should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because employees who never make mistakes never do anything interesting. Admitting that mistakes happen and dealing constructively with them when they do makes mistakes less likely.

Also, failure is often the path to new, exciting opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise. Closing your eyes to failure means closing your eyes to these opportunities.

New maxim: Failure happens. Deal with it.

Old maxim #2: The customer is always right

Meaning: The customer is king. We satisfy our customers’ every need.

No. No, no, no. This tired business maxim often means that loyal hardworking employees are scorned in favor of unreasonable customers. It also, ironically, results in bad customer service.

“The customer is always right” makes employees unhappy and unhappy employees almost always give customers bad service.

New maxim: Happy employees means happy customers.

Old maxim #3: Never be satisfied

Meaning: You can never be satisified and complacent in business. You’ve always gotta want more.

This is a bad mistake which rests on a very fundamental misconception, namely that being satisfied means that you stop acting. That satisfaction breeds complacency and therefore that a happy, satisifed company will be passive. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, a constant sense of dissatifaction in an organization sends one powerful message: We’re not good enough! The irony is that this results in worse performance.

People who constantly appreciate all the good in their organization and express their satisifaction create a much more positive working environment characterized by more:

• Motivation
• Energy
• Self-confidence
• Happiness at work

This is not about closing your eyes and pretending things are great if they’re not. It’s about appreciating the fact that people in constant states of dissatisfaction erode an organization’s will and ability to act. The trick is to appreciate what you have and still aim for more.

Replacement: Always be appreciative but never complacent.

Old maxim #4: Nice guys finish last

Meaning: We can’t be too nice in business. In fact, being nice may hinder your career and impede results.

That’s just not true, of course we should be nice at work. This doesn’t mean that you have to be nice to all of the people all of the time, but it means that you absolutely can be a nice person and succeed in business. Unpleasant people hurt the bottom line. In a networked world reputation matters, and it’s more important to be generous and likeable than to be ruthless and efficient.

New maxim: Nice guys get the job done.

Old maxim #5: Grow or die

Meaning: A business is either growing or dying. A business can’t be successful if it’s not growing.

It’s interesting to see how growth has been elevated to an automatic good, questioned by very few businesses and executives. Growth certainly has some positive effects especially because it creates new possibilities and challenges for an organization and its people. I’m not saying that growth is bad but that growth isn’t always right for every business. Sometimes a business might be better off spending a quarter or a year not growing but simply consolidating existing business. Consequently not growing or even shrinking does not automatically represent business failure.

That’s what Semco’s CEO Ricard Semler meant when he said this:

There is no correlation between growth and ultimate success. For a while growth seems very glamorous, but the sustainability of growth is so delicate that many of the mid-sized companies which just stayed where they were doing the same thing are much better off today than the ones that went crazy and came back to nothing. There are too many automobile plants, too many airplanes. Who is viable in the airline business?

If someone asks me, ‘where will you be in 10 years’ time?’, I haven’t got the slightest idea. I don’t find it perturbing either if we said, ‘look, in 10 years’ time Semco could have 500 people instead of 3,000 people’; that sounds just as interesting as 21,000 people. I’d hate to see Semco not exist in 10, 20, 50 years’ time, but what form it exists in, what business it’s in and what size it is are not particularly relevant.

Growing also entails its own risks, especially fast growth on borrowed money. This almost killed Patagonia in the early 90’s. Founder Yvon Chouinard says this:

It was back in 1990 or so and we were growing the company by 40 to 50 percent a year and we were doing it by all the textbook business ways — adding more dealers, adding more products, building stores. Growing it like the American dream, you know — grow, grow, grow. And one year we predicted 40 to 50 percent growth and there was a recession and all the sudden we only grew 20 percent. And at the same time, our bank was going belly-up and we had cash-flow problems and it went to absolute hell. And I had been the person who had never bought anything on credit in all my life. I always paid cash for everything, and to have to call someone and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t pay my bills this month,” was killing me. And I realized that I was on the same track as society was — endless growth for the sake of growth.

That’s when I decided to put the brakes on and decided to grow at a more natural rate — which basically means that only when our customers want something do we make more, but we don’t prime the pump.

New maxim: Grow when you gotta.

Wrap-up

The scary thing about maxims is that they’re often accepted unquestioningly because they come in the shape of old addages which are repeated - a little like nursery rhymes used to educate children. That means it’s not enough to oust the old maxims we need to replace them with new ones that are guaranteed to bring better results for people and for the bottom line.

Annual Mary Kay Seminar

Managing organizational culture?

How Not To Run A Meeting

(I do not endorse the book plugged at the end of the clip.)

Happy Holidays to All!

Best wishes to you for a happy holiday season and the best new year!

It's Not Easy Being HOT...

...and by HOT I mean a Hands-On Teacher... (if you don't understand this post so far, I have not lost my mind...it's a MGT 3120 thing...)

It is a tough task to run a community of individuals where authority and respect have to be earned every day. Few people can do it well, consistently and successfully, because it demands an unusual combination of attributes. But these are characteristics you too will need as you take your rightful place among the management ranks of the future. I try everyday to hold on to these ideals, and they are what I also wish for you to find and maintain:

A belief in oneself is the only thing that gives an individual the self-confidence to step into the unknown and to persuade others to go with you where perhaps no one has taken them before. But this has to be combined with constant self-questioning, the humility to accept that one can be wrong on occasion, the acceptane that others also have ideas, and that listening is as important as talking.

A passion for the job provides the energy and focus that will drive your organization and you must always try to act as an example to others. But this also has to be combined with its opposite, an awareness of other worlds, because a sole focus on your own ideas can turn to blinders, and an inability to think beyond one's own box. Great leaders find time to read, to meet people beyond their own circle, to go to the theater or see films, to walk in other worlds.

The leader must have a respect and love of people, because in a community of individuals, those who find individuals a pain and a nuisance may be respected or feared, but they will not be willingly followed.

Yet this attribute, too, requires its opposite, a capacity for aloneness, because leaders have to be out front. It is not always possible to share one's worries with anyone else. Few will thank the leader when things go right, but many will blame the leader if things go wrong. Great leaders have to walk alone from time to time. They also have to live vicariously, deriving their satisfaction from the growth and successes of others and giving those others the recognition that they deserve.

Living with these paradoxes requires great strength of character. It also requires a belief in what one is doing. Although it may seem so now, money alone may not be enough to provide the motive to live with these contradictions. Even a love of power is insufficient, because power irons out the contradictions rather than holding them in balance. I believe great leaders are bred from great causes, but leaders at their best will also breed great causes. Until and unless business embraces a cause bigger and more beneficial to society than enrichment of self and shareholders, it will have few great and memorable leaders that will stand the test of time.

I wish you all the best as you carve your own way through this management maze. It has been a pleasure and honor to have met you all. Please come back and visit me...even if only through this blog in the future.

--prof K

The Leadership Secrets of "Attila the Hun"

"We should rule the world." --Attila the Hun

Attila the Hun was a member of a nomadic Asian people in search of global conquest. By AD 432, Attila the Hun had become a leader of historic repute. He gained so much power that his army consisted of 700,000 warriors, and he was content with nothing less than the ransacking of Rome itself. The Huns had a reputation for cruelty and barbarism that was not undeserved. They ate their meat raw (often human flesh), had little use for virgins, and possessed a strong appetite for murder and mayhem. No one could look Attila in the eyes, not even any of his 400 wives.

***

Back in 1987, a very famous and controversial leadership book was written, called "Management Secrets of Attila the Hun." The book pretends to be a collection of campfire stories told by Attila while training his chieftains to be better leaders. Of course there's no historical evidence that Attila ever had such fireside chats, but it's an interesting way for the author to infer what Attila might have said under such circumstances.

Here are a few of Attila's secrets that the author claims are fully appropriate for the business world. What do you think? Is there any wisdom in behaving like a Hun today?

YOU'VE GOT TO WANT TO BE IN CHARGE -- You've got to be ruthlessly ambitious. Never be bored, disinterested, or cowardly in any way. Good leaders are lustful leaders. Power is like sex, but don't appear overeager, just extremely determined to succeed under any circumstances, fair or unfair.

PICK YOUR ENEMIES WISELY -- Do not consider all opponents, or everyone you argue with, as enemies. These are accidental enemies. Choose your enemies with purpose. They may be people you have friendly relations with, and in fact, you should let them think of you as a friend, all the while never telling them anything, and lulling them into a state of complacency and acting prematurely.

EXPLOIT THE DESIRE TO ENJOY THE SPOILS OF WAR -- Harness your peoples' desires for short-term gains. Grant small rewards for light tasks. Reserve heaps of booty for other times, and be generous with items that hold a value to yourself. Never underestimate the ability to buy obedience.

EXPECT CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT -- You must encourage learning and innovation among those you lead. This can be done in several ways, by creating competitions among the people. Never allow them to wander aimlessly. Regularly upgrade your standards of performance.

NEVER CONDONE A LACK OF MORALE OR DISCIPLINE -- Terminate people at the first sign of disrespect for the common good, but by no means stiffle individualism or punish the innocent who don't know the common good. Definitely, do not allow uncontrolled celebration. Pillaging and looting are only fun if done in the name of one's mission. Discipline will build morale.