Posts Tagged: business culture

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31
Jul 11

The Knowing Doing Gap

I recently started reading the book, The Knowing Doing Gap, How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action by Jeffrey Pfeffer (Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford) and Robert Sutton (Professor of Management science, Stanford).

I’ve been a long-time follower of Bob Sutton’s blog, and it was about time I picked up one of his books to read. To my way of thinking, Bob has some fairly sensible advice for working with people, and I’d suggest you take a moment to hear what he has to say.

From the Preface:

“But once something was clearly not working [while writing the book], we abandoned the path quickly, stopping just long enough to figure out what we should learn before trying something new. We never stopped to worry about how much time we had wasted and never spent one minute talking about which one of us was to blame for the last dead end. Rather we were inspired by the successful firms we studied, in which setbacks and mistakes were viewed as an inevitable, even desirable, part of being action oriented. We heeded their advice that the only true failure was to stop trying new things and to stop learning from the last effort to turn knowledge into action.”

 Great advice for being action oriented — from the preface, no less!

  1. Recognize that something isn’t working. (This is often easier said than done.)
  2. Abandon that path quickly.
  3. Figure out what to learn from the last effort, and try something new.
  4. Don’t worry about wasted time, nor assigning blame.
  5. View setbacks and mistakes as desirable.
  6. The worst thing you can do is to stop trying new things.

My questions to you are: When did you last fail in front of your whole team (maybe even your whole company)? What did you learn? What are you trying now?

Can’t wait to read the rest of the book!

- Peter

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9
Feb 11

Focus

Hoarce Dediu; Why focusing on a few products is hard:

But “focus” is the willful rejection of this theory. By saying no to alternatives you increase risk disproportionally to the reward. If you have the means to maintain a portfolio it certainly seems imprudent not to do so.

So why would someone want to focus?

The answer is that too much diversification is dangerous. It’s dilutive to everything the company uses to create value: its resources, its processes and its priorities. It dulls the mind and tarnishes the brand.

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13
Nov 10

Time Waste

Henry Ford:

“Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.”

Time wastes are hard to see, and even harder to fix.

Take for example, communicating an idea to someone. You could spend 30 minutes crafting what you think is a perfectly clear email, or you could just talk to them for 5 minutes and let them ask a few questions. Who knows, they may understand your idea far faster than you thought.

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9
Nov 10

The Right Team

Jim Collins, in Good to Great:

“We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage “People are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”

I think vision and strategy are important (just watch the Knowledge Navigator from Apple’s distant past to understand how they got to be where they are today), but getting the right people in the right places is far more important.  Studies have found 10-fold differences in productivity between different programmers, and I see no reason why that wouldn’t apply to other roles. New tools routinely are found to be exponentially more useful than their predecessors.

“the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline – a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.” – Jim Collins

“People can learn skills and acquire knowledge, but they cannot learn the essential character traits that make them right for your organization.”- Jim Collins

I’m not a fan of calling people resources, but perhaps in the sense that they are the foundation of any company, people are by far your most important asset. Get the right people on the team first, and there’s nothing you can’t do exponentially better (or 10-fold better) than your competitors.

Seth Godin, describes these people:

“Is there anyone in an organization who is absolutely irreplaceable? Probably not. But the most essential people are so difficult to replace, so risky to lose, and so valuable that they might as well be irreplaceable.”

Now that is the type of person you want filling each and every role on your team.

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5
Nov 10

Good Ideas

Worth watching: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. It is a “trailer” for a recently released book. Same folks did this one as Dan Pink’s The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Video:

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