It’s About the Work, Not the Office; Corralling workers in one place doesn’t necessarily lead to productivity or innovation

March 7, 2013

It’s About the Work, Not the Office

By JENNIFER GLASS

THE recent decision by Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo, to eliminate telecommuting for all workers brings her company back in line with most of corporate America, where working from home is more illusion than reality. Although many — some estimate most — American jobs could successfully be performed at home, only roughly 16 percent of American employees actually telecommute in any given year. And that figure is reached only by using a very generous definition of telecommuting — working from home at least one hour per week.

The idea behind the Yahoo announcement, as well as a more limited announcement from Best Buy this week that will add restrictions to its telecommuting policy, was that bringing workers back to the office would lead to greater collaboration and innovation. This is despite numerous studies showing that telecommuting workers are more productive than those working on-site.

Yet a work force culture based on long hours at the office with little regard for family or community does not inevitably lead to strong productivity or innovation. Two outdated ideas seem to underlie the Yahoo decision: first, that tech companies can still operate like the small groups of 20-something engineers that founded them; and second, the most old-fashioned of all, that companies get the most out of their employees by limiting their autonomy. Read more of this post

Talking It Out: The New Conversation-centered Leadership; Leadership Conversations is part of a growing recognition that the so-called “command and control” model of organizational leadership is fast becoming outdated in today’s world

Talking It Out: The New Conversation-centered Leadership

Published : March 06, 2013 in Knowledge@Wharton

Every year, hundreds of thousands of new graduates enter the business world, eager to climb the corporate ladder. Their progress on the early rungs of that journey will often be determined by qualities like hard work, determination, knowledge and technical proficiency. But business consultants Alan S. Berson and Richard G. Stieglitz argue that those same qualities prove less helpful at higher rungs on the ladder, and may even be one’s downfall if they are not balanced by a very different set of leadership qualities. They sum up the thesis of their new book, Leadership Conversations: Challenging High-Potential Managers to Become Great Leaders, like this: “As you move into upper leadership levels, your technical skills — what you know — become less important. What counts is whom you know and, perhaps more important, who knows and trusts you.”

The importance of building strong working relationships within an organization may seem self-evident. But Berson and Stieglitz go well beyond a call to establish and maintain open lines of communication. The kind of conversations they are advocating for are not simply talk for talk’s sake. Rather, they are the heart and soul of any thriving organization’s culture: a strategic tool incorporating very specific techniques toward very specific ends.

A Changed Environment

Leadership Conversations is part of a growing recognition that the so-called “command and control” model of organizational leadership is fast becoming outdated in today’s world. The reasons for this shift are many. Today’s business environment is increasingly global, diverse, fluid and unpredictable. Technological change and the rise of social media have fundamentally altered the way companies interact with their customers. Rigidly hierarchical organizations risk losing ground to more nimble, collaborative ones. Read more of this post

Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease

Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease

Rafe Sagarin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 27, 2012 | ISBN-10: 0465021832

Despite the billions of dollars we’ve poured into foreign wars, homeland security, and disaster response, we are fundamentally no better prepared for the next terrorist attack or unprecedented flood than we were in 2001. Our response to catastrophe remains unchanged: add another step to airport security, another meter to the levee wall. This approach has proved totally ineffective: reacting to past threats and trying to predict future risks will only waste resources in our increasingly unpredictable world.

In Learning from the Octopus, ecologist and security expert Rafe Sagarin rethinks the seemingly intractable problem of security by drawing inspiration from a surprising source: nature. Biological organisms have been living—and thriving—on a risk-filled planet for billions of years. Remarkably, they have done it without planning, predicting, or trying to perfect their responses to complex threats. Rather, they simply adapt to solve the challenges they continually face.

Military leaders, public health officials, and business professionals would all like to be more adaptable, but few have figured out how. Sagarinargues that we can learn from observing how nature is organized, how organisms learn, how they create partnerships, and how life continually diversifies on this unpredictable planet.

As soon as we dip our toes into a cold Pacific tidepool and watch what we thought was a rock turn into an octopus, jetting away in a cloud of ink, we can begin to see the how human adaptability can mimic natural adaptation. The same mechanisms that enabled the octopus’s escape also allow our immune system to ward off new infectious diseases, helped soldiers in Iraq to recognize the threat of IEDs, and aided Google in developing faster ways to detect flu outbreaks.

While we will never be able to predict the next earthquake, terrorist attack, or market fluctuation, nature can guide us in developing security systems that are not purely reactive but proactive, holistic, and adaptable. From the tidepools of Monterey to the mountains of Kazakhstan, Sagarin takes us on an eye-opening tour of the security challenges we face, and shows us how we might learn to respond more effectively to the unknown threats lurking in our future. Read more of this post

To Become More Adaptable, Take a Lesson from Biology. Decentralization. The most successful biological organisms are structured or organized in such a way as to eschew centralized control in favor of allowing multiple agents to independently sense and quickly respond to change

To Become More Adaptable, Take a Lesson from Biology

by Rafe Sagarin  |  12:30 PM March 5, 2013

Remember when Apple’s stock traded at $7 a share? I do, because that’s when I sold my shares. Tech experts’ sage predictions had convinced me that the Mac would never make a dent in the PC market. As it turned out, the Mac didn’t need to make a dent, because Apple mutated its cute computer DNA into cute music players and phones that fit massive unfilled niches. Yet even the genius architect of this turnaround made faulty predictions sometimes. Remember the invention Steve Jobs said was going to be “bigger than the PC”? You may have seen a mall cop riding onerecently.

Even the best of us are horrible at predicting the future. That’s too bad, because our world is full of risk that we’d love to avoid and opportunity that we’d love to seize.

Fortunately, there’s a rich source of lessons on how to thrive in an unpredictable world, and it has been cranking out success stories for 3.5 billion years. It’s called biology.

All of Earth’s successful organisms have thrived without analyzing past crises or trying to predict the next one. They haven’t held “planning exercises” or created “predictive frameworks.” Instead, they’ve adapted. Adaptability is the power to detect and respond to change in the world, no matter how surprising or inconvenient it may be.

While there’s much chatter in the management world about the need to be adaptable, only a few creative companies and innovative managers have probed the natural world for its adaptability secrets. But when they have, they’ve been remarkably successful. A study of nature offers straightforward guidance through four key practices of adaptable systems.

Decentralization. The most successful biological organisms are structured or organized in such a way as to eschew centralized control in favor of allowing multiple agents to independently sense and quickly respond to change. An octopus, despite its surprisingly intelligent brain, doesn’t order each arm to change a certain color when it needs to hide quickly. Rather, individual skin cells across its body sense and respond to change and give the octopus a collective camouflage. Read more of this post

P&G’s Legendary Ex-Chief On How Today’s CEOs Are Failing; “They think that benchmarking, best practices and copying what the rest of the industry does is a strategy.” They also get seduced by success, expecting that what’s worked in the past will serve them just as well in the future.

P&G’s Legendary Ex-Chief On How Today’s CEOs Are Failing

Max Nisen | 5 minutes ago | 15 | 

A.G. Lafley was one of the most successful executives in recent times. During his nine years at the top of Procter & Gamble, the consumer product company’s value increased by more than $100 billion. In a recent interview, Lafley told the Wall Street Journal what he saw as current CEOs’ biggest shortcoming:

They don’t think they need a strategy, or their strategies are flawed. They think they have a hot product or hot service, and these don’t last forever. They think that benchmarking, best practices and copying what the rest of the industry does is a strategy. They try to be all things to all people. If you’re not clear about which customers you’re going to serve, how to serve them in a unique and better way that creates real value for them, and your core competencies, you’re just not going to have as much of a chance to win.

Essentially, Lafley is arguing, executives hate to make choices. When they take charge and commit to a strategy or a particular customer group, they become responsible for the consequences. Instead, they play it safe. They look to best practices, and they look to competitors. That may be the easiest path, but that’s not one where you can win. They also get seduced by success, expecting that what’s worked in the past will serve them just as well in the future. During his time at P&G, Lafley developed a 5-step program designed not just to succeed in a market, but to win it entirely, which he lays out in “Playing To Win.” Businesses have to decide what winning is, where to play, how to win, what their core competencies are, and what management systems they need to execute their strategy. Not only that, but they have to build those kinds of questions into their culture, so things are approached strategically on every level and constantly re-evaluated.

Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach To Fun on the Job; the story of AES, whose business model and operating ethos -“let’s have fun”-were conceived during a 90-minute car ride from Annapolis, Maryland, to Washington, D.C. In the next two decades, it became a worldwide energy giant

Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach To Fun on the Job [Paperback]

Dennis W. Bakke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2006

Imagine a company where people love coming to work and are highly productive on a daily basis. Imagine a company whose top executives, in a quest to create the most “fun” workplace ever, obliterate labor-management divisions and push decision-making responsibility down to the plant floor. Could such a company compete in today’s bottom-line corporate world? Could it even turn a profit? Well, imagine no more.

In Joy at Work, Dennis W. Bakke tells the true story of this extraordinary company–and how, as its co-founder and longtime CEO, he challenged the business establishment with revolutionary ideas that could remake America’s organizations. It is the story of AES, whose business model and operating ethos -“let’s have fun”-were conceived during a 90-minute car ride from Annapolis, Maryland, to Washington, D.C. In the next two decades, it became a worldwide energy giant with 40,000 employees in 31 countries and revenues of $8.6 billion. It’s a remarkable tale told by a remarkable man: Bakke, a farm boy who was shaped by his religious faith, his years at Harvard Business School, and his experience working for the Federal Energy Administration. He rejects workplace drudgery as a noxious remnant of the Industrial Revolution. He believes work should be fun, and at AES he set out to prove it could be. Bakke sought not the empty “fun” of the Friday beer blast but the joy of a workplace where every person, from custodian to CEO, has the power to use his or her God-given talents free of needless corporate bureaucracy.

In Joy at Work, Bakke tells how he helped create a company where every decision made at the top was lamented as a lost chance to delegate responsibility–and where all employees were encouraged to take the “game-winning shot,” even when it wasn’t a slam-dunk. Perhaps Bakke’s most radical stand was his struggle to break the stranglehold of “creating shareholder value” on the corporate mind-set and replace it with more timeless values: integrity, fairness, social responsibility, and a sense of fun. Read more of this post

The Decision Maker: Unlock the Potential of Everyone in Your Organization, One Decision at a Time; How Dennis Bakke build AES into a Fortune 200 global power company with 27,000 people in 27 countries.

The Decision Maker: Unlock the Potential of Everyone in Your Organization, One Decision at a Time [Hardcover]

Dennis Bakke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 5, 2013

Who makes the important decisions in your organization? Strategy, product development, budgeting, compensation—such key decisions typically are made by company leaders. That’s what bosses are for, right? But maybe the boss isn’t the best person to make the call.

That’s the conclusion Dennis Bakke came to, and he used it to build AES into a Fortune 200 global power company with 27,000 people in 27 countries. He used it again to create Imagine Schools, the largest non-profit charter-school network in the U.S.

As a student at Harvard Business School, Bakke made hundreds of decisions using the case-study method. He realized two things: decision-making is the best way to develop people; and that shouldn’t stop at business school. So Bakke spread decision-making throughout his organizations, fully engaging people at all levels. Today, Bakke has given thousands of people the freedom and responsibility to make decisions that matter.

In The Decision Maker, a leadership fable loosely based on Bakke’s experience, the New York Times bestselling author shows us how giving decisions to the people closest to the action can transform any organization.

The idea is simple.

The results are powerful.

When leaders put real control into the hands of their people, they tap incalculable potential. The Decision Maker, destined to be a business classic, holds the key to unlocking the potential of every person in your organization. Read more of this post

Big data in the age of the telegraph: Daniel McCallum’s 1854 organizational design for the New York and Erie Railroad resembles a tree rather than a pyramid. It empowered frontline managers by clarifying data flows

Big data in the age of the telegraph

Daniel McCallum’s 1854 organizational design for the New York and Erie Railroad resembles a tree rather than a pyramid. It empowered frontline managers by clarifying data flows.

March 2013 • Caitlin Rosenthal

In 1854, Daniel McCallum took charge of the operations of the New York and Erie Railroad. With nearly 500 miles of track, it was one of the world’s longest systems, but not one of the most efficient. In fact, McCallum found that far from rendering operations more efficient, the scale of the railroad exponentially increased its complexity.¹

The problem was not a lack of information: the growing use of the telegraph gave the company an unprecedented supply of nearly real-time data, including reports of accidents and train delays.² Rather, the difficulty was putting that data to use, and it led McCallum to develop one of the era’s great low-tech management innovations: the organization chart. This article presents that long-lost chart (see sidebar, “Tracking a missing org chart”) and shows how aligning data with operations and strategy—the quintessential modern management challenge—is a problem that spans the ages. Read more of this post

Why innovation is sequester-proof

Why innovation is sequester-proof

By Vivek Wadhwa, Tuesday, March 5, 1:39 AM

This may come as surprise to people in Washington (or perhaps not), but the sequester is hardly a topic of discussion in Silicon Valley. Indeed, it’s not even a trending topic on Twitter. That is how unimportant short-term government decisions are to innovation. While lawmakers battle over taxes and fiscal cliffs, entrepreneurs are busy solving humanity’s problems so that we can go from debating how we distribute scarce resources to discussing how we equitably share the bounty we are creating.

In his bestselling book, “Abundance”, my colleague, XPRIZE Chairman and CEO and Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis, tells the story of how aluminum went from a rare metal to something we casually wrap our food in. When the king of Siam hosted Napoleon III in the 1840s, writes Diamandis, the people working for Napoleon were served with silver utensils. Those working for the king received gold. The king himself got aluminum-the rarest metal at the time. Aluminum was so valuable because it was extremely difficult to extract from bauxite-though it is one of the most abundant elements on Earth. Then came electrolysis technology, which used electricity to liberate aluminum from bauxite, driving down aluminum’s value.

It isn’t just aluminum that has become abundant — so have electrical power, refrigeration, television, telephones, cars, and air conditioning. Two hundred years ago, kings and queens didn’t have these luxuries. Today, many people who are classified as poor in the U.S. do. This prosperity has not reached most of the developing world yet. But the proliferation of mobile phones shows what is possible. Within ten years, their numbers have gone from zero to nearly 1 billion in both India and China. Even some of the poorest villagers own them. Read more of this post

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule; Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule

Paul Graham

July 2009
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour. When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it. Read more of this post

Billionaire inventor James Dyson: Why we invent in Britain, but build in Singapore

Why we invent in Britain, but build in Singapore

James Dyson

Published at 12:01AM, February 26 2013

Singapore offers skills, location and a supply chain. The UK’s future lies in ideas and patents

For the past 15 years, Dyson’s highly-skilled engineers have been developing a tiny revolution in our laboratories. It is a new motor a third the size of a traditional one, but which can spin 100,000 times a minute — five times faster than a Formula One engine. Making 6,000 adjustments a second for optimal performance, the Dyson digital motor can supercharge prosaic machines.

At Dyson we invest heavily in our ideas and develop all of our technology in Britain: All our research takes place in Malmesbury where we employ 850 world-class design engineers and scientists — about a third of them recent graduates.

Our new motor performs like no other — and because we are developing it in our own laboratories, with our own people, no one else can get their hands on it (despite trying!).

This is not only good for Dyson, but also for Britain. The intellectual property is owned here and all the profits will flow back to the United Kingdom where we pay more than 85 per cent of our global tax.

But last week, Dyson opened a new £150 million (S$281.4 million) motor manufacturing facility in Singapore. Why?

Savvy governments understand the need to support advances like our new motor and to create incentives for companies to develop them. They also value the highly skilled workforce able to develop them — 40 per cent of graduates are engineers, versus 2 per cent in Britain. They realise that the more successful the company, the more they export, bringing more revenue into the country and employing more people.

And the potential for discovery at the moment is enormous, particularly in the sphere of materials. There are significant gains to be made from materials such as carbon 60 and graphene, which was discovered in Manchester. This is 40 times stronger than steel and 1,000 times more conductive than silicon.

Thankfully, Britain is moving in the right direction and there is a renewed desire to develop technology on its shores.

Prime Minister David Cameron has increased the research and development tax credit — which supports companies that take risks and invest in developing ideas for the future — to 225 per cent. As a result, patent applications rose 29 per cent in 2011 and investors have reacted positively.

But Britain still has a shortage of engineers — it has a 60,000 engineering deficit. Who will develop the ideas?

IDEAS AS TRUMP CARDS

Britain is not the only country that is creating incentives for invention — and companies such as ours are in global competition. Singapore understands this and rewards investment in research and development with a thumping 400 per cent tax credit. The country supports and values inventiveness and backs it up with an education system that encourages ingenuity — they have plenty of world-class engineers.

Bereft of natural resources, Singapore realises that human resources and ideas are its trump cards.

The result is a buoyant economy, with highly inventive companies such as Rolls-Royce knocking at its door.

Building a complex motor such as the one that Dyson is developing, with minute tolerances, requires the precision of a fully automated production line. The highly-skilled workforce, the tax incentives and the nearby supply chain make Singapore appealing for us.

We will make six million motors this year; increasing our production capacity by 100 per cent — a necessary jump to meet rising demand, particularly from Japan and America. We source the motor’s 22 components from across Asia, so it makes little sense to ship them to Britain, only to export the finished motors back again. So Singapore is the obvious place for production.

Britain’s focus should be on generating ideas and patenting them — that is the high-value part of the process and the one that will earn this country a competitive advantage. Britons must focus on being the best problem solvers in the world, developing technology and then exporting it.

And for this Britain needs high quality engineers, backed up by supportive government incentives. The country has the foundations in place — but continuing government support, both through the education system and tax system, is essential.

Sir James Dyson is the founder of Dyson, the technology company. This commentary first appeared in British daily The Times.

Want to Change the World? Be Resilient.

Want to Change the World? Be Resilient.

by John McKinley  |   1:00 PM February 26, 2013

What’s the difference between someone with a good idea and a person who can transform their ideas into real impact? To tackle the world’s biggest problems, we need to be able to identify and support the people who are capable of creating lasting change. At Acumen Fund, we spend a lot of time trying to find and train aspiring and established leaders from around the world who have the right mix of talent, ideas, and passion.

And what we’ve found time and again is: Resilience matters most.

Resilient leaders have three key characteristics:

1. Grit: Short-term focus on tasks at hand, a willingness to slog through broken systems with limited resources, and pragmatic problem-solving skills.
2. Courage: Action in the face of fear and embracing the unknown.
3. Commitment: Long-term optimism and focus on big-picture goals.

Read more of this post

Is traditional leadership on its way out? Today leadership is about Creativeship, which he defines as “the creation of sustainable cultures and business models.”

Is traditional leadership on its way out?

Ray Williams | Feb 26, 2013 5:47 PM ET
In an earlier article in the Financial Post, I argued “If management is so good at predicting outcomes through analytical and scientific methods why have so few public companies performed well?” The leadership of today’s business institutions has increasingly been put under the microscope.

“Companies that are managed the traditional way — by executives developing analytically driven strategy and shaping the organization to meet the needs of the business as they see them — are obsolete. Management as we have known it, is too cumbersome,” argues Thomas Hout in an article in the Harvard Business Review.  That sentiment is also held by Alan Murray, who in an article in the Wall Street Journalwrites that management, as an innovation, won’t survive the 21st century.

Barbara Kellerman, author of The End of Leadership, contends that the leadership industry is a $50 billion a year business, that has been unable to produce true leaders and in essence, failed. Kellerman argues while leaders once dominated and controlled followers, now followers are more educated and independent, and leaders must now rely on influence and persuasion.

Bob Kelleher, author of Creativeship: A Novel for Evolving Leaders contends the definition of leadership as “the ability to lead people, build fellowship and make money” is archaic and so “yesterday.” Read more of this post

Culture as Risk Mitigant: Cockpit, Country and Company

Culture as Risk Mitigant: Cockpit, Country and Company

Posted: 02/21/2013 11:27 am

How did the national airline of Korea transform itself from one of the most accident-prone to one of the safest carriers in the world in less than a decade? As Malcolm Gladwell forcefully argues in Outliers, the driver was “cockpit culture.”

Most plane crashes are the result of an accumulation of minor malfunctions rendered disasterous by human interaction. As is hauntingly evident from flight recorder transcripts, preventable errors have prevailed due to a breakdown of teamwork and communication.

Cultures can be distinguished by the scale of their power index — the rigidity with which hierarchical distance is maintained — and the extent to which individuals are reliant on rules as opposed to resourcefulness in the face of ambiguities.

The assertiveness and choice of words with which a deputy communicates with his captain or his controller is a direct function of his cultural context. Consequently, linguists and psychologists proved to be as relevant to airline safety as technical engineers. Read more of this post

INTUIT FOUNDER: ‘Success Makes Companies Stupid’

INTUIT FOUNDER: ‘Success Makes Companies Stupid’

Max Nisen | Feb. 25, 2013, 6:35 PM | 854 | 3

Intuit is one of the unsung success stories of Silicon Valley. The maker of software like Quicken, TurboTax, and QuickBooks has been around for 30 years and made $4.15 billion in revenue last year.

Intuit’s founder, Scott Cook, believes that success can actually be dangerous to the company. At a seminar with Harvard Business School faculty, he said that “Success is a powerful thing, it tends to make companies stupid, and they become less and less innovative.”

According to Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, Cook argues that companies need to adopt the lean startup model pioneered by Eric Ries. That means “launching as quickly as possible with a “minimum viable product,” a bare-bones creation that includes just enough features to allow for useful feedback from early adopters. The company then releases a quick succession of product upgrades, forming hypotheses and conducting experiments with each new version along the way.”

Getting feedback early and often means the product improves quickly, picking up new users along the way.

That’s the polar opposite of the way many successful companies come up with new products. They spend years developing things, many of which are only minor improvements on what already exists. Once something’s set into motion, it has a great deal of inertia and can take a long time to stop, even if it’s not working.

That’s an easy way for a company to stagnate. However, adopting something like the lean startup model takes a significant cultural shift. It’s not easy to take product teams used to taking years and get them to take ideas from birth to execution in months. It also takes creating a culture that’s OK with failure and starting again, which is the opposite of what you see in many large companies.

Some companies choose to have a small part of their company, like a skunk works, to constantly try to innovate. But when it’s a small part of the company, you see small benefits. Far more effective is forcing a whole company to constantly experiment and innovate.

East Meets West in Class

Updated February 25, 2013, 5:02 p.m. ET

East Meets West in Class

Pericles Lewis is founding president and professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, a joint venture between Yale University and National University of Singapore, to open in August.

Read more of this post