People are often surprised that I do not read popular business magazines, the latest management books, or eagerly attend speeches by top executives and successful entrepreneurs. I am certainly not knowledge averse; I read a great deal and love information. I am very interested in business and know a lot about it. Clients know that there is seldom an aspect of their enterprise I can not comment upon usefully. I just do not get my data from the usual sources.
I just came across an article in the California Management Review that explains one reason that reading most business journalism and executive memoirs is worse than useless. Phil Rosenzweig’s article, Misunderstanding the Nature of Company Performance: The Halo Effect and Other Business Delusions and his book shows that bad science and poor logic permeate the business press. Rosenzweig’s demolition of the over-praised Good to Great books is especially satisfying.
…it’s easy for pundits and professors to claim that someone blundered. Decisions that turned out badly are castigated as bad decisions. However, these sorts of judgments are erroneous, made retrospectively in light of what we know to have happened subsequently. These errors are surprisingly widespread in the business world. They affect not only journalistic accounts about specific companies, but also undermine the data used for large-scale studies about company performance. They lead to a broad misunderstanding of the forces that drive company success and failure. As we will see below, some of the most popular business studies in recent years are undermined by fundamental problems of data integrity.
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strategy is about choice, and choice involves risk. There are no easy formulas to apply, no tidy plug-and-play solutions that offer a blueprint for success.
I do some balancing postures as part of my yoga practice, standing on one foot while stretching my body. The people who taught me these postures said to “find a point some distance away and hold your gaze on it” while in the posture. I resisted doing this, preferring to let my eyes wander during the stretch. Besides, I know how to balance. It is just a matter of holding your body in the proper position. So, I wobbled or fell.
Now, I remind myself to choose a distinct object as a focus point: the corner of a doorway or the center of a flower. While holding the posture I often notice my eye wandering. And my body wavering. I can only regain my balance by (more…)
According to an article by Michael Shermer, Ph.D. in the September 2007 issue of Scientific American, several elements are needed for a movement or an idea to gain acceptance:
The idea takes a stand for something, not against something, and is based on a positive assertion.
The idea uses an intelligent, rational approach to tackle myths and raises consciousness and awareness.
The idea embraces the uniqueness of self and others, and it requires us to respect each other.
The idea encourages exploration, experimentation and a sense of adventure.
…goal setting should be undertaken modestly and carefully, with a focus more on personal rather than financial gain. They* also make the case that much more research–and more skepticism–is needed about the practice of goal setting. “Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for students of management, experts need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision,” the authors write. “Given the sway of goal setting on intellectual pursuits in management, we call for a more self-critical and less self-congratulatory approach to the study of goal setting.”
I tell my CEO executive coaching clients, prior to the executive offsite, that the CEO can dictate the values statement, perhaps with some team input on word choice. If the organization’s stated values are not entirely consistent with the CEO’s personal values you are in for a rough ride. The CEO must embody and have an emotional commitment to the vision, so it largely comes directly out of him or her, too. I like to start the offsite at a dinner where the CEO clearly and emotionally states the values and vision. Then, with those guideposts, the team can get to work on strategy, tactics, milestones, etc.
A question naturally emerges when I suggest this sequence: what about the executives who do not share the CEO’s values or vision? This helps smoke them out early and by “out,” I mean resigning from the company. Any compromise on values is a step into the abyss, what Bion called “non-work.”
There have been more than 110 goal setting experiments conducted in the laboratory and in organizations in just the last twelve years. Ninety percent of these studies obtained positive results for goal setting. This makes goal setting one of the most dependable and robust techniques in all the motivational literature. … A recent study of high and low productivity … found that goal setting and deadlines were the single most frequently mentioned causes of … high productivity. [page 6]
For more than twenty years, I have led groups and individuals through a powerful goal-setting process with astonishing results: marriages, career changes, doubled incomes, published books, and more.
The two downloads linked from this post include all you need. Use the Specific Measurable Results (SMR) Kitworkbook and podcast to follow the same planning method my executive coaching clients have long employed. Like them, you can create a (more…)
He thought–while his hand moved rapidly–what a power there was in words; later, to those who heard them, but first for the one that found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps the basic secret the scientists have never discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought first takes shape into words.
In 2008, I spoke with two groups of business leaders that I coach on the topic, “What should we be doing now to weather the down economy?” Seven ideas received broad support:
Stay in touch with your center and manage your outlook.
Get busy with personal, executive-to-executive selling.
Why plan? So much changes, so many things are unforeseen. The world is unpredictable and out of our control. The people we depend upon are fallible and have free will. There is no telling what they will do, how they will react to us.
Any airliner spends most of each trip off course and pointed in the wrong direction. Wind, weather, and traffic are constantly diverting the vessel from the perfect path. Rather than being discouraged by the impossibility of staying on course, the pilot and the instruments are continually working to compensate for these random and unforeseeable influences. After a trip of “unplanned” but expected diversions, airliners almost always arrive at their intended destinations. What would be the result if the pilot did not declare where and when he would land? How would he react to the distractions and diversions? Would you buy a ticket on that plane? Rather, could that pilot enroll you in his project?
You have many choices each day–even if they don’t seem like choices–and a consistent target will give you a ready reference for making those choices. Your plan is useful not because it is a description of what will happen, but because it provides a reference point to evaluate and respond to the inevitable circumstances that differ from the plan.
Planning is not Predicting.
The value of a plan is not as a guarantee that things will happen exactly as you expected, but that when the unexpected does -inevitably- occur, you can notice and respond to the deviation.
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People are often surprised that I do not read popular business magazines, the latest management books, or eagerly attend speeches by top executives and successful entrepreneurs. I am certainly not knowledge averse; I read a great deal and love information. I am very interested in business and know a lot about it. Clients know that there is seldom an aspect of their enterprise I can not comment upon usefully. I just do not get my data from the usual sources.
I do some balancing postures as part of my yoga practice, standing on one foot while stretching my body. The people who taught me these postures said to “find a point some distance away and hold your gaze on it” while in the posture. I resisted doing this, preferring to let my eyes wander during the stretch. Besides, I know how to balance. It is just a matter of holding your body in the proper position. So, I wobbled or fell.
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