Business Insight Zone

How much energy do you expend trying to avoid failure?

You could be forgiven, reviewing certain early years of my career, if you thought that my main goal was to avoid ever being seen to make a mistake. This has been true even at times when I knew that forging ahead and making productive (or instructive) mistakes would have been much better for my career, not to mention my psyche. The psychology of human performance is a tricky thing.

Particularly if you have a record of achievement behind you (and you should have seen my high-school transcripts!), you can easily get trapped in thinking that you must always succeed. It’s a mindset that can keep you from stretching yourself to go after bigger goals: you aim at closer targets so that you can be totally sure of hitting them — even when that means foregoing more distant, more meaningful objectives.

Jo Rowling’s abject failure.

I’m thinking of all this because I’ve just listened to J. K. Rowling’s excellent Harvard commencement address, which focuses on the merits of failure:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending Read more

Being both a stickler for words and a student of workplace issues, I’ve been paying more attention lately to the “crutch” words we use when we talk about work. I encounter these in my own office (not least from myself!), from my students, from my friends on Twitter, and in countless articles about the way we work today.

Here, then, is my nominee for Public Enemy #1 in the category of “crutch” words:

Busy.

Someone asks, “How’s it going?” We say, “Good — but I’m soooo busy” or “Ack — I’m SO busy” or just “Busy, busy, busy.” Often, we don’t even pause to think why we’re so busy, or why the busy-ness isn’t getting better over time.

The way I’ve used the word, and the way I’ve heard others use it, it’s like talking about the weather: “I can’t believe how rainy it’s been” turns into “I can’t believe how busy I’ve been.” As though busy-ness is something that just happens to us.

Well, UNlike the weather, busy-ness is something that everybody talks about that we CAN do something about. So in the interest of reminding myself that I’m responsible for my own working life, I’ve stopped using “busy” and started using expressions like these:

• “I have a lot on my plate right now.”
• “I’ve taken on too many commitments, and now I’m trying to figure out how to balance them.
• “My schedule has been hectic, but that’s my own fault.”

Sure, these are just semantic tricks, but the words we use shape the way we think. And I’d rather think clearly about the way I work, instead of acting like the universe has dropped a big pile of “busy” on my plate and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Down with “busy”-itis!

~

Now over to you, dear reader:

What are the worst “crutch” words YOU hear at work?

~

(Photo by wanderingseoul61.)

American has the right idea by posting YouTube videos like this one.*

Direct outreach — especially when used to accept blame — can help the company restore its image after this week’s debacle, when thousands of flights have been canceled because American Airlines planes didn’t meet F.A.A. standards.

But American chief Gerard Arpey and his lieutenants have a chance to make their outreach even better by the low-tech means of clarifying their language.

Hoover’s has always rejected jargon in its profiles. Indeed, you could say it’s our stock in trade. Corporate executives like Arpey would be better off if they did the same thing.

In the YouTube clip of his press conference, Read more

Kitty Genovese, you’ll recall, was the victim in a dark episode in modern urban history: she was stalked and murdered in Queens, New York in 1964 — not in silence or seclusion, but in the full hearing of her neighbors, all of whom assumed that someone else would do something about what they were all hearing. Horrified reactions to her death prompted not just intense media coverage, but a wave of research into what we now call the “bystander effect.”

Usually I try not to think about gruesome things like Genovese’s untimely end, and I would never make a straight-up comparison between the frustrations we face in the workplace and the murder of an innocent woman. But I was reminded of Genovese and the bystander effect by a short, powerful item by Francois Gossieaux that I came across this morning.¹

The Conspiracy Of Silence - how silence fails — and sometimes kills.

Before turning to the business applications of his thoughts, Read more

Kathy Sierra has become a perennial hit at South by Southwest Interactive. She’s one of the prime movers behind O’Reilly’s Head First series of software books, and she’s won a large following with her smart application of neuroscience and psychology to the challenges of making software more user-friendly.

Although she suspending blogging at Creating Passionate Users last year, her archives are still available to inspire those looking for better solutions to usability problems. While I don’t write software, I love thinking about how Sierra’s insights apply to broader issues of teaching/training and to much broader issues of general management. Smart companies are increasingly turning to the insights of neuroscience to tease out better ways of doing things.

Some of what Sierra said in this year’s speech was old hat for her long-time followers, but who cares? Her talk was so popular that it filled Ballroom A at the Austin Convention Center, and then filled overflow rooms as well.

I won’t recap the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

• The goal of your products shouldn’t be to have users crowing about your company, or even about your products, but rather crowing about how they — the users — now “kick ass” by using our products. You want them saying “I kick ass!” (This is one of Sierra’s favorite lines, and always draws a laugh.)
• To do this, we need to make software applications that compensate for the missing “human-ness” in human-computer interactions.
• Why do people want to grow and get better? Read more
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Here’s a postulate: We tend to conflate the emotional difficulty of something with its cognitive complexity — and it gets in the way of our success in business.

Let’s define our terms:

• Cognitively complex: possessing many rational layers, elements, or valences. Examples would be advanced mastery of chess, organic chemisty, or computer-network architecture, or the level of complexity that routinely faces big-company CEOs as they try to make decisions for their companies.

• Emotionally difficult: things that are painful, like the death of a loved one, or facing one’s deepest fears in life.

My hypothesis is that, in our working lives, we often experience emotional difficulty while labeling it as cognitive complexity.

In cases like this, what’s really holding us back are deep-seated emotions — fear, self-doubt, apathy, or what-have-you. But who wants to admit that emotional hangups are hampering their progress on Big Project X? Aren’t we supposed to be grown-ups? Tough, business-minded professionals? Right?

It’s hard — painful — to confront thoughts like these. So we end up averting our gazes elsewhere. And what do we land on instead? The purported complexity of the tasks at hand.

It’s easy to tell your team: “This thing is way more complicated than we ever thought. We’re going to have to do a lot more research to get a grip on it.” It’s much harder to tell your team: “You know, there’s some complexity here, but I think what’s really holding me back is that I’m just afraid this whole thing is going to blow up and I’m gonna get blamed for it.”

Or how about this one? “Deep down I believe we’re headed down the wrong path, but I’ve been too afraid to say anything about it for fear of rocking the boat. I think we’ve been making this more complicated than it is, just so we don’t have to admit that it’s a failed project, plain and simple.”

If it’s about cognitive complexity, then all we need is more studies, more thinking, more meetings, more PowerPoint decks, more committees. We can do that. We know how to budget for that. Time to start adjusting the Gantt charts . . .

If it’s about emotional pain, then we have to muster the courage to confront our own hangups and those of our organizations. And where does that fit into the project-management lifecycle? Or the budgeting process? Or our quarterly reviews?

What do you think? Am I on to something here? I’ll be looking for examples of what I’m talking about in the business news; meanwhile, please share your own insights.

[Chess photo by dlkinney; grief photo by MegElizabeth.]

Reading this excellent GigaOM piece on Freescale, I was struck by this tidbit:

As the CEO of Intersil, [new Freescale CEO Richard] Beyer presided over several acquisitions and created a laser focus on analog chips. That strategy isn’t likely to work at Freescale, he said, which is too big in too many markets to pare down to just one.

No doubt Beyer’s judgment on this issue is sound — he’s earned his high reputation in the world of microchips — but it leads me to ponder this broader question:

Would you reduce the scale of your company if doing so meant that you enjoyed a better quality of business?

Some companies do. Earlier this decade, ABB hived off many of the businesses it had acquired from the mid-1990s forward, in favor of a devoted focus to its core markets. Alan Mulally has said that he intends for Ford to be a smaller — but much better — company when its restructuring is complete. And many companies have spun off lower-performing units in hopes of improving their own fortunes.

Such changes can be wrenching, especially because Wall Street loves to see apples-to-apples revenue growth, quarter after quarter and year after year. Just because the investment community wants it, though, doesn’t make it the right thing approach for a successful company. In any business, there will always be a tension between short-term and long-term gains — but in my view many, many firms would be better served to turn the knob more in the direction of the long term.

Freelancers and contractors know very well what it’s like to “fire” the customers who don’t bring them joy. The parting of ways could be over fees, personalities, irreconcilable creative differences, whatever. But the savviest veteran freelancers know that life — and a happy career — is too short to stick by unworthy customers, even though they do pay you such shiny, shiny money. (Stowe Boyd has a nice post here about dropping those clients whose cultures he finds toxic.)

Individually, we should also “fire” the worst uses of our time — but pride and the force of habit often prevents us from doing what we should. Since organizations are amalgams of many flawed individuals, it’s not surprising that they share the same hangups that many individuals do, even though organizations exist, in theory, to must our individual weaknesses while magnifying our strengths.

Does your company have the guts to go smaller-but-better? Do you?

(Porsche photo from the Porsche Club of America — and what a fine bunch of eye-candy those old cars make!)

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+.

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.)

Some colleagues and I were talking about long-dead, now-dying, and will-be-dying phrases from the business world. Who knows when the last time was a US executive said “Take a memo!” — possibly there are a few Juraissic CEOs still plying their trade — but it’s a handy indicator of the type.

The specific culprit that got us talking about this was “the ever-increasing pace of technological change.” (You can also insert “business” in place of “technological.”) Our collective best guess was that, sometime soon, people will just stop saying this because everyone will take it as a given.

What’s your best example?  What did people used to say that they no longer do?  What do they say now that they won’t in five or ten years?