Passion, People and Principles
post # 219 — October 19, 2006 — a General post
Last year, I was asked to contribute to a book commemorating Tom Peters’ 60th birthday. Here’s what I had to say:
Tom, whatever impact you have had on global industry and commerce, it may be that your biggest impact has been on people like me who saw your success and said “I wanna do that!”
Goodness knows how many consulting, speaking and writing careers (of highly variable quality and success) you are responsible for. Countless young academics (like me) dropped out, were liberated from the confines of dry scholarship by the example of someone who made a difference by being provocative, focusing on idea generation, challenging people to their face and, in general, acting like you were having a lot of fun.
Trouble was, it wasn’t as easy as it looked! Not everyone can get away with attacking people’s cherished beliefs and have them respond by giving you a standing ovation! Tom, why didn’t you warn us that they’d be more likely to throw us out of the room? (And, in vast numbers, proceeded to do so!) Eventually, some of us figured enough of it out to survive, but, hey, you could have warned us!
Then there’s that issue of writing. OK, Tom, we got it, writing works. Gotta do a book! So, like a million other clones, we went through the process. As in real life, the conception part was fun: about the most fun we were gonna have for a long time. Then came the morning sickness, the constant burden (which lasted more than 9 months: it was elephantine) that we were carrying around something that was supposed (eventually) to have a life of its own. Then came delivery: we stretched and we squeezed, until we Tomclones finally produced something that we hoped was a beauty, or at least not totally ugly. Only to discover that while the rest of the world made polite noises, no-one really cared. Tom, why didn’t you tell us not only how hard it was to do a book, but how hard it was to get anyone to notice, let alone care! You made it look so easy, you son-of-a-gun! Do you realize how many lives you ruined? How many trees were cut down to print imitation-Peters volumes that no-one ever read?
And then what did you turn around and do? You wrote another bloody book! And another! Oh, Jeez, what game have you suckered me into, Tom? I just about had a few good ideas for one book, and now I’m supposed to start over? You led us down the garden path, Tom.
There’s a vast horde of us, Tom, who couldn’t be Elvis or Paul McCartney, so we tried being you. I know you’ve had a big impact on the people you’ve met, Tom, but what about all the people you’ve never met, whose lives you changed, not always for the better, by your example? Net, net, net, Tom, are sure your influence has been benign?
PS. Thanks! I couldn’t have had my wonderful life without you!
post # 218 — October 18, 2006 — a General post
This blog sometimes gets intense, so I thought I’d throw in some light things from time to time.
I hope what follows is out of copyright. It was popular as a party piece among my friends in the 1960s UK, although I believe it dates from the 1950s Saturday Evening Post. Anyone have more background? Enjoy!
Prinderella and the Cince
by Colonel Stoopnagle
Here, indeed, is a story that’ll make your cresh fleep. It will give you poose gimples. Think of a poor little glip of a surl, prairie vitty, who, just because she had two sisty uglers, had to flop the more, clinkle the shuvvers out of the stitchen cove and do all the other chasty nores, while her soamly histers went to a drancy bess fall. Wasn’t that a shirty dame?
Well, to make a long shorry stort, this youngless hapster was chewing her doors one day, when who should suddenly appear but a garry fawdmother. Beeling very fadly for this witty prafe, she happed her clands, said a couple of waggic merds, and in the ash of a flybrow, Prinderella was transformed into a bavaging reauty.
And out at the sturbcone stood a nagmificent coalden goach, made of a pipe rellow yumpkin. The gaudy fairmother told her to hop in and dive to the drance, but added that she must positively be mid by homelight. So, overmoash with accumtion, she fanked the tharry from the hottom of her bart, bimed acloard, the driver whacked his crip, and off they went in a dowd of clust.
Soon they came to a casterful wundel, where a pransome hince was possing a tarty for the teeple of the pown. Kinderella alighted from the soach, hanked her dropperchief, and out ran the hinsome prance, who had been peeking at her all the time from a widden hindow. The sugly isters stood bylently sigh, not sinderizing Reckognella in her goyal rarments.
Well, to make a long shorty still storer, the nince went absolutely pruts over the pruvvly lincess. After several dowers of antsing, he was ayzier than crevver. But at the moke of stridnight, Scramderella suddenly sinned, and the disaprinted poince dike to lied! He had forgotten to ask the nincess her prame! But as she went stunning down the long reps, she slicked off one of the glass kippers she was wearing, and the pounce princed upon it with eeming glize.
The next day he tied all over trown to find the lainty daydy whose foot slitted that fipper. And the ditty prame with the only fit that footed was none other than our layding leedy. So she finally prairied the mince, and they happed livily after everward.
And that wasn’t a shirty dame, was it?
Today’s blogpost is from “The Best of The Corporate Curmudgeonâ€, a syndicated column by by Dale Dauten
(Thanks to Bill Peper for drawing it to my attention)
“When the outcome of a meeting is to have another meeting, it has been a lousy meeting.”
— Herbert Hoover
Let’s say you attend, on average, two meetings per workday. That would be about 500 meetings a year, or, if aggregated over a forty-year career, 20,000 meetings — a thought that could make anyone want to reach for the black capsule of death and hope for something better on the next plane of existence.
What got me thinking about meetings was sitting in one so tedious that I had time to do ridiculous calculations, such as the number of meetings in a career. And I also had time to recall that handful of meetings where the minds in the room caught fire, where ideas were spiraling toward group genius.
What made those meetings special, and what makes the average one so agonizingly… well, average? I spent the rest of the meeting trying to work out the formula for the group IQ of the meeting.
The calculation of Intelligence Quotient is standardized, so that 100 is the mean, so let’s start with a score for meetings of 100 and then add and subtract from that. We’re after mental energy and the goal is to quantify the types of places and people that hum with energy and ones that suck the life-force right out of you.
MEETING IQ (or MIQ) = 100
• Minus the number of cell phone rings,
• Minus the number of Blackberries in the room (times ten),
• Minus double the number of fluorescent tubes lighting the room,
• Minus the distance, in feet, between the two farthest participants,
• Minus 50 points if there are rules (formal or informal) about
who sits where,
• Plus triple the number of times the highest-ranking person in
the room makes a note of something said in the meeting,
• Plus the number of magazine subscriptions by the participants,
not counting industry publications,
• Plus the number of novels read by all participants in the past
six months,
• Plus the number of minutes a lousy boss is out of the meeting,
• Plus the number of minutes a great boss is in the room,
• Minus the number of times an assistant enters the room to give/say
something to one of the participants (times ten),
• Minus the number of clichés used during the meeting (with each
“out of the box†counting as five and each PowerPoint slide
counting as an instant cliché),
• Plus the number of times the word “customer†is used,
• Minus the number of times the word “budget is used,
• Minus the number of times “hold onâ€, “wait a minute†or “could
you repeat that?†is used,
• Plus triple the number of genuine laughs during the meeting,
• Minus double the number of polite chuckles,
• Plus the number of workplace compliments anyone in the group has
received in the past 30 days,
• Plus the number of new ideas/experiments tried in the past six
months (times 10)
• Plus the number of years between the youngest and oldest person
in the meeting,
• Plus the number of industries worked in by all the participants,
• Plus the number of customer locations visited by people in the
room in the past 90 days.
• Plus 25 points for use of a phrase similar to “There has to be
better way,â€
• Plus 50 points if the group applauds an idea,
• Plus 100 points if someone says “We need to come up with
something truly unique.â€
As you can see from this list, it’s entirely possible, likely even, to have a negative Meeting IQ score. When this happens, the IQs of all attendees are diminished by about ten percent for the rest of the day. Repeated exposure may cause a permanent reduction in IQ.
In other words, bad meetings are an intelligence suction device, pulling mental energy out of organizations. Where does all that lost IQ go? That’s how they make neon lights.
post # 216 — October 17, 2006 — a Strategy post
This week I have posted the final episode in my 14-part strategy series of podcasts. The final episode, based on the closing chapter of my book PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH, is called “The Courage to Manage.”
The central argument of the final episode is that the key to strategy is having good managers who can create a sense of ‘insistent patience’ — Rome doesn’t get built in a day, but we ARE building Rome.
My Business Masterclass audio seminars are always downloadable at no cost. You can download “The Courage to Manage” or sign up to receive new seminars automatically every week by subscribing to my Business Masterclass Series with iTunes or other podcast players. Or you can subscribe right here by going to davidmaister.com/subscriptions.
After this week, I will be taking a few weeks’ break in issuing podcasts, in preparation for the launch of a new 15-part series on CAREERS, which will begin in mid-November.
post # 215 — October 16, 2006 — a Managing post
I’m always fascinated that we all keep trying things that don’t work.
I work quite a lot with CEOs and managing partners, each of whom wants to get their organization to stretch for greater achievement. The two most common approaches they seem to try, at opposite extremes in style, are the Vision and Technocratic approaches.
The Vision approach tries to bring about organizational energy and determination by “selling the dream.†Managers ask the people in our organization to stretch for ambitious goals and be accountable for higher or different standards, all in the name of achieving fame, glory and riches for the organization.
There would be nothing wrong with this approach -if it worked. However, few of us pass the reality test of actually being able to energize large numbers of other people either through the glamour of the dream we describe or our skill in presenting it.
The sad truth is that we cannot automatically assume that people care enough about the organization to contribute extra energy. It may be a depressing commentary on the human condition, but except in some very special cultures, “do it for the glory of the group†works on only a very small percentage of people.
The second common managerial approach to creating energy and excitement that I see attempted (a lot of the time) is the Technocratic process. This is made up of three steps: (a) announce goals, (b) put in place new metrics that monitor those goals and (c) design a reward scheme for those who score well on the metrics.
If this were all it took to head an organization, effective managers would be ten-a-penny, and every business school in the world would have to be shut down due to a lack of customers. Contrary to what we are often told (and many people believe) it takes more than a pay scheme to move an organization. (See— or, rather, hear— my podcast on this topic.)
If the Vision approach is too inspirational to work effectively for most of us in the real world, then theTechnocratic approach is too devoid of human feeling to accomplish its goal. In essence it says: “Do these things and we’ll pay you.†There is nothing illogical about this, but as Alfie Kohn has pointed out in his book Punished by Rewards (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), the very act of asking people to do things primarily for the money diverts their attention from any meaning or purpose in what they are doing. As a result, they do it with less passion, care and attention to detail, and performance will, surprisingly, decline, not improve.
There is yet another problem with trying to energize, enthuse and engage an organization through measures and rewards. Itis often true that as strategies accumulate over time, so do reward metrics. New metrics are often added, but only rarely are old ones taken away. Confusion inevitably arises as to which metrics management really wants people to pay attention to.
As a result, people inevitably default to measures that track short-term financials. New, strategic metrics are rarely viewed as equally powerful. On his blog, Stanford professor Bob Sutton describes this as the “Otis Redding problem,†based on a line from the song “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay†— “I can’t do what ten people tell me to do, so I guess I’ll remain the same.â€
It is worth pointing out that, if the Vision and Technocratic approaches to bringing about organizational energy are difficult to pull off, trying to use them in combination is often a disaster. “Do it for the glory of the organization, but by the way we’ll pay you less if you don’t do it!†may not be absolutely contradictory, but the tone and style of the messages are completely different. We are unlikely to be effective if we try to inspire and threaten in the same sentence!
Some questions for the community:
- Do you agree that these approaches are very common?
- Do you agree that these approaches usually fail?
- Why do people keep trying them?
- What works?
post # 214 — October 14, 2006 — a Client Relations post
David Kirk added this comment and question to the post on value pricing. I decided to move it to a new post to see if the community has reactions to his questions. Here’s what he had to say:
The timing of this post is almost perfect for me. Unfortunately, almost in this case is three days too late!
Over the last year, I’ve been working on-and-off with a trade association to do some work to solve a problem (entailing calculating a price index in a particular way based on historical data). This has all been in the “proposal stage” where we were all deciding whether what I could offer could work. (Not that my solution is particularly exceptional, but it is the best solution to their specific problem in this case and I know of very few others in South Africa who can provide all the aspects of this work – you’re gonna have to trust me on this part!). When they agree they want the work I done, I prepare a quote based on hourly billings for the team to be involved on the project. I don’t include any amount for the time already spent (amounting to about 40% again on top of the quote) because I felt that was part of the process leading up to getting the work. It was during this proposal phase where I did signficant research, both about their problem/situation and about the best solution for them.
If the results are positive (they will be based on historical data, so neither party can know this yet), the impact on the regulation of this industry is likely to mean that the member companies of the trade association will see a return on their investment in the project of several thousand percent (based on retaining pricing power and thus profitability from several large, listed businesses.
In a meeting this week that basically demanded a massive discount. Their argument for why the cost is too high? “The trade association is a non-profit company with limited funds.”
Also, based on the work done to date and the documents I prepared for them, it is possible that someone could “reverse engineer” the required calcs and do a decent job at performing the work (although if they messed up they probably wouldn’t even know it, let alone what to do about it) at a lower cost because their billing rate doesn’t reflect the expertise required to understand what calcs and formulae were needed in the first place.
So, my questions:
- What to do about the trade association claiming no money when the real beneficiaries have plenty, and how does this tie into value pricing?
- How do I get around the problem of having given away so much “free consulting”?
- How should I have approached this situation from the start, since it’s clear my actual strategy failed miserably?
- Does this sound like the sort of client that we should all avoid like the plague?
post # 213 — October 13, 2006 — a Client Relations post
One of the most frequent questions I get at seminars and speeches is whether or not I support ‘value billing.’
Usually, the questioner is asking whether services can and should be priced on some basis other than the hourly rate cost that it took to produce the service.
We are all familiar with the perverse incentives that hourly or daily pricing systems create: if the provider gets more efficient and finds a way to do the work with less time, then the provider gets paid less for the job.
This is an ancient problem. There’s an old, traditional song in my music collection, sung by Paul Robeson, called “The Cobbler’s Songâ€. One verse goes like this:
The stouter I cobble, the less I earn
For the soles ne’er crack , not the uppers turn.
The stouter I cobble, the less my pay.
But work can only be done one way.
The best source on value pricing is Ron Baker’s book The Professionals Guide to Value Pricing.
However, I think many people who analyze this situation get it completely wrong. They want to call it value pricing because they think that if they create more value for the client, they should be paid more.
Wrong! We like in a capitalist, free exchange society. In such an economy price is not set by what things cost to make, nor the scale of the benefits delivered to the client.
Instead, prices are set by scarcity — the relative supply and demand for the service provided. Water has more inherent benefit than diamonds, but diamonds cost more because of an artificially managed supply and demand imbalance.
If you save your client a million dollars through your tax advice (for example), that doesn’t mean you deserve a high percent of those savings — IF MANY OTHER TAX ADVISORS WOULD ALSO HAVE ACHIEVED THAT BENEFIT.
You get paid a lot when your client believes you deliver a level of value that cannot be (or is not being) delivered by other possible providers.
For each of thus, then, whether we are individuals or large firms, our challenge is “How do I make myself special, in ways that clients value?†It’s not primarily a pricing problem, but a combination of ensuring that I DO become more valuable in my clients’ eyes, and then have a method of pricing which captures that.
For over ten years, I have practiced a particularly “clean†form of this. I set my fee by the number of days I work for the client (at particularly high daily rate) but I give every client an unconditional satisfaction guarantee.
Every bill I send out, without exception, has these precise words: “If you are anything less than completely satisfied, then pay me only what you think the work was worth.â€
Note that it doesn’t say “call me to discuss payment.†It says “Pay me what you think I was worth.†The obligation is now on me to serve the client in such as a way that he or she can really see the value provided.
The amount they pay is now based not on my cost to deliver, not the amount of the benefit they received, but whether or not THEY believe I was sufficiently special to deserve a premium fee.
There’s no secret trick to value billing — just figure out a way to be more valuable. If you are, you’ll get paid more.
In last week’s Economist, there was a special report on the competition for talent, which concluded (among other things) that employers needed to develop an “Employe Value Proposition†ie a reason why a talented person would want to join (and stay with) an organization.
Good idea! Not too many examples of such ‘EVPs’ were given, but it was observed that a major theme could be delivering to talented people the “learning organization†— the chance to learn, develop and grow. However, the Economist concluded that few organizations knew how to create that.
The topic of marketing your organization to the people you want to attract has never been more timely. What The Economist got absolutely right was that you need a specific proposition to market successfully. You can’t possibly be attractive to all possible recruits. Some will want to be team players, some will want lots of autonomy. Some will want immediate rewards, some will want o be part of building something.
Some, in the language of Bob Sutton’s blog and book, want a “No Assholes†policy. Some of them want the freedom to BE the asshole!
Here are the (strictly enforced) rules I would establish to form MY company’s employer value proposition:
- EVP rule 1: Anything that can be delegated must be
- EVP rule 2: Only true team players allowed — no lone wolves, no matter how big their book of business
- EVP: rule 3: Grow or go — no room for anyone who doesn’t want to take on new responsibilities and skills every year
- EVP rule 4: Only those who are interested in helping OTHER people succeed are allowed to hold managerial or supervisory positions.
- EVP rule 5: No (repeat offender) assholes (we all get it wrong sometimes.)
- EVP Rule 6: Ten percent of everybody’s time and everybody’s budget is to be spent investing in the future
- EVP 7: As soon as we know you aren’t going to et promoted, we will tell you. No faking it.
- EVP Rule 8. If we part, we will do all we can to ensure that we part in friendship
- EVP Rule 9: If we part, we will provide more assistance in helping you find your next job than any of our other competitors.
What do you think? Would that be an attractive EVP in your business? Would it make talented people want to work there?
What would YOU offer as a viable Employers’ Value Proposaition that would attract the best and the brightest?
I have been doing a lot of client work in the last few weeks in many countries, meeting people young and old in professional businesses.
My message is one of the economic benefits of optimism, professionalism and high standards, but it is met most often with a dejected, beaten-down cynicism.
Many times during my latest trip I was told things like: “David. It would be very nice to have your ideals: to believe that the managers with the highest integrity get the best work and the highest profits out of the group they manage. But don’t task-masters and slave-drivers also get results?â€
“It would be nice to believe that the way you get the best out of employees and clients is to try – at least try — and understand them as human beings, and get better, if necessary at meeting their human needs. But don’t such idealistic people get rejected in companies — can you really get promoted as a manager if you care about your people — or your customers — too much?”
I keep meeting people who have given up their ability to believe in the power of standards and ideals (or to believe that anyone else in business has them).
Some Examples
A consultant (age 50 or so), who worked for one of the most famous ‘brand names’ in consulting:
“I was as simple boy who grew up in the country. When I came to the city, they taught me that to get on in business you have to lie. You exaggerate and misrepresent in proposals in order to win the work, you claim to have done things you have not done. That’s the way the game is played, you are taught.â€
A 30-year-old middle-level supervisor at a European-wide training program:
“The firm pretends that it wants to inspire us, but the truth is that we do boring work, and so do those more senior than us. We cannot imagine that there are people who do work they are still excited about. That’s a luxury we cannot dream about. They just want us to work harder and get the people who report to us to work harder.â€
A partner in a tax firm:
“We know many ways to save our clients money, but that just would mean we would bill them less and take home less pay, so we don’t work at getting efficient. That would be the ‘right’ thing to do, and may even get us a good repuation in the long run, but no-one would seriously suggest changing to that way.”
A senior national-level director of a professional business, in charge of 6,000 people:
“It’s OK talking about all this quality and employee motivation stuff, David, but we just want to make money — lot’s of it. What’s wrong with that?â€
So here’s my question to you: How did we / you end up here? Clearly, something was missing from my education and upbringing – the world forgot to “beat out of me” my ideals, but seems to have done a good job of beating them out of most other people.
I’m really interested: What (specifically) happened to you that made you lose your innocence about how business (or academia) was run? (Stories please.)
post # 210 — October 9, 2006 — a Client Relations post
In case any of you need to “win some new business†and don’t have time to wroite a proposal document, I have prepared a genreic one for you here.
Beloved Client: You have ambitious goals, which will generate significant returns if you can achieve them. However, you have told us that your goals will not be achieved by ‘business as usual.’ You recognize that you will need to re-examine and redesign a number of your processes to capitalize upon the opportunities you have.
In turn, redesigning some of your processes will inevitably involve re-allocations of responsibilities, duties and accountabilities.
It can be anticipated that achieving consensus on these re-allocations will not be easy, and must be accomplished through a process of consultation, participation and involvement if you are to ensure the buy-in necessary for diligent implementation and execution of your plans.
In assisting you, we will play the role of objective outsiders, using our accumulated expertise and proprietary methodologies to support you in the following stages of your decision-making and implementation:
- Suggesting information collection from employees and customers
- Assisting in analyzing and interpreting responses from these sources
- Conducting discussions with those you consider peers in your business, collecting best practice guidelines
- Preparing for, conducting and analyzing one-on-one and small-group consultation sessions with your key decision-makers to identify issues, raise concerns, test emerging consensus on possible action areas
- Re-analyze your financials and other numeric data to shed fresh insight on operational and financial results over time, geography, industry, product-line and other operating groups.
- Facilitating top-management review of this information by design of meetings and conferences, where necessary acting to challenge assumptions and generate alternatives not previously considered.
Once management decisions have been arrived at, we will help in the design and execution of communication and consensus-building activities to educate the organization in the new methods of operating, helping to communicate the vision, clarify new roles and responsibilities, and design new metrics to monitor the organization’s performance (and that of each operating unit) in the new behaviors. Where necessary we will integrate these new metrics into a balanced scorecard and assist with a redesign of your performance appraisal and compensation schemes to reflect the new strategies, processes and responsibilities.
We recommend that you invest $XXX in our services to ensure the arraignment of your goals.
What do you think? Would this earn any business? Are proposals like this all con jobs?
What would you put into a generic proposal or pitch document?
