Is growth an unachievable myth for most corporations?

Your humble

[yeah, right]

correspondent, BadConsultant, was thinking of growth this morning

[on the way to his local diner for the best low-carb omelet-fest this side of the Mississippi]

and the fable of rice on a chess board came to mind. I think it’s an old Confusciuscian

[made-up words are cool]

parable, though, knowing BadConsultant‘s luck, it’s probably that bastard Aesop muscling in again.

But… We digress.

Here’s the fable. There’s this dude, who meets another dude, who offers the first dude something amazing, and then that dude, sensing the second dude is trying to pull a fast one, tells the dude that he’ll only agree to the deal if the dude offers the dude…

Ah, screw that… I don’t even know the chinese symbol for dude.

Let’s cut to the chase. It’s a mathematical core. If you put one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, etc.

[i.e. doubling each time - for those working in corporate analytics functions]

by the time you reach the 64th square there isn’t enough rice in the world to put on the square.

[forgetting for a moment that the surface area of the square is likely only a little over a square-inch, so it'd have to be a mighty, might tall tower of precisely balanced rice anyway]

The moral of the story is lost on us, except that the simple mathematics of scale soon outstrip reality. I think, if I’m right, the number of grains of rice on that last square are 2-to-the-power-of-64 (=2^64 in Excel). It’s a very, very large number:

18,446,744,073,709,600,000

A large number indeed.

[almost as much as Wall St receives in bonuses (in a bailout year)]

And so to growth.

Stop for a moment and think of a large corporation. One you work for maybe. Or one you’ve heard of. What scale of growth are they on the record as having in their sights. Let’s say it’s a range – from the conservative 8% to the more common 12%

[because we love to say 'double-digit' - YEEHAW!!!]

to the still common 20%.

Let’s take 3 companies aiming for those growth rates: Company A ($1m base-revenue), Company B ($500m base revenue), and Company C ($10bn base revenue).

And let’s say we drop in on them at 5, 10, 20 and 50 year points:

In our fantasy scenarios, anything is possible, of course. So yes, over 50 years, Company C could conceivably grow its revenue from $10 billion to $91 trillion, but BadConsultant would suggest that as unlikely. But what about Company A growing its revenue from $1 million to $9 billion in that same 50 years? Is that any more doable? If there were that size of market potentially-available, how come Company A is only $1m at the moment?

The mythology of growth is a powerful aphrodisiac. We just love to get turned on by the illusion of momentum

[and use confirmation-biased analysis to convince ourselves that our stock purchases are anything but]

we are, after all, a progression-based organism.

[guaranteed promotion and career ladders… Anyone? Anyone?!!]

But here’s the thing, pinning your hopes and dreams on growth is a risky prospect – and, we would argue, leads to the sort of behavior that creates Credit Default Swaps, LIBOR fixing, Ponzi schemes, and every other trick that brought the global economy to its knees.

Long-term hyper-growth is unachievable

[if not simply for the fact that it assumes unlimited resources - to which, the Earth might have something to say]

and every ounce of leadership and organizational energy and commitment pursuing that myth is destined for the morass of futility, frustration and, ultimately, despair.

The only growth industries left are those that result in happiness, joy, satisfaction and enoughness

[made-up words are cool]

and the company that begins to deliver to those aims – and not the illusion of certainty that is materialistic comfort purchases – will wipe the floor with those laboring for the mythology of growth.

BadConsultant won’t be holding his breath, however.

As ever, your humble correspondent,

BC

A New Remit and Mandate for HR/OD: Human Results through Organization Destruction

BadConsultant has been sojourning on a small island off the coast of somewhere warm, enjoying mojitaritas

[® BadConsultant, 9th August, 2010]

and reading many upon many books.

And we’ll start this post by being very clear, you are currently taking a first look at a concept that will become a book within the next year

[which you will scan and turn your nose up at when walking through airports - but that, 3 years' later, you'll be claiming you'd been an early reader of - and that's fine, BC will get the royalties eventually]

The book’s working title is “Destruction HR” – though that will likely change long, long before it’s published.

First, some reference points which you need to read to have some sense of where BC is standing:

1. “The Future of Management” (Hamel w/ Breen)
2. “Beyond HR” (Boudreau, Ramstad)
3. “Ishmael” (Quinn)
4. “The Black Swan” (Taleb)
5. “The Drunkard’s Walk” (Mlodinow)

[NOTE: in all the above, I've edited out the post-title sentence all these books carry for brevity's sake]

From all of the above, and BadConsultant‘s inordinate opinion and experience, we contend:

Human beings have, for centuries, been diving deeper into the delusion that it’s a) possible to live in a rational universe; and b) that human beings can create rationality through the power of their brains alone.

Note that word, per Merriam-Webster online:

Delusion (noun)

Etymology: Middle English, from Late Latin delusion-, delusio, from deludere

Date: 15th century

1 : the act of deluding : the state of being deluded

2 a : something that is falsely or delusively believed or propagated b : a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary; also : the abnormal state marked by such beliefs

[Bold courtesy of BadConsultant]

Fast forward to now, a century into the mythology of the modern organization. Most people who enter the workplace every day are trapped in the delusion – organizations perpetuate the myth that they are somehow rational; that things occur in line with immutable and forecastable laws.

They are not. And things don’t.

HBR case studies, best practices, business books – they all sell on the basis that the delusion can be maintained. That it’s possible to live in rational times.

[The first line of the book will be "This book does not contain a single best practice" - in fact, if BC has his way, it's the only time those two words will appear together in the whole text"]

It isn’t. We are human. We are programmed to exist and survive through

[and therefore create]

randomness.

As BadConsultant has written many times, the illusion of hunky-doryness, is largely driven by the need to perpetuate delusional rationality.

And the corporate functions are the keepers of the hunky-dory, and therefore the keepers of the delusion.

So, why a new mandate for HR/OD?

Because the organization that succeeds in becoming completely irrational, completely human, will succeed beyond the wildest dreams of competitors. The Human in Human Resources is increasingly being proven to be the pivot point; the R of HR is increasingly demanding to be thought of as Results – i.e. what comes out of the sausage factory, not what goes in

[pig lips! I need pig lips!]

A new remit for HR: Human Results.

But what about the OD? While BadConsultant would love it if the concept of organization – pre-ordained structures, departments, roles, responsibilities – quietly slipped off this mortal coil and went to meet its maker, that’s not about to happen in the next few

[billing cycles]

decades. So, the O remains Organization… simple enough.

But it’s the D that needs radical change. It’s the D that will demand a new mandate.

Because over the years HR/OD have become addicted to a) keeping leaders happy and self-contained in the illusion of hunky-doryness; and b) adding things to the organization. Removing things is one of the great holy grails of HR/OD.

• We’ll be more strategic when we lose the transactional stuff (that never goes away)
• We need to focus only on work driven by the strategic plan (but if a leader asks me to do what I did yesterday as a favour, I’ll salivate)
• We need standard processes, but my client group needs it done their way (so we’ll help them create a shadow system)

Nothing ever comes off the conveyor belt.

It could. It really could. But the current D in OD – Development – means additive development.

As a profession, we are now introducing fixes for the fixes that were supposed to fix the fixes that were designed to fix the…

Don’t believe ye olde BC?

Take a long, hard look at your performance management process. If it isn’t a lash-up of 5 or 6 legacy processes that bears no relation to business performance, we’ll be very surprised. If it is pristine, clean and simple, understood by every manager and deployed without deflection from business performance, then a) congratulations, you’ve achieved the impossible; or b) sorry that you are so far into the delusion of rationality that you believe that.

So, BadConsultant argues the the D must change. Radically.

The new D is for Destruction.

Destruction as in tearing down global career families and losing job titles. Destruction as in giving managers complete control of their budgets, including compensation and demanding on-budget, results-based management. And once that’s in place, Destruction meaning no salary bands, no calibration, no norm distribution, no across the board merit increases – just Managers paying their team what they believe they’re worth based on the measured results they’re achieving.

[How many managers? Many fewer than currently - of course]

Destruction as in removing every policy that protects against the worst behaviors of a small minority by legislating the behavior of all. Destruction as in firing people who consistently under-perform, not moving them sideways to spread cancer elsewhere in the organization.

Getting the BC drift yet?

The shape and scope of that word – Destruction – will be the shape and scope of the book.

And there could be no better function than HR/OD to lead the future – but it won’t be the HR/OD of today.

It’ll be “Destruction HR”.

With a new remit and mandate:

Human Results through Organization Destruction

We rather think we’re starting a movement, so drop BC a line if you want to be part of it.

’til we meet again, may the mojitaritas(®) flow freely,

BC

The Illusion of Hunky-Doryness – Part II: As luck would have it, I’m bulimic

The latest in our line of mythology illumination…

• Part I

BadConsultant really should have learnt his lesson

[denial, avoidance, resistance... anyone... Anyone?]

by now. But sure enough, a moth to the networking flame, I found myself doing the circuit again a couple of weeks back. Margartias were quaffed, nachos nibbled and… erm… well there was much conversation and mutual distribution of business cards. All in all, a fun and successful week.

So why my dismay?

Well, let’s start with the obvious: HR in its current state is rapidly becoming obsolete, almost a parody of itself. So, an HR conference was always going to make me go ‘Hmmmmmm…’ more than I normally do. But that wasn’t it… If anything, I was reassured that while the function’s leaders may be missing the point, there is talent deeper in the function that is ready to emerge

[and for whom BadConsultant will be writing a book later this year]

and reinvent the future of talent and organization capability.

No. It was simply this. Being an organization culture

[groupie, geek, nerd, guru, observer, catalyst]

student, I was pleased to see the word culture appear in at least one presentation title

[did I mention that many HR leaders are missing the point?]

until I got to the session. Which was OK. Really. It was OK. BadConsultant didn’t grind his teeth once.

It was slide 3.

Slide 3.

Which repeated the homily:

“Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast”

[funny, when you type it with capitals it looks like a newspaper headline - Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast, police are searching for a bloated bureaucracy addicted to manipulating financial reports that maintain the perception of double-digit growth]

Turning to my ready reference source, Google, I get 4,640,000 hits on “culture eats strategy for breakfast quote” – and even in the first page worth of links, I see it attributed to several sources.

[obviously, the management quote just appears fully formed... like paperclips - c'mon have you ever purchased one?]

Some inventive spark had even extended the concept by suggesting that culture also ate strategy for lunch.

[though no-one had yet suggested that dinner was on the menu - a nod to work-life balance, perchance?]

Hence my dismay at the conference. Here was somebody preaching to the supposedly enlightened about a subject that IS the future of the function, leading with a phrase just about as hackneyed as something about someone being someone else’s ‘greatest asset’.

Like it or not, while BadConsultant is pleased to note that there is at least awareness that culture is eating strategy for breakfast, he can’t help observing that most corporations keep feeding new strategies to the beast in the hope that it’ll get full and stop stuffing its face. Truth is that it doesn’t… it quietly nips to the bathroom, pukes up the last strategic solution it sampled and returns to the table for more.

And there’s the problem. We’ve created another myth that supports the culture of averageness, where failure is acceptable so long as it doesn’t do too much damage, so long as the illusion of hunky-doryness is maintained.

Organization culture is bulimic. It binges, pukes, binges, pukes, on and on in a continual cycle

[and it has REALLY bad teeth]

and the one group of people who are able to see it for what it is, has even the closest appreciation of what makes it so and, some would argue, already have political permission to act upon it, choose not to do so but instead – because they’ve been indoctrinated to believe that a seat at the table comes from being a ‘Strategic Business Partner’ – collude with the self-destructive behavior.

So, if organization culture is bulimic, why aren’t we treating it as such:

1. Intervene
2. Introduce self-awareness of the situation
3. Identify automatic thoughts
4. Encourage behavioral experiments
5. Structured, controlled rebuilding of identity

BadConsultant would argue that we’ve actually got pretty good at steps 1 and 3 – well, those of us running organization surveys may have done if we’re not just using a framework off the shelf, however the very last thing that HR

[heck, let's be expansive: Corporations!]

will do is encourage experimentation in order to rebuild identity. That might destroy the illusion of hunky-doryness. It might erode the slavish HR belief structure that leaders have all the answers

[clue: they don't]

that it’s possible to make everyone behave in predictable ways

[clue: it isn't]

that a corporation can protect itself from all risk

[clue: it can't]

That’s the mythology that is the illusion of hunky-doryness.

So.. Bottom line…

The next time your business leaders offer up a strategic solution to your current business challenges, start watching your culture closely. If it goes quiet and politely excuses itself from the table, it may be time for you to knock on the bathroom door and say “it’s time we had a talk”.

And that knock may be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.

With love,

BC

Innovation isn’t just for things – Part VI

As if there’s any point in providing the history:

Part I – Part II – Part III – Part IV – Part V

From your exhaustive re-reading of all the preceding parts, you’ll know that we have three questions:

1. Who is your ideal employee?
   

   A: Those employees most likely to maintain and grow their productivity in the future and who have the most potential to increase value for our future customers

2. What proportion of your workforce could be classed as your ideal employee?
3. How do you increase that proportion?

In Part V, we were beginning to build the answer to the second question, by looking at how to derive products

[yes, and services]

from a simple customer value proposition

[BINGO!]

and identifying 5 areas of work most critical to bringing that product to life:

• Innovation
• Production
• Brand
• Face
• Culture

So, there you have your answer… R&D, Manufacturing, Marketing, Sales and… er… HR?

Except.

Not really. The answer to question 2 isn’t simply that those organizational functions are important, despite the

[claims of the respective leaders of those functions trying to avoid budget cuts]

mythology of corporate abnormality holding them near sacrosanct as it perpetuates the illusion of hunky-doryness .

You see, we know those functions and there’s a panoply of individual contribution within and across them. We’re not talking about performance – we’ve got that covered in the answer to question 1. The contribution we’re referring to here is that of making the future look different to today. Yes indeed, even amongst the home of the future(®) that is R&D, there are more folk intent on keeping things just the way they’ve always been than those who truly want to break new ground.

Even R&D is populated with

[geniuses, geeks, nerds, robots... delete as appropriate]

people. And without a catalyst or

[cattle-prod]

leadership, the majority of people will seek to maintain an uncomfortable status quo rather than leap into the unknown.

So, one way of answering question 2 is simply:

Those employees who are willing to be your ideal employee

but that’s somewhat circuitous logic

[which BadConsultant would only use if being paid for this contribution]

and wholly unsatisfying.

So let’s try and construct a more detailed and nuanced answer to question 2 – What proportion of your workforce could be classed as your ideal employee?

Those employees who willingly and consistently flex our innovation, production, brand, face and culture to develop and deliver products and services that release unseen potential for our customers

OK, let’s throw that against the wall and see what sticks.

[yes, this stuff really is as easy as cooking pasta]

Taking the first two answers together, we have increasing individual productivity to meet future customer needs by willingly flexing innovation, production, brand, face and culture to release unseen potential. Or:

Performer – Customer – Potential

And yes, there are those who will say that Customer should always come first, and to those commentators BadConsultant would say

[bad luck, we're writing this]

this blog doesn’t make it easy to draw venn diagrams but, if it makes it easier for you:

The answer to question 2 is, therefore, those employees who use innovation, production, brand, face or culture willingly and consistently to stay in the red ‘sweet-spot’.

Alles klar? We’ll be back soon to transition from question 2 to question 3 – What can you do about it?

Stay cool,

BC

Built to Fail

Ah, the majestic herds sweeping across the plains, moving as a single organism, flowing in energetic patterns. But look closely, the old are falling behind, the young are jealously guarded, the whole is hyper-aware of predators lurking in the tall grass. Something changes, a thousand ears prick to the sky in alert observation, sixth and even seventh senses tingling. In a flash, one of the herd is taken down – another turn in the feeding cycle of life in the wild. Nature, red in tooth and claw. The herd slows, safe in the knowledge that the threat is diminished for a while, and returns to feeding.

Business literature has a lot to answer for, doesn’t it?

In Search of Excellence, if you’re not Built to Last, you’ve no hope of going from Good to Great. If you’re not Doing What Matters then you’ll be left behind in the race From the Ground Up to The Future of Management.

Oh, how we love our snappy titles.

And animal metaphors.

And the preoccupation with numbers

[we suspect that first-hand executive experience with 12-step programs might have something to do with it]

and lists.

Here’s a selection from an Amazon.com search for Jack Welch books:

• 4 E’s of leadership
• 74 of the toughest questions in Business Today
• 29 Leadership secrets
• 250 Terms, Concepts, Strategies & Initiatives
• 10-10-10: A Fast and Powerful way…

And Drucker’s up to it as well:

• The 5 most important questions…
• 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for…
• The best 60 years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management

That last one’s a stretch – as is ‘Managing Oneself’ – but we thought that to be able to choose the best 60 years of Drucker’s output is a statement in itself.

[Did Drucker have a worst 60 years? Where's the book about that?]

All right.

It’s a known fact that humans can learn through mimicry and that visualization can aid performance. What do we learn from, for example, Good to Great? We learn that a CEO with a clear and specific vision coupled to organizational nous can achieve the focus to bring that vision to life. Cool. Case studies, metrics, comparator groups. All support that central learning. Cool.

Except.

Looking at exceptions and believing you can make them the rule is… erm… odd.

In 2007, over 31 million business entities were required to file tax returns, including 22 million self-employed individuals. How many of those business entities fall into the ‘Great’ category? How many are, at best, average? How many should be out of business by now?

How many have a CEO with a clear and specific vision coupled to the organizational nous to achieve the focus to bring that vision to life?

You see, we learn from business books that the unique individual makes no difference, that everything is planned and planful, that there is a 60/29/12/7/5/3/1 step program that can solve all the challenges a company faces. Or in other words, we’re all the same and looking and acting like someone else is a best practice

[spit]

to success.

Business books are written for the herd. They add to the illusion of hunky-doryness

[if it worked for Jack Welch, it's good enough for me... dammit!]

and sustain the culture of averageness.

Here are the business books we would pay to read:

• “Make It Up As You Go Along: How to ignore what they tell you is ‘best for you’”
• “I Don’t Know: Admitting the obvious and making it work for you”
• “Things Go Wrong, Deal With It”
• “Just Keep Going: Delivering strategy when all about you scream change!”

Of course, that’s not the story that’s ever told in this hunky-dory world, so we doubt we’ll see them in print soon.

[unless BadConsultant ever gets around to writing them]

Business books sell predictability. They trade in the illusion of certainty. Certainty doesn’t exist, chaos does – so here’s one parting thought.

The next time someone plays the ‘reference game’ – you know it, trying to one-up each other with the ‘have you read…<insert obscure title here>’ question – look them square in the eye and ask the following:

What problem are you avoiding right now? Why are you choosing not to deal with it? Why are you willing to substitute reading someone else’s experience for growing experience of your own?

then sit back and enjoy the discussion.

Be well,

BC

All right – I’ll say it… most posts on recruitment effectiveness are gumpf

BadConsultant declares a vested interest in the subject of this post, yet will post anyway in the hope of generating thought and discussion.

We just went browsing for the umpteenth time in the past few weeks for blogs, articles, ezines, etc. on recruitment effectiveness. And, after a little while found we were grinding our teeth.

Here’s the problem.

Efficiency = doing something well (usually against cost, quality and time measures)

Effectiveness = doing the right thing to make the impact you want to make (usually against outcome measures)

Efficiency and Effectiveness are NOT the same thing, simply because it’s possible to do the wrong thing really, really well.

People who post about recruitment effectiveness

[you... yes, you... stand STILL laddie!]

please read that sentence above again. And again.

And again.

If I have to read one more post anywhere purporting that the following metrics measure recruitment effectiveness, I will officially scream blue murder:

• Cost per hire
• Time to hire
• Offer – Fill ratio
• Voluntary turnover of new hires in year 1
• Promotion rates in year 1
• Performance rating in year 1

Let’s take a look at these:

Cost per hire, Time to hire and Offer-Fill ratio

These are fine and dandy as efficiency metrics, although I would argue that they are always subjective based upon the talent pool – it might take longer and cost more to hire a neurosurgeon than a pond cleaner, after all.

The problem with these metrics from an effectiveness standpoint is that they are not markers of impact. Let’s paint a short, sweet scenario.

I have a job to fill. I wander to the area in town with the highest unemployment rate, grab someone and offer them the job, starting the very next day. Voila! $0 cost-per-hire, 1 day to hire and 100% acceptance. You know the punchline. So I won’t bother repeating it. The metrics don’t guarantee effective recruitment.

Voluntary turnover in year 1

Given the sheer number of people who work in a culture of resentment, the idea that everyone leaves a job as soon as it becomes a problem is laughable. The idea that the only people on board with a company are those who are fully capable of, and delivering, performance. It’s delusional!

Put simply, using voluntary turnover in year 1 to measure recruitment effectiveness is like assessing how great a surgeon is by the number of deaths in his/her operating theatre. It’s the crisis scenario.

Performance rating and Promotion rating in year 1

Grrrrrr… Ask most, if not all, new starters what they were told at their first performance review and pretty uniformly you’ll hear some version of:

“… you’ve had a very good year, but no-one gets an above expectation in their first year”

Like it or not, most corporate performance management approaches and systems steadfastly maintain a culture of averageness and the idea that objective differentiation a) exists; and b) will be systematically visible in the first year is

[excuse us... hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahaha]

laughable. In essence, this is the opposite of the Voluntary turnover metric – it’s the walks-on-water scenario.

Don’t even get us started on promotion in the first year…

[so you're a great recruiter because the person you hired was capable of much more than the job in hand - that's not effective recruiting, it's padding a position with an over-qualified candidate]

The BadConsultant Bottom Line

Yet, even with all of the above, it’s remarkable how widely these metrics – this mixture of subjective, inaccurate efficiency measurement and bipolar aftermath monitoring – are offered up as recruitment effectiveness.

We’re not going to retread old ground

[unless you're willing to pay us, in which case, we'll gladly open our knowledge management database and re-package existing work]

about what recruitment effectiveness means – and we’ve already posted today about how DidWe.net bridges the gap between recruitment and performance outcomes, so we won’t over-egg that particular pudding

[even though we openly declared our vested interest]

All we will ask is that purveyors of recruitment effectiveness literature listen to themselves and think about what they’re touting – recruiters deserve better and, now more than ever, businesses need the most effective decisions on who to bring on board – the single-most important decision in the human capital chain.

Rant over,

BC

Checking in, not checking up

Been a busy few days for ye olde BadConsultant, launching DidWe.net (I’ll be posting about that in the coming days).

DidWe very much builds upon the Strengths Springboard, which I created last year. At that time, I couldn’t quite be as transparent as I generally aim to be, so it was the Strengths Springboard was something of a soft launch. Now that I’m unfettered and free, I thought I’d share some of that document here to level-set the group-tipping-point

[misused hyphens are cool]

as it really is the distillation of much of what I write about here at BadConsultant.

So, without further ado

[and definitely without annotations and formatting gorgeousness you can get at the linked PDF]

from ‘The Strengths Springboard – is your organization ready?’ I present ‘Checking in, not checking up’.

***************

Hopefully by now, I’ve managed to convince just one little corner of your thoughts that if you get a clear, specific focus on customers and the outcomes that are meaningful/critical to them, then encourage colleagues to first meet and then exceed outcome-driven performance standards, you’ll begin to create an environment where strengths-based working can flourish.

Play it right and you will see a virtuous cycle begin to form: Aspire à Succeed à Aspire à Succeed à Etc.

But that doesn’t mean that the cycle will be self-fulfilling, or maintenance free. It’s true that, in some rare organizations, a control-free culture has been created but none of us should be naïve enough to believe that a quick flip of the Strengths Springboard switch will magically change a century’s-worth of the ‘modern’ organization.

We have to change the nature of performance relationships – particularly that of the manager-colleague.

First, let’s speak openly of beliefs that are enshrined in the ‘modern’ organization: Theory X & Y. McGregor proposed this motivation theory in the 1960’s and it has become so deeply baked into subsequent theory, management science and practice to be taken for reality.

The ‘modern’ organization built its Taylorist utopia on the Theory X assumption that employees were lazy, work-avoiding, ambitionless drones that had to be energized, organized and controlled by the manager.

In Theory Y organizations, however, employees were seen as desirous of self-fulfillment, aspirational, seeking opportunities, ready to learn and… well… strengths-based, I guess.

Which leaves managers with a choice – to be either a Theory X or Y manager. The difference?

·       A Theory X manager checks-up on her direct reports (i.e. doesn’t trust them to deliver on their commitments and therefore manages their work).

·       A Theory Y manager checks-in with her direct reports (i.e. trusts them to deliver and offers support to their efforts).

The trick here is to recognize that, while managers need to be a bit of both, if you truly pursue the Strengths Springboard, the Theory Y approach will be much, much more prevalent.

Checking-in, not checking-up.

Strengths-based working benefits from strengths-based management.

That seems pretty common-sensible to me.

But this paper isn’t about strengths-based management directly – once again, I recommend Marcus Buckingham’s outstanding work on that subject. Remember the Strengths Springboard is about the organization’s belief system. How can we gear the system to help a manager see why the nuance in belief is important?

Theory X – given a chance, employees are a net drain on the organization.

Theory Y – given a chance, employees create value for the organization.

Perhaps looking at the value created by each employee will help build the case for Theory Y beliefs.

To do this, we’ll make use of GAAP data published on any publicly-listed company. Here’s the equation:

Value Created per Employee ($) =	Gross Revenue – Operating Costs
	Number of Employees

What’s great about this equation is that it recognizes that there are costs associated with employees, but that for those costs there is a return on investment. It’s almost the perfect equation for symbolizing business intent.

1.     Are we growing revenue?

2.     Are we managing cost?

3.     Are we optimizing each employee?

Let’s take a look at an example using figures quoted on Yahoo!

Intel Corp 2008 Gross Revenue:                 $37.6 b 2008 Operating Expenses:                       $27.9 b 2008 Number of Employees:        82,500 2008 Value Created per Employee = $117,139

Some others:

·       Whirlpool Corporation =       $10,429

·       GE =                   $175,610

·       Google =                   $328,902

Thinking in terms of Value Created per Employee begins to position the time spent with employees not as a Theory X “get their lazy butts moving” but instead very much more along the lines of a Theory Y “I am investing in an asset that is capable and willing to grow”. Indeed, a manager of 10 direct reports at Intel in 2008 could be described as managing a value portfolio of $1.1 million.

Have you ever thought about a manager as an investment professional?

Checking-in, not checking-up. How are my investments doing? Active portfolio management. All of it comes into play once value is on the table.

Now, let’s add one more spin of the wheel in regards to checking in.

Theory X assumes that the organization owns, and is stuck with, the colleague. But remember the stats relating to Free Agent Nation that I described earlier. When 30% of the US workforce is self-employed, choosing to be freelance, how exactly does any manager or organization hope to perpetuate a Theory X belief system?

When the worker is choosing to deploy their talent, you’d better not be checking-up on delivery. When the worker knows by the very nature of the employment relationship that they are a competent, proud professional, there really is no space for pseudo-parental checking-up shenanigans. In the Free Agent scenario, it really is time for mutual respect. It really is time for Theory Y.

So, get your managers positioned as investment professionals, focused on making the performer successful and maximizing the return on investment. Teach them to be active portfolio managers. Celebrate those who increase the return on investment – measured increase in meaningful outcomes coupled to increased engagement – through an action-based approach to strengths development.

Checking-in, not checking-up.

How many are the shades…

… of thy deficiency?

BadConsultant is a complete, total adherent to strength-based working and how organizations and cultures either amplify or erode the chance to do what you do best

[and boy-oh-boy is there a lot to see]

in fact, you might call us a strong believer

[ba-dum-tish]

Just this last week, we had an insight into how alarmingly early the die can be cast. Our 4-year old BadConsultant intern recently got her first pre-Kindergarten progress report – 6 pages of skills and behaviors that had been deemed as appropriate for her age group and that were assessed by a knowledgeable adult.

We’ll stop right there

[because our teeth are grinding]

6 pages. 6 pages!

Of how much our little intern does or does not look, sound and act like every other child in the pre-school.

[don't mention the D-word in our vicinity right now]

OK. Breathe. Let’s continue.

We’re not going to even get into assessment by a knowledgeable adult. Not because we doubt the teacher’s abilities, but because they have little room for manoeuvre within the system.

Which had 5 ratings. From top to bottom:

• C: Consistently demonstrates skill or concept, has developed mastery
• W: Is working on a skill of concept but is inconsistent in its demonstration
• I: Is beginning to show interest in a skill or concept but is inconsistent in its demonstration
• NE: The skill or concept in [sic] not evident at this time
• NA: Not applicable; subject matter has not yet been introduced

Stop. Read that list again. Got it? OK, let’s go…

Stevie Ray Vaughan played the guitar. Eddie Van Halen plays the guitar. Matt Bellamy plays the guitar. BadConsultant has been playing the guitar for more than 35 years but doesn’t come close to being able to do what the greats can do. ‘Mastery’ is NOT a subset of ‘Consistently demonstrates’.

According to this oxymoronic scale, the only gradation is in how much the kid is unable to do something – essentially, “just how deficient is your child?”

Let’s move down the list.

And ask a simple question – what exactly is the difference between W and I?

[aside from 18 letters in the alphabet - yes, you can count on your fingers if you want]

When exactly does ‘beginning to show interest’ become ‘working on’, given that the net outcome is inconsistent demonstration? And, while we’re on the subject, when do we ever stop working on a skills or concept… Oh, wait a minute, that would be the search for mastery and, as that is just a subset of C we don’t really need to worry about it, do we?

We really must have trained our educational establishment to be able to differentiate levels of incompetence.

We won’t even comment on the NE grade – save to say that the spelling error in the original is irony at its crystalline best.

Finally, we have the NA indicating that the child can only learn or be assessed upon material that has been introduced. In other words, “your child doesn’t learn or express interest unless we tell her to”

Except.

The littlest BadConsultant intern likes to tell stories, likes to sing and dance, to get a laugh out of anyone who is paying attention. She’s as funny as it gets. Her imagination is weird, though

[we don't know who she could possibly get it from]

and listening to her free play is like diving down the rabbit hole with Lewis Carroll. She introduces subject matter that adults find hard to follow.

How can that be assessed? And… er… Who can assess it?

So, here BadConsultant sits, far from a competitive parent, simply looking for those early signs of strength to be nurtured and cultivated in the face of the dreadful negativity of the weakness-inspired modern educational approach.

And gets 6 pages of C’s. What is BadConsultant meant to say?

“Well done, darling… you are competent! Although you may have developed mastery, the main thing is that you aren’t even working on something!”

Hardly the stuff of energy, positivity and love is it?

Do we really need to draw the parallel between this weakness-based approach and the performance management systems in most modern organizations?

If education serves to prepare the child for work

[an 'if' that BadConsultant is beginning to challenge more and more as the years go by]

then this is how society breeds its automatons.

And BadConsultant sits here wondering how many parents would receive those 6 pages of C’s and rejoice in the conformity it represents

['scuse us, an unpleasant shiver just went down our spine]

content that their kids aren’t slipping into the quagmire of deficiency assessment, aren’t falling behind, aren’t learning anything that won’t help them succeed in the culture of averageness.

And how many of those parents are managagers?

Grrrrr.

BC

And then NBC said “watch out, here comes the boss!”

We wrote a while back about the Winter Oly… Olympic Winter Games and what it could teach us about corporate abnormality. While the sport may be done, the learning continues.

1. Hurtling down a bob-sleigh run at 90 mph has gotta hurt
2. Canada really cares about hockey and curling
3. NBC US really does choose to focus predominantly on US athletes

We know about number 3 because we made use of the NBC online video site

[hideous navigation]

which in turn uses Microsoft Silverlight video player to provide fabulous high-def streaming video – on our iMac the pictures are gorgeous.

So it was that we got to watch all the late night fin de siècle finals that were on just too late for this BadConsultant, Mrs BadConsultant and our two little BadConsultant interns. Digging beyond the front page of videos posted

[often about US athletes who had often come in 19th place rather than the athletes from other countries who had won]

it was possible to see much of the Olympic Winter Games.

Except.

BadConsultant was having one of his moments, triggered by the Microsoft Silverlight player. Or more accurately, the NBC installation of Silverlight on its site.

Down in the bottom right hand corner, there’s a small button marked ‘Boss Button’

[not a new innovation, by the way - we first saw it on the Cisco job-site in the late 90's]

which immediately hides the video player with a screenshot of Microsoft Vista sporting an empty Excel spreadsheet. Nothing else, no icons, no temporarily stored files.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.

1. As soon as you click the screen (anywhere) the video starts up again
2. There are NO icons on the desktop
3. There are no applications indicated on the taskbar, not even Excel, which is open on the desktop

Bottom line – even the dumbest boss is going to know you’re not working

[just sitting staring at an empty spreadsheet]

remember, the Vista/Office combo is the modern manager’s wet-dream.

But that wasn’t what gave us pause.

[we're used to ranting about Microsoft products, and felt slightly dirty installing Silverlight on our macs]

Encapsulated in that Boss Button is everything that is just deeply weird about corporate abnormality.

Firstly, it goes without saying that it’s reinforces the deeply-held Theory X view of work that permeates the modern corporation – that employees are feckless, lazy and will shirk responsibility whenever possible.

Secondly, it reinforces the old-school ‘them’ and ‘us’ of manager-employee relationship, and presumes that a manager is a) micro-managing; and b) punitive.

We’ve written about both subjects enough to not bring them in here.

What’s most striking about the Boss Button deployment is that, while Microsoft functionality might have made it easy, NBC chose to put it there.

NBC, the national network that runs newsitorials

[made up words like newsitorials are cool]

about how American industry is failing with no hope of improvement. NBC, the national network that daily laments behaviors that contributed mightily to the downfall of modern capitalism as we knew it. NBC, the national network that is clawing for every pair of eyeballs it can get.

NBC, the national network that just threw away a huge opportunity

[once every four years]

to use its unique access to educate and influence its users for the better. In essence the value proposition from NBC for this Olympic Winter Games could have been written as:

We know you hate your job and are scared by your boss, we can help you dodge your responsibilities by watching our videos, and we’ll even keep it our dirty little secret, OK?

Is that what we want from a national network? Is it how NBC will survive and succeed in the integrated world? BadConsultant doesn’t think so.

How about this:

At this very special time, which only comes about every four years, your employees are going to be distracted by the Winter Olympics, many of them are going to be watching our video feeds while on duty. This is going to happen regardless of anything you do, so we thought we’d help you gain some benefit – at our online site, you will find a team chat-room, so that your employees can build stronger relationships with their colleagues rather than watching in isolation and, as you’ll be naturally worried about productivity, we’ve included a widget to post performance progress so that your employees will know if they’re pushing the video-watching too far. In the team area, you’ll also find resources to help assess performance, coaching and management practices from the olympics so that you can gain maximum learning for the time your employees spend on our site. You’ll also find the ‘Who Are Our Olympians?’ recognition widget so your own team can celebrate its star players.

Granted, it’s not so pithy, but it offers at least some sense of value-add.

[and we'd be happy to provide a statement of work for NBC or anyone else wanting to introduce any of the functionality above]

The point being, in a time where every eyeball counts, wouldn’t it be nice to have a national network that understood that the only way it will survive and succeed is to go beyond ‘we are presenting images’ to ‘we are growing others’?

Ah well, as we said, it was just one of those moments…

A bientôt mes amis!

BC

ps: congratulations to athletes of ALL countries for a fabulous Olympic Winter Games, and to Vancouver for a fantastic job well done

If only everybody would…

Ahhhh, change management

[or, to ascribe its formal status, let's capitalize]

Change Management… How doth we love the sound of thy name? How many are the ways that we shall enshrine your virtues and purvey your countenance? How rich are the opportunities to spread your beneficence across a world that has lost its way in human foibles and trinkets?

Where, oh where, to start?

Well, first off, let’s refer you to our newly coined term: BureaucraSy. And

[because you're likely an executive who is just tooooo busy, important and, above all else, infallible to actually take any time gaining new knowledge]

let’s summarise – people experiencing frustration introduce fixes that don’t work but induce frustration in other people who then introduce new fixes that… over and over and over in an endless cycle of

[billable hours]

well-meant insanity.

And each one of the fixes is accompanied by

[cue parting clouds, rays of sunshines and heavenly host of angels]

a robust change mana… sorry… Change Management Plan.

Because those fixes are firmly rooted from the view of the fixer as to how people should work, not how people are working.

Let’s take as an example the introduction of document management systems that require fifteen fields of meta-data to enable cataloguing and retrieval of information. That’s how the system works, it’s a beautiful, perfect filing regimen – the intranet equivalent of the dewey decimal system – everything in its right place. Disciplined. Clean.

So, logically, that’s how every user should work, right? Right?

The project team runs ahead and builds the chang… Change Management Plan with that in mind, drawing up from/to scenarios, business case definition, executive alignment assignments, training, knowledge transfer, incentive/dis-incentive cycles, WIIFM statements, etc, etc, etc.

[oh, how we love you billable hours]

Except.

Take the average employee – let’s call him Bob – and accompany him home, ask to look in his sock drawer. Chances are it isn’t meticulously arranged by colour, material weight, rate of aging

[sock aging ratios can be made available at badconsultant.com for the right price]

nor will you find order in the t-shirt drawer or the shirt rail in the closet. Join Bob at his desk and ask to look at his e-mail. Chances are that his inbox is overflowing with many items out of date but not dealt with – if you’re lucky, Bob might use a folder structure to store old messages, or he might just be one of those people who copies himself on emails that he sends so they remain in his inbox, rather than making use of his ‘Sent Items’. Finally, let’s join Bob as he looks at his local drive, where he stores working documents. Chances are it’s chaos, absolute chaos.

But it’s a chaos that makes sense to Bob. That doesn’t mean it works, it’s just his reality and he knows how to work within it. It’s the way he is working.

Other, more organized people might take a look at Bob’s ways of working and scream in horror: “no-one should work that way!” Some might shower pity upon him. Others may even claim that there’s no way Bob could ever be a high performer with working practices such as his chaotic use of e-mail.

And they would, of course, be wrong.

But in the modern organization’s BureaucraSy, they would be able to make enough noise to the right people to justify a fix. And so the Change Management Plan would emerge for how people should work.

And everyone would be expected to change.

Every Bob and Bobette would be expected to undo their whole reality because there was a supposedly better way that they should work.

Wouldn’t it be better to invest the time, effort and

[billable hours]

emotional energy to listen to Bob and hear what would help him improve his performance and what gets in the way and then design the limited, minimal solution that he is already seeking – not the fix that tries to change his fundamental being?

Or in other words, how about we de-capitalize change management so we move away from:

“Everybody should… if only everybody would…”

to

“Where performance is blocked… somebody will be able to…”

Now, that’s a Change we could sign up to…

BC