Dan Erwin

Once More: What Do Managers Do All Day?

Austerity. Employee engagement. Social media. Crowd-sourcing. Entrepreneurial. Social networking. Restructuring. Innovative. Internet company.

Words come and go. The verbiage changes, but how has this changed what managers actually do?

In a recent conversation with a Gen-Yer, just 14 months into his first management job, he downloaded most of his day at my request. He uses different language than most of my exec clients. His context, an internet company, is a lot different than theirs: technology, small appliance, agribusiness, etc. Does that mean that the heart of what he does daily is different than what 45 year-old execs at old-line firms do?

For the sake of audience appeal and to desperately offer newness, I need to be able to answer my question with a big, detailed “yes.” There are a lot of new approaches to management: new frameworks, models and buzzwords. But does the heart of managing more traditional companies differ from the heart of managing internet startups today? Or is the new language just new hype?

The context is different
It took only a bit of reflection to realize that at the heart of what managers do, nothing has changed. Oh yeah, the context is quite different, as are the products. But whether you manage at Facebook, GE or General Motors, the heart of management is action.

Most of us know that the orderly reasoning about managing is intriguing, but fairly useless. Even with just a semester of business, you know the business language, describing how managers are supposed to work. A rational approach to management includes the following: planning, organizing, staffing, coordinating, recruiting, etc., etc. When managers step away from the work, most of them still use the terminology of management. But we all know those descriptions have a lot of fiction in them. Managing, like other experiences in life, is messy. Very messy.

The Gen-Y manager
Listening to that Gen-Yer’s talk about chairing a meeting of eight people where an important and controversial issue was to be decided, I thought about his frustrations. He’d gradually come to realize that managing is not what he expected. It’s all action: 10 to 12 hours a day.

Here are six conditions that are completely reflective of what he experienced. Only the conditions were formulated nearly 25 years ago. Not surprisingly, my young friend said that they were completely identical with his 2012 experience. This is a highly descriptive statement about what managers do and can’t do all day:

As a manager, you “cannot avoid acting.” At each moment of the meeting you are acting. Even letting things go constitutes an action—and with effects you may or may not want. So, you are always “thrown into action, independent of your will.

“You cannot step back and reflect on your actions.” You have to rely on your instincts to react and act in real time, even though you may reflect on the meeting later on and realize or wish that you had done things differently.

"The effect of your actions cannot be predicted.” There are too many paths that any action could lead to, so you cannot always depend on rational planning to find steps that will achieve your goals. Instead, you have no choice but to “flow with the situation.

“You do not have a stable representation of the situation.” Things in the meeting evolve continuously. At any moment, you only see fragmentary pieces. The overall pattern of the meeting is only discernible after it is over.

“Every representation is an interpretation.” Even after the meeting is over, your description of what transpired at the meeting will never be the only one. Someone else will read the meeting differently and so the facts will always be elusive—what one must work with is opinions and interpretations.

"Language is action.” Every time you speak, you are not merely stating the facts, you are acting. You are actively shaping and constructing a definition of the situation and trying to persuade others of the facts as you see them and the action s that you believe must be taken. The rhetorical nature of managerial action cannot be escaped and must be constantly attended to.

That new Gen-Y manager breathed a sigh of relief. He expected his job to be something different than what he was experiencing. It was liberating to talk through these actions. They were pragmatic. His practice is not so much about business hype, but what works.

The more you know and understand a situation, the easier it is to work in that situation. I rarely get stressed by a situation I understand. So, like my Gen-Y friend, I find this description liberating. I’m very curious to know what you think about it.

Note: The six points are from Robert G. Eccles and Nitin Nohria, Beyond the Hype: Rediscovering the Essence of Management.
Photo fm Flickr.com: by **Anissa**

So How Are You Going to Frame This Issue?

“We now face the exact predicament we expected. We must either allow interest rates to rise on student loans, or stick taxpayers with another multibillion-dollar bill.”

--Jennifer Allen, Republican spokeswoman, Minnesota Legislature

“On behalf of my generation, I should apologize to all of you. We tell you your education is important, which it is, that you should get as much of it as possible, which you should. That it will benefit you and society and the world, but we’re not going to help you pay for it. It’s a profound breakdown of the inter-generational compact.”

--Mark Dayton, Democratic Governor of Minnesota

It’s rare that I permit a newspaper article to strongly impact my emotions. I normally either ignore reports or add the data to my mental filing system and think through any needed system changes. When it’s a serious case of conflicting values like this morning, then the conflict can be challenging. So the front page of this morning’s Minneapolis Star Tribune really, really pissed-me off. The article reported on a conversation that UMN’s President Kaler, Governor Dayton and Senator Franken had with a number of students about loan indebtedness. (Lest there be any doubt, education is one of my highest values.)

The student loan debt of Minnesota students is fourth highest in the nation. The state’s college students who graduated in 2010 and borrowed had an average of $29,058 in student loan debt.

And there are plenty of students who are walking out of college with loan debt between $27 and $40,000.

Framing the issue
Democrats (Dayton) framed the issue as an intergenerational failure and Republicans (Allen) framed the issue as a tax-and-spend issue.

So the Democrats want us to think about the issue as an intergenerational failure. That’ll be a tough sell to the older generation who do much of the voting.

And Republicans want us to think about the issue as a demand on our pocket books, another tax issue. That’ll be an easy sell to the older generation.

FYI: Studies show that most of our decisions are made on an emotional basis. That’s not a completely negative way of deciding. Sometimes our emotions are smart. They’re useful for survival. Furthermore, it’s important to recognize that our tribal membership (Republican or Democrat) deeply impacts our decisioning. We have deeply held values and commitments, often lacking serious rationale. But they still impact our decision making. However, if the issue is personally or organizationally important, rational decision-making is the best route to success.

What you get is how you frame the issue
Most of us intuitively know something about frames. We allude to them when we talk about “thinking outside the box” or “not being on the same page.” A frame is simply a mental structure that simplifies and guides our understanding of complex issues. Our world is too complex for our brains to ever hope to fully process what’s coming at us. Even prior to the information age. If we didn’t use frames, we’d be quickly consumed with trying to make sense of all the data flowing at us.

Most of us pay no attention whatsoever to this automatic mental process. But we can pay a very high price for this much-needed simplicity. It can limit what we see and what we understand. The analogy of a window frame shows us the difficulties. Architects designing a new house choose where to place windows to give us a desired view. But no single window can show us the entire panorama. When we first moved from Colorado and Arizona to Minnesota nearly 40 years ago, my wife and I went nuts about the windows in Minnesota homes. They were very small. We didn’t like what we got from a small window: little light and no perspective. There’s an important lesson in that. Both Governor Dayton and Jennifer Allen are using frames that are far too small for their subject. But few people will recognize that.

Frames and policies
The fact of the matter is few see their frames for thinking unless they’ve had the training to do so. Frames are like stereotypes or mental models. They’re very powerful. With Dayton and Allen, the frame difference is the major cause of the policy difficulties. As long as the legislators are working with those two frames, the public will never hear or even understand the issues. And as I said, that’s good for the Republicans and bad for the Democrats. That’s because the rhetorical world of the older voter is filled with tax issues and largely lacking in any sense of the broader good. So how the hell do you talk about the “broader good?” The Democrats better figure that one out. The Democrats are winning a lot of battles, but losing the one about the broader good. And it’s all about framing.

Frame distortion
Frames guide our thinking in a chaotic world. They can play tricks on our minds. Here, from Russo and Schoemaker, are some of the built-in dangers of frames:

• Frames distort what we see.
• Frames themselves are often hard to see
• Frames appear complete. We don’t even notice that something’s missing.
• Frames are exclusive. It’s hard to look out more than one window at a time.
• Frames are “sticky” and hard to change. We’ve been locked into the same frames for years—with a lot of reinforcement—so it’ll take conscious effort to change them.

Making frame change
About ten years ago my frugal wife decided she needed a new car. Her old Pontiac was dying. She turned the planning and research over to me, so I checked out her frame. Her conclusion was that she wanted a very “secure, safe” car (she taught in the inner city), preferably a four wheel drive, heated front seat and it should be small to move around in traffic and park. Using her frame, my research found that there was only one car that fit the bill: the Audi A4. “But that’s a very expensive car,” she responded. I pointed out that she hadn’t factored cost into her frame and that there was only one car that could give her what she wanted. She agreed that I’d framed the problem correctly, but still . . . . I finally sold it to her on the basis that it was a “Kraut car,” German made. Since she’s half German, with all the analytical precision thereto appertaining, she rolled. She got the Audi—and I was the proud, status-oriented husband of a wife who drove an Audi. She’d framed the issue correctly and as a result she got exactly what she wanted--and needed! (She agreed that as empty-nesters and the kids out of college, money wasn’t an issue. So we took that out of the framing.) I assume you realize that my case for the Audi was both rational and emotional decision making.

When Death Takes You By Surprise

Marilyn, my beloved wife of more than 50 years, died on December 29 of complications associated with Alzheimer’s. It was a fortunate death, though not, in the usual sense, a good death. She had lost 95% or more of her mental capacities, and had no obvious sense of who I was or of what was happening to her.

She was a wonderful woman, the love of my life, and I miss her dearly. When the kids and grandchildren came in from the Coasts to see her in Memory Care, she always had a big smile on her face. I don’t know whether she recognized them, but I prefer to believe that her wiring was so strong that she knew, unconsciously, who they were. Even in the last stages of her Alzheimer’s-destroyed-life, what a smile broke out on her face every time I walked into her apartment. We have a family photo of her reading to her three-year-old grandson in her lap, a paradigm of who she was and the simple happiness we enjoyed. I have always found a deep sense of satisfaction in the love we were able to give and receive, an experience depicted by that picture from a dozen years ago.

Initially, I decided not to write this very personal blog, but I decided otherwise because of its therapeutic value as well as a medical experience in the early ‘90s. As a result of a bout with serious prostate cancer and its inevitable surgery, I was surprised by the number of young men—and a few women--who wanted to talk with me about the experience. At the time, I had a number of projects at Ralston Purina, so had done a great deal of interviewing and had become a familiar face at headquarters. The questions, especially from the youngest generation, were about how I handled the news of cancer, my prognosis, the degree of success, the sexual implications and the potential for incontinence. I’m experiencing a similar number of the younger generation asking questions about Alzheimer’s and my wife’s death. It’s not often that people can talk about their own concerns and fears with someone they trust who’s had some success in dealing with those fears.

Death, of course, is a more traumatic and final experience for all of us. But having dealt with what can only be considered an “ambiguous loss” for more than two years, I had come to believe that with my extensive background in psychology and counseling and a phenomenal number of resources I’d be able to manage the finality of her death very well. But still, I was surprised that the experience of death took me by some surprise.

When it came to resources, probably no one on earth had more than I. My eldest daughter, Director of Fundraising for the research foundation, CureAlzheimers, has the ability to access resources from Harvard’s Alzheimer’s research center. Her husband is a research physician with an awareness of the physical and psychological implications of Alzheimer’s. My middle daughter was involved in Alzheimer’s research at UMass Lowell. One of my very best friends, Libby Bellinger, is a gerontologist with counseling background who also works for a long-term care organization and coincidentally, dealt with the personal issues of her own mother’s Alzheimer’s disease for 18 years. I have access to top physicians at the UMN medical clinic. And to top it all off, my wife was involved in research at Mayo Clinic with a physician who was inevitably and always available to me personally, or by email. With all that, it was improbable that I’d be surprised by death.

Furthermore, lacking financial worries, I was able to carry off all the right things for the management of emotions and life. I treated myself with care, putting off as many decisions as possible, and made certain to access the friendship of colleagues and neighbors. I was scrupulous about my routines, careful about food selections and kept up most of my exercise program.

Finally, my children and I decided months ago not to have a funeral, but instead to have a celebration of her life, inviting friends, neighbors and colleagues for drinks and appetizers. Indeed, the invitation was clear: “No liturgy, no ceremony, no rituals, no homily . . . just mingling, conversation, and even laughter.” And even though we’re not having the party until the end of February, I’ve been delighted by the overwhelming positive responses we’ve received toward that celebration.

How did the grief surface?

But in spite of all the decisions and care, her death has been difficult. There were tears at the strangest times of the day. I finally realized that they flowed when I noticed an especially sensuous gesture either between two others or in a TV show. Marilyn never walked into my study without her hand on my shoulder and usually a smile. I also noticed that though most of the time I was careful in the food I selected, I utterly failed to manage portions, gaining 40 pounds over the past 3 ½ years. But what really frustrated me was my inability to focus on tasks, especially on creative writing. I just couldn’t force my brain to engage. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to set worries aside, put them in a box, and go on with the task at hand. That didn’t work, especially the last two months as it became clear that Marilyn was dying. It was as though my creative juices had been wrung out of my body. But most significantly, in spite of keeping to my sleep routines, I found myself tired out—almost daily for the first two or three weeks after her death. I still have to take naps three or four times a week.

So what have I learned about grief?

Thus far, I’ve learned several things to help me process my grief more successfully. I don’t anticipate that the grief will ever be fully resolved and I’m not certain that I want that. But I do want to go back to life, giving myself wholeheartedly to my work.

First, I can’t stress how important it is to take care of yourself. My objective was to make certain that I kept involvements to the minimum and always do the things that are important to me. My children, as well as many friends, emphasized the necessity of that self-management. My children made it very clear to me, reminding me of their support, that I was to limit my visits to the home to just once or twice a week and get on with my life. Knowing Marilyn’s ever-Germanic orientation to task and work, I’m certain she would have approved and insisted. After all, Marilyn would not know that I’d been there two minutes after I walked out the door. I have a great awareness that my resources were unique. Still, to the degree possible, in whatever your situation, if you are to find hope and optimism, you must put yourself first. This is not a time to make sacrificial decisions for others or give others a lot of time.

Second, it’s important to access your support system regularly, and if you don’t have one, to seek one out. Most resident homes have group meetings and systems that you can tap into. Identify the friends who’ll do things with you, let you talk, and are simply willing to listen. They may not be the friends you expected, but they’re out there and they’ll do some caring for you. On occasion, I found it important to simply ask whether a person had time to talk with me. I learned to read the sign language fairly accurately so as not to overstay my welcome. When a person inquired regarding my wife, I usually shared two or three sentences. If they were desirous of further information or open to listening, they would inevitably make that clear to me after I’d shared just a bit.

Finally, it’s important to recognize that you’re not going to be able to predict or control your own responses to death. Give up the notion that the control mechanisms you’ve used to succeed in your professional career will work when facing a death in the family. Thinking you’re in complete control of your memories and emotions sets you up for failure and even more grief.

I have long been an optimist and practitioner of a “sanctified nonchalance.” In other words, I don’t hold tightly to life, but view it as a gift to be used for myself and others. And I gather people around me who hold similar views. Rather than focus on what I’ve lost, I face the future grateful for what I had. So I’m certain that makes the surprises of death easier for me than others. But still, as my friend Libby Bellinger said, when talking about my inability to control my emotions, “it kind of slips up on you, doesn’t it?”

Boomerang: Crooked Greeks, Anal Germans, and Brain-Dead Californians

Michiko Kakutani, easily the most ruthlessly critical book reviewer in the world, puts it this way about Michael Lewis’ latest book, Boomerang: No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Lewis. . . . [An] entertaining new book. That’s an understatement. 

I first wandered into Michael Lewis writing in Liar’s Poker, his early semi-autobiographical depiction of the 1980s Wall Street bond traders. I was initially resistant to reading the book, but one of my best friends insisted that in spite of my lack of interest in Wall Street I’d find this book intriguing. After nearly having to pick myself up off the floor—backdrafts from all the laughter—I’ve become a devoted reader of absolutely anything Lewis writes and says. Ummmm. This is not a book review. Just a dedicated . . . ummm, well. . . response.

The dust jacket explains the hilarity. The trademark of Michael Lewis’s best-selling books is to tell an important and complex story through characters so outsized and outrageously weird that you’d think they have to be invented. (You’d be wrong.)

What’s really frustrating about Lewis' writing is that he teaches me finance by osmosis, even though I’m certain I don’t want to learn it--or be bothered by the insights. Still, it’s tough not to be curious and intrigued by finance with all the mess of recent years. So, for my money, he’s the best teacher in the world. He seems to recognize that seduction works better than any other strategy. Lewis’ books are always page-turners.

Having consulted for a still unnamed sub-prime lender, I was especially curious about this new book. Lewis doesn’t let me down. He explains what the hell went on in the global financial markets, but he does it through the unique, national character of the players. Though cartoonish, they’re too real to reject. 

If you want to gain intercultural insight, this book is better than any grad class on the subject. Yeah, I know. What he writes may not be politically correct, but, god, it’s very accurate. I’ve worked with endless internationals over the years. And Lewis’ insights inevitably ring true. 

Since I’ve got family memories from Greece, Germany and California, I’m pretty comfortable with the title of my blog. I learned about a dozen years ago that when it came to the Greeks and Greece, they were all living on hot air. I had to insist again and again that my ex-son-in-law step outside Greek practice and report all his earnings. Uncle Sam actually enforces the rules. Married to one of those Germans, I’ve always celebrated her “orderly” (nice term, but “anal” is probably more accurate) ways. Her order always seemed to make life easier for me. And when it comes to Cal-i-for-ni-a, well. . . having lived there for a couple years in the ‘sixties, and consulted there more recently, and with a kid who lives there, I’m well aware of its plastic ways. Lewis got it right. 

You can be damned certain that Lewis gets it all very, very right. He’s also a weird one—with a degree in art history from Princeton, a master’s in econ from the London School of Economics, and Wall Street experience in bond trading.  Where do these occasionally strange, delightful writers really come from? Is it in the genes? Or what? This is a book that will make for some of the most delightful, hilarious reading of the year. But if you don’t believe me, you’ll want to read why he could have made a fortune in business, but instead, made a fortune writing about it.

When Feedback Goes Wrong

In significant contrast to industrial age workers, knowledge workers are rewarded and often succeed because of their mentoring and coaching expertise. Indeed, my blog, What the 21st century career looks like, emphasizes not only organizational needs for technical and analytical skills, but the competencies of persuasion, social perceptiveness, the capacity to bring the right people together on a project—and, coaching and mentoring skills. So if you want the most lucrative salary and the greatest growth and learning opportunity, you’ll involve yourself in coaching and mentoring. Feedback, of course, is the central competency of coaching.

But feedback can go very wrong and fail to achieve its fundamental objective. Why is that?

A recent web conversation among members of the Center for Evidence-Based Management alerted me to an intriguing study on feedback by Jodi Goodman and colleagues that deals with this very issue. But first, a little background.

Those who coach regularly are familiar with the cookbook statement on feedback that effectiveness is dependent on specific, timely, concrete input. As Goodman says, that means that effective feedback is immediate and includes information on the behaviors that were performed incorrectly and how to correct them.

However, as you become more focused on the feedback process, you soon recognize a real problem. When you give highly detailed, specific input, a certain proportion of people don’t seem to be able to apply the information to other contexts, demonstrating they haven’t truly learned from your feedback.

For all but the simplest of tasks, learning the correct actions typically requires some active search and processing about what will achieve the desired outcomes. And if the task is more complex, that increases the need for the mentee’s exploration of the different impacts of actions.

Goodman points out the double bind: If your feedback amounts to hand-holding (highly specific, concrete and timely input) throughout the performance, you’ll get the performance you want—yet inhibit the learning. That seems to go with hand-holding for most people. Alternatively, if you provide less frequent and specific feedback—no hand-holding—the result is often poorer practice, but better learning. That’s the result of searching for action impacts.

So the research shows clearly that hand-holding feedback won’t give you the learning you want for future projects. That doesn’t mean you should never do hand-holding, but it does seriously question the conventional wisdom about the value of specific, timely feedback.

Here are my conclusions:

• If you’ve got a tight deadline, do the hand-holding feedback so your mentee can meet the deadline. But realize the person is liable not to be able to repeat the actions in a different context. Learning probably did not take place.
• If your deadline is not tight, go for learning. Limit the amount of feedback you give, and turn the person loose to explore and search on their own. The person will learn, but may not achieve the level of performance you desire. You can refine the performance later.
• I’ve learned it’s important to provide the person similar opportunities in different context ASAP so that they may internalize the learning. Dedre Gentner of Northwestern has shown in numerous studies that behaviors need to be successful in several different contexts for learning to take place.
• I’ve also found that unless the person is clueless about a given task, it’s very important to emphasize that you don’t need to see them until they’ve exhausted their search and exploration. One of my friends, Eric Linner, an associate at Wold Architects of St Paul, is a master at insisting upon search and exploration—“do your homework”--before they come to him for help. The corporate culture, heavily oriented to learning and team work, has its answer in Eric--a straight-talking, poised, ex-marine who can be a bit scary to newcomers who don’t understand the ground rules. But employees quickly learn he’ll give them great feedback—if they’ve done their search homework before they come to him. Employees are immensely respectful and grateful to Eric for his learning orientation—in spite of his toughness. Indeed, I’d say that an architect that gets to work with Eric is very, very lucky.  

So there’s a definite danger in over-generalizing about feedback, and it’s easy to go wrong. There are plenty of people out there who, when needing feedback, want all the details. They want hand-holding. I rarely succumb to those demands—largely because it’s not good for them. Typically, I’ll respond to that expectation, “That’s enough information to get you going. I’m quite certain you can figure out what to do. And if you get caught in a bind, come back and we’ll talk about it.”

There are also plenty of employees who—rightly—don’t need or want hand-holding, but desire just a little input. I thrive with that kind, because when they come back I’m liable to learn as much from them as they learned.

In sum, don’t over generalize about feedback. Too much or too little specificity can cause feedback to go wrong. It all depends . . . on the task deadlines and your objective for the mentee.

Jodi S. Goodman, Margarethe Hendrickx and Robert E. Wood, Feedback Specificity, Exploration, and Learning, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2004, Vol. 89, No. 2, 248–262.

Flickr Photo by Rolleh

Seven Steps to Better Brainstorming

The best help and insight I’ve ever had for brainstorming was a senior course in discussion and conference leadership at the University of Colorado, years ago.  Although there was a lot of research and theory presented, it was primarily a hands-on course, with the prof as facilitator, using issues that were of importance to all of us.  In other words, we worked on a project together and she intervened when necessary. Talk about learning!! It was just superb. She gave us insight and feedback like mad, and we had five weeks to get used to it all. By the end of that time, we were a well oiled, productive team, willing and capable to take on the subjects of mutual importance. 

Yet, as a recent McKinsey article by Kevin and Shawn Coyne points out, most attempts at brainstorming are doomed from the start. Still, companies run on good ideas. As a result, teams and groups are inevitably probing for new, time-saving and productive process improvements. 

So how can you get better brainstorming out of a team? There are a lot of things that won’t work: teams chosen for political reasons, telling people to “get creative” or “think outside the box,” working with a lot of group exercises, reminding people that there are “no bad ideas,” or even using outsiders that are unfamiliar with your business, etc., etc., etc. 

Effective brainstorming requires a fair amount of preparation. Indeed, when I’m asked to facilitate a team, I’m quick to refuse unless I understand the business, its problems and needs. That means that I’ll do a fair amount of information gathering before the team meetings (note the plural—meetings). Furthermore, when facilitating it’s important for me to keep checking my information with the team in order to keep myself and them on target. Structure for the sessions is terrifically important, even imperative. So, here are seven steps for brainstorming, adapted from the Coynes, that really will work: 

1. Shape the decision criteria. For example, dwelling on products or IT changes that the company won’t fund is a waste of time. Talking to senior managers to gain the criteria BEFORE the team meetings is an excellent use of time. It’ll make the team far more focused and productive.
2. Focus on the right questions. Decades of research on questions for your team to explore have been found to be an imperative. And that’s not easy. The trick is to get the right questions. As the Coynes suggest, questions should force the participants to new, unfamiliar perspectives. The second trick is to limit the topics for the team to explore, without being so restrictive that it forces the answers. For example, my architectural clients worked with a question such as “What are the key client mental models, that if diffused, will provide us with the most opportunities?”  (We found that there were only five recurring models held by a base of more than 25 different clients, making it possible to create change conversations that brought architectural success.)
3. Pick the right people. In other words, the only people of value are those that can answer the questions you’ve structured. You want “in-the-trenches” team members. Putting people on that architectural team that didn’t relate regularly with clients and construction people would be farcical. They wouldn’t understand what was going on.
4. Small groups are an absolute necessity. The old research was that once a group got beyond 13 people, you were done for. We’ve found that 5 or 6 in a team is maximum. That way everyone has to talk and weigh in on ideas. They’re forced to speak up and the team is not so large that any would be fearful or hide. Although usually bosses get in the way, I’ve coached them so that they became peers and colleagues, rather than bosses. It can work, but it’ll take some time. Big mouths get shut down pretty quickly in a structured group.
5. It’s not fast and furious. In structured brainstorming you may work with no more than two or three ideas over a period of an hour and a half. Although the first few minutes may generate a lot of talk, it quickly settles into just a few issues. In fact, you may find yourself coming back to those issues at the next meeting, largely because participants have spent time on them between sessions. And you’ll find a couple members attacking ideas. That, too, is very useful.
6. Narrow the ideas generated. Suppose you’ve gotten a lot of ideas. It’s important to let participants know that execs may have info they don’t. That means nothing is in concrete until there is exec feedback on them.
7. Follow through—quickly. With the groups that I’ve worked with, it’s important to try on the ideas, review and adjust. Sometimes the success of an ideas means that we enlarge it. Other times, its failure means that we have to replace it. That’s all normal stuff.

Surprising Insights from Rule-Breakers Murdoch and Brooks

Two recent analyses of the Murdoch Watergate have piqued my interest. One about Rupert and the other about his protege, Rebekah Brooks. In contrast to almost everything else I've read on the hacking scandal, these two analyses take a different perspective. Rather than simply demonizing the two of them, their analysis is far more balanced . . . insightful and useful.

In today's world, ad hominem arguments regarding such characters as Murdoch and Brooks rule the roost--wrongly. Let me explain. Ad hominem arguments are belittling and insulting statements about a person, usually about real (or unreal) character flaws, for the purpose of attacking that person's claims and refuting his arguments. Rather than deal with the argument or evidence presented by an individual, we attack the person instead, making him out as a jerk or criminal or an immoral character. What typically happens in the popular culture is that once the person is demonized (that's how ad hominem works), then there is nothing of value that that person has ever said or done. There's no reason to consider any of his or her ideas because immoral idiots can't possibly make a trusted, valid contribution of any sort. But the result of such thinking is that many options, ideas, and even genuine contributions are never considered. Ideas that may ultimately have real value for the resolution of problems or contributing to the betterment of business, family, an individual or even society.

Rather than demonize, the authors, Jeff Pfeffer of Stanford Business School, and Carl Bernstein of the original watergate and Deep Throat, speak to the contributions as well as the rule-breeaking and potential criminality of Brooks' and Murdoch's behaviors.

In a Newsweek article Bernstein argues strongly that Murdoch's approach to business has spread through journalism like a disease virus, undermining the influence he covets. Over 17 paragraphs Bernstein points out the scope of the hacking, Murdoch's commanding and often frightening political influence and king-making powers, the unfair and imbalanced politicized "news" of the Fox News Channel, the "industrial scale" of the hacking at News of the World and the lawbreaking on his behalf among the police and even Scotland Yard.

But don't miss the single, glowing paragraph in which Bernstein points out the contributions made by Murdoch to the newspaper business. Contributions desperately needed in the news business which has been under siege for years, and searching, often fruitlessly, for a way to make news profitable once again. Bernstein's analysis is important enough to quote in full:

None of this is to deny Murdoch’s competitive genius, his superior understanding of the modern media marketplace, or his dead-on reading of popular culture. He has made occasionally dull newspapers fun to read and TV news broadcasts fun to watch, and few of us would deny there are days when we love it. He’s been at his best when he’s come in from the outside: starting Sky News, which shook up a complacent British broadcasting establishment; contradicting conventional American media wisdom that a fourth TV network (Fox) could never get off the ground; reducing the power of Britain’s printing trade unions that were exercising a stranglehold on the U.K. press.

It needs to be said that without Murdoch, his insights and his reading of popular culture, the media and especially the news business would be in far worse shape than it is now. So in Murdoch's case, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. There are still a lot of important things the news business can learn from his expertise.

Jeff Pfeffer, a scholar in the field of personal power, draws numerous insights from the experience and activities of Rebekah Brooks. In an astute blog on both power and rule-breaking Pfeffer points out that in just eleven years Brooks rose from secretary to editor of the now-closed News of the World. She understood from an early age that people like people who are similar to themselves, taking up the sports that would enable her to be close to the powerful. She got a short-cut to power because of her willingness to succeed on different terms than the establishment, managing to win out as an underdog. She, like the brilliant Tina Brown of the Daily Beast, understands that you have to be audacious to get noticed.

But, here's the important insight. Rules are good only so far, then they become destructive. Pfeffer explains:

But as demands mount in Britain for Rebekah Brooks' resignation, it is another principle of power-seeking that her experience may end up proving best — and it's the one that makes teaching power strategies so hard. So often my students arrive hoping for rules that are foolproof and linear: when I tell them something works, they want to believe that if a little of it is good, more must be better. Power, like many things in the world, doesn't work that way. With salt and other minerals in the human body, a little is required to live; an excess will poison a person. The secret to power is not figuring out what to do and doing it more than anyone. It is figuring out what to do and then doing it just enough.

So how can you put these learning processes to work for yourself? Here's a practical model.

Whenever there's an issue that seems unresolvable, questionable, needs political support or even further insights, be sure to access possible insights from those with which you disagree, including the jerks and screw-ups.

In organizations it's especially valuable to access intelligence from a diverse a set of people--including those you don't trust and who don't trust you. Follow an issue-oriented approach, not a person-oriented approach to developing insight and understanding.

For example, take any problem on which you've made a tentative conclusion, say a change in business process. Normally, the wise person would check out its validity with others. The people who trust you and agree with your conclusion are usually your closest advisors. These are your allies. However, they are the least valuable in terms of gaining needed insights. They think the way you do, they trust you and so they're at the same place as you.

The most valuable people are those who might be labelled opponents. These are people who have high trust in you, but disagree with your conclusion. They've worked through the issue, coming out at a different place than you. They'll have significantly different insights, use different evidence and reasoning to build their conclusion. They are exceedingly valuable. You'll want to question and listen until you understand their thinking in spades. Typically, the result will be some fine tuning of your conclusion, making it better. On occasion, your opponents may even make you change your mind. That can only be for the good.

The third group, your adversaries, have little to no trust of you and also disagree with you. And you return the favor. But you'll want to get close to them to understand their thinking, both its strengths and its weaknesses. You know the proverb, keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. Consistently, as you dig into their thinking, you'll gain important stuff for fine tuning your thinking. There's a lot to learn from the Brooks and Murdochs of the world. When you go to adversaries for input, you may find it difficult to get information out of them at first, but they too can be personally valuable.

Learn to ignore the ad hominem talking and thinking that fills the airwaves and popular culture. It has little use is just downright childish. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are prolific users of ad hominem. You'll also find the liberal Rachel Maddow doing it--and she knows a lot better.

If you take the issues surrounding national health care, put Obama on one side and Ryan on the other, you'll notice a huge amount of rejection and demonizing from the political tribes. But if you want see a really smart guy make some sense out of both sides, google David Gergen on CNN and work through a few of his articles. He'll clarify what I'm saying about getting good stuff out of opponents and adversaries. In this instance, it's Republicans and Democrats, Obama and Boehner, Ryan and the Democrats. But notice, especially, that Gergen refuses to demonize. He goes for the important stuff and can teach us all a good lesson. You can really learn a lot from difficult, disagreeable, even criminal characters.

4 Tips for Dealing with an Urgent Request

The business world is an urgent world. At least that's what managers want you to believe. Take a deep breath, lean back, and get real.

Here's the skinny: managers are paid to get results. The consequence is that they talk urgent, like a speeded up newscaster. So don't get spooked. It is exceedingly rare for any manager to move as fast as he or she talks. One of the few, really frustrating truths I've learned in nearly 30 years of consulting is that my understanding of urgent is different than my client's understanding of urgent. I've always got more time to respond than I initially thought. In the back of my mind is an important footnote: Bosses, even CEO's don't push McKinsey consultants and other powerful people with "urgent requests." McKinsey, in very measured and articulate fashion, will push back on corporate people so that they can do the job in the form they want and make the money they expect.

Here are four tips on how to respond to an urgent request, borrowed and freely adjusted from Ron Ashkenas.

1. Don't think that urgent means right now. Talk to your boss or your client about what he wants accomplished. And in the conversation, move beyond the specific, concrete task to his objective. He'll want to talk task, you want objective. What will this task achieve for him? Be smart about the question. Respond like, "so what you want from me is blah, blah, blah. Right?" If he says yes, then ask how doing that fits into his overall objective. If he tells you to "just do it," respond with, "I can do a lot better job for you if I understand how this fits into . . . ."
2. Listen for the politics. Here's my rule: All tasks have a political component. Who besides your client or your boss is making this an urgent matter? That information will help you make a timeline decision. If it's the CEO or board chairman, get your ass in gear. If it's several of your boss's colleagues, you can usually slow down.
3. Respond, but don't be in a hurry to act. Get real. Ninety-five percent of the time when you finish the task for your boss or your client, it'll sit on his desk for a week or more before he does anything with it. Think about it. Your boss probably needs to clear out his in-basket. Since he'd like to get it done today, that's his rationale for making the task urgent. You might say, "OK. I have number of high priority tasks, but I can get it done by the end of next week. Will that be OK with you?" Don't forget that one of the reasons that your boss is a manager is that he's learned how to juggle priorities. You can be certain that he knows how to put off projects for other priorities, so your request will be a familiar issue.
4. Be prepared to say no. Once you've figured out whether it's a real crisis or your boss (or client) is crying wolf, then you're ready to say yes or no. If your client or your boss thinks he needs something right now, it's quite OK to decline the request.  A second way of saying no to your boss is to force him to reprioritize your tasks.  Say something like, "I understand that this task is urgent, but you've given me a number of priorities . . . A, B, and C. How would you suggest that I repriortize?"

There is a very important, and "urgent" assumption under all of this. And that is that you have an effective and open relationship with your boss. In today's economic climate, success with your boss is your highest priority. Don't skim over that. Your boss is your highest priority, not your other tasks. That means that you manage him. If he trusts that you manage him and his needs well, you can probably get away with murder. You're too valuable to him, personally, to ignore. Check out my posts on managing up. In one especially potent blog, I reveal the real secret to managing your boss. 

Erwin rule: business never moves as fast as it would like the world to think. Plodding along, making slow, political decisions is the norm. If you think government moves slowly, check out business. It moves just as slowly and makes just as many mistakes. Maybe more. I have that info on good authority from leading execs. Business just has better PR.

So U.S. History Doesn't Flip Your Kid's Switch. So What?

Diane Ravitch, who recently changed her mind and decided to support public schools, took a look at the test, the scores . . . and blew her cork. "The answer was right in front of them. This is alarming."

The test was the National Assessment of Educational Progress given to 20% of our fourth graders, 17% of of eighth graders and 12% of high school seniors. It showed that our students are less proficient in their nation's history than in any other subject. The other subjects? Math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, economics. No surprise. Students scored highest in economics. That won't, by itself, resolve 21st century corporate--or political--needs.

So why does it matter that kids don't know U.S. history? (Before I go any further, I need to 'fess up. I was an undergrad history major, who also took a bit of political science and econ. Smart advisor guided me. And that was the 1950s.) Sure, the data of historical events, dates, people, cultures, politics, wars and movements helps us understand what's going on in our world today. But there's also a second, far more important reason for understanding history. And it gets practically no press.

My answer to the question tells you why I nearly went bonkers when I read Penelope Trunk's blog telling her readers to avoid the humanities, of which history is one of the major disciplines. She couldn't have been more wrong. I was so pissed that I almost wrote a blog on why a business major is the absolute worst undergrad major to major in. If my daughters had even let business as an undergrad major cross their minds, I'd have indicated that they'd get no money from me for college. What a dumb major for smart kids. Might as well take cheer-leading or basketball. Ninety-five percent of the stuff you'll get at work anyway. The only thing it possibly offers is a faster track to your first job out of college. By your fifth year of work, practically everything you got in it is obsolete. Zip. Nada. Useless.

What history offers, instead, is a phenomenally important, permanent set of critical tools. History forces you to investigate an endless set of highly complex issues [religion, culture, politics, scientific thought (Ben Franklin, Benjamin Rush, David Rittenhouse), media, wealth, taxes (for the unenlightened, "taxation without representation"), natural resources or lack of (Jefferson, Lewis and Clark)] to enable you to figure why something happened, and what else might have happened, if. . . .

In short, there is not a single undergrad major more effective for teaching critical reasoning for a highly complex world. No critical reasoning tools is exactly why 95% or more of business people can't do strategic thinking and legislators have so damn much difficulty with policy-making. Simply no tools in the toolkit.

History is an inquiry-based study and a problem-solving activity. So it teaches you how to ask the really significant questions and deal with the complex problems that business and government people struggle over. (Here's a successful humanities grad who really gets it.)

History requires students to deal with social problems that are poorly structured, very controversial and with all kinds of reasoning and built-in illogic. It requires different kinds of thinking than a student would learn in the well-structured problems of philosophy and basic logic. Furthermore, it forces students to look at conflicting accounts of the same problem (the residents of Boston versus the British military perspective on the Boston Massascre). It also presents students with moral and ethical challenges (were the colonists justified in using violence against British authority?) Finally, students who study these challenges learn to recognize the different biases asssociated with perspectives. (Here's one ninth grader who gets it.) Significantly, they learn to compare their moral suasion against the different persuasions within a historical context.

There's endless stuff about all kinds of wars. Lack of historical tools is a major reason why Iraq, which the Bushies thought would be delighted with their intervention, blew up in their face. Lack of historical tools is why so few understand that you can't take a country like Afghanistan, that's living in the ninth century, into the twenty-first century in just ten short years. Lack of historical tools is why so few understand that the Medicare and Social Security systems impact all kinds of people, businesses, state governments, classes and generations of people in half-a-million different ways. Lack of historical tools is also why so many don't understand the conflicting perspectives and conflicting ethics of the different political parties involved. Lack of historical tools is why the resolution of the problems those programs have given us is evidently impossible to manage.

I think it was Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the first Senator of Missouri early in the 19th century, who commented about a certain decision and a certain legislator, that the decision was not nearly as simple as some simple-minded people would like to think. In today's highly complex world, "don't do nuance" and no critical historical tools can lead a person, a company and a nation into tragedy.

You can't possibly imagine how good it feels to vent my spleen and stick my middle finger into the air on this issue..#!%@!!

Why Is Real Collaboration So Very Difficult?

Collaboration skills are very tough for people to learn. You'd think that teamwork, where people have shared values and objectives would facilitate collaboration. But no, put people from two different divisions or groups together--and it can be a really painful mess.

Today's Times alluded to a terrifically cool piece of research, reported by Patricia Cohen, that explains the problem. So I had to dig it up. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber looked closely at our human capacity for reasoning.  Remember that collaboration is about working through differences and coming to a workable joint decision. Team members walk into collaborative discussions with a lot of ideas. Typically, they're conclusions they've held for a long time. Collaboration is all about joint reasoning. As you know, when you get together to collaborate on something, most everyone already has their own conclusion to the problem.

So bear with me. A person's conclusions are simply mature inferences, a mental representation based on a lot of other ideas. Let's suppose, for example, that you're a school superintendent who's brought in an architect to build a new elementary school. In order for the planning to move forward, architects have to collaborate with the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers to put together their proposal.

As soon as the architect sits down with the teachers, the architects find themselves dealing openly with some "conclusions" (mental models) that can make collaboration very difficult. What comes up are statements like, "we don't want a Taj Mahal," "you're just in this for the money," "you don't understand education, why should we trust you," or "you guys always build what you want, not what we need." That's a setup for a breakdown, not a collaboration.

Similarly, architects have to work with the contractors, the construction people--and their reasoning can be just as difficult. Contractors are especially difficult because they get to talk to the school's representatives nearly every day. They can easily sabotage the relationship for the architect with reasoning that sounds like this: "architects just draw lines on paper," and "you guys don't know anything about building a building." How's that for collaborative reasoning?

The same stuff happens in most any collaborative effort in law, medicine--and business. Get into any collaborative team setting, and the same kind of stuff starts surfacing in ten minutes, making collaboration a very difficult exercise.

It's all about why people reason, not how people reason. 

Mercier and Sperber assume, like all of us, that reasoning is the best way to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Yet, plenty of evidence shows that reasoning often leads to off-base distortions and poor decisions. So they decided to take a different tack. Rather than look at how people reason, they wanted to know why people reason. 

There was one very important clue. When a team is trying to come up with a decision they noticed that everyone was mostly interested in arguments for themselves and against the other people. The confirmation bias is always a feature of collaboration. 

I won't lay out all the research, you can read it yourself if you've got time for 50 pages. But their conclusion is very important. Why do people reason?  To win. The entire history of reasoning since Socrates is not tied to improving knowledge and making better decisions, but focused on winning. Winning is in the genes, but not collaboration.

So how the hell can we collaborate successfully?

As some of my clients have told me, I tend to play dirty. I explain the problem. Then I'll ask permission to intervene anytime I think someone has switched his/her model to winning. And I wait until everyone agrees to my intervention. As you can guess, sometimes there's a bit of silence before I get assent. Then whenever I think the conversational model needs to change from winning to collaborating, I intervene. I make this a lot of fun and stay away from being "serious Dan." 

As a facilitator, I've learned to get all the undiscussables on the table. And do it throughout the meeting. For example, I'll repeat something like, Hey guys. This is not an argument to win. That sounds like a "win agenda." As soon as you start looking to confirm your own beliefs, we're going to be in trouble. I know it's tough, but let's get all the stuff on the table for a better decision.

As I'm writing this, it crossed my mind that Republicans and Democrats in the House really need me. But, truthfully, I sure as hell don't need them. Enjoy!