Monthly Archives: March 2009

March 26, 2009 · 7:04 am

I wish I’d thought of that…

Today when I was asked a question about organizational change I found myself repeating a story from a few years ago. There’s a lesson in it for all of us who make our living with ideas. The lesson is this. As a change agent, you are constantly making a choice. Take credit. Or make a difference.

The trick is that many people don’t know that this is a choice they have to make. Witness the following real story:

A consultant in my practice was reporting back to me on a big meeting he’d had with senior execs. He was very proud to have the CEO there.

“They loved us. I can’t count how many times I heard the consultant’s plan is great. ”

My response. “We are dead. We are soooooo dead.”

The consultant was dismayed. There was always a little bit of tension between us. He’d wanted my job. I got it instead. That much is fact.

But personal relationships are not about facts. They are about perception. I know his perception was that I was more critical of his work than I should be. Like so many times when we attribute motives to people, he was simply wrong. I wasn’t trying to undermine his “victory”. We really were in trouble.

Sometimes a question is the best way to explain. “When they say the consultant’s plan who is accountable for delivering that plan?

His answer was quick, “Their team has to deliver. We’ve done our job.”

My reply was also quick. “So how can they be accountable if it’s our plan?”

Silence.

By the way. I took no joy in it, but I was right. Despite all the great words, that project did not move forward. Somewhere in a backroom, a casual conversation, or just in the general stuff that happens it got buried, lost, derailed or just forgotten. We lost a big potential sale and a lot of revenue.

It was our plan. It had no champion. No-one at that company would be willing to put it forward, to believe in it and to make sure it was not forgotten.

If only someone on the client’s team had taken ownership. But why should they? It already had an owner. It was the consultant’s idea. In fact, if they had tried to take ownership they would have looked like they were taking credit for someone else’s idea. Admittedly, for some — that’s not a problem. But there’s another corporate issue. Why take the risk? No new idea is without risk. So let the consultant float the trial balloon and see if it goes anywhere. If it does, there’s lots of time to get on board.

In fact, I have often proposed that this is a great use for consultants. We can raise subjects that nobody else will touch. We are — or should be — regarded as intelligent and objective. Some of these ideas are true game changers for the companies we serve. At those times we provide a very useful service. We help make lasting and measurable change.

As I pondered this consultant’s problem, wondering why he didn’t get it, a light went on for me. It was something I knew internally, but had never really articulated fully. In the art of being a consultant, you have to have wisdom to know when – and when not to take on initial ownership of an idea. That is, if your real goal is to make change.

That’s where I had to take my own medicine. Instead of worrying about this other consultant’s problem, what I should be asking myself is, what can I learn from this. You cannot change others if you can’t change yourself.

Here’s my reflection. I don’t know why everyone gets into consulting. I can only tell my story and see if it resonates. I like to help people, I like to solve problems and — but deep in my heart, I’m still a bit of an entertainer. My friend Ian Tamblyn (one of Canada’s great songwriters and a great entertainer) captures this so well in his song, Campfire Light. “I like to sing, I love to dance, I will play the fool if I have the chance…”

The danger for me is that I do like to the be the one who comes up with a great line, a joke — or an idea. I like to win debates. And I like recognition for my work. It’s a part of what drives me to be a consultant and facilitator. I have to say it is also a factor in any successes I’ve had. I’ve been able to get my ideas across because I present well and I can grab an audience.

But I’m also driven by the need to make real change. Life is precious. You spend a lot of that time working. I can’t simply sell that much of my life for money. What I do has to have purpose.

What I didn’t really realize is that sometimes I might have to choose between the two.

In these little moments when life sends you a message, you have to decide what you are going to do. I decided that it was time to wrestle with my ego. I wanted results more than I wanted the applause.

So I started to try to let others come up with the great ideas. They need to discover the answer for themselves. And like any major change of unconscious behaviour, I embarked on a long journey of becoming aware of a multitude of tiny things and changing them — one by one.

I’m still on the journey. But believe it or not, I’m a lot further than I was when I had this conversation with the other consultant. I’ve changed a lot about how I tackled problems. I worry less and less about presentation to the audience and more and more about engagement. I get groups on their feet. I get them doing things. I get them thinking. I listen more. I take more chances.

It’s not easy. Especially when I know the answer. And often I do — before the group does. Don’t get me wrong, this is not ego. As my partner Darrel Berry says, “we’re not smarter (than our clients) we just do this every day.” To quote another famous musician, Brownee McGee, “If you do something for 30 years and you don’t get good at it, shame on you!”

So I sit there, looking externally calm (I hope) while inside me, the “keener” kid from grade 6 shakes his arm frantically, trying to get the teacher to see him. Oh! Oh! I have the answer! When that seizes me, I try to take a deep breath and restore my patience. I wait for calm. I bite my tongue. I wait for someone else to discover the answer.

If they don’t, I realize its my challenge as a facilitator to try to create the conditions that will help them discover it. I do everything short of discovering it for them. They have to do that.

the bottom line is this. Aristotle said “the understanding changes nothing.” As someone who values logic, that phrase has troubled me for years. I think I finally understand. Even if you logically understand the issues, it does not give you the inspiration and the drive to make real change. Real change involves risk and sometimes sacrifice. And before people are going to go on that journey, they need to engage on a visceral level. They don’t need a fact handed to them, they need a realization from within them. They need to come to an insight – that flash, that aha! moment. And from that insight, they need another step. They need to take ownership of the problem.

If they discover the solution, they’ll own it. If they own it, they’ll be driven to solve it. If they solve it successfully, they’ll learn to be successful. It’s a virtuous circle.

If the consultant takes ownership, or solves it — it breaks the circle. They learn. But it’s a different lesson.

Not as easy as it sounds. But every time I start to doubt this, or if I get lazy, or if my ego gets in the way, I replay that story of me and the consultant. I think of how different it would have been if instead of it being the consultant’s plan or report, if we had one champion among the client’s own employees — coached by us — but having their own solution. If they had made the case. If they had offered to be accountable for the results — what would have been different at that meeting?

If.

I’ve tried to build this into everything I do. Everything is about the client and their team — learning, experiencing and engaging with that solution.

Was it Harry Truman who said that great things are possible if you don’t worry about who gets the credit? I wish I’d thought of that!

On second thought…

Excuse my interuption? Actually – I’d rather not.

“The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.”

I wish I’d said that. I forget who did. But it knocked me for a loop. Because it is so true.

The speaker at the time was making a point about how we take one concept and use it as a metaphor to explore another new concept. We do this all the time. Because it works. Especially when we are talking about things that are unfamiliar to us. Or if we want to see something we already know in a new way.

We are working on new deal that merges several companies. We use the “marriage” metaphor a lot. It helps us a lot. Or you’ll hear the line “fences make good neighbours” — you get my drift. We’d be lost without metaphors.

Where metaphors become dangerous is where we start to think of them beyond their ability to illustrate. We confuse the two. A business partnership is LIKE a marriage in many ways. It is NOT a marriage. I have had many successful and long term business partnerships with people I didn’t even like. I can’t imagine I would have been married for 27 years in similar circumstances. It would have been laughable if our marriage prep would have talked about the rules under which we could invest in other companies. In the metaphor that is relationships, my wife didn’t want me buying shares in any other company — if you get my drift.

Sometime ago, everyone got on the genetics bandwagon. We talked about DNA of everything. We had “organizational DNA” as a metaphor for corporate culture. It works to illustrate, but it can easily lead you to some bad decisions.

Wisely used, metaphors are valuable to explain or illustrate. Badly used, they promote logical fallacies and lead to some very, very bad conclusions. This is so frequent that logicians even have a term for it. It’s called “faulty analogy.”

A case in point — multi-tasking.

Somebody the other day brought out that old chestnut — I’m more efficient when I’m multi-tasking. The truth is, no, you are not. Full stop.

The faulty analogy in this case? Everyone likes to think that multi-tasking is like parallel processing. We can somehow split our attention between many different things and do a number of things simultaneously, paying enough attention to each and thus getting many things done at the same time.

When this helps someone juggle several quick task like doing work while riding on the subway it’s useful. When you think that you can translate that into doing your email while “listening” at a meeting – no. The human brain can do several things at once, but only when operating on a subconscious level. You are enough like a computer that you can do batch and online at the same time. But two online processes — doesn’t really work well.

The fact that it feels good only reinforces the fallacy. I won’t debate the causes (others have done it) but I don’t think anyone has seriously argued that attention spans are getting longer. So staying on one thought or task from beginning to end is hard. It takes a lot of discipline for some people. In those cases, we have a perfect storm – faulty analogy meets the shortened attention span.

How do I know this? I’ve spent a lot of time adapting LEAN principles to white collar environments. For anyone who doesn’t know LEAN it’s the gold standard in process transformation. It’s the reason why Toyota overtook General Motors well before the auto meltdown.

LEAN has a concept of uninterrupted flow. A task that moves from beginning to end without interruption is more efficient. It uses less resources and time for the amount of end benefit it generates. Someone out there is madly saying — no, batch processing is faster, better, cheaper. Great. Only the true facts get in the way. Even in this down economy, who’s shares would you rather have bought 6 months ago – Toyota or GM?

If you are still resistant, don’t worry. It took me a long time to figure it out. I try to find exercises to illustrate what is a simple point:

Whenever you interupt a process you pay a penalty for setup. Setup means that
you have to stop what you are doing, put it away somewhere and then when you come back to it, you have to reorient yourself, get back up to speed and then — and only then — do you get back to performance.

How much setup time depends on the person, the task and a lot of factors. The reason why I write my blog at 3 in the morning? There are no interruptions. I can go from start to finish.

But we still claim that multi-tasking works. My son tells me he can watch TV and do homework and be on Facebook. So why did his grades improve so radically when he fell behind and we cut off his computer and TV privileges until he caught up? Coincidence?

I thought about this last night when we were in a meeting and I watched someone “listening” while they did their email. If I’d have called them on it, they would have said they were multi-tasking.

That’s the problem with the faulty analogy. You see, a computer can have several threaded processes running at once — though even on a computer there is a bottleneck where the tasks are sequentially organized in stops and starts. The big difference with a computer? The setup costs can be minimized because it can recreate the exact state that it was in before an interruption and get back up to speed in milliseconds. Even then, run enough of these interruptions and you will swamp even a big processor as we all have experienced from time to time. That “not enough system resources” message is the setup charge catching up with you.

When analogies become mythologized, they are even harder to deal with. We all think – Henry Ford, mass production, batch process … good. Even though it’s not true. So I look for examples like Toyota. I’ve found others and I keep searching for them. Why? Because most people don’t let the facts get in the way of a strongly held belief.

I find most of them by luck. For example I was trying to explain LEAN to the head of a refinery in Acton, near London U.K. I was worried because a lot of refining is batch by design. I explained the batch “myth” and waited for the usual counter argument. He didn’t make one. Instead, he took me to another area of the plant and showed me his pet project – a continuous flow refining process – one that that was many times more efficient than the old batch process. I thanked him profusely. I wanted to see a mechanical process prove that uninterrupted flow was superior — if only so I could use it to dispel the myths and faulty analogy.

But people are not machines or mechanical creations. Our setup costs are much larger. When interupted, we need time to be reoriented. The amount depends on the person and the complexity of the task. How many times have you been at a meeting and paid the “setup cost” for someone else whose attention was distracted? Or how many times have you come back to a task and had to get back “up to speed”?

We’ve cut days, literally days out of business processes by moving to an uninterrupted flow. Even IT has caught up. No one seriously does batch processes for systems anymore unless you have a legacy or you absolutely have to. And my son’s marks improved. How much more proof do you need?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not out to tell everyone what they have to do. I do resist when I or my team have to pay the setup cost for someone else.

It’s a modern world. The shortened attention span is real. The addiction to busy work versus thought and planning is real. Proof in point? I ask people this all the time. If you saw someone on the phone talking would you interrupt them? Hardly. But if you saw them sitting quietly at their desk, staring into space, would you interrupt them? For most people it’s a no-brainer. And yet, why would we assume that the phone was work and thinking wasn’t? It says something profound about our culture.

People will wax profoundly about how they are more effective when multi-tasking. So would you like it if the pilot of your plane was doing his taxes? Or if your surgeon was doing a crossword during the operation? I don’t even even like it when other people are talking on their cell phone while driving. It’s okay for me, however — I can multi-task.

Or can I? So why is that when I get to the end of a day and I felt like I hadn’t gotten anything done I would explain it as having fallen victim to the dreaded “got a minute?”

We aren’t going to stop the interrupt driven nature of our lives because I write a blog about it or even if I’ve held a workshop. But I can help reduce it, even a little, it’s worth it. if we could improve by 10 percent – what would that do? The results would be significant. LEAN thinking puts cycle efficiency (the amount of real value in a process) at between 5 and 25 percent. Increase it by a small factor and you get amazing results.

But the first step is admitting there is a problem. I have my own private 12 step program for low attention spans. Because I suffer from it too. That might be the REAL reason I write this at 3 in the morning. Maybe I paid so much setup cost this week that I have to work harder than I want to.

But if I can break this faulty analogy and make more of my tasks into uninterrupted flows, I could gain back some of that efficiency. If I did it enough times it might become a habit. Heck, it could even become part of our organizational DNA.

A pen is just a pen…or is it?

A pen isn’t just a pen. Not when Mark Graham holds it up. He looks at, studies it and holds it up in the air for the audience to see.

“This is exciting!” he says. Tonight, everything Mark talks about is exciting. Pens are not just a product. They are his product. And a pen isn’t just a product — it’s a story — a story about what it takes to produce it and customize it for his customers. If he’s passionate about his products, he’s really excited when he talks about his customers.

At 34 years old Mark, the president of Rightsleeve.com, he has a wisdom beyond his years — and he’s discovered the the real secret to success. It’s this. “Love what you do.”

If you lived through the 90’s where greed was good, or the tech bubble when things were “built to flip” or if you’ve thought about those whose greed and stupidity dragged us into this recession, Mark is a breath of fresh air.

Like people who love what they do, he’s not just playing the game. He’s changing the game.

He’s doing it using technology to advance his strategy. So that’s why he was here tonight, speaking to a group of strategy consultants in CMC Canada’s Strategy special interest group. In addition to my duties as chair of the Toronto chapter, I also chair this group, which I helped found. I love it. It’s where you can meet people who are changing the game.

But back to Mark — and how he’s using technology so well. Because he is using it very well.

There’s a lot of hype about social networking, open source, web 2.0 — the technology industry has never met a buzzword it didn’t over-hype. What’s rare are good examples of how these buzzwords can be used practically to advance your business in new and exciting ways. That’s where Mark comes in.

I met him at a seminar weeks ago. He was there, on a panel with representatives of the big vendors who were spouting the usual blah, blah, blah — buy our products you’ll be the next internet sensation, we love small business, blah, blah, blah. Sorry guys, but my business isn’t going to be energized because I buy your server versus somebody else’s. And it was also a breath of fresh air to hear someone who could say open source without being condescending. It’s hard to take people seriously when everything is a sales pitch for their product.

Mark wasn’t selling us his solution. He simply explained what he’d done, the challenges he’d faced and the results that he’d achieved. No hype. Just a guy who loves what he does.

That sort of thing has real credibility. So when Mark talks, you have to listen. And I did. Along with the rest of the room tonight. In fact, I made notes. Here’s some of the tips that picked up from Mark:

Use technology to foster conversations about important things:

Mark’s open source systems allow him flexibility to dream and adapt — and he’s used that ability to facilitate conversations about things that are important. He has taken a page (literally) from social networking applications like facebook and twitter. He’s uses these to keep people in his company up to date on key activities.

The important words here are key activities. Mark was smart enough to take the essence of social networking, not just adding some features from another application. What makes it work is that they made a conscious choice of what things were most valuable and these are selected and displayed as part of their own in house news feed. By focusing on the information that has the most value — people in his company watch it. Contrast that with what appears on most social networking sites.

There is a law called Sturgeon’s Law and it says that 90% of everything is crap. So if you cut through that and go to what is really valuable, you provide a real service — especially in these days when everybody is overloaded.

Activities, events — new clients, orders and prospects — all of these conveniently packaged, shared and used to make sure everyone knows what is going on and can contribute. I immediately thought of virtual enterprises, like our own company. We have people all over the country, sometimes all over the world. We could use this to keep everyone up to date — even though they aren’t in the office.

Hmmm.

Here’s another great idea that Mark talked about which is close to my heart. Jim Collins, the renowned business writer says there are three things that go into a strategy. You need passion and you need to know what you can do better than anyone else in the world. Mark’s got those covered. But Collins says there’s a third thing — you need to really understand the metrics that drive your business. Sounds easy, but even if they get it (which I doubt) few companies understand it. They publish reams of data or none at all. They don’t give the vital few pieces of information that guide their employees to understand what they have to do on a day by day basis to help fulfill the company’s strategy.

Mark’s company has a great approach to this as well. For example, he has a great little application which shows a sales person what their commission is going to be on each and every sale. So they can see how they are doing constantly. Motivation 101. But Mark’s company goes a step further and guides them with costs so that they can see the profitability of the sale. Sales people know what they can and can’t do. And….there’s more. Operations people are also plugged in with data they need. They can see the orders that are coming in — again in real time. They can sort it by supplier to make sure they can cover multiple orders at one time. Everyone is up to date. The old “sales/operations” feuds are reduced, if not eliminated.

I do a lot of process transformation work using something called Lean. It’s a way to radically improve customer satisfaction, quality and efficiency (yes, you can have all three).

Lean is customer centric. It says that any process that doesn’t generate value to the customer is a waste. It also says that you find ways see all inefficiency and waste. One way to avoid waste is to eliminate mistakes before they happen instead of trying to catch them in the “quality control” steps.

So picture this. Some of Mark’s customers can have their own web-site to order goods. Their standards for orders are place on the each order page — right down to the exact description of the company colours in technical terms. This is important. Companies spend an enormous amount of money on their branding. They want consistency, quality and above all — accuracy. By making all of this visible and having a preset group of items for a company on their own web store, Mark’s company eliminates the potential for error AND increases the efficiency of the process. It’s not rocket science, it’s just damn good process design — enabled by a very friendly, customer focused technology.

But Mark’s approach, like Lean, is not just about efficiency. It’s about a relentless focus on what is of value to the customer. It’s a way to really engage your customer. Once again, Mark is using technology to help. He opens up his site to allow customers to participate. For instance, his customers can comment directly on products they have bought.

That’s where this is about more than technology. It’s about courage. If you only ask questions where you know that you’ll like the answer, you are not really listening. But if you take a chance and ask — people will tell you what they really think. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes its not.

Many companies shy away from real discussions with their customers because they don’t want to face the reality of dealing with issues. How many times have you heard those programmed words, “is there anything else I can do to help you?” when the “customer service” person you are talking to in some far distant land hasn’t helped you at all?

Mark’s people pounce on customer problems and address them. Why not? They are on the customer’s side. If the products tare substandard, they want them fixed or they want them off the list. When you really feel this way, you will have the courage to ask — in public — “what do you think?”

The added bonus is that your customers trust each other more than they will any sales person. Getting that real information adds value to the shopping experience.

This honest is the best way to engage your customers. My favourite saying about customers is from a book called “The Cluetrain Revolution” and it’s as fresh now as it was almost 10 years ago when I read it. It says that “Elvis was right. We can’t go on together with suspicious minds.” In so many companies today, Elvis has truly left the building.

As a strategic consultant, I think one of the best questions that I like to ask is “what do you want people to say about you when you leave the room?” Then I set out to help the client make that happen. Hey, did I say strategy was hard? It’s not — it’s doing it that’s hard.

Conversations in the age of social networking are no longer person to person. They are one to many, thanks to networks like twitter, facebook, Linked In and a host of others. If you can get people to say good things about the company you can get incredible coverage. How do you do that? Easy — well not exactly easy. If you want people to say great things about you or your company, you have to do things that they value. If you have an event, you have to make it a great one so that if someone is on twitter, and followed by thousands of people, their twitter message will say — having a great time @ Rightsleeve.com party. In fact, that has happened.

Doing the small things right. Relentlessly pursuing a dynamite customer experience. Having the creativity and flair to make your message distinct and worth telling. Those are the real tools of using social networks effectively — not just technology. And whether it’s giving out Rightsleeve.com underwear or his hysterical YouTube video with the tag line “friends don’t let friends buy bad promo” — everything is aimed at the customer experience.

To paraphrase my earlier question, the issue is to understand “what do you want people to say about you when they are engaging their social networks?” Then make it possible for them to say that in a way that’s fun and interesting.

Right down to his blog, Mark takes that approach. As a blogger myself, I wish his three rules which he shared were universal:

– write it yourself
– be authentic
– have fun

Notice that “mention your product” is not on the list. Be yourself. Be authentic. Have fun.

And when you do that, even a pen becomes exciting. And it’s rewarding for everyone. And I’ve always maintained that this is good for the bottom line. I won’t tell any tales out of school, but Mark’s company appears to be defying any of the trends that you are seeing in the papers. Sales are up and the company is growing profitably. And that, too, is exciting.

What can I say? Sometimes the good guys win.

I had a great time.

Thanks Mark.

Mark Graham’s company is called Rightsleeve.com and they go in to my “mission statement hall of fame” because you can actually tell what they do from what they say they do. RIGHTSLEEVE.COM uses design, promotional media and technology to deliver outstanding marketing results.

Check them out! I don’t think you’ll regret it.

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