Production values

Euan remembers a painful effort at internal communication at the Beeb. High production values get in the way. I think it applies elsewhere too. High production values used to be a way of increasing credibility; a lot of times now it's the other way round.

Scared of the net?

Jeff Jarvis criticises Republicans for their unwillingness to engage with the internet.

In the end, this is not only short-sighted tactically but also essentially insulting to the American people. We are on the internet. Come talk with us. What, you’re too scared to? Big, tough terrorists don’t scare you but we do? Come on, boys, we don’t bite. But we do vote.

I think it's easy to put up a persona when doing one-way communication but much harder when there's some risk of a real exchange. So much of the fear of the internet by those in powerful positions seems really to be a fear of us.

Weinberger on web 2.0

Though I'm sure you've already read it, I feel obliged to add my own link to David Weinberger's delightful, robust and - most admirably - compassionate dismantling of Andrew Keen's arguments. For a clear understanding of why it's worth feeling optimistic about Web 2.0 - because it's worth being optimistic about your fellow man - look no further.

Following the gourd

Regular readers will know there's a parallel universe in which I run a management course based entirely on Monty Python. In the module on leadership, this scene from Life of Brian will provide the key case study.

It seems to me that most literature on leadership is about how to design a gourd or sandal.

(See other modules from my course here and here).

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A380 tickets on Ebay.

Singapore Airlines are going to auction all the seats on their inaugural A380 flight for charity. On Ebay. Strikes me as a small but good bit of marketing.

Flogging...

Matt points to this excellent video from "Dr David Vaine" on how to enforce corporate blogging. Dr Vaine brilliantly encapsulates everything I loathe about best practice in Knowledge Management.

Big event - Big cause?

Mark Earls has a good post on a cognitive bias that leads us to see conspiracy where they may only be a cock-up.

Interactive Circus Act

Sig contrasts three schools of marketing - The MBA, The Circus Act and The Conversation, and comes down in favour of an Interactive Circus Act. You'll find me sitting next to him, joining in.

More blurring...

Adpulp spotted this article in the WSJ: My boss wants to 'friend' me.

Declining a "friend" request from a colleague or a boss is a slight. So, Mr. Dyer accepted the invitation, then removed any inappropriate or incriminating photos of himself -- "I'd rather speak vaguely about them," he says -- and accepted the boss's invitation.

Mr. Dyer, it turns out, wasn't the one who had to be embarrassed. His boss had photos of himself attempting to imbibe two drinks at once, ostensibly, Mr. Dyer ventures, to send the message: "I'm a crazy, young party guy." The boss also wore a denim suit ("I'd never seen anything like it," Mr. Dyer says) and posed in a photo flashing a hip-hop backhand peace sign.

I can't help feeling optimistic about the implications of this for corporate culture.

Leadership?

It's interesting how often Rudy Giuliani gets cited by books about leadership. He's invoked as if he's an unarguable archetype. For me, this highlights a deep flaw running through most of what's written about leadership, which I think is a displacement of a whole bundle of feelings. We invoke heroes to absolve ourselves of responsbility, or as a confused effort to take control.

Anyway, whether you agree with the points made in this YouTube or not, it certainly should make you pause before buying into hero worship.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Not computers and not children but rather like chimps

I keep meaning to write a long, well-argued rant against a basic assumption in much corporate thinking: that we're all basically computers on legs that simply need reprogramming to achieve excellence. Excellence, in this context, is a little hard to distinguish from conformity.

I suppose it would then go on to relate such thinking to a Creationist world view which copes with the extraordinary mystery of life by reducing it to a silly morality tale. The ten commandments translate as the trite mantras of "best practice" etc etc.

It seems to me that a cursory glance at psychological research will confirm that we're all rather wonderful but not-especially-rational creatures who are somewhat at the mercy of biology and barely controlled herd instincts. So could we all just take break from the "Search for Excellence" and maybe, just maybe, stop trying so damn hard to manipulate each other?

Anyway, I keep meaning to write that long, well-argued piece. But this will have to do for now.

The dead language of organisations

What a pity that Lucy Kellaway's piss-take on Deloittes' Little Blue Book of Strategy is behind the FT paywall. Here's a bit of what you might be missing:

On the second last page there is a check-list of 10 points to see if you are “living the strategy”, including “I reach high” and “I make things happen” and “I fuss over the grey areas”. Only this last did I tick with conviction, thinking we were back on hairdos again. But then it turned out to be referring to an obsession with integrity, which I don’t suffer from quite so badly.

There is much to marvel at in the Little Blue Book but the pièce de resistance is the page entitled Our Pledge. “The promise of our brand. To that we pledge allegiance,” it says.

To pledge allegiance to the US flag and to “one Nation under God” may have become a bit un-PC, but at least one can understand the history of it. To pledge allegiance not just to a brand, but to a promise of a brand, you’d have to be utterly daft. And if you were that daft, I wouldn’t want you anywhere near my audit.

You have to wonder about the quality of the conversations that led to this being published. Still, at least they're not asking us to sing along.

Hat tip (for the article): Dave Snowden.

Seeing influence

Another nice nugget found by Richard Oliver:

Once people see themselves as influencing one another, they cannot be merely victims: anyone, however modest, then becomes a person capable of making a difference, minute though it may be, to the shape of reality. New attitudes are not promulgated by law, but spread, almost like an infection, from one person to another. Theodore Zeldin

Fairness

Mark Pesce has some interesting reflections about money and fairness. Here's a snippet:

Social scientists and neuropsychologists have recently begun to test the human drive to wealth. One of the most significant findings – released just a few months ago – indicates that we each have an innate sense of fairness in every financial transaction, and we’re more than willing to walk away from a transaction which we deem unfair. Furthermore, we’re willing to punish others for perpetrating those transactions. This cognitive “center of fairness” is one of the last areas of the brain to develop fully – it marks the final stage of adulthood, appearing reliably in adults after about age 22. This means our sense of fairness draws upon many of the foundational cognitive structures of the brain, which help us to understand value, social ranking, need, and so forth. Only when these systems are in place can we develop a notion of fairness. And if any of these systems fail – as does happen, on occasion – psychologists can predict an individual’s descent into psychopathology. Being fair is perhaps our highest cognitive achievement as individuals, and thus – quite rightly – it is marked as the beginning of wisdom.

Hat tip: Richard Oliver.

Content not King, shock horror crisis probe

Matt Moore on fabulous ironic form, referring to someone who banned his daughter from sending texts because they were "content free":

Following his example, I have banned people from hugging me as such interaction is "content free". They should at least send a properly written email.

Blurring

Carman Pirie blogs how an memo from Verizon,marked "Proprietary & Confidential. For Internal Use Only." inevitably got published. The memo's about how to counter the iPhone. As Carman says, why couldn't Verizon just write something for public consumption and be done with it.

I'm fond of showing a picture of InternalMemos.com during presentations, and asking the rhetorical question: can we meaningfully talk about an "Internal Memo" any more?

It seems to me that the old hard lines between organisations and the rest of us are getting more and more porous. The people I meet these days at big organisations are typically dressed more casually, on Facebook, don't really love music companies, and don't pretend ritualistic loyalty to the organisation. That doesn't mean they aren't loyal or responsible, just that what keeps them there is not hypnotism. They're not deserters, they're volunteers, and who wants an army of conscripts these days?

And sure, there are those who don't feel so good about all this. I don't want to spend too much time trying to push or persuade them that they're wrong. I'm much happier working with the volunteers, there seem to be enough of them.

Not taking it seriously

Oli Barrett's post Facebook has Landed captures how business is being changed by social software. And he has given me the very slim pretext I need to dig out this YouTube classic from the Python archives.

It's a long and delightful clip, and I was thinking especially of the bit five minutes in. Here, Graham Chapman's archetypal army general is horrified to discover that the enemy is "not taking the war seriously" any more. There's a similar shock coming for those who don't see how fundamentally the Web is changing how we see our relationships with work.

Facebook may come or go, but I think we're seeing an inspiring blurring of what what we used to call "our lives" and "work". And now it's not just us crazed bloggers.

When a top law firm has to back down when it tries to block Facebook at work, it's clear that we live in interesting times.

The Halo Effect

I blogged briefly about The Halo Effect the other day. Phil Rosenzweig gives a clear analysis of the delusions that undermine the credibility of a great deal of popular management writing. He debunks the In Search of Excellence fad in which people claim to unravel a simple winning formula for business success.

Personally, I've always disliked In Search of Excellence and generally get irritable when people bang on about excellence in organisations. I've had a lot more time for Jim Collins' Good to Great. which struck me as a much more solid effort that took effective pot shots at a lot of ego-based gimmickry in business. However, Rosenzweig raises a series of well-argued objections to the Collins methodology.

Overall, he identifes nine common flaws, some or all of which tend to colour efforts to explain the factors that cause businesses to succeed.

Here's how Craig Howe summarises them in his Amazon review.

1. The Halo Effect - many performance drivers are simply attributions based on prior performance.

2. The Delusion of Correlation and Causality - Two things may be correlated but we may not know which is the base cause.

3. The Delusion of Single Explanations - Many explanations are highly correlated; the effect of each one is usually less than suggested.

4. The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots - It is difficult to isolate the reasons for success. There is no way of comparing them with less successful companies.

5. The Delusion of Rigorous Research - If the data are not good, it does not matter how sophisticated the research methods appear to be.

6. The Delusion of Lasting Success - Almost all high-performing companies regress over time.

7. The Delusion of Absolute Performance - Company performance is relative, not absolute.

8. The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick - Highly-focused companies are often successful; yet highly-focused companies are not all successful.

9. The Delusion of Organizational Physics - Despite our quest for certainty and order, company performance does not obey the laws of nature and science.

For example, we all see those surveys that show places that are great to work also give great performance. But because of the Halo effect, people tend to believe high performing companies do have great practices, so any research based on surveys of people's judgements will be skewed by this. And of course, since nothing succeeds like success, it's quite possible that great practices are actually funded by high performance, not the other way round. And I've only touched on the first two of the nine delusions. You'd need to read it to really appreciate the quality of thought.

Rosenzweig does identify two pieces of research that he believes are rigorous enough to mitigate these all-too-human cognitive biases. The first, done by MIT, investigated whether company performance was affected by the CEO's personal management style. You'll have to read the book for details of how this was done, but it wasn't based on reading what newspapers said or asking managers to give style ratings. The result?

Bertrand and Schoar found that individual managers indeed have preferred personal styles when it comes to investment and financial policies, and that these preferences explain about 4 percent of the variance of company performance... That's a statistically significant finding but it's hardly a seductive story. You won't excite many managers by saying: If you do these things, all else equal, you might improve company performance by about 4 per cent.. But rigorous science doesn't always lead to a riveting story.

In the second example, folks from McKinsey and the LSE test the correlation between specific management practices and company performance, again avoiding the Halo effect. The result: a company that adopted best practices (let's not get into what that means) across the boards tended to outperform a laggard by 10 percent.

Essentially, the thorough research has no sizzle. Rosenzweig talks about two worlds; one which speaks to practising managers and trades in stories, the other which aims for rigour but, er, doesn't produce many gurus like Jim Collins who gets up to $150k for a speech.

Where do we go from here? Essentially, Rosenzweig argues that managers need to acknowledge that while stories are fine, in the real world they're dealing with constant uncertainty. It's a position very similar to that of Richard Farson, who I've blogged about before. In my work, I see a lot of folks who essentially have a circle of concern way outside their circle of influence, partly because of the kind of excellence-fetishism that management porn creates. It's one of the reasons I tend to recoil in horror at the heavily diagrammed programmes for change in organisations.

I suppose the quality in Good to Great that I appreciated was its emphasis on a certain kind of humilty, although Rosenzweig rightly nails Jim Collins for trying to uncover the "physics of business". It does seem to me that so many of the brittle "truths" of business are really highly subjective and we'd do well to realise that we really only get to manage small parts of a much bigger more complex system. And one of things we need to manage is all the cognitive biases that make us look for a great leader (or think that it's us).

Anyway, it's a great book, I'd encourage to take a closer look.