Who is first?

Photo by Faith Goble

A few days ago I read a post in the blog education invitation titled: Putting Students First and Putting Teachers First: The Ambidextrous Professional Learning Community.  This is the basic idea: Education is about the students. We should put them first. Giving them valuable education is the number one goal. But in order to do that, we need to put teachers first. Because by investing in our teachers, we do the best thing for the students. Now, on its face these two ideas seem to contradict each other. And that is exactly the point. Because holding these two contradicting ideas together in our minds, allows us to reach innovative solutions.

And this is applicable not only in education but also in business:

Research by Gallup and others shows that engaged employees are more productive. They are more profitable, more customer-focused, safer, and more likely to withstand temptations to leave. The best-performing companies know that an employee engagement improvement strategy linked to the achievement of corporate goals will help them win in the marketplace (source: Gallup Website)

Yes. The customer comes first. Yes. We need to think about the bottom line and profit. But as I wrote in Obliquity and management, sometimes the best way to reach your goal is the indirect way. And in this case, the indirect way is by putting your employees first.

I hope that by putting the employees and some other goal first, we will have to come with innovative ideas about how to treat our employees. It is time we desert the Taylorism and begin to adopt an approach that does not see the employees as an instrument but as a partner. It is time to understand that most businesses thrive if employees are given the right tools and good bosses. It is time to accept new thinking that allows innovative solutions. Let’s put our employees first together with other goals.

Elad

More on managing meetings

A week and a half ago I wrote here about my most important concepts for managing meetings. I got many comments on this post, many of them offering other important concepts and some disagreeing with some of the concepts I mentioned. One of the disagreements that kept coming up dealt with my concept about coming prepared.

This is what I wrote:

Everybody must come prepared. And when I say prepared I mean totally and utterly prepared. When you get to the meeting you already: read everything; made the preparations; calculated the numbers; came up with your own ideas. I spent so many meetings where people come unprepared and as a consequence half of the meeting is spent on just understanding the issue or on doing things that should have been done earlier without wasting everybody else’s time. Too many people believe that they perform the best under pressure and rationalize their way into procrastination. This trend extends itself into the meetings and people say to themselves – “hey, I learn the subject while the meeting takes place”.

Here are some of the comments about this point:

Everyone needs to be prepared. However, avoid over preparation if you want to be innovative. If you want to build ideas as a group, you don’t want to have people come with their ideas nailed down.

Too much preparation can be a downside, leading to people coming in with pre-conceived ideas and already solved problems. Basic preparation is a must though, to understand the key facts etc. but I’ve found too much preparation can hold back a discussion.

While I respect the people who commented on this point, I have to strongly disagree with them.

First, I think the comments confuse between communication skills and preparation. One can come totally unprepared, but still be closed to other people’s opinions. On the other hand, somebody can come with his own ideas and solutions, but be open, receptive and listen to other people. The fact that some people come prepared and are not willing to listen does not mean that coming prepared is the problem (causality). It means that their lack of communication skills and ability to listen is probably the problem. I think one of comments actually described it quite well:

… but I think there is a thin line between coming prepared for a meeting and coming with THE solution. I think it’s very important to be open to new ideas and avoid selling your solution. The attitude that you have when you go to a meeting is crucial.

The issue is the attitude and not the preparation which is positive.

And this brings on the second point. Part of the problem occurs when only one person comes to the meeting prepared. The others, who are not prepared are not able to contradict that person so he seems like he is not listening to them and they are also not able to point mistakes or to create a positive influence on his idea. Everybody loses.

Third, most of the comments also talked about wasting time in meetings and the fact that we have to many meetings. If people come unprepared, everybody’s time is wasted because people have different abilities and speed of understanding. I honestly don’t see the negative connection between preparation and being innovative. On the contrary, the fact that everybody has come prepared only allows spending more of the time on the actual innovation and allows avoiding things like groupthink.  

Fourth, preparation is disregarded in many aspects of our lives, and while I don’t support excessive over perpetration I feel that it should be given its due place. Just recently Jon Gordon wrote a post exactly on this subject:

So often we fail because we fail to prepare. We focus on hitting the ball but we forget to take the time to tie our shoes tight before the game starts

I am going to come prepared to my next meeting. What about you?

Elad

David and Goliath

Photo by Alaskan Dude

I love the story of David and Goliath since I was a little kid. You must admit, it is the basic story of the underdog. Lately, as I was reading other interpretations of it, I understood how loaded with ideas and morals this story is. Then, Last week I read this fascinating article by one of my favorite writers, Malcolm Gladwell, called: “How David Beats Goliath“. And took another spin on the ideas I have already been exploring. In it, Gladwell makes two very interesting points. This is the first one:

When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win. David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life.

There are so many implications for this idea and many of them are mentioned in the article itself and I don’t want to ruin the read for you. One thing that I thought about immediately is companies’ strategy and some of things I learned and wrote about in the last few weeks.

From all the cases I have been reading lately in my strategy class, one thing is clear. In order to win against the big ones, you cannot try to be like them. You got to be different. You got to create a comparative advantage and then exploit it. Dell, Southwest, SAS, Airborne. All examples of companies who went against the big guys and won. Not because they tried to be better than the big guys. But because they were different. They came up with something new.

This is what I wrote just a few weeks ago:

But this also creates temptations. To imitate and not innovate. To be like somebody else, because it is safe. Because it is easy. This is a temptation we should be careful off.  Do you want to out-Apple Apple? Is that possible? Companies tried to out-Southwest Southwest and failed.

The same logic goes the other way. If you are the big guy, watching the little guy get bigger, your reaction should not be imitating him. You are a big guy. Little guy’s strategies will not work for you. When Dell started with the direct selling model, HP, Compaq and IBM tried it as well and failed. Their structure was not suitable for direct marketing.

The second point is about real time. To fully understand it, you should really read the article, but here is the gist of it. When talking about the Federal Reserve setting interests, one of the interviewees in the article says:

The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or under heating your house.

Two thoughts on this point:

The first is a something I have been lately thinking about a lot. It is one of the most prominent things every manager should do. Investigate the information he already has. There is an abundance of information in every organization just lying there because people gather it anyway. You can make a lot out of it.

The second thought is about the challenges facing governments in the future. I think three concepts are important here: real time, transparency and aggregation of information. Governmental bodies which will be able to harness the power of real time and aggregation while keeping and improving transparency will be the most successful bodies for our society.

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