The Long View

The ultimate conversation killer

I posted a new article on busionomist on the destructive power of the "Yes, but…" tool in conversation.

Ever heard of WILB?

A study by the University of Melbourne reveals that WILB can be a productivity booster.

WILB is Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing.

The study, which is also available as video and audio downloads shows some intriguing facts:

70% of Internet users engage in WILB. This increases their productivity by an average of 9%, as long as they spend less than 20% o their time on the net. 

The increase in productivity is attributed to the brain's need for a rest after about 20 minutes' concentration. (When did you last doze off last during a long presentation?). Then, refreshed and restored, it can take up a full workload again.

However, don't use the argument to justify your Internet addiction: too much time online has the adverse affect and kills productivity. A new Internet Addiction Center opened specifically for this purpose. Check if you already got it: Internet addiction creates irritability and stops you from taking breaks when the time is right…

Nice excuse, though.

The eternal quest for motivation

When I work with my coachees, we often have long conversations around what motivates them at work. When I work with managers, we have the same conversations, in particular around how they can motivate their staff. 

My general view is that one cannot motivate people; you can only bring people to motivate themselves.

Motivation is a strong emotion inside that makes us do stuff because we want to do it: so the only effective way of motivation is self-motivation. Hence the limited effectiveness of rewards in the work environment: they will work well for some tasks and contexts (repetitive, left brain environments, but much less for others (right brain, creative contexts).

Sam Glucksberg did some extensive research around intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The following video with Daniel Pink explains the differences beautifully, and, crucially, with a good sense of humour.

BN Quote of the week

"Only those who constantly retool themselves stand a chance of staying employed in the years ahead."

Tom Peters

->: What are you doing to stay ahead?

A few Peter Drucker quotes

Here a few quotes that may seem familiar - all by Peter Drucker (and we might not know it):

About strategy:

• The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different..
• The best way to predict the future is to create it.
• The entrepreneur always searches for change,responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. 

• Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes, but no plan. 
• Plans are only good intentions unless they degenerate into hard work.

About customers: 

• Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it.

• The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits and sells itself.

About process:

• Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right thing.

About leadership:

• Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
• The successful person places more attention on doing the right thing rather than doing things right. 

• For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets examples and is imitated.

• The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said.
• We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

The Socrates of modern management thinking

Peter F. Drucker spent his 70-odd year career teaching, consulting, writing and asking questions. Fundamental questions to guide managers in the awareness of their responsibilities and the execution of their tasks. Having had virtually no hands-on management experience himself, he prided himself that he was helping people to find out people what to do, yet not how to do it.

When Peter Drucker began his work in the thirties, management as a discipline was virtually unknown. 

Many of the business concepts we talk about today (and so often take for granted) can be traced back to Peter Drucker. Management was not a worthy subject of study in the first half of the century. At the start of his career, he found it extremely difficult to find books on management... so he wrote a few himself (about 40 of them).

Common modern business concepts and practices, like management by objectives, management by walking around, empowerment, people as an asset not a cost, doing the right things, leadership by example and countless others are all described, generally for the first time, in Drucker's writings.

In 1981, when Jack Welch (CEO and Chairman of GE, Forbes CEO of the Century) began his mission at the helm of GE, he went to see Peter Drucker for advice on running the conglomerate. He came away with only two questions. Yet those two questions were going to define everything he did in the following 20 years until his retirement in 2001:

1. If you were not already in the business you are in, would you enter it today?
2. What are you going to do about it? 

Whereupon Welch set off to sell hundreds of businesses of the GE Empire, restructuring, redefining and strengthening the organisation to 25 times its value.

And this is how Drucker described himself:

"My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions."

To me, that sounds eerily like what a certain Socrates said two and a half thousand years ago.

Fragmentation, convergence, contribution

The world is becoming more and more abstract. Certainties of the past are dwindling; we are moving in an ever escalating spiral of innovation, change and, more recently, turbulence.

There are essentially two ways to deal with this: cautious withdrawal and open embrace. 

Whichever you "chose" (and a lot could be said about that conscious or unconscious choice) will have an impact on our individual and collective outcomes and futures (yes, with a plural s). 

Yet there is more to it: the fragmentation of the traditional monoliths (state, company, society, family) is not just a breakup of cherished habits. It is also a powerful invitation to connect with people"other" side with the "other" context, with the people we do not usually do business (or buddiness) with. 

The opening of new intellectual and social portals produces and generates vast opportunities to talk to people of varying backgrounds, knowledge levels and semantic fields and linguistic jargons. Organisations, well established, like Ted, or more recent ones like Mindshare, highlight the growing desire to converge and exchange field notes with people from different scientific backgrounds.

In this interactive mash-up between social sciences, cognitive discoveries, business priorities and fractal movement, each of us can make a contribution. 

What we sometimes forget today, in the fearful chatter of recession an depression, is the basic fact that we still live in an economy of abundance, as measured in terms of available information, accelerated creativity and opportunities to shape and create the new paradigms for the century, while helping those around us that may be struggling today.

I am fundsmentally convinced that the sucess stories of the future will be written not by those who ask "What do I have to lose?" but by those who act on the question "How can I help you succeed?" 

The How of the What, in the context of the Why

This week I had a lot of conversations around leadership. There is lots of great literature available on the subject, and I will create a list of the most important one of these days.

One comment I got this week was along the lines that "sometimes these books cloud the issue instead of clarifying it for me. The author's thinking process looks great on paper, makes lots of sense, but then when I have to apply it to real life situations, it turns into quite a different animal." 

Readers get lost in models, definitions, principles and graphics. Managers don't know if they should use a different theory at the beginning of the week and then end, in the morning and the evening.

What the entire leadership discussion might just come down to is three things: the What, the How and the Why.

The What: management roles - objectives, responsibilities, targets, directions, tasks,  deadlines, deliverables… This is what managers get hired for in the first place. It is their job.

The How: leadership roles (and styles) - personal credibility, accountability, inspiration, motivation, communication, handling of (own and others') emotions… This is how each person builds up the work culture in and around him, how she relates to her staff and what environment they chose to work in (Yes there is a choice element in that as well…).

The Why: What do we want to achieve in the end, why are we making all these efforts - vision, mission, values… The Why provides the context, background and the ultimate reason for our actions. Without it a vital piece is missing and this makes the manager's job virtually impossible.

The consistency and overall effectiveness of the manager (in managing others or/and themselves) lies in the careful reflexion on and mutual balancing of the What, the How and the Why.

And if you look closely, that works for pretty much everything in life.

Leadership lessons from an unlikely corner

The May 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review carries an article looking at what businesses can learn in terms of leadership from online games, and more particularly from MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games). 

These games require players to create an avatar (online persona) for themselves and then collaborate (and compete) with/against other other players and teams of players across the world to move up to each next level in the game. 

Research commissioned by IBM on these games points to future aspects of business leadership: 

1. Individuals ended up taking leadership roles in online teams who were very unlikely to do so in the real world 
2. Successful leadership in online games has to do more with the environment of the online game, and less wit personal attributes of the person 
3. The importance of non-monetary incentives for leadership behaviours. 

Conclusion of the study: "Getting the leadership environment right may be at least as important to a organization as choosing the right people to lead". 

Context over content. So, what does this mean for leadership in tomorrow's business? 

The article highlights some of the features of the future leadership environment: 

1. Fluid workforces 
2. Self-organised and collaborative work activities 
3. Decentralised, non hierarchical leadership. 

With that, the article extrapolates some of the characteristics tomorrow's leaders (and, in truth, even today's) will need: 

1. Leadership demands speed 
2. Risk taking is encouraged 
3. Leadership roles may be temporary 
4. Non-monetary incentives (= individual credit for success) are a powerful motivating force 
5. Information becomes hyper-transparent. Full article at "Leadership's Online Labs".

Perspective taking v. empathy - not quite the same

Much of what I do, and much of what I talk about in coaching sessions and workshops alike, has to do with understanding the person across.

Looking at things from the perspective of the other person can help us in tricky negotiation rounds, delicate customer situations or conflictual interactions, at work or elsewhere. Studies have long proven that managers, for example, who can empathise and/or adopt the perspective of the person across the table (or across the corridor) tend to be, over the duration of their career, vastly more successful than managers without that ability.

A new study, published by the Association of Psychological Science comes to a interesting new conclusion:

In negotiation situations, perspective taking is far more successful than empathising in terms of achieving a win-win outcome.

The difference between the two?

The perspective taker gets into the head of the other party, the empathiser connects with their emotions.

In an experimental negotiation situation, involving the purchase/sale of a petrol station where the seller's reserve price was always going to be higher than the buyer's purchasing budget, multiple parallel teams were told to either try to understand either the other party's perspective, or their emotions, or just to get on with the talks and to focus on their own role.

Needless to say, the people who did open their eyes, ears, brains and hearts to the other person were vastly more successful in achieving a positive outcome than the control group.

The number of the success rate give pause for thought:
• Perspective takers: 76%
• Empathisers: 54%
• Control group: 39% (figures from a related Economist article).

First: understanding the other person is vital for success in any case. No one is a island.
Second: It pays to get into the other person's head (and therefore shoes). The extra energy and time spent pays handsome rewards.
Third: empathising (unlike perspective taking) is great, but has its limits. Over-empathising can get in the way of outcomes: over-empathising can create a lose-win situation where the empathiser loses focus on his/her own best interest.

Emotional management is at the heart of communication, we have been (sometimes vaguely) aware of this for years. Mental management is even more important. it helps us become more aware of our blind corners. As the study report says:

“Perspective takers are able to step outside the constraints of their own immediate, biased frames of reference. “Empathy, however, leads individuals to violate norms of equity and equality and to provide preferential treatments.”

The world just got a little more complex (again…).