“Disagreeing with you is a sign that I trust you”

TheBuildNetwork   Article

The Good Fight: How to Grow Healthy Companies Through Conflict

“Healthy divergence exhibits two telltale traits: It emerges from a climate of trust and it is reinforced from the top.

First and foremost, a good leader will recognize when his or her company is wrought with artificial harmony. Are people holding back ideas or criticisms due to fear? Are they nodding yes during the meeting, then back-channeling to vent frustrations and concerns after the fact? Are they more concerned with job security than innovation? If so, then your organization needs a trust adjustment.

… toward healthy internal conflict. How, you ask?

1. Establish this simple meeting norm: Silence = disagreement. If a team member is silent, call him out to air his concerns right then and there.
2. Question the idea; don’t criticize the person. Keep conflict from getting personal.
3. Don’t leave the meeting without a unified pact to work together toward a goal. Not everyone will agree on the goal, but they all must agree to work toward it wholeheartedly.
4. If someone comes knocking to air a grievance after the meeting, refuse to engage in back channeling. Shut down passive-aggressive tendencies but be certain to address valid concerns with the whole group out in the open.”

2 Questions That Make People Do What You Want

TheBuildNetwork   Article

“Imagine you’re a manager at a major PR firm and one of your reports balks at revising an important part of the next big campaign. Instead of asking rational but ineffective questions, try the following two seemingly irrational questions:

1. How ready are you to make the revisions, on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 means not ready at all and 10 means totally ready?

“On the rare chance that she says, ‘1,’ surprise her by saying, ‘What would turn it into a 2?’ In telling you what it would take for her to become a 2, she reveals what she needs to do before she is able to make the revisions to the campaign. That is what you motivate her to do first.”

2. If she picks a number higher than 2, ask, ‘Why didn’t you pick a lower (yes, lower) number?’

“Question 1 seems irrational, because you’re asking, ‘How ready are you…?’ of a person who just said, ‘No,’ which we can assume means not at all ready. However, most resistant people have some motivation that they keep from us. … if you ask them the ‘1-10’ question, they’re much more likely to reveal their motivation by saying a 2 or a 3, which is far better – you’ve now moved from a ‘No’ to at least a ‘Maybe.’

“Question 2 seems really irrational, perhaps even absurd….However, by asking Question 2, you’re asking her to defend why your directive to revise the campaign is even the slightest bit important to her… rather than to defend her excuses why she won’t do it (e.g., too busy). The answers she gives lead her to rehearse the positive and intrinsic reasons for doing what you asked, which, in turn, dramatically increase the chances that she gets the project done.”

9 Slimy Sales Tricks That Work

By Mike Michalowicz   Article

“1. Exclusivity. “…elite real estate training program” When something seems unique and prestigious, customers are more likely to participate. Consumers will spend more and be more loyal to your brand if you give them the feeling of exclusivity.

2. Comparison. “…not $10,000, not $1,000, not even $300″ … $183 seems inexpensive when compared with $10,000. But when $183 stands alone, compared to nothing, it actually sounds kind of expensive.

3. Urgency. ”Today only you can get” Info-marketers do everything they can to entice consumers to place the order ASAP, because the more time they give customers the less likely the customer is to buy. …

4. Specificity. “…get it all for only $183″ Round numbers make consumers think that a price is potentially arbitrary. In other words, it is up for negotiation. Specific numbers give the perception that there is a “reason” behind the number, and that it is justified. …

5. Free. “A $500 value for free” All consumers like to get something for free. Marketers, who throw in a bonus for their clients, get a lot of something in return—more sales! …

6. Pleasure Sensation. ”How will you spend your millions?” The technique of invoking a pleasure sensation is commonly used in infomercials. …

7. Pain Relief. “…break free of the grind and you’re on your way” To motivate consumers, marketers have to first make them “feel the pain,” and then show them how to get relief. …

8. Scarcity. “…only 5 spots left” When there is less of something, consumers want it more. …

9. Social Proof. “…expert advisers are taking calls right now” Info-marketers will show operators busily answering phones and smiling during the commercial. This is social proof. When consumers see others taking an action, they feel more comfortable doing the same.”

In case of an emergency

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The Only Management Strategy You’ll Ever Need

By Jeff Haden   Article

“So I was only half-listening as he said, fairly quietly, “No one cares how much you know until they first know how much you care about them.” Wait–what? “Can you repeat that?” I said. A number of heads slowly turned in his direction. “We think we have all the answers, and maybe we do, but that doesn’t matter. No one cares how much you know until they first know how much you care about them,” he repeated. I stared. More heads turned in his direction. He took the silence in the auditorium as disagreement.

“No, really,” he said, starting to sound more confident. “Yeah we’re in charge and yeah we talk about targets and goals and visions, but our employees don’t care about any of that stuff for very long. We can communicate and engage and connect all we want, but no one really listens to us. They just smile and nod and go back to doing their jobs the way they always do. ”Our employees don’t really care about what we want them to do until they know how much we care about them. When an employee knows–truly knows–that you care about them, then they care about you. And when they know you care, they will listen to you… and they will do anything for you.”"

Most Annoying Business Jargon

Forbes   Article

“The next time you feel the need to reach out, shift a paradigm, leverage a best practice or join a tiger team, by all means do it. Just don’t say you’re doing it, because all that meaningless business jargon makes you sound like a complete moron. Here are 45 words and expressions to avoid. ….”

One-party town

By: Times-Dispatch Staff   Article

“Political partisans have been having a whale of a time lately dissecting the stats on federal appropriations to figure out whether Barack Obama is a big spender who puts drunken sailors to shame or so tight with a dollar you need the Jaws of Life to pry one out of his hands.

The answer depends. He’s a big spender if you assign him sole responsibility for every dollar spent since the moment he took the keys to the Oval Office, and a tightwad if you agree that everything wrong in America is still George W. Bush’s fault. DeeCee is like that.

Meanwhile, here in Ramerica — the Rest of America, outside the Capital Beltway — the public ought to take note of a number that does not depend on partisan spin. Federal debt has risen to nearly 75 percent of total GDP. In 2008, it stood at just 40 percent of GDP.

That’s because for all the bickering between Democrats and Republicans, Washington is really a one-party town. It belongs to the pro-spending party. Tax revenue goes up and tax revenue goes down, but spending just keeps climbing. President Obama deserves plenty of blame for this, but he needn’t shoulder it all. There is more than enough to go around.”

Top 400 taxpayers and the bottom 50%

By Jason Pye    Article

“But do the rich get a pass on taxes? Not according to Mark J. Perry, who has crunched the numbers and produced this chart (below) showing that the top 400 taxpayers paid nearly as much in federal income taxes than the bottom 50% of income earners. Here’s Perry’s conclusion:

A small group of 400 of America’s most successful earners in 2009, about the number of residents living in a typical apartment building in Washington, D.C., paid almost as much in federal income taxes as the entire bottom half of America’s 138 million tax filers, which is a population equivalent to the combined number of residents living in America’s 29 least populated states, plus the District of Columbia.  What makes this disparity possible is the fact that an estimated 47% of individual income tax returns filed in 2009 had a zero or negative tax liability.

And the chart:”

I love this manifesto

By Jeff Hilimire   Article

“Never to identify opportunities for headcount reduction”

By Jason Piatt   Article

Lean is About People, Not Tools

“If we consider the position of a typical American plant manager, the problem-statement has historically been “keep hitting your numbers, make sure the plant has plenty of work in the backlog, and avoid too many problems with the union and vendors.” This perspective typically forces the plant manager to stay in his or her office, focus on “the numbers,” run large batches of product to gain efficiency, etcetera.

Utilizing TPS, the problems are redefined entirely. The new goals are “produce only items that have been ordered by a customer, never let plant personnel face a problem alone, never skip past a problem in the plant, and continually improve the plant’s processes.” The work of the plant manager will now dramatically change. In order to solve the problems in the TPS perspective, the plant manager must spend most of his or her time on the shop floor understanding the intimate details of the plant’s operation and working with teams to be more precise and to improve the processes with which they interact.

So what’s the answer? Knowing that long before rolling out lean tools in our operations, we must first teach our people to see the operation through lean eyes. This is best achieved through respect for people. In a respectful way, we teach the team within our operations to see waste without feeling wasteful. We show that we are using lean to improve the processes and to ultimately increase success on an organizational and personal level — never to identify opportunities for headcount reduction.”

Smart People

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“The Honesty Box”

Posted by Steve Gladis, Ph.D.   Article

Thinking: Post#7 – Priming

“Priming: Exposure to words prepares our brain to act in accordance with the word. In an experiment called the “Florida Effect,” students exposed to words like aging walked slower and more like older people.  This ideo-motor effect influences action by an idea. Such an effect is a powerful influencer on System 1 thinking, creating biases and inaccurate decisions. For example, if you go shopping when you’re hungry, you’ll tend to buy far more than you need. If you watched “Fast and Furious” and then went out to buy a car, guess what kind of car you might buy—a Prius or a sports car? Reverse priming also exists. We smile when we’re amused, and if we force ourselves to smile, we can make ourselves get more amused. The pencil in the teeth experiment was fascinating as was the British “honesty box” experiment (see pp. 54-55). Putting a pencil in your mouth (laterally) makes you smile, which disposes you to laugh and see more humor in a given situation. The Honesty Box at an English university was put there to pay for tea on the honor system. When a picture of eyes was placed over the box, people gave more money (three times as much $!) than when a picture of flowers was placed over the box. Thus, primed by a set of eyes “watching” them, tea drinkers became more honest.”

“… in search of their inner asshole”

By Andrew Hargadon   Article

The Responsible Company

“Just finished reading The Responsible Company, the second business book by Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia. His first, Let My People Surfing, laid out Chouinard’s personal path and the company’s history before spending the bulk of the book on the business philosophy of the small (roughly $400M) outdoor gear and apparel company. This second book establishes Chouinard’s voice and leadership in the new sustainable business movement—though he and co-author Vincent Stanley are quick to point out there’s no such thing as a truly ‘sustainable’ business.

If you’re thinking about starting something—or re-orienting your existing something—towards what matters to you, this book belongs on the stack on your desk. It’s a perfectly-timed counterbalance to the Jobs biography.

The Jobs book has had the unfortunate effect of sending millions of corporate honchos in search of their inner asshole. There is nothing wrong with more boldly pursuing your dream, but what is that dream? Chouinard’s, on the other hand, inspires you to think about, and pursue, what matters to you. And to pursue it responsibly. The message is of self-awareness, of building a company whose operations incorporate “the true

cost—human, ecological, economic—of everything we make.” If Jobs has come to represent how to lead, Chouinard steps in to represent why.”

A mountain and a tennis racket

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“… a cow, a chicken and some grass”

By Kare Anderson   Article

What Captures Your Attention Controls Your Life

“Whatever we focus upon actually wires our neurons. For example, pessimistic people see setbacks and unhappy events as Personal (It’s worst for me), Pervasive (Everything is now worse) andPermanent (It will always be this way) according to Learned Optimism author Marty Seligman. Yet, with practice, he found that we can learn to focus more attention on the positive possibilities in situations to then to craft a redemptive narrative of our life story. Consciously changing what you pay attention to can rewire your brain from a negative orientation to a positive one. “Attention shapes the brain,” as Rick Hanson says in Buddha’s Brain.

… psychologist Richard E. Nisbett showed an underwater scene to students in the U.S. and also to East Asians. While the Americans commented on the big fish swimming amongst smaller fish, the East Asians also discussed the overall scene, including plants and rocks. Nisbett concluded that East Asians focus on relationships while Westerners tend to see isolated objects rather than the connections between them.

John Hagel reported on a similar experiment. “A developmental psychologist showed three pictures to children — a cow, a chicken and some grass. He asked children from America which two of the pictures belonged together. Most of them grouped the cow and chicken together because they were both objects in the same category of animals. Chinese children on the other hand tended to group the cow and grass together because ‘cows eat grass’ — they focused on the relationship between two objects rather than the objects themselves.”"

“… the decision to live up to or ignore contractual commitments is a business decision, not an ethical one”

By Michael Josephson   Article

What is Business Ethics? 

“Some years ago, a senior executive at a Fortune 100 company objected when I asserted that corporations have an ethical, as well as a legal obligation to keep promises and honor their contracts. He said that the decision to live up to or ignore contractual commitments is a business decision, not an ethical one. The other party has legal remedies, he said, and therefore responsible managers have a duty to evaluate whether it’s in the company’s best interest to honor or breach contracts. The decision should be based on a simple cost/benefit analysis. Ethics has nothing to do with it. …

In business, the argument goes, ethical principles are simply factors to be taken into account; they’re not moral obligations. As a result, fundamentally good people who would never lie, cheat or break a promise in their personal lives delude themselves into thinking that they can properly do so in business.

Nonsense! There’s no such thing as “business ethics” — there’s only ethics. Fundamental standards of right and wrong like trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and good citizenship do not become irrelevant when we enter the workplace. And it doesn’t matter how many people think otherwise.  Remember, ethics is not a description of the way people actually behave. It’s a prescription for how they ought to behave.”

“I wonder if this is a good time to get in”

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Free entrepreneurial ideas

By Kim E Lumbard   Article

“As a former entrepreneur, I am continually coming up with ideas to create viable products and markets. Unfortunately, with my focus on writing the Pursuit of Happiness Series these ideas mainly languish doing nothing. So, I’d like to give them away to those other entrepreneurs out there interested in creating a business. There’s no strings attached, though I’d appreciate you letting me know how the ideas worked out if you actually tried starting a business with one of them.

I’ve classed the ideas according to projected markets. In general, smaller companies are easier to start, have less risk, and turn a profit quickly, whereas the bigger ideas would take a long time to execute, be much more risky, yet have a considerably larger payoff if successful. All the ideas are technically feasible, though some clearly require more technology development than others.

Enjoy!”

Lean Thinking: Why Are Learning Organizations So Scarce?

By Pascal Dennis   Article

“Here are some of the mental models I picked up at engineering and business schools:

- We are very smart and successful

- We can manage from a distance, by the numbers

- Corollary: What can front line people possibly teach us?

- Everything wraps up nicely – just like an MBA case study

- Problems are bad things …

- If there is a problem, we need to launch an INITIATIVE…

… Effect?

Hubris, disconnection from the front line (where most value is created), apathy & cynicism in the organization.
In other words, an environment that precludes learning. …

People go to professional and business schools with the best of intentions. To develop their skills, advance their careers and so on. But we often get more than we bargained for. The interesting thing is that these mental models are never articulated. They are in the atmosphere, invisible, accepted and unquestioned.

The great Henry Mintzberg has said that MBA graduates should have a skull & crossbones tattooed to their foreheads. I’ve been trying to remove mine for a couple of decades now…”

To Investigate Culture, Ask the Right Questions

By Bill Barnett   Article

“In my last blog post, I encouraged thoroughly investigating the culture you’re thinking of joining. In the comments, some people agreed they needed to learn about culture but were unsure how to approach it. A few were skeptical. I believe you can learn about culture, even in the early stages. Here are suggestions about how to structure your inquiry.

To get started, be clear what culture to learn about. In a large institution, there may be big differences across departments. Cultures also can be moving targets. Large institutions may change with their environment. In start-ups, expect everything to be different a year later.

Be sure to understand the role you’d have, what you could accomplish, and what you’d learn. A strong culture will set people up for success, and you need to be sure that’s in place. In discussing your role, you’ll also get insight into how the place works.

Then, ask questions that point the discussion to how the organization works. General questions — “What’s the culture like?” or “Are people treated well?” — seldom work. I’ve come up with specific sample questions you can ask as you’re interviewing for a job or talking with others who know the institution. They’re grouped into six topic areas. ….”

20 Counter-Intuitive Company Policies That Actually Work

By Contributor   Article

“8. Paying new employees to quit.

Offering new employees $2,000 to walk right out the door sounds like insanity. But at Zappos, it’s a great way to test commitment and find employees that are willing to stick around and do a great job. They do have new employees take them up on this offer, with 10% of new call center employees taking the money and running, but it all works out for the best. Zappos is happy to spend this money to weed out employees with a bad fit sooner rather than later.”

6 Leadership Styles, And When You Should Use Them

By Robyn Benincasa   Article 

“Taking a team from ordinary to extraordinary means understanding and embracing the difference between management and leadership. According to writer and consultant Peter Drucker, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Manager and leader are two completely different roles, although we often use the terms interchangeably. Managers are facilitators of their team members’ success. They ensure that their people have everything they need to be productive and successful; that they’re well trained, happy and have minimal roadblocks in their path; that they’re being groomed for the next level; that they are recognized for great performance and coached through their challenges.

Conversely, a leader can be anyone on the team who has a particular talent, who is creatively thinking out of the box and has a great idea, who has experience in a certain aspect of the business or project that can prove useful to the manager and the team. A leader leads based on strengths, not titles. The best managers consistently allow different leaders to emerge and inspire their teammates (and themselves!) to the next level. …

Here are the six leadership styles Goleman uncovered among the managers he studied, as well as a brief analysis of the effects of each style on the corporate climate: ….”

Big Customers? Who Needs ‘Em!

By Jason Fried   Article

“Some companies spend all their time chasing huge accounts. But big customers make me nervous. Here’s why. …

You can spend years catering to a major corporation, for example, only to see your contact there move on. Some new guy comes in with his own set of favorites, and you’re out. It happens all the time. But when you book the same amount of revenue by serving hundreds or even thousands of customers, it doesn’t much matter if one individual changes his mind.

The risk of relying on a handful of customers is not just financial. Your product also is at risk when you’re at the mercy of a few big spenders. When any one customer pays you significantly more than the others, your product inevitably ends up catering mostly to that customer’s specific needs. In other words, when GE becomes your customer, you become a consultant for GE.”

Private company stock: Benefit or burden?

By Steve Parrish   Article   

“What can be better than giving employees a benefit that doesn’t cost anything? Plenty if that benefit is company stock. In a cash-strapped economy it is often tempting for an employer to assuage the sting of decreased wages by making a grant of stock options or restricted stock. … stock as a benefit can be a mistake. Why?  I can name 10 good reasons: …

6. Employee Disenchantment … “the owner uses the business as a personal checkbook, so I have no control over what that stock will really be worth.”

7. Employee Disenchantment 2 – the employee has a stock option that is in the money. But, to exercise the stock option, the employee needs cash. In a period of tight credit, this credit isn’t always forthcoming.

8. Owner disenchantment 1- the owner now has a new critic. If the employee becomes a stockholder, he or she is also privy to the company financials. I’m aware of an engineering firm where the employer is desperately trying to buy back all the stock from the employees. The engineers’ penchant for detail is causing the employer to respond to constant inquiries, complaints and challenges.

9. Owner disenchantment 2 – if the owner wants to sell the business to an outside buyer, the small amounts of stock scattered among the employees can cause a serious impediment to transacting the sale.”