Emergence of excellence

Photo by scalespeeder

Two separate sources talked about the same issue today. Designing the conditions for success.

In planet money, the weekly podcast discussed the issue of job creation. The conclusion, job creation is not about one act of leadership. It is not necessarily about raising taxes (which could work) or lowering taxes (which could also work). It is about creating the optimal conditions in which jobs emerge.

Seth Godin discusses a different issue all together but so similar: customer service. Godin explains that it is not only about the person who actually provides the service, but actually many times, about how the environment was designed:

Too often, we blame bad service on the people who actually deliver the service. Sometimes (often) it’s not their fault. Sadly, the complaints rarely make it as far as the overpaid (or possibly overworked) executive who made the bad design decision in the first place. It’s the architecture of service that makes the phone ring and that makes customers leave.

And I ask you, as a manager, what are you doing to design an environment which enables emergence of excellence? Are you focusing on the conditions that support success? Why not?

Elad

Team Maintenance

Photo by rkramer62

We have all been there before. We decide to go on a diet. Or start working out. Or spend more time with the family. It starts out great. We go to the gym 4 times a week. We eat only an apple for five days. We manage to get home three times in the first week before 7PM. We see results. But then, something happens. We stop. Life takes its toll on us. We can’t seem to prioritize our decision anymore. The way our life is built is not supporting our decisions. These decisions will not work in a vacuüm. They must be incorporated into our life, slowly, but surly. Otherwise, it is just to hard to deliver results.

Teamwork is just the same. We think that if we only concentrate on the results, on the task or the issues at hand, everything will be fine. And then we go into a spiral, where the task demands more and more time. And what gets left behind? The team. It’s culture, it’s structure, the interactions between the people.

We have so much work on our hands that “working on the team culture and processes” seem like an indulgence. Who has time for that? We have real work to do. So what do we do, we go to some team building exercise in the woods, where we pull ropes for a day and feel like we worked on our teamwork.

But that is just like going to the gym for a week. Very painful in the short run and not very helpful in the long run.

Every research ever done on the subject of teams suggests that real high performing teams require maintenance. It is enough to focus on the task at hand and on the deliverables. Teams are made of people, and people form relationships. And these relationships, just like our personal relationships, need to be maintained all the time. And they need a setting and environment that supports them. Otherwise, they became a relationship on paper.

Jon Gordon writes in his blog today:

Whether we’re talking sports, business, education, healthcare, etc. the key to success is to build a winning team first. Of course this seems obvious but with increasing pressure to reach certain targets and goals and a challenging economy it’s easy for leaders and their teams to become outward focused on numbers and outcomes rather than inward focused on building the right environment, culture, attitude and synergy.

We must remember that it’s not the numbers that drive the people but the people and team that drive the numbers.

Yes, it is about choosing the right people. About creating the right process. About creating a supporting environment and culture.  Like so many things in life, sometimes the best way to reach our goal, in this case the results, is to not focus on them. The indirect approach.

Just like every person needs to incorporate weekly thinking-time into his schedule, so does a team need to set maintenance time to work on its effectiveness (and not on the results). Time to talk about how the team is doing. Time to get to know each other. Time to reflect about the team’s purpose and every individual’s role in it.

Like starting a diet or going to the gym, there is no one who will do it for you. If you are a team member demand it, make it a part of the culture, of the norm. Ignore those who make fun of you and insist. If you are a team manager, there is really no one else who has more influence on the team’s design and processes but you – and your team – if you let them…

It’s time for some team maintenance.

Elad

Why you should go and observe someone else’s work?

Photo by Timothy Valentine

Last week in our strategy class we were talking about competitive advantages. We learned about the two main ways you can create competitive advantage – cost advantage and differentiation. Then, as an answer to a student’s question (I don’t remember what it was exactly) the professor said something like this: if you are looking for how to create cost advantages – you need to look for answers in the operations class. If you want to create differentiation advantage – you need to look for answers is the marketing class.

I can’t say I agree.

I think one of the major problems companies are facing today is to create ways disengage from this kind of thinking. To create synergies between operations and marketing. And finance, accounting and HR for that matter. The thought that the advantage of the company, whatever that is, lies in one aspect or one discipline of the business is counterproductive and for me, counterintuitive. With everything we know about the importance of diversity in the creation of innovation, about the effects of social capital derived from interaction between different parts of the business, even thinking about competitive advantage as being the responsibility of one part of the business is dangerous.

I am sure our professor acknowledges that as well. All the examples of successful companies we keep seeing are examples of companies which succeeded to do both cost and differentiation advantages. Doing both requires coordination.

More than that. In the operations class we learn about things like TQM and Six-Sigma. These are concepts that not only reduce cost, but also increase quality and can create differentiation. Marketing decisions can have cost implications. The fact the Apple chooses (or choose) to create the I-pod with a very limited user interface (which I find terrible) is a marketing decision. But I am sure it has operations and cost implications. Design of the product can be a competitive advantage – who does it? Marketing or operations.

In the words of Guy Kawasaki:

The separation of engineering and marketing is artificial. It presumes that engineers build feature-laden crap that no one cares about but engineers. Maybe mediocre engineers do this. Great engineers create with a customer in mind. Fantastic engineers create with themselves in mind as the customer. Every Nokia engineer should give their prototypes to their mothers, fathers, and kids. That would fix everything. The user interface of almost every phone is unintelligible. Anyone could have done an iPhone—it’s not like Apple has a monopoly on design.

I understand the need to simplify concepts for MBAs. But the fact that we study each and every one of the courses separately is enough to create silos of thinking instead of integrative thinking. I think all disciplines, and especially strategy, should embrace an integrative look.

No matter where you work and what is your pre-defined role in your company, you should try to schedule an hour, a day, a week – with another department – to understand their work, their needs and their problems. What you will learn will be invaluable to your work.

Elad