Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

One of the basic beliefs behind this blog is that the same basic psychological issues confront us both as individuals and in our organizational lives. In other words, the same hangups that drag down one person can drag down an organization. We see this all the time in the way, for example, that fear undermines the confidence of both individuals and companies. For a person, we call it a “mindset”; for a company, it’s a “culture”; but the outcome is the same — paralysis.

With that in mind, I’d like to kick off a discussion of one of my favorite hangup-busting tools: the naive question.

What is a naive question?

I’m glad you asked. Read more

How many of us really think that we must be in the office every day for eight hours to do our best work? Or to get our work done at all? Probably not many.

Well, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson feel your pain, and they’ve proposed a whole new way of thinking about the working life in their forthcoming book, which is titled, bluntly enough, Why Work Sucks and How To Fix It.

The core of the book is their concept of the Results-Only Work Environment. Under their system, you and your company treat each other like grownups, capable of navigating the world of work without a million-bazillion rules about when and where you must show your face. Why? Because showing your face at a certain time and place doesn’t have any necessary relationship to how well you’re doing your job.

We’ve all knows folks who show up for work every day, “wear the flair” for the company, attend every meeting . . . and never make a dime’s worth of difference in how well the organization performs. Hey, maybe you’ve been that person when you were stuck in a low-excitement job.

The point is, time-serving does no one any good, because good work, profitability, social impact, and all the other things we say we’d like to accomplish don’t come from simple time-serving. (Ponder this: Martin Luther King was killed when he was 39 years old. It doesn’t take long to make an impact, if you put your guts into it.) No, results come from putting your energy into what you do.

Often this can be accomplished in short bursts. We tend to rediscover this in the few days before we leave for vacation, when mountains of work magically get done — or discarded — without hesitation. That’s when we cut out what Chris Brogan calls “fluff” and really get down to the brass tacks of our work.

What’s needed is a better approach to measuring how work gets done in your world. I came across the ROWE material by reading a post from Darren Barefoot that reminded me of Paul Graham’s thoughts on the subject:

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man’s land, where they’re neither working nor having fun.

It’s not a mistake, of course, that so many high-achieving workplaces (Google, Bloomberg, Container Store, etc.) are peopled with employees who are both working and having fun. That’s a far sight better than all those Office Space-like offices that kill results while also crushing the human spirit out of their denizens.

I’m looking forward to Cali and Jody’s book — I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve read it.

Meanwhile: how well does your workplace run from the standpoint of “Results-Only”?

So far I’ve only alluded briefly to Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo, figuring mainly that there was plenty of talk already going around. But a couple of friends have asked for my take, so here it goes, in short format:

• Microsoft can’t compete with Google on Google’s turf, and neither can Yahoo. Google commands a majority — and still growing — chunk of the world’s search traffic, and there’s no reason to expect that the combined Microsoft-Yahoo would have any better traction against it.
• If MicroHoo did enjoy any competitive advantages against Google — Microsoft’s deep pockets fueling Yahoo-led innovation, for example — we could guess that it would take the combined companies a long time to deploy these advantages. The reason: Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo has a great track record in delivering innovative products to market in bang-bang time. Why would the combined entity, which no doubt would be facing the usual internal frictions that accompany megamergers, do any better? And the time lost to friction inside MicroHoo would be more time for Google to make hay.
• Overall, a Microsoft-Yahoo tieup looks to me like a lite version of the Alcatel-Lucent tieup: two ineffective also-rans teaming up to become . . . a bigger also-ran. In this analogy, Google = Cisco, i.e. the suave bully who keeps taking your lunch money, but in a friendly way.
• From the perspective of Yahoo’s owner/managers, they either need to get religion about changing their ways for the better, or they need to take Microsoft’s money and run.

For more, let me recommend this short take by George Colony, and this long, detailed one by Dave Livingston.

Late in 2007, Atul Gawande made a stir with this New Yorker article:

The Checklist

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that Dr. Peter Pronovost, the subject of the article, has made a stir in the world of intensive-care medicine with his work introducing systematic checklists to monitor ICU procedures.

The concept is simple: for many medical procedures, the bulk of problems can be avoided and the bulk of benefits gained by hewing closely to “best practices” that are well-known within the medical profession. In many cases, these practices aren’t complicated; they include things like making sure that all doctors and nurses wash their hands thoroughly right before a procedure, or covering a patient’s entire body with antiseptic drapes when inserting a stent.

Simple as these individual steps may be, remembering them all is tough to do amid the hurly-burly of an emergency room or an ICU. So Pronovost, an M.D./Ph.D. with lots of smarts and lots of energy, has worked on setting up procedures for using checklists that take care of the remembering for you. A nurse is responsible for ensuring that medical staff adhere to every step of the checklist in every case.

As Gawande tells it, the results have been little short of astounding. Here’s a sampler:

Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

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Look familiar?

This is a picture of the inside of my mind.*

I’m halfway kidding. For the most part, I’m good about keeping a clean desk, and I may have mentioned before that I’m a real devotee of the philosophy embodied by Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero guide.

But if you think that means I don’t typically carry around a big stack of scribbled-up papers (drafts, articles, to-do lists, . . .), or that I don’t have many unfinished blog posts in the works, or that I’m totally on top of my many projects — if you think any of that, you’d be mistaken.

“Workiness”

One problem I tend to have is a tendency toward “workiness.” Read the title of this post again, ponder Steven Colbert’s use of “truthiness,” and you’ll understand what I mean. Just as Colbert’s on-air persona is more about the assertion or the mood of truth rather than the, y’know, truth type of truth, workiness is about the appearance or the attitude of real work rather than the doing of work.

Most of us fall victim to this at least some of the time. We spend all day in our offices, diligently writing and answering e-mails, attending meetings, cluttering and uncluttering our desks and our minds. Yet at the end of the day we tote up the score and can’t think of anything we’ve actually accomplished.

Or is it just me?

I thought not. Some office culture — the culture of the fire drill, we might call it — promote this counter-productive workiness more than others. Some personality types and styles of thinking (like, apparently, mine) are more prone to workiness than others.

And workiness gets us just as far as truthiness does. It may churn up our emotions like truthiness. It may feel like work just truthiness can feel like truth. But workiness isn’t the real work. It’s just a cheap copy, costume jewelry in place of real diamonds.

“The truth will set you free.”

Breaking free from workiness requires telling the truth, to yourself and to the rest of your organization. If you have a habit that you suspect wastes your time, take an honest look at it, figure out whether it really wastes your time, and take appropriate action. Maybe you won’t like it. Maybe it will be hard to break an old, unproductive habit. But it’s a heck of a lot better than pushing papers forever to no end.

It’s also good preparation for the next step, which is performing a workiness check for your team, your department, or your whole company. Look around you at all of these busy people. Busy, busy bees. But how much work is getting done? How much is being accomplished?

Baby steps.

It’s hard enough reforming yourself and your own habits — without the complexities of group dynamics in the mix. So don’t worry about reducing the workiness ratio of your team single-handedly, and don’t worry about achieving it all at once. But if you want to free yourself up to do your best work, it’s well worth the effort, for you and for those around you.

And if you don’t make the effort? Well, go ahead and embrace the mental and physical clutter depicted in the photo. Go ahead and keep up your non-producing habits of workiness. Go ahead wondering, day after day, whether all your toil is worth it — whether you’ll ever see any real rewards for your efforts.

Me, I’m in the process of reforming myself. No busywork. No half-hearted stabs at my projects. Work, or don’t work — but don’t fall victim to the siren song of workiness.

How’s the workiness in your organization?

~

* Not really. It’s actually taken from kk+.

Hugh’s latest post offers his insights on why Microsoft’s proposed purchase of Yahoo might be a good idea for Microsoft.

Leo Burnett and Microsoft

Do read what he has to say if you’re interested in that deal. (Dave Winer also has a perceptive take, on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal, while we’re at it.)

But this is what struck me most about Hugh’s post:

It’s easy to say in a meeting, “The world is changing, and we need to change with it”. And just as easy to get everybody in the meeting to agree with it. What’s harder is what happens after everyone has left the room. When everyone has to worry about keeping their jobs.

This could stand as the Grand Unified Theory of why it’s hard to get things done in a corporate setting. Think about it: many people find it hard enough to get themselves to follow through on their own desires for change, whether that means losing weight or changing jobs or finding someone to love.

When you translate these same psychological challenges into a group setting — especially if it’s a bureaucratized one — the task becomes all the harder.

How do you cope with these pressures?

As mentioned earlier, I spent a couple of days last week in Miami Beach talking about social networking. At the conference, I was struck by attendees’ diversity of opinion about social networking and the diversity of their approaches to it as a business proposition.

These differences came through most clearly in the final session of the conference, when I found myself disagreeing with some of the fundamental premises of one of my co-panelists. Maybe this shouldn’t be too surprising, given that social networking is such a young and molten field of endeavor.

There are plenty of folks who don’t even like the term “social networking,” preferring to talk more broadly about the role of social media, or to focus instead on how to build “community” through online means.

To pull together my thoughts on these topics, I’ve worked up a series of five posts that I’ll unroll over the next several days. Here’s are the headings:

• Giving up command, sharing control.
• Social media within and without your company.
• Measurability.
• Gaps in the landscape.
• Many paths up the mountain.

Social networking (or media, or community, etc.) is expanding and evolving so rapidly that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and it’s meant as an exploration rather than any final verdict. So I hope you’ll come exploring with me and be generous with your feedback.

(Image by imageafter.)

I’ve had enough.

No more “Web 2.0,” much less “Web 3.0″ (whatever that’s supposed to mean), and so on. The whole idea of “Web [integer].0″ is lazy and inherently meaningless.

Why meaningless? Because the boundaries between “generations” are (a) unclear, (b) shifting constantly, and (c) far more incremental than the X.0 nomenclature would indicate. The usage comes from the common practice of numbering software releases to show major or minor increments in code. E.g., the browser in which I’m typing this is Firefox 2.0.0.11.

Many of the tools that people would like to label “Web 2.0″ or “Web 3.0″ for p.r. purposes would more accurately be something like “Web 1.7.2″ or “Web 2.06″ . . . which is ridiculous.

So, from now on, I’m going to do what I can to shift the discussion toward the (intentionally facetious) format I used in the title of this post.

Welcome to “Web 2008.02.04.” Tomorrow we will welcome the arrival of “Web 2008.02.05.”

(Image from the Computer History Museum.)

Which Super Bowl ads made the best impression? Which ads fared the worst? These are key business questions as the nation recovers from the televisual orgy known as Super Bowl XLII.

To the Super Bowl ads you missed, or to see them again, check out the video player on our dedicated page, Big Game Central. That page also collects analysis from our industry experts on various business angles of the Super Bowl.

Having read a lot of this morning’s news coverage on Super Bowl commercials, I like these takes best:

• Wall Street Journal: Coke, Clydesdales Score With Super Bowl Viewers
• Reuters: Supermodels, celebrities dominate Super Bowl ads
• AP: Ahead of the Bell: Superbowl Advertisers

At the party I attended, favorite ads inluded Will Ferrell’s goofy Bud Light spot, Audi’s Godfather-themed ad (everyone agreed the Audi R8 advertised is smokin’), and Bridgestone’s spot featuring a petrified squirrel who fears he’s about to be run over. My wife liked the Victoria’s Secret ad featuring Adriana Lima in sexy-but-tasteful black lingerie (thank you, Victoria’s Secret!), and I especially liked two very different football-themed spots: the NFL’s witty spot about oboe-playing lineman Chester Pitts, and Under Armour’s minute-long, semi-apocalyptic, 300-style ad for its shoes — which, by implication, pits Under Armour against the dominance of Nike in that market.

My friends were perplexed by Frito-Lay’s Doritos ad featuring unknown singer Kina Grannis. Nothing wrong with Grannis’s voice or the execution of the ad — we just didn’t grasp what Doritos had to do with promoting unknown musical acts. Many other ads registered no more than an “Ehh” with my crowd.

As for what I disliked, I agree wholeheartedly with Suzanne Vranica’s take from the Wall Street Journal story linked above:

The biggest fumble of the night with viewers was by Salesgenie.com, a company that provides databases to marketers. More than half-a-dozen ad executives found the company’s animation spots offensive. In one ad, a married panda-bear couple speaking with Asian accents worries that they may go out of business but are saved by a panda psychic who recommends Salesgenie; the other ad shows a white boss berating an Indian salesman, Ramesh, who has eight children.

“Its hard to imagine that a company would be that insensitive,” says Rita Rodriguez, chief executive of the Brand Union US, a branding firm owned by WPP Group PLC.

Later on I’ll have more to say about the game on the field and the management lessons we might extract from it.