Terri Griffith blogs

Do You Have an Entrepreneurial Mindset?

terrigriffith — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 21:11:34 +0000

It’s Engineers Week! #eWeek2016 In celebration, I’m going to think (and post) this week on the idea of an entrepreneurial mindset. More than entrepreneurship, an entrepreneurial mindset supports innovation and value creation in personal work, team development, all across the range of small to massive organizations and freelanced careers. We all need an entrepreneurial mindset, whether or not we are going to start a business around our ideas.

KEEN

I first heard the term, entrepreneurial mindset, from my colleague Prof. Chris Kitts. Chris is the lead for our work with KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network). The network was founded with resources and insights from The Kern Family Foundation.

The Kerns started their business in 1959, but at the end of their work careers they began to reflect on the attributes they found most important to their customers, community, and company. KEEN is a part of how the Kerns support education, character development, the value of work, and the development of an entrepreneurial mindset (and I thank them for funding the development of my Cultures of Innovation course).

The Kerns offer:

An entrepreneurial mindset consists of three key elements: Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value. Entrepreneurially minded individuals:

have a constant curiosity about our changing world and employ a contrarian view of accepted solutions;
habitually connect information from many sources to gain insight and manage risk; and
create value for others from unexpected opportunities as well as persist through, and learn from, failure.”

Note that this is a broad definition and does not say that you have to go out and start a business. One point I’ve taken from Mr. Kern is how valuable people with an entrepreneurial mindset can be as they work inside a company. (For a later post, I’ll take on how organizations need to lead by letting go gain full value from their entrepreneurially minded employees.)

McGrath & MacMillan

The Kerns are not alone in their support of the entrepreneurial mindset. Professors Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan, in their book, The Entrepreneurial Mindset, offer a pointed set of characteristics held by what they call “habitual entrepreneurs:”

They passionately seek new opportunities
They pursue opportunities with enormous discipline
They pursue only the very best opportunities
They focus on execution--specifically, adaptive execution (I love this point - ties to design thinking)
They engage the energies of everyone in their domain

Though I see these as more project oriented than the Kern descriptors, McGrath and MacMillan’s boundaries are also broad and valuable across a range of freelancers, start-up founders, teams, and organizations.

Are You?

We started with this question, “do you have an entrepreneurial mindset?” I hope you do! ...and I’d appreciate hearing examples of how such a mindset has played out in unique settings. What can you share? Be a part of Engineers Week 2016 and use #eWeek2016

Books to Catch Up On in 2016

terrigriffith — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 18:33:46 +0000

My end of year schedule was a bit thrown off this year (all good things!), so I’m looking to the future with these book recommendations rather than looking back. I've split my selections into Communication & Leadership and Innovation categories. It was a very good year on these topics and here they are in title alphabetic order. (I did do a few reviews in 2015, and I have links to them at the bottom of this post.)

Communication & Leadership (Because you can’t lead if you can’t communicate)

Communicate to Influence: How to Inspire Your Audience to Action by Ben Decker and Kelly Decker. I’ve had the pleasure of attending several Decker executive sessions as a student and hosting the Decker guru’s in my classes. It’s wonderful to have the book to use as a motivator as I prep the next talk.

Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time by Jeffrey Pfeffer. Jeff Peffer is a rare scholar who can both conduct the most rigorous research and then effectively share those results with the world. I have used Leadership BS as a kind of a Snopes.com for leadership concepts.

Message Not Received: Why Business Communication Is Broken and How to Fix It by Phil Simon. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it in 2016, this book should trigger a movement. Business Communication (much of all communication?) is broken and Message Not Received is an opportunity to set things right. Bring this book to your book club!

Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock. You know you want to know how Google is managed. This isn’t high level strategy, but down in the dirt sharing of how they understand their employees and build an organization to match.

Innovation

Elon Musk by Ashley Vance. I’m very glad I read this. Great background Elon Musk, the commercial space industry, and the world of high capital-cost entrepreneurship. Also helpful as my colleague Ann Majchrzak and I prepped for our meeting with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (more on that later).

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson. Watch Steven Johnson’s TED talk on Where good ideas come from and you’ll know you want to read this book.

Traversing the Valley of Death: A practical guide for corporate innovation leaders by Stephen K. Markham and Paul C. Mugge. I’m happy to know both the authors and the Center for Innovation Management Studies at North Carolina State University. Keynoting their conference was one of the “good things” keeping me from blogging here. This book is a great summary what they’ve learned about innovation and how you can use those results in your own organization.

From Earlier in the Year

Getting (More of) What You Want: How the Secrets of Economics and Psychology Can Help You Negotiate Anything, in Business and in Life by by Margaret A. Neale and Thomas Z. Lys. Here is my full review from August. I’ve gone back to the book multiple times since then.

My post: Summer Reading List on the Future of Work. Over 25 books on the mindmap when I started, and I keep adding to it. Amazon list of all the books for your one-stop shopping pleasure.

Background: Co-Innovation as a Form of Open Innovation

terrigriffith — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 16:28:48 +0000

On October 27th, I have the pleasure of being the keynote speaker for North Carolina State University's Center for Innovation Management Studies Conference: Open Innovation - Revisited. They invited me to provide a bit of background in their blog series on the material I'll be covering. Here is a lightly edited version of that post: Co-Innovation as a Form of Open Innovation.

My basic premise is that 20^th-century organizational boundaries and practices may be holding back our ability to innovate. The idea of open innovation is very 21^st-century in that there is a definitional acknowledgment that innovations flow in and out of formal organizational boundaries. This likely makes great sense to anyone reading this post.

Benefits and Burdens of Open Innovation

Mark Spry, CEO of Pulse Mining Systems, a very 21^st-century enterprise resource planning technology company (I've mentioned Pulse Mining Systems in an earlier post) has helped me understand their open innovation practices. A key to the company’s success is the foundational focus on co-innovation with its customers and partners. This is one type of open innovation and is very successful in Pulse's context.

However, in other contexts, we can see examples of tensions between the old and the new. Think about the challenges Uber, Lyft and even UpWork (merger of Elance and oDesk) face when it comes to organizational boundaries, like who is and who is not an employee. In that context it is the people doing the work who are flowing in and out of formal organizational boundaries. As long as benefits are tied to employment status — something that goes back to colonial times in the US — there will be friction in those flows.

What Pulse Mining Systems has done so well is to manage the people, the roles, and the technology (both the tools and the product), such that there is benefit to all parties for working together. Using the terms from my book, The Plugged-In Manager, they are mixing (negotiating) across the various boundaries and putting a priority on sharing/demonstrating to others the benefits of the co-innovation approach. Allow me to share a bit of the background here.

Definitions

As Hank Chesbrough, one of the foundational authors in the open innovation area, has noted that there is some confusion in our broad use of open innovation and related terms like, “open collaborative innovation.” Given my own expertise is in the application of open innovation rather than its theoretical foundations, I’ll stick with a recent definition offered by Chesbrough and his (and my!) colleague Marcel Bogers:

Open Innovation

Open innovation is defined as, “a distributed innovation process based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organizational boundaries, using pecuniary and non-pecuniary mechanisms in line with the organization’s business model. These flows of knowledge may involve knowledge inflows to the focal organization (leveraging external knowledge sources through internal processes), knowledge outflows from a focal organization (leveraging internal knowledge through external commercialization processes) or both (coupling external knowledge sources and commercialization activities)….” (Chesbrough & Bogers, 2014). These knowledge flows are the building blocks and processes of innovation.

Just as a reminder, I offer Chesbrough and Bogers’ Figure 5 to highlight the particular focus of this post:

Co-Innovation

Co-innovation, or “coupled open innovation” in Chesbrough and Bogers’ terms, “involves two (or more) partners that purposively manage mutual knowledge flows across their organizational boundaries through joint invention and commercialization activities.”

Pulse Mining System engineers do not sit behind closed doors and design new enterprise software tools for their customers. Instead, they co-innovate with their key customers and vendors to build the tools that the customers need most and in a form that will be immediately valuable.

In the particular example Mark Spry shared with me, customer Centennial Coal and vendor Birst (a business intelligence and analytics company) played major roles. Centennial shared their needs. Pulse opened their already broad platform of software to components created by Birst. The new product was then offered to all customers with feature updates made possible much faster than they would have been if each of the groups had to work independently.

Lead by Letting Go

In prior posts, I’ve written about how we can lead by letting go (of old school management techniques), but that creates an image of chaos for some. Instead of chaos, imagine a structured handoff of responsibility. We are unlikely expert in all the areas where we need expertise. Co-innovation is a solution. Pulse has found like-minded partners in their customers and vendors (SAP has done the same with its co-innovation labs.) Each seems to have developed simple rules to handoff pieces of the innovation process to partners with appropriate skills.

Mark Spry offers that we, “can’t underestimate the power of shifting mindsets… to get that buy in and bring that data to life. Co-creation gets some of that end-user buy in from the beginning.”

In the keynote presentation at the CIMS Conference: Open Innovation – Revisited, I will suggest that many organizations need to let go of 20^th-century boundaries and processes if they want to get full value from open innovation. Certainly we need to hold tight to our performance standards, relationships, education and the laws of the organization’s ‘physics,’ whatever those might be. However, think of these as the scaffolds that then let us open up organizational boundaries for co-innovation.

Shall we do a little co-innovation here? Do you have an example to share here and/or at CIMS Open Innovation — Revisited?

Mapping Organizational Design: Part Two

terrigriffith — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 22:24:54 +0000

In our last post we described how the star framework is used in a graduate organizational analysis and design course. Again, Shandon Fernandes, a prior student, joins me to show how the framework is used in practice.

Star Framework Basics

People – Psych 101 material. How do people behave? (Whether or not they are in an organizational setting.) People generally like rewards and don’t like punishments. Different generations may have different preferences.
Process – This dimension allows for an evaluation of organizational policies. Hiring, performance, pay, training, any policy or procedure, big or small.
Technology – Technology forms a crucial and inevitable part of the star framework. Technology has not only transformed the nature of work, but offers organizations an effective tool to evaluate and transform operations. Technology ranges from the kind of office furniture you have, to electronic communication, to robots and artificial intelligence.
Structure – Structure lays out the location of decision-making and authority. This is where team-based strategies and org charts are considered.
Context -- Context is the linking point to many other MBA courses. Is this an international business or a local one? Is the market trending up or down?

Shandon's Example

I recently paid a visit to a large Federal government organization, herein referred to as FGO, for a routine task. On the surface of it, the staff were very customer focused, very helpful, pleasant, and made us feel welcome. That said, I was there long enough to see some STAR dynamics play out in ways that suggest opportunities for improvement. It’s hard to know the specific strategic goals the organization has, but customer service, efficiency, and effectiveness are likely candidates.

As is very usual with these type of organizations, large lines are typical. Security is always a priority (context) and people are carefully checked. The security officers are the first point of contact (process). The FGO has one line given their single security scanning device (technology). When people with appointments show up they are allowed to cut in front of the others (process). This had significant impact on my satisfaction as six time people moved into the line ahead of me. I recalled the better flow at the California Department of Motor Vehicles where appointments have a separate line (context - customers’ expectations given their past experiences).

But to continue with the specific case. An elderly woman was in line with her walker (people and technology dimensions linked). She had to empty her walker’s basket of about 20 different recyclable bags as each needed to be scanned separately (technology). In addition, she required a special escort (process) up to the relevant floor as she had no identification, which she said she had forgotten (people). When finally reached the service counter, she was told that no service could be provided given she didn’t have her identification (process).

Crafting a Solution

Terri adds: A Fishbone Analysis could be helpful at this point, but for a light-weight analysis, I generally just ask participants for the biggest or fastest lever -- where is there the most or quickest opportunity to make a pilot improvement? For long range planning, we would try several different lead levers. We could also do the analysis from the perspective of a variety of different stakeholders.

Back to Shandon: The woman could have been turned away before getting in the line for security screening. This would have saved her time, the time of the other people in line, and the time taken at each of the different steps. Ideally, there would be a way to signal that she needed her identification before she left home, but that is a longer discussion.

Through its design, the star framework reminds us to “never change just one thing.” A process change where security officers would check for identification before asking a customer to join the line would require increased customer engagement from the security officers. Since security officers are from a private security firm (structure), we would need to assess the legal ramifications (context) of them turning away a customer who requires service from the FGO. Given the increased customer service interaction, we would also need to see about additional selection or training requirements for the security officers (process). There could also be context issues if the security officers are unionized. We might need to move the security station and change signage (technology).

Tools in Your Kit

Terri: For many of us, a visual representation of the options is a help. Using a template like the one shown here, we can keep track of the main change (when identification is checked in this example) and the supporting adjustments. The 0 to 10 rating is a simple signal of the power or severity of the issue. Higher scoring items might receive the greatest attention as the change is considered.

The template might also trigger ideas around possible tradeoffs. (For example, the possibility of hiring a valet to check identification and help people manage the overall visit - perhaps a smaller hit to the budget if the task is moved to the security officers.)

To take the next step, I suggest thinking of the change process as a negotiation with all the related stakeholder analysis, issue identification, and creativity around finding valuable solutions. I cover the approach in Chapter 4 of my book, The Plugged-In Manager: Get in Tune with Your People, Technology, and Organization to Thrive. You can also see a short discussion of negotiated change in this post from a while back.

End of Part Two, But The Start of A Discussion...

Tackle your next organizational decision using the star framework. Where did come up against uncertainty? Were you able to see how the different dimensions could be thought of as the issues of a negotiation -- even if you were negotiating with yourself?

In Part One, Terri and MBA student Shandon Fernandes describe the basic structures of the STAR model and its foundations in Jay Galbraith’s work (Galbraith Star Model), Nadler and Tushman’s “Mapping organizational Terrain” and the “open systems model.”

Shandon Fernandes is pursuing an MBA at Santa Clara University and is specializing in Leading Innovative Organizations. A Political Science graduate, Shandon has always had an interest in the structure and functioning of government organizations. She has previously served as a Research Officer for a Diplomatic Mission in Mumbai.

Mapping Organizational Design: Part One

terrigriffith — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 22:13:51 +0000

When I first starting teaching the MBA course, “Organizational Analysis and Design,” I went in search of a tool to offer the students as they learn to describe organizations and think about organizational redesign. I’ve generally had the students read some version of Jay Galbraith’s work (Galbraith Star Model) and pieces of Nadler and Tushman’s “Mapping organizational Terrain.” One of the first things we do is look at the two models and think about how they fit in the students’ organizations. Quickly it’s clear that these models were written when technology was considered more like plumbing and less like a strategic opportunity for organizational design (or possible ways to augment or fully-substitute for human work).

Adding Technology to Traditional Organizational Design Frameworks

Organization design’s goal is to support the strategy of the organization. Give me a strategy and we can work out a design. Galbraith and Nadler and Tushman are foundations, but we need something that matches modern organizations, while is still basic enough to have top of mind for evaluating or creating thoughtful proposals, making sure you don’t let a particular dimension get dropped from discussion, or getting your thoughts together for an unexpected job interview.

My students and I end up drawing this image almost every class session. For shorter courses, like my sessions in the 21st Century Management program, I give them a stack of templates. At some point I break out one of my Skwish toys to demonstrate interconnections across different organizational design dimensions.

I’m now going to turn this post over to past student, Shandon Fernandes, for the real story:

From a Student’s Perspective

On the first day of class, Terri divided us into groups and sent us to nearby restaurants. The goal was to come back with an assessment of the organization -- without doing any interviews.

Our six member team was assigned to a nearby Starbucks. When we arrived at the store, we started to think about organization from the point of view of the business owners and made customer service and satisfaction a primary focus.

This assumption, that the most important thing for a business entity is the end result of what your customers get, led us to make shallow and casual observations, like how the two baristas rotated between counter and coffee making. We assumed this was to the benefit of the customers. At no point did we stop to think about the corporation’s policies and how other organizational dimensions could be interacting with each other. In retrospect, our observations were missing vital elements and the connected nature of the various dimensions of the star framework Terri would help us develop when we got back to class.

Star Framework Dimensions

People – Psych 101 material. How do people behave (whether or not they are in an organizational setting)? People generally like rewards and don’t like punishments. Different generations may have different preferences.
Process – This dimension allows for an evaluation of organizational policies. Hiring, performance, pay, training, any policy or procedure, big or small.
Technology – Technology forms a crucial and inevitable part of the STAR Model. Technology has not only transformed the nature of and specializations of jobs but offers organizations an effective tool to evaluate and transform their operations when used appropriately. Ranges from the kind of office furniture you have to electronic communication to robots and artificial intelligence.
Structure – Structure lays out the location of decision-making and authority. This is where team-based strategies and org charts are considered.
Context -- Context is the linking point to many other MBA courses. Is this an international business or a local one? Is the market trending up or down?

Soon after that field trip experience we had our first Harvard case analysis. Many found it difficult to put the complexities of the case in perspective. Terri then reminded use to use the star framework as a tool to sort things out. This approach proved useful as we were better able to understand the underlying design of the organization based on the five star dimensions.

Don’t Change Everything All At Once

Terri adds: You also want to avoid trying to change everything all at once, either when playing with a Skwish or implementing all encompassing enterprise software -- I use FoxMeyer’s failure an example.

End of Part One

In Part Two, Shandon applies the star framework to a recent customer experience. Terri and Shandon work out some possible improvements and demonstrate using the template.

Shandon Fernandes is a currently pursuing an MBA at Santa Clara University and is specializing in Leading Innovative Organizations. A Political Science graduate, Shandon has always had an interest in the structure and functioning of government organizations. She has previously served as a Research Officer for a Diplomatic Mission in Mumbai.

Diversity, Transparency, and Accountability

terrigriffith — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 19:30:07 +0000

In my last post, I focused on the value of transparency for getting work done. Transparency can also have a broader effect. In a recent peer-reviewed study in the journal Organization Science, Emilio J. Castilla looked at merit-based rewards for almost 9,000 employees before and after changes related to transparency were implemented. Before accountability and transparency tactics were put in place, women and underrepresented groups had lower pay unexplained by differences in performance or position. After transparency and accountability practices were implemented, the gap went away. My take, supported by over 30 years of research in my field, is that given information, managers do the right thing. Without information, bias can creep in.

Diversity Context

This is timely, important research and especially interesting from my Silicon Valley location. The graph below shows 2014 data from the top tech companies. To their credit, they share this data voluntarily and it has focused attention on the problems for women and underrepresented groups. Apple recently reported their 2015 data, though with little change showing up yet. Slack, Pinterest, and Airbnb are all working with Paradigm, a startup focused on helping change these numbers.

Graph from VentureBeat

I’m very interested in the internal accountability and transparency in these companies. Google has been in the spotlight around a spreadsheet Erica Baker, then a Google employee, created for Googlers to share information about their pay. The data raised questions about pay equality. She received great support from her peers, but not always from management. In later reports, Google told reporters that “employees are welcome to share information about salary if they choose.” What if such a spreadsheet were part of standard practice? Gender wage gaps are smaller in government and union settings where there is pay transparency as a matter of course.

It’s wonderful that these companies are sharing and taking action. (I’d also like to see data on age diversity - Microsoft provides theirs here, but guessing results look different in some of the other firms.) Internal, at least, accountability and transparency may be directions for them to consider. We can all take part by supporting young people interested in STEM fields and the organizations that give them solid backgrounds.

Tools to Support Transparency and Accountability

Technology may also play a role. Transparency and accountability are areas where technology can help us do the right thing. Technology supported task feedback helps us do work “right” and better. Process and outcome transparency (at the heart of the Castilla study) help us stay on the right side of just behavior. As internet enabled sensors, ubiquitous video, and internet-enabled work become the status quo, it’s easier to “work out loud” without extra effort and to hear the work of others as part of the ambient environment. Transparency doesn’t have to be hard and it can provide great value even as it supports our values.

More on Castilla’s Research

Castilla opens with a detailed review of accountability and transparency research. Building on Tetlock’s research in the 80s, Castilla describes accountable situations as those where you will have to justify your decisions and actions. Accountability provides motivation to make more analytical/careful decisions. As shown in some of Castilla’s earlier work, this can reduce bias in organizations. Transparency is about relevant, accessible, and accurate information. He splits both accountability and transparency into process and outcome categories -- which for those of you keeping score -- also ties the work nicely into research on how just people feel an organization is.

Transparency and the Future of Work

terrigriffith — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 23:07:32 +0000

Transparency is at the heart of modern work and organizations. Tom Malone, in his book, The Future of Work, talks of a shift to more decentralized organizations where there is “participation of people in making the decisions that matter to them” [emphasis in the original]. People can’t make decisions if they don’t have information.

Warren Bennis, in Transparency: How Leaders Create A Culture of Candor, highlights the monetary value of transparency, "[a]gain and again, studies show that companies that rate high in transparency tend to outperform more opaque ones." He cites a 2005 study finding that a group of 27 U.S. companies noted as "most transparent" beat the S&P 500 by 11.3 percent.

Lead By Letting Go: Transparency

I’ve had the chance to talk with a variety of executives about the value of transparency. These conversations, combined with results from peer-reviewed research, prompt me to place transparency at the heart of how you lead by letting go. It’s not that transparency is an absolute positive, but rather that managing transparency is a key skill in our future of work. (Below, I’ve provided links to three articles if you want to follow the recent research on these issues.)

Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO and founder of Clarizen, the online collaboration and project management company, provides thoughtful advice as well as a tool to support transparency. Over a coffee on the San Francisco waterfront, he and I talked about the challenges of modern work. We are often physically separated from our teammates and the pace of our work seems to be increasing. I’ll add that, though not really a change, it surprises many that the U.S. median tenure with a company is just 4.6 years. We don’t have a lot of face-to-face opportunity to learn from our colleagues.

Technology Can Help

These dynamics are enabled in part by by technology tools. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, in their book, The Second Machine Age, describe the good and the bad of our changing work environment. They suggest that we learn to “race with machines,” rather than against them.

One way the machines can help us is by providing greater transparency around our work. Rather than proactively reporting on our work, the machines can automatically share as we get on with the tasks at hand. Teams do better to the extent that their members know who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate. If we have tools and the will to apply the knowledge gained via the tools, team performance can be supported by technology. In the past, when it was more typical to work in the same room with our teammates, transparency was supported by the technology of the furniture layout. Today, our electronic tools can provide some similar access to knowing who knows, and needs to know, what.

It’s a classic example where the outcome is the result of the human, technical, and organizational dimensions of the work. Transparency has value, if we pay attention to what we see and don’t make the process of providing transparency onerous.

Guiding Principles

Nowogrodski suggests four principles which span the human, technical, and organizational dimensions of work, as well as crossing individual, team, and organizational levels of action:

Democratic information sharing
Evolution into a transparent enterprise
Aligned input and impact
Organic innovation

It’s not transparency for transparency's sake, but rather for impact and innovation. In an article for Entrepreneur.com, he offers:

[L]eaders within enterprises that exercise transparency do not feel the need to “force feed” transparency to employees. This is because transparency is embedded within the fabric of their culture.They own it. As such, they unleash transparency from within to qualitatively and quantitatively improve employee engagement, workflow management, communication and collaboration, customer support and development, program and project governance, and more.

Take Action -- At the System Level -- Then Let Go

Performance is a combination of motivation, opportunity, and ability. Transparency can help motivation by letting people understand the connection between their actions and their outcomes. Transparency can help opportunity by signaling about the work that needs to be done (I’m looking forward to posting about a recent interview with RallyTeam founder, Dan Ellis, on a related topic). Transparency can help ability as people get feedback closer to their own actions. Build organizational systems that enable transparency, then let people get on with their work. Lead by letting go.

Deep Dives into the Academic Work on Transparency Process and Outcomes

The Transparency Paradox: A Role for Privacy in Organizational Learning and Operational Control (Bernstein, 2012)
Organizational Transparency: A New Perspective on Managing Trust in Organization-Stakeholder Relationships (Schnackenberg & Tomlinson, 2014)
E-leadership: Re-examining transformations in leadership source and transmission (Avolioa, Sosik, Kahai, & Baker, 2014)

Getting (More of) What You Want

terrigriffith — Sat, 01 Aug 2015 18:35:43 +0000

Getting (More of) What You Want: How the Secrets of Economics and Psychology Can Help You Negotiate Anything, in Business and in Life is Margaret Neale and Thomas Lys' valuable new book. I've known Maggie and Tom for decades, but friendship isn't needed to motivate this review. I need this book. I bought both electronic and hardcover versions because this is a book I'll use in my work -- and you should too.

If You Are a Negotiation Novice

You should read this book because is provides an accessible foundation. I cover negotiation as part of my Plugged-In Management workshops and this will be the book I offer (at the end!) of the sessions I teach. The preface gives you a clear perspective on the power of a disciplined approach to negotiation. By the end of Chapter 4 you'll already have the ability to to get more of what you want. If you've been trying out the techniques as you read these chapters, you'll have already paid for the book and the time it took you to read them. Neale and Lys also have done a wonderful job distilling the material from their consulting and courses into clear frameworks and tables to support your preparation.

If You Are A Self-Taught Negotiator

This book will take experienced, self-taught negotiators to the next level. You’ll discover why your good techniques are working and how to improve on your results. I expect that even the most experienced negotiators will be interested in the results from recent research on negotiation and the connections across psychological and economic perspectives. Neale is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Lys is the Eric L. Kohler Chair in Accounting at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. Have no fear, this isn’t a textbook nor is it heavy statistics. What it is heavy with are solid examples and eye opening results. I've read the foundational research on whether or not to make the first offer -- and the systematic review provided in the book both extended what I knew and put it into actionable terms.

If You’ve Already Had a Great Negotiation Class

I suspect that even Neale & Lys’ students will find significant value in the summaries following each chapter. As soon as my hardcover arrives (this review is based on the Kindle version), I’ll be adding tabs so I can quickly flip to the summaries as preparation for any upcoming negotiation. No doubt you learned in your negotiation course that preparation and high expectations are critical to getting more of what you want. Use these summaries to kick off your preparations and problem solving efforts. Chapter 8, Managing the Negotiation: Supplementing and Verifying What You (Think You) Know will get special attention as it describes how to learn from the responses of the person you're negotiating with - a topic I know I need to give more attention.

If You Don’t Negotiate

Perhaps you don’t negotiate in a traditional sense -- but you do negotiate. Change management, technology implementations, teamwork, and social settings are all full of negotiations. In my book, The Plugged-In Manager, I rely on negotiation to help people leverage their human, technical, and organizational resources. I learned the basics and more from Maggie Neale and our colleague, Greg Northcraft. I recall feeling, and being, far more powerful once I understood the problem-solving nature of their negotiation practices.

Conclusion

Getting (More of) What You Want: How the Secrets of Economics and Psychology Can Help You Negotiate Anything, in Business and in Life is a book you should use, not just read. It’s also the kind of book that you should share with your colleagues. The last practice of a a plugged-in manager is sharing. The idea is that if others understand the same language you do, you’ll find new value in your day to day work. This is a language you want to know.

Scanning the Future: 21st Century Management

terrigriffith — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 20:06:08 +0000

Is your organization ready for the 21st Century? Do you understand the increasing pressures on organizational structure and management? Is your organization’s design and leadership approach ready to face these demands? These are the questions twenty-eight senior executives from the U.S., Colombia, India, Oman, and Thailand addressed as we worked together to leverage old and new strategies for their organizations and careers. The occasion was Northwestern University’s 21st Century Management executive program. The phrase, “scanning the future” is drawn from the last segment of my sessions.

I promised the participants additional readings (building on my earlier, Summer Reading List), and hope others will add to what I have here via the comments. I’ll also include the pre-readings we used to prepare for each segment.

The Demands on 21st Century Organization

In this segment we worked through the pressures on organizations today and in the future. These included (vast simplification): globalization, artificial intelligence, disintermediation, freelancing, and education. Earlier in the week the group had discussed the pace of marketing and strategy change, the value of mindfulness, our networked society, and multi-generational workforces.

We started with Leadership Is More Than Interpersonal Skills, a short Harvard Business Review blog post focused on what I mean by demands on the 21st century organization and how this puts pressure on you to lead with all your resources -- not just your interpersonal skills -- all of your human, technical, and organizational resources.

Additional Reading:

Thriving in an Increasingly Digital Ecosystem (Weill & Woener)
In the Future, Employees Won’t Exist (Milbourn; Note: I’m an investor in Milbourn’s company). The extensive comments to the article will provide a starting point for future sessions.
Hacking Education for our Future of Work: A Grand Challenge (Griffith)
The STAR model (Galbraith). I hope to have a Griffith STAR description up soon and will update this post then.

Designing the Agile, Connected Organization

We used the case, WL Gore: Culture of Innovation (makers of Gore-Tex), to take on the questions of organizational design and control in the 21st Century. Slide-deck version. Note that WL Gore (and Nucor Steel) are famous examples of light-weight management -- in companies designed in the 50s & 60s. Zappos’ work with holacracy is just a current visible version.

Additional Reading:

What's Happening at Zappos May Be All About the School Bus Test (Collings)
The Big Idea: The Age of Hyperspecialization (Malone, et al.) goes into some of the opportunities of slicing work into smaller pieces and loosening the boundaries of the organization to enable others to participate.

From the hyperspecialization article:

This ability to distribute computer-based jobs to a vast army of workers doesn’t only make old tasks go faster; it enables the completion of a whole new class of time-critical tasks. Consider the search for Jim Gray, a well-known computer scientist who disappeared at sea in his small sailboat in 2007 and was never found. When the news of his disappearance reached his colleagues, they realized it would not be impossible to search the 30,000-square-mile patch of ocean in which Gray’s boat just might still be afloat. Over the next few days near-real-time satellite images were relayed to thousands of Mechanical Turk workers and volunteers for close examination. Such an effort could not previously have been imagined—and suggests many other possibilities, from scanning for suspicious activity in an office building’s overnight video feeds, to translating headquarters communications simultaneously into many languages, to responding quickly to a potential client’s complicated request for proposal.

We see this approach now in the vast application of volunteers to natural disasters, solving complex business analytics problems, and more. The freelance marketplace continues to diversify even as heavy weights Elance and oDesk join to form UpWork. The “gig economy” is in the news this week in the US presidential campaigns.

Leading the Agile, Connected Organization -- Execution on 21st Century Practices

In this segment I had the opportunity to share some of my current work on Lead by Letting Go. We started with a case on LinkedIn, looking to gain value from whatever LinkedIn does -- for example, with their recent purchase of online education company, lynda.com, rather than solving the typical case. We looked to let go of 20th century boundaries and processes, while holding tight to our performance standards, relationships, the value of education, and the laws of our particular organization’s “physics.”

Staying with the ideas of leveraging modern technologies and organizational relationships, we looked at the article The Third Wave of Virtual Work, before reading the case -- LiveOps: The Contact Centre Reinvented. The case follows the American Red Cross as they dealt with over one million people displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Whether or not your industry works with call or contact centers, it’s interesting to consider how to work with “instant on” capabilities. LiveOps is just one example of 21st century organizational forms built on a freelance economy. Uber, Lyft, Mozilla (Firefox), Freelance Physicians, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and many many others, offer options to traditional “balancesheet” employees.

We used light-weight experiments as a key tool in this segment. Tom Chi’s “doing is the best kind of thinking” video was a great opener and we followed it with examples from Intuit.

Additional Reading

Connecting talent with opportunity in the digital age (Manyika, et al.)
Intuit’s resources for innovation catalysts
The Lean Startup (Ries)

Scanning the Future

Our last segment was short, but critical. We discussed execution and especially the role of data-driven processes. We focused on iterative change throughout the session (the world moves too fast for long periods of planning in many settings, note the Tom Chi quote above) - but here we applied it toward scanning the future. Marissa Mayer’s “Data is apolitical,” video as well as Scott Cook on Intuit’s global expansion, emphasized the role that evidence-based management plays.

The task for the participants was to design a scanning process for themselves or their organization. Whether personal, team, or organizational, we all need a process for staying aware of our challenges and opportunities. One of them was wise enough apply the technique, “leverage your network,” to turn the first step of their process on me, asking for additional readings -- and thus this post. I’ll now do the same with you: What have we missed? What readings, videos, and links should I be using to prepare for future sessions? What other materials would be excellent follow-ons to the material here?

Our Future Together

Join us for a future session of 21st Century Management. Dates are available in December 2015 and May 2016. The focus on agile, connected, execution makes it especially powerful if more than one member of an organization attends. We had several groups with three or more members and it felt like they had unique opportunities for leveraging their experience.

Partnering, Integrating, To Make the Complex Simple

terrigriffith — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 17:41:35 +0000

In the recent top rated book, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World , Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt offer that, “When many parties must work together, simple trumps complex” (p. 44). This is a beautiful fit for the future of work, a future made up of complex work, performed in complex ways. Freelancers, contractors, and global project work, all intermingle with traditional organizational forms. Rather than try and understand all the complexities yourself, partner with those who do -- and do it in a simple way. By simple in this instance I mean push decision-making to where the information is, close to the work itself.

Complex Work and Partnerships Require Simple Rules and Direct Connections to Feedback

This is such a strong idea that Sull and Eisenhardt use it as the conclusion of their book:

..simple rules work because they provide a threshold level of structure while leaving ample scope to exercise discretion....

Close to the facts on the ground, individuals can draw on their judgment and creativity to manage risks and seize unexpected opportunities. The latitude to exercise discretion not only makes simple rules effective, it makes them attractive. People [and organizations, my addition here, but also covered in the book] thrive when given the opportunity to apply their judgment and creativity to the situations they face from day to day. And if they benefit from simple rules, they are more likely to use them and use them well" (p. 228).

The “threshold level of structure” is what keeps the ground-level decision making from just being tactical. Key is that the structure is understood and committed to across all actors. Nilofer Merchant talks about the value of co-creating strategy so that the vision and the tactics are tied across all levels of the work from inception. Co-creation can support commitment and innovation. Sull and Eisenhardt provide detailed notes on the value of working throughout the organization as rules are created -- and are clear that strategy and execution cannot be separated.

The Future of Work Is Complex, But the Underlying Technologies Can Help

Internet enabled collaboration, product development supported by real-time data, The Internet of Things. These all mean we spend more time and effort checking and connecting with data and others throughout our days, and nights. The process is not simple, but it could be simpler. Some organizations have found ways to leverage the complexity of data in ways that simplify the work.

Pulse Mining Systems

Pulse Mining Systems provides integrated business management tools to mining companies. (I’m looking forward to writing a more historical piece remarking on how much mining has taught us about management.) They offer resources for operations, human resources, marketing, and more. The key is that they don’t do it alone -- and their tools aren’t meant just for executives or data scientists.

I spoke with Rob Parvin, then their visualization and analytics manager. I was looking for an example of the value of offering access to operational data to people doing the work, but I found much more. Yes, he described examples where mines with five kilometer conveyors are progressing from manual reporting to real time, sensor-based, feedback to the shift managers. Yes, maintenance and staffing decisions are made with better data. (More on those soon.) But what surprised me was how they were creating these opportunities.

Pulse Partners to Co-Innovate

Pulse partners to simplify both their strategic decision making and how they then take action on that strategy. They co-innovate -- work with their strategic clients -- to identify the specific information needed by the client for decision making (going for simple rather than complex), key metrics, and prototyping. The product is eventually rolled out as a general offering -- but with the knowledge that it’s a tool that’s valuable in the industry and works. The implicit rule is that products are co-developed rather than created away from the work itself. They’ve been able to create early versions in as little as three weeks.

Pulse is able to move this quickly because they’ve partnered with two analytics companies rather than trying to build out their own capabilities (implicit rule: Don’t reinvent the wheel). They work with Birst (see an earlier mention here) and Tableau to provide analytics and visualization building blocks that are rapidly prototyped and tested in the field. The complexity is managed by focusing on pre-built, reusable capabilities. The partners are bound by a common interest in answering operational questions.

In prior posts I’ve written about how we can lead by letting go (of old school management techniques), but that creates an image of chaos for some. Instead, let’s think about a structured handoff of responsibility. We are unlikely expert in all the areas where we need expertise. Pulse has found like-minded partners. SAP has done the same with their co-innovation labs. Each seems to have developed simple rules of organization to handoff pieces of the innovation process to partners with appropriate skills.

My Own Simple Rules

Rereading Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, and considering the issues in the context of our quickly changing work environment, has inspired me to think about my own simple rules. I work with a variety of audiences interested in designing organizations for innovation and offer a process for creating designs unique to their settings (I’m in full agreement that the local creation of the rules is an important piece of the process). That said, I think there are a few rules many can work with and I share them here in hope that you will help me improve them.

Base decisions on data, with decision makers as close to the work as possible.
Build teams with diverse skills, but common interests - highlight the interest.
Bundle similar work, and where possible, pass off to automation.
Be transparent and pay attention to what others are sharing with you.

Sull and Eisenhardt use the second half of their book to discuss how to refine and improve your rules. The above are just a start for me, are they also an interesting start for you?