Lessons learned through a discussion of the Amazon-Zappos deal

Last week as we heard the news of the Amazon-Zappos deal an on-line discussion started between a few of my fellow students at the AGSM MBA. We discussed whether it was a good idea, what will the effect of it on the culture of the two companies, etc.

Amazon has always been a company I admired (and had some very good customer service experience with), so I was glad that as part of the discussion and even more glad to come by this movie clip of Amazon CEO and founder (Thanks Amit). You never know how much of what the CEO is actually saying is happening in real life. But, there is no doubt that Amazon is a success story. And I think that the principals they stand for and Jeff Bezos is presenting in the video are very similar to things I write about a lot in this blog.

Obsess over customers (not over competitors) – I love this approach. First, because it takes the company out of the regular We (or I) culture. As humans we attribute to much importance to ourselves in the mind of others. And this translates to companies’ strategies and tactics that focus on the company and not on the customer. Nobody really cares about company X. People care about themselves. But the second part of this concept is even more important. We spend so much of our lives comparing ourselves to others, using benchmarks, thinking – I want to be like him/her. We forget to be ourselves. We forget to excel at what we do. We forget to exploit our comparative advantage. Instead of focusing on them, we should focus on us. And I know what you are thinking. Isn’t that a contradiction? You just said that we should stop with the culture of we. Well it isn’t. They can co-exist. And anyway, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time”.

Invent – There is no doubt in my mind that the need (and ability) to invent is and will be the hallmark of successful people and companies and out changing world. Not only invention of new products but also of process, of business models, of ideas and of sharing mechanisms. A company that puts invention as its core belief represent, in my mind, a great manifestation of everything that is good in the capitalistic system.  

Think long term for customers not according to customers – Again, two very strong ideas. Long term. The financial crisis has proved, if any more proof was needed, how important the idea of long term thinking is. Again, it is a manifestation of a very basic human trait that is discussed a lot these days. The need for immediate gratification. I hear about the Gen Y phenomena and the fact that people today are looking for immediate gratification and I involuntary cringe. This is not something we should celebrate. This something we should avoid. I think mentioning the famous marshmallow experiment is enough to make my point. Patience and perseverance, in the business world are essential. The second part of this concept is about customers and that they don’t always know what they want. Listen to your customers, but don’t be entrapped by them.

And not less important: “it’s always day one”. There is always more to learn, discuss, improve and question.

Elad

Surprise with your presentation, even using technology

 

Umair Haque at BRITE ‘09 conference from BRITE Conference on Vimeo.

I was watching this lecture by Umair Haque from the Brite Conference. It is a very interesting lecture where Haque claims that the creativity of the past is not good enough for the new economy and the new world. This is the second time this week I see an attack on the notion of creativity as we know it (link in Hebrew). I will not attempt to explain what Haque is saying because I am not sure I totally understand it (I really liked some of the examples and really disagree with some others). I will let you see and decide for yourselves. What I want to talk about is the way Haque gives his presentation.

Haque is not a very articulative presenter. The flow of the speech is not consistent. He does not capture the audience with good use of voice, movement or structure. But, one thing stood out -the visual aid he is using. Haque is not using regular PowerPoint presentation slides. Instead, he is using some kind of big flash or java sheet that allows him to “sail” (there is no other word I can think of to describe it) between the different points, magnifying on one point for a second and then moving to another. I never seen anything like it used in a presentation. The constant movement across this sheet, which represents linkage of different ideas, creates not only great repetition of the main ideas but a great sense of understanding of the connections between them.

This got me thinking. My training in presentations comes from the education background. I learned how to speak, present and structure according to the frameworks of education. I find myself struggling many times adapting this “bias” I have when I tried giving different kinds of presentations. When you teach, a lot of your concentration should go to structure and keeping consistency. You don’t use differences and surprises a lot, only when trying to make certain points. In other types of presentations, especially one time presentations, being different, surprising and inconsistent is a great and important tool that should be used throughout the presentation.

Haque’s presentation captivated me even though his regular public speaking skills were not remarkable. Because he used a new and different technological tool. That takes courage, but that also made him special, and made me pay attention closely. This shows that you don’t have to be a great speaker. You can use technology smartly in order to amplify your message. I hope to see more and more new tools that will allow us to create new visual aids that help improve our presentations.

Elad

If it isn’t broken – break it, if it is broken – ask somebody how to fix it

Yesterday I saw this video from 2006 of a lecture by Seth Godin (for better quality see here). It is a fascinating and highly entreating talk. In it, Godin describes how so many things are “broken”, and by “broken” he means just stupid, non-cooperative with the client or non efficient.

I don’t know about you, but the feeling he describes is something that I feel almost every day. You see something and you ask yourself – why is that? Why can’t they make it simpler? Or easier to use? Or just plain efficient? Now, you can cast doubt if all the examples are really “broken”. That is what the commenter’s on the Boing-Boing blog do. But I think doing that is missing the point.

I think two of the main points are:

1. “It is not my job” – Godin claims that many things are broken because the people who can fix it, say: “it is not my job”. I think this thinking is so common we don’t even notice it anymore. When we encounter it, it frustrates us, but it seems reasonable to us. We say to ourselves: “what can we do? It is probably not his job”. Why?

Ask yourself. If you think about a way to change something, to make it better, what do you do? Do you go to your manager? Do you put it in a suggestion box? Or do you just give up and say to yourself: “well, nobody is going to listen to me anyway”.

Now, wear the other hat. When is the last time you went to your employees or team members and asked them – “what would you change?”. These are the people who usually say “it is not my job”. They usually know already what is broken and how to change it. Go and ask them.

Some places are already doing that. Check out “My Starbuck Idea“. Think about all the sites that allow anybody to write an applet. “Hey, this site should allow you to do this. Maybe I will just write an applet for that” or “hey, I should be able to do this with my IPhone, I can write an applet for that”.

2. “Broken on purpose” – this is a point Godin makes all the time, especially in his book “purple cow“. In order for something to succussed, it needs to be remarkable, meaning that people will make a remark about that. You create it by creating an exceptional product, or you just make it plain different. Maybe it is time to break your product?

Elad

Iconoclast

Photo by Ilan Sharif

I just finished reading a very interesting book called “Iconoclast” (read more about the term iconoclasm), by Gregory Berns. The book describes what is unique about people who do things that others say can’t be done. By using case studies of remarkable people from all fields of society, sports to business, science and space flight  to human rights, and combining it with new research about the way the brain works, Berns makes a compelling argument about what makes these people so unique. This basic theory is that iconoclast can be distinguished by three traits: a perceptual system that allows him to see differently from other people, the ability to conquer fear of the unknown and social intelligence to sell ideas to other people.

As usual, a few thought about this book:

1. I think tis books amplifies two messages I deal a lot with here in this blog. The first one is the importance of the comparative advantage and use of the uniqueness of strengths. As it turns out, even those people who have one of the traits of an iconoclast don’t hold all three of them. This means, that they need to corporate. They need to find someone who can complete what they lack in order to do things that can’t be done. This means that one of the most important things you can do is concentrate on your strengths and find someone else to take care of your weaknesses.

2. The second one is the importance of leadership. I already mentioned that I strongly believe that the most important role of a leader is, as Markus Buckingham describes it, to create a clear picture of the future. Because most people are afraid of the future and afraid of the unknown. The people who succussed in doing things that other thought were impossible, were not deterred by the uncertainty the future holds. They managed to overcome their fear. As a leader, your role is to help people do just that. To complete the picture, check out item number one. Maybe your ability to as a leader to make the future less frightening will be just what others need in order to bring their iconoclast ability of perception to reality.

3. One of the biggest problems iconoclast face is the ability to persuade others of their ideas. We all know this. Great inventions and discoveries take a long time to come about, many times because the guy who thought about them just has to wait for the entire current community to die or leave. In the book, Berns says that an iconoclast has two options. Either try to persuade the early adopters, which means you have to find the right way to reach them, or make your idea more compatible with present ideas. This is a known trick in presentations – if you are having a hard time explaining something new, use something old. If any of you ever saw the TV show “Numbers” you recognize the great use of everyday concepts to explain complicated mathematical ideas. This is just the same. It is what the authors of “Made to stick” call: the curse of knowledge. Your own knowledge does not allow you to see how other people who don’t know what you know think. When you are presenting something, think what your audience already knows and use that concept to explain yours.

4. Finally, reading about so many people who took the current reality and just smashed it, is inspiring. These people disregarded what everybody said and changed most of our lives. Each and every one of you can do that every day. It is simple. Just like Tim Berners Lee says in his TED talk: it is time for you to become the sort of person who just does things which will be good if everybody else did them.

5. Even if you don’t do anything ground breaking, the ride a good enough reason.

Elad

The new challenges of measuring and evaluating people performance – a few non-personal lessons from prison

 Photo by aussiegal

A short story about prison

I don’t remember where exactly I read it. I think it was in one of Marcus Buckingham’s books. Anyway, the writer described an interview with a manager of the prison authority in England. That manager told the interviewer about the ways in which that organization became much more effective. Now, when you think of a prison, you would probably think about things in the lines of tightening security. But the most important activity that was described had to do with the way the prison authority measured its effectiveness. Instead of measuring how many people got out or escaped, which was the traditional way to measure the effectiveness of prisons, the manager changed the way that organization measured it success. They started measuring how many people who got out of prison legitimately, returned to prison. The manager said that he realized that the objective of a prison is to make sure prisoners who return to society don’t go back to the life of crime. In how many other places in life do we still measure the wrong thing because of habit or because of the available data?

From prison – to the basketball court

I was reminded of that story this week when I read this amazing article by Michael Lewis from the New York Times called: “The non-stat All-star”. In a nut shell, Lewis describes the story of Shane Battier, the NBA basketball player of the Huston Rockets. Battier, is the kind of player that his contribution to team does not show on the “regular” statistics usually measured during a basketball game. But if you look closely, you see that the effect he has on his team is amazing.

Now, I know what you are thinking. Because my E-book tries to draw conclusions about life from the basketball court to real life, and Lewis writes in the article that: “In its spirit of inquiry, this subculture inside professional basketball is no different from the subculture inside baseball or football or darts. The difference in basketball is that it happens to be the sport that is most like life”, I am discussing this article in this blog. But that is not the case. I bam discussing this article because of these quote:

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group… When I ask Morey if he can think of any basketball statistic that can’t benefit a player at the expense of his team, he has to think hard. “Offensive rebounding,” he says, then reverses himself. “But even that can be counterproductive to the team if your job is to get back on defense.” It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly. “We think about this deeply whenever we’re talking about contractual incentives,” he says.

Isn’t this just like life in organizations?

Sounds familiar? Similar to basketball, where the interest of the individual player is to do things that benefit him, but hurt the team, the business world is a world where the individual has all the incentives to act for his own benefits even if it is not beneficial for the organization. In other words, the interest of the individual and organization are not in alignment. This is what is usually called, the agency problem or the principal-agent problem.   

After reading Lewis’s article Tom Davenport wrote in the Harvard Business blog that:

In business, we’ve all known managers whose units or companies perform better when they’re in charge. Unlike professional basketball, however, most companies haven’t yet begun to evaluate managers or employees systematically based on their individual and team contributions. No plus/minus statistics have been developed for a business context. The emerging field of human resource analytics has a lot to learn from the Houston Rockets

It is the measurement, stupid!

I think the story Lewis describes, although about basketball, actually represents some of the most urgent problems the world is facing today:

• 1. In order to create comparative advantage, new ways to make people more effective are in high demand. If we create a way to the get people to do the right thing for the organization where other employees of other organizations don’t, we create a comparative advantage.
• 2. Many of the incentives we have in the world today, measure the wrong things. Just read some of the explanations for the Global Financial Crisis.
• 3. Today it is much easier than it used to be to measure things. Basketball, off course is just an example. Think about companies which accumulate enormous amounts of data in ERP systems. The data is immense, and it is almost free to collect it. but still, although we have more data and statistics than we ever had, we still succussed at measuring the wrong thing. It is more than that. The more data we have, the tendency to measure the wrong thing only increases.  

What can we do? - let’s return to prison

Two things you can ask yourself:

1. Am I measuring the right thing? Think about the prison example and about the way they used to measure basketball players. The fact that we can measure or that we have a certain stat does not mean it is the right one to use.
2. What can that data I have tell me about the non obvious things. In Rudy Giuliani book “Leadership” he describes some of the process he implemented in order to improve New-York city. Most of them revolve around using statistics they had to measure different things. One story I remember vividly is again, about prison. They found out, that when sales in the prison cantina went up, it meant there are going to be prisoner riots. The prisoners were gathering food for the hard time after the riots. 

Vital signs

A few months ago, after reading a manifesto tilted: “Redeeming Sisyphus – Get Out of Control! Get More Done!” by I. Barry Goldberg of Entelechy Partners I wrote:  

Everybody knows saying by Peter Drucker that what isn’t measured does not get managed. But modern economics and behavioral economics, also shows us that if you decide on the wrong measures (or in Goldberg name: “vital signs”) you can create negative incentives. Books like “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt have been saying this for years. So, I believe the challenge of managers in the next few years, especially in the more subtle fields that are hard to measure will be to create the right vital signs

After reading Lewis’s article about Battier I think this is an understatement of the challenge. The challenge of managers today is to find the needle of right measures in the haystack of statistical data. The challenge is to re-think the way we measure our success. The challenge is to re-invent the way we interpret the actions of people.

Elad

Why do we have to ignore our past success while doing our current work?

Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer. She is the writer of many books. Her latest book, “Eat, Pray, Love” is #1 New York Times Bestselling memoir. She is now working on a new book. The problem is she is overwhelmed with fear that the new instalment could not exceed her last success.

From these feelings, Gilbert generalizes about the problem of creative people. In her talk in TED (I don’t why I can’t embed talks from ted to this blog, but press on the link to watch it), called: “Nurturing Creativity” she describes the problem creative people face. The problem is the fear that their next work would not be as good as their first one. The fear that their best work is behind them. Her claim is that taking this fear inherited into creative people’s lives, it is not surprising that many young creative people die young, many times by their own hand.

I could relate to that concept (not taking my own life, the fear). I am truly proud of my e-book, “Playing it to excellence and happiness in real life”. Even though it is not New York Times #1 bestseller, the responses I get from people who read it are great. I am currently working on a new e-book. But, will this one be as good as the next one? It is actually frightening to the point of paralyzing.

Gilbert advice (which is described in a very entraining way, I recommend watching this talk) is that you just do your job. You should just be proud of going out there and trying. She talks about the ancient Greeks believing that a spark of genius is a touch of an outside divine source, thus, not feeling guilty for not succeeding. She says we should try to implement that thinking into our creative process. I think I generally agree. Some complementing thoughts though:

1. You should really not care. If you are passionate about what you do, and enjoy doing it – just do it. If passion is there, results will follow, because people connect with passion. What you did in the past, people expectations, what other people think is right – all of these are not important. Go with your passion.
2. It is true that there are some people who created something and after that only lived on the reputation of that creation. But a lot of other people did not. There are numerous examples of writers whose second book was better than their first one. Who says you next creation would not be better than your last? Actually, usually creative people don’t reach the top immediately. They work and improve along the way. In some point of their career, there was a work worse than their last one. Look at Gilberts Bio. Not all her books became bestsellers. Who says that this time must be the peak? What you need to remember is that this time you have the experience you did not have when you created your last master piece. That experience is surely on your side.
3. There is no true way to know what will succeed. Not in art. Not in writing. Not in business. Don’t believe the experts – many times they are wrong. Don’t believe the surveys – people don’t know what they want. So there is actually no way to predict if your next work will be a success. If there in no way of knowing, the only option is to do your best. If you keep doing that and create something great, success will come. It does not work the other way around.
4. You cannot say that because something worked in the past, than a similar thing will work in the future. The only standard that matters is your own personal standard. Something that was unique and remarkable one day ceases to be so after a certain time. Your job is to find your true unique voice that you feel is right. If you keep doing that and create something great, success will come. If you keep pushing (or changing) the standards, you will improve.

 Elad

Connecting Ideas

Photo by seier+seier+seier

Seth Godin writes in his blog today about the problems of selling ideas. His claim, In short, is that selling ideas is a different skill than coming up with them. Most importantly, as he puts it:

The quality of ideas is not a factor in whether or not you will be in a position to have a chance to sell those ideas

Seth advice to those who are not able to sell their ideas is to blog abut them so they can have bragging rights later.

That made me think, in our age, of conceptual economy, where everything is free and we need to look for ways to sell things that are free, shouldn’t  there be people who are proficient  idea sellers? It is just a “comparative advantage” thinking or a “partnership thinking” or a “strengths” thinking.

If I have the idea but don’t know how to sell it, I do need to find someone to sell it for me. Someone who, like Godin puts it: “invest heavily in the skills and status to do that”.

If there are so many ideas out there looking to be connected, should there be a market for it?

Elad

Hey – do you have an idea…?

 

Photo by a_whisper_of_unremittin g_demand

A few months ago, before I knew I got accepted to an MBA in AGSM , I decided to leave my job and entered a phase where most of what I did was job interviews. Most of us know this horrible drill, and for me, due to my characteristics, it was even harder. I feel really uncomfortable in situations where there is a need for artificial conversations and when it involves new people it extra difficult for me. So interviewing for new jobs is a really hard process for me.

However, one interview actually was a great lesson. It was an interview with a company called SIT (Systematic inventive Thinking). I think the interview was different than other interviews and was conducted in a much easier atmosphere, but the reason I remember it as lesson is to the fact that my preparation for it was different. If you click on the link and visit the site you will discover a very interesting website. I spent something like an hour there before the interview learning about the company and its methods.

As I explain in my E-book, “Playing It to Excellence and Happiness in Real Life – Five Concepts I Learned by Playing Basketball, Working and just Living”, I believe in the power of processes. I think that if you find good processes and stick to them, while improving them, you can reach excellent results. What I like in the SIT method is that it treats creativity and innovation not as a “eureka moment” but at as the result of a systematic process. By limiting the creativity using a process you actually create more creativity. This resembles Malcolm Gladwell’s Idea in his speech at the New Yorker conference, “Genius: 2012″ that “13 smart guys are better than one genius in dealing with modern problems”. Today’s great ideas and solutions are the result of a process of many people working together or one after another.

The great thing about the interview and the preparation is that I actually learned (although in a limited fashion) to think with some of the tools that SIT uses: Attribute Dependency, division, multiplication, subtraction, task unification. I actually used that thinking to offer improvements for my last employer.  I keep learning to do so by following the SIT blog.

That interview got me more interested in innovation and creativity. In the past I used to think that I was not a creative man. As time passed I understood that there are many ways to be creative and that I am creative in my own way and on my own areas of strength. Now, I keep looking for processes that foster innovation. This is why when I got the book called “The impossible – Possible!” by Yarin Kimor a present before coming to Australia, I was really excited. The book is filled with great stories about innovation and especially with great processes that help foster innovation.  

One story in the book got me thinking. It tells about a man who had no training but got to be the manager of a large supermarket which was losing half a million dollar. After a few months he created a profit of 3 million dollars. When the writer of the book asked him what he did, he told him that because he knew nothing about managing a supermarket he just went into every department and asked the person working there what was his ideas to improve the place were. After that person told him that, he told him or her: “just do it”. We can find ideas and creativity in many places. When was the last time you asked your team, in unbiased way – what do you think we should change around here? You would be surprised by the answers you will receive.

Elad

Thinking Time

In his post today, Franice Wade of The 2Time Management System blog, talks about setting aside “thinking time” every day. His post was inspired by an article about the presidential candidates’ time management, and espically that of Barak Oboma:

 Obama’s solution was to set aside time to let his brain work during his mid-August vacation. “The most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking,” he said, repeating advice he’d gotten from a Clinton administration veteran.

Setting aside scheduled “thinking time” is a tip you can see in almost any management or time-management book. Most of the biographies I read about great managers and leaders contain this tip as one of the wisdoms that helped those men reach their success. It has almost become a cliché of sorts. But the trouble is most people don’t implement it in their daily lives. Off course setting aside “thinking time” every day might prove a bit difficult but doing once a week or every other week should be easy even for the busiest of managers.

When I give workshops about personal vision building I talk about setting aside “thinking time” as one of the fundamental skills good leaders acquire for themselves and as a way to updated personal vision constantly. I always point out that I am not talking about thinking during the shower, but as an integral part of your day, preferably, in your office. At this point, people usually nod and agree. But if you ask them a few months later, how many times since the workshop did they take a break during their work day to just stop and think, they usually answer – zero.

There are some truths that people will always agree to, but are reluctant to implement. This is something I know for myself. This piece of advice is easier to preach about than practice. So what is the solution? I think the best one is to outsource the responsibility for setting “thinking time” to somebody else.

I think the Obama example is great one. I am not sure, but I guess Obama does not set his own schedule. He has assistants building it for him. This actually simplifies the task of setting aside “thinking time”. It just has to be written into the instructions the assistant gets. Can you outsource the creation of “thinking time” to somebody else? If so, do it right now. My former boss had a secretary who controlled most of his times and meetings – it would not have been a problem for him to instruct her to create “thinking time” once a day or week.

But for managers, the lesson is even more important. You should ask yourselves – if setting “thinking time” for knowledge workers is so important, what am I doing in order to give my subordinates their “thinking time”? You have the power to help you workers by actually making it mandatory to have “thinking time” in their schedule and report to you about the results. Try it. I think you will find the results you workers produce surprising.

Elad