Top WGP Blog Posts of 2016

/0 Comments/in , , /by

WGP’s most popular posts in 2016, and a few strong late entrants.

 

2016 has been another fun year on this blog.

The blog itself is nearing 200 posts since 2014.  That’s hard to believe. While it makes for a nice hobby, I have to admit that I fully appreciate the supportive comments and suggestions I receive.  I appreciate all of you who read regularly.

As we get ready for the new year, I thought it might be good to list some “most popular” reads from 2016.  This is totally unscientific, of course–posts from January 2016 get more play than posts from December by virtue of exposure time. So, to offset that advantage, I’ll put a few “honorable mentions” at the bottom.

The blog’s top 10 posts in 2016 were:

  1. A Song for Me At 23 – Some personal reflections on work and life as a youngster.
  2. It Ain’t What You Put Into It That Counts – Why an overweening focus on input is a loser’s game.
  3. The Pain of Mourning Alone – Some reflections on the importance of team and community in hard times
  4. What You Learn is What Matters – Reflections on making the best of any circumstance.
  5. Shark Tank And Manufactured Choices – Why it’s important to take a breath and evaluate all your choices.
  6. Real Talent Never Dies – A tribute to Prince and his influence–written in strategic talent terms.
  7. What Tesla’s First Autopilot Fatality Teaches Us – A short stab at the challenge of a killer product.
  8. Why I Don’t Believe In Recruiters – An experience-based screed about recruiters and headhunters and how to use them.
  9. The Worst Strategy Metaphor In Use Today – An older post about the “chess fallacy” in business strategy.
  10. When The Spin Stops – Why the Theranos case shows the limits of spin and hyperbole.

And, a few honorable mentions from the second half of the year:

  1. That Dead Guy In Your Organization – Why you put it in their belly, not their back.
  2. Cheese, Change, and Cheyenne – How to handle change, and why that matters.
  3. When Your Karma Runs Over Your Dogma – Why leadership via questionable means can come back to bit you.
  4. Ooh! That Smell – Why it’s important to know whether your organization stinks.
  5. They Believe In Good Ethics, Too! – A post from early October about how highly unethical people can thrive in highly ethical environments.

Onward to a great 2017!

GW

Ooh, That Smell!

/0 Comments/in /by

Do you know what your organization smells like?

 

Alright, so I’m a biology major from wayback…and sometimes biological reality meshes with organizational reality far too easily.

It’s the tail end of the Thanksgiving weekend.  As an encore to the festivities, we are having some family over for a holiday meal this afternoon.  I have spent this Sunday morning roasting a Wilson-family signature wet-brined turkey while simultaneously boiling the well-picked carcass of a Wilson-family signature cherry-wood smoked turkey that we consumed earlier in the holiday festivities.

Yes, that’s a bird in the oven and a pot of bird essence boiling on the stove.

My house smells exceptional.

Except, I only know that because my wife just returned from a brief outing and told me so.

The olfactory sense being what it is, I’ve lost all sensitivity to the ambient aromatic goodness that is in my house. My sense of smell is saturated. It took someone coming in from the outside to tell me how good it smelled in here.

And, there’s a lesson in that.

On getting stale…

You know what?  People become stultified. That is, they lose enthusiasm and initiative after too much of the same.  They do it in both good and bad circumstances.

In cultures where the air is heavy, people stop noticing.  I’ve been in places where the sword of Damocles hung over the head of every executive, casting a pall over the whole organization. They eventually stopped really noticing–until some outsiders forced a change and the more perceptive around them realized how much the prior regime really stunk!

Their sense of smell for the badness was saturated. They started focusing in on retirement, or the next job, and forgot how many years they sank in the stink.

Happens all the time.

The funny thing is, the same thing can happen in positive cultures.  People become desensitized to how good they actually have it and constantly yearn for the greener pasture next door.  I’ve been in one of the greatest organizations in the world and listened to grievances that would lead you to think it was a prison. People stopped noticing how brilliant their colleagues were and how interesting the work was.

During that time, I had a (very prescient, it turns out) mentor tell me that “people can’t ever tell how great it is here because we focus on improvement all the time. And, then they leave and it’s the best place they ever worked.”

He was right.  But, we were positively desensitized.  We had the organizational “smell” equivalent to a Thanksgiving feast, but couldn’t’ tell.

And, it leads to the question:  Do you know how your organization smells?

About the only way to tell is to have someone check it from the outside.  Unfortunately, as I’ve subtly noted, organizations full of stink rarely want to confront reality; and organizations reeking of positivity only focus on how to get better (which, in its own way, is a mild stench if used improperly).

So, who is your outsider, providing you with a fresh nose?  If you are an executive and you can’t answer that question, then how do you know what your organization smells like?

I’d be curious how you tackle this question. Please comment below. 

[and, yes, this was written between bastings spaced exactly 17 minutes apart]

 

 

Selfish Selflessness

/0 Comments/in /by

Hard-nosed pride makes it all possible.

It’s Thanksgiving weekend, so how about a post on football?

I was an offensive lineman.  That fact has left physical and mental imprints on me that are hard to ignore.

The paradox of the great offensive lineman (and, to be clear, I make no claim of greatness…) is that he is able to take a fantastically selfless objective and make it selfish.

Yes, you heard that right. An offensive lineman, who toils ideally in anonymity (unless he’s doing it wrong), has to be at once selfless and selfish. He has to be able to work selfishly at a trade that is intensely individual–working for a win on every single play of a football game against another man–while at the same time doing all his work for the success of others and team.  He doesn’t carry the ball.  He doesn’t score.  He just puts in work in hopes that others will, too.

I played in 35 college football games and started 30 of them. In my college days, I officially touched a “live” football perhaps twice (on fumble recoveries), and never in a position other than on the ground.

That is twice that I actually had the football in my hands, out of perhaps 2200 total plays I was a part of in official collegiate football games.

Every single other play required absolute dedication to a job that resulted in somebody else’s ability to move the ball down the field.  It required dedication to playing within a unit of four other offensive linemen plying their trades at the same time, and dedication to doing whatever it took to help the ballcarrier get down the field.

The interesting reality of a lineman’s role is that the lineman can have a massive victory against his opponent on a play that goes nowhere, and he can get beaten on a play that results in a touchdown (ask me how I know). What matters is a commitment to the success of another person and an absolute commitment to getting the job done.  There is an odd sense of humility in knowing that you can be a dominant player and a failure at the same time.

There’s an odd selfishness that one must develop in the job. More importantly, there’s an odd selflessness that one must develop in the job.  It’s selfish selflessness, perhaps best described as pride.

It’s pride in doing what it takes to help the team.

The play called requires you to sprint on sprained ankles to hit a 320-pound defensive tackle with your left shoulder–the one you just sprained–to use your head (connected to your neck which has been sprained since that game three weeks ago) to cut off his path to the ballcarrier?

Get it done.  It’s your job.

It has been a long time since I’ve been on a football field as a player.  But, you know what?  I miss the simplicity of that sort of grinding pride.  The pride in being a key but anonymous part of moving the team forward.

And, I’ll tell you this: Finding people with the right combination of selfish selflessness is exceedingly difficult.

We live in a fantasy football age.  Everybody scores points. It just ain’t so in the real world.  When you find someone with a combination of true ability and pride in being able to help others that can be characterized as selfish selflessness, hold onto them.  Their less interesting counterparts–the ones more focused on their rights than their responsibilities–will pale in comparison to someone who can combine ability with personal pride.

As the proprietor of a now years old consulting firm, I get to apply my sense of selfish selflessness every day.  It’s embodied in the bar that I hold for myself and for my teams in delivering for clients.  We don’t carry the ball.  We don’t score touchdowns.  We work hard to prepare the ground and direction for the ballcarrier.

We hear words like “selfish” and “prideful” nowadays, and they sound very negative.  That’s because we impute some negative traits along with them like arrogance, stubbornness, and greed.

Those things don’t go along with the kind of selfish selflessness I’m writing about this morning.

I’m here to tell you that pride in a job well done, whether one is carrying the ball or wallowing in the mud in front of the ballcarrier, is one sports analogy that truly does convert to the business world.

Hard-nosed pride–combined with a selfless mindset of helping others–makes it all possible.

What do you think?

When Your Karma Runs Over Your Dogma

/0 Comments/in , /by

What goes around actually does come around every now and then. Choose your methods wisely.

 

The recent U.S. presidential election and the veritable smorgasbord of delicious irony–current and impending–has me thinking…

This is not a political blog.  But, it’s hard to ignore the very real strategic insights that come from an election that gives us:

  1. A winning candidate whose methods of winning have left a lot of scorched earth to recover–whether you think him a buffoon, a fighter, a genius, or simply a flawed person (like all of us).
  2. A media sector whose methods have demolished whatever trust remained in it for the time being, leading up to the New York Times editorial board needing to redouble its efforts on “reporting America and the world honestly” (an astounding non-admission if there ever was one).
  3. A set of supporters of the non-winning candidate who now realize that the methods of powers that were behind some of the biggest “wins” for their side (budget reconciliation, as a starter…) probably could be used against them once power passes to someone they simply don’t like.
  4. A vastly smaller set of people who have chosen to protest, riot, and in general cry foul while breaking things in response to what was a fair outcome (not policy outcomes…the person, mind you).

So, what’s the insight?

I’ll give it to you simply, and it’s nothing original.  It’s this:

If you live by the sword, be prepared to die by the sword.

If you live by bullying, shouting down, ignoring, and using unique devices to get your way, then just know that turnabout, while not always fair, is in play.  Yes, in this case I’m referring to the healthy proportion of Democrat Party supporters who have taken off their “open minded, tolerant” masks to show that actually, it was really just either “our way or broken glass.”

But, the truth is we all resort to such conveniences without thinking about it.

We all choose what our dogma says we should, and ignore the blow-back that is likely to come later.  in the 2000’s, U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stemmed from a neoconservative dogma that everybody, eventually, responds to the big stick.  That dogma is flawed (and, ironically enough, proven wrong by the very existence of the United States of America).  The blow-back the U.S. has experienced both internally and externally since deciding to prosecute those wars is instructive of the flawed dogma.

The same is true in the private sector.

I know of multiple executives–some of whom are recently “returned to the market”–whose own arrogance, conspiracies, and secrecy-driven styles ultimately boomeranged on them.

The blow-back was real, and easily foreseeable for anyone who knew the nitty-gritty details.

One in particular was so dogmatic about a social Darwinist approach (and their own superiority to others within that worldview) that, when faced with feedback about their own behaviors and how such behavior could get them figuratively offed from the organization, just cruised right on into oblivion perilously ensconced in the calm self-confidence that such dogma can bring.

One might, in fact, call it karmic justice that the individual faced a sudden and unceremonious ouster from a cold, unfeeling, and similarly dogmatic (about other important character traits) boss.

It’s kind of like what we have witnessed in the “how could we be so wrong” set of 2016 election pollsters who were, in fact, so wrong about the election. The pollsters couldn’t measure the number of people in their polls who, uncomfortable with being called deplorable or bigoted for voicing their support for President Elect Trump (it’s still a stunning reality to write that, by the way), simply didn’t answer the polls correctly. The pollsters’ dogma was in the numbers and not the very real human elements of strategic prognostication.  Human character traits matter.

Sometimes, character traits that can only be measured in actions or lack of actions–not numbers–are the ones that carry the day. Executives who perform beautifully on the financial numbers but who ignore their own character flaws and how those might be viewed by other powerful people are similar.

They succumb to blind spots.

But, they are blind spots only to those who don’t understand the notion of living and dying by the sword.

If you are a strategic jerk–pitting customers and employees against one other for constant gain–then don’t be shocked when someone comes along and beats you at your own game.

If you are an organizational jerk–saying you hire and fire people for their performance but really only when you like and dislike them–then don’t be shocked when someone comes along and simply…doesn’t like you.

If you are a political jerk, using false promises and propanda to fool and lie to people in order to get them to follow you, then don’t be shocked when someone comes along and appropriates your own emotion driving style, and beats you at your own game.

The incoming Trump administration and pretty much any of us presiding as executives ought to take heed:  When your dogma gets run over by your karma…it ain’t pretty.

If you find yourself in a position of believing there is no way you are wrong, then you probably are already wrong.

Choose your methods wisely.

You’ve just taken the time to read this…now take the time to comment.  What do you think? 

 

How Do You Know When It’s Over?

/0 Comments/in /by

How do you know when it’s time to move on?

 

“They never reach out when they’re giving up.” – Better than Ezra, A Lifetime

I once observed a poor manager become keenly and demonstrably irritated at the thought that one of his charges didn’t come to him for advice.

“[He has] turned away, and I’ve offered advice over and over again.”

It was brilliant theater with fantastic words, but the truth of the matter was this:

The manager’s charge had given up on him long ago.  After months of watching the manager make silly decision after silly decision, the direct report was done.

How do you know when it’s time to go?

How do you know when it’s time to find a new boss, or a new employee, or, bluntly, a new CEO for your company?

It’s when your interactions with your boss or employee shift from a dialogue of active discovery and discussion to a dance of passive avoidance.

Colin Powell once said the following:

“The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them.  They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care.  Either case is a failure of leadership.”

The same can be said of followers…  Once your boss stops coming to you with problems to solve, you’ve probably lost her confidence and failed at the task of being a productive team member–or you’ve shown you don’t care.  I’m not quite that categorical…after all, I’m not suited to solve all my people’s problems and they aren’t suited to solve all of mine. But, I am bought into the core notion.

And, you know what? Unlike my original example where the leader failed (frankly, was a failure), it’s actually not always the leader’s “fault.”

It can be nobody’s fault.

It can just be time to move on.

Taking the time to realize when things aren’t clicking is integral to any leader’s thought process. Sometimes, when you no longer seek discovery and discussion, it’s better to seek greener pastures.

Sometimes, when your direct reports no longer engage with you, you need to self-reflect on whether they and you belong together.

Because they never reach out when they are giving up.

What do you think?

Discourse Tactics of the Weak Minded Executive

/0 Comments/in /by

Watch out if you use these arguments…they show you are lazy.

Now and then, you come across a management tactic that is as frustrating as it is weak.

This article is about a few deflection tactics I’ve seen managers use, and why they convey a weak mind.

Picture it:  You are recommending a course of action to a senior manager.  You’ve done your homework, figured out the right course, and put together a solid set of facts.

And then you get smacked in the face with a bit of lazy logic…only it’s the kind of lazy logic that can’t be argued with…because it’s the kind of argument that, if you call it out, proves the arguer is a raving lunatic.

Try these on for size… 5 argument tactics of weak minded executives.

Type 1:  The Straw Man

You:  We really ought to protect Bill in accounting during this round of layoffs…he is a strong contributor.

Them:  Yeah, but we can’t save everyone…

Hey…mister manager…I didn’t say “let’s save everyone.”  I said, “let’s save Bill.”  There’s a difference.  “Saving everyone” is a straw man.

Type 2:  The false dichotomy

You: Investigating the salty snacks segment has merit.  There could be a few gems in there.

Them:  Yeah, but I’m not going to sink millions in capital to get in there, so why bother.

Dear leader: There wasn’t an investment proposal, much less one that requires millions.  You made that up.  Your idea that it’s all or nothing?  That’s a false dichotomy.

Type 3: The ad hominem

You: The marketing team put together this outstanding set of data that says we should pull back from the frozen snacks area.

Them:  The marketing team?  The next time I get a good recommendation from them will be the first time.

Dear boss:  Perhaps this is the first time. Attacking the group that created the data does nothing to advance your strategy (or reputation as a critical thinker).

Type 4: The pocket veto

You:  We are ready to make a decision on the omega project.

Them:  Where’s my jacket, I have a lunch appointment.

Managers who won’t make decisions are worse than those who make bad ones.

Type 5: The reductio ad absurdum

You: He’s a bit high priced, but he’s the best sales rep I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot.

Them: Yeah, but if we hired everyone at this price, we’d go out of business.

This manager not only makes an absurd generalization, but he also betrays ignorance of how talent markets work.

I’m sure you have plenty of examples of argument tactics used by managers when they just want to avoid the issue.  The key for all of us is to address decisions directly. Using weak minded tactics not only proves that you are a lazy leader, but it makes you look bad, too.

These are tactics used by little minds everywhere. Often, some of the “smartest” executives go to them on a daily basis.

What do you think?

Maliciously Delicious

/0 Comments/in /by

Great compliance can equal unhappy customers.

 

Not long ago, I asked some people in my organization to make a change to how they submit expense reports.  Instead of titling the expense reports willy-nilly, they were to use a more systematic titling convention that allows our chief administrative officer (that’s me) to quickly sort through a high volume of reports.

I asked for a simple convention:

Last Name, Client, Month, Year

Admittedly, when reports are submitted this way, it has worked beautifully for me…shaving off minutes of time it takes to review, to book, and where needed to accurately bill expenses from our firm.

Today, I chuckled as I received an expense report titled “Last Name, Client, Month, Year.”  As in, literally named with those words.

Now, notwithstanding my amusement at what was clearly a person’s diligent attempt to remind themselves of how to name their reports that accidentally didn’t get updated prior to submission, it brings up a really interesting topic for the manager and strategist in all of us.

Have you ever heard of “malicious compliance?”

Malicious compliance is compliance with the letter and not the spirit.  It’s doing what you are told and not what’s right.

Good examples of malicious compliance come up in all organizations all the time.  Did you attend that “mandatory” meeting instead of fixing that customer problem because you knew your boss would focus (pettily I might add) on your absence vs. the customer?

Did you ever have someone do exactly what the customer wanted, even though it was exactly the wrong thing?

That’s malicious compliance.

In establishing change programs, we have to balance the need for strict compliance with what I will call “first things.”  First things are principles like the Hippocratic “do no harm.”  They are principles like “customer experience first.”  First things are values.  The first things have to come first.

You want all reports for your strategy deployment effort on time, every time?  Sure, but what about the fire down at the plant?

Having strong values is a way of avoiding instances of malicious compliance.

The point here is that great compliance–even with good rules and regulations–can equal unhappy customers and unhealthy organizations.  Your values should guide you to when it’s time to “overcome compliance.”

I’m curious:  What’s your favorite example of malicious compliance?  If you start the conversation, I’m betting this one could be more interesting in the comments than in the post!

What do you think?

Strategic synthesis: The art and corruption of brevity

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Pithy management insights have their place—and their perils.

Geoff Wilson

I dig synthesis. I mean, I really enjoy enlivening concepts by making them simple and direct. You say, “I want to have the best service, best product, best operations, and the best brand.” I say, “You want a delighted customer.”

See what I did there? Same concept, synthesized. But synthesis is a Goldilocks proposition: too much and you get burned; too little and you’re left cold. Take the above example. Is it sufficient feedback? I’m not sure. That mostly depends on the leadership team receiving the synthesis.

I know some leadership teams that would take “delighted customer” and turn it into a map of service, product, operations, brand, etc. And I know other leadership teams that would hear “delighted customer” and knuckle down on their customer service function. It’s obvious, right? Customer service is the function that delights customers … right? Wrong.

That’s where synthesis is dangerous. Excess synthesis make you pithy. Pithiness is useful in some contexts. Look at the typical internet meme and you’ll see pithiness writ large. But go too far down the pithy path and you end up at pithy’s dangerous neighbor: glibness.

If synthesis is a beautiful red wine, pithiness is a wine cooler, and glibness is a nasty bottle of Boone’s Farm. Dilettantes guzzle Boone’s until they suffer the consequences. Boone’s is cheap, shallow, and insincere—just like a glib statement.

boones

To wit, I’m struck by a meme that recently passed through my LinkedIn feed. It depicts Simon Sinek and a quote about hiring attributed to him:

sinek-skills

This statement epitomizes glib, dangerous advice. Would you select your surgeon based on demeanor? Or choose a mechanic based on attitude? Of course not.

The advice is so extremely context-driven as to be useless. It’s not pithy, it’s shallow—glib, even. Such thinking may apply to the most basic entry-level or noncritical jobs, but adopting the same philosophy to hire your CFO would not only be moronic but could also put you in jail.

While I’m not trying to disparage Sinek—I don’t even know if he approves of the use of this particular quotation—I am denigrating truthiness in management advice. Sinek, I suspect, may know better. Synthesis is an art of the highest order. It delivers precisely what you need when you need it.

Pithiness is an art, too, but it’s a corruptible one. Pithy bullshit sells. But that same pithy bullshit can also get you in deep trouble. Leaders, strategists, managers, and people of all sorts must be skilled at hearing a pitch, proverb, or proposal and searching for the bones beneath it.

If I tell you to “delight your customer,” you may be able to find the full skeleton of a well-built customer-value proposition. At that point, I may have done my job. But f I tell you to “delight your customer” and you then zero in on only the customer service function, I haven’t done enough. I’ve delivered you a wine cooler when you actually need more wine.

If Sinek tells you to hire for attitude and then teach skills, and you rightly ask how that works when hiring senior software engineers, you have properly looked for the bones that were never there. You’re calling bullshit on a tidy, pithy, pseudo-synthetic glass of glibness. Think Boone’s Farm.

Such swill is from the bottom shelf of management thinking—just like a $2 bottle of “strawberry-flavored citrus wine” (a description that sounds like the recipe for a bad hangover). You can live with a wine cooler now and then, but if you’re swigging Boone’s Farm, you’re in for a rough awakening.

What do you think?

That Dead Guy In Your Organization

/0 Comments/in /by

Put it in their belly, not their back.

You ever have an experience where a senior manager called the death of a living and breathing individual?  I don’t mean literal death, I mean figurative death. I mean like when Michael Corleone tells his older brother Fredo, “You’re nothing to me now.”

Here’s that epic scene…

You get it?  Harsh. Right?  “You are dead to me.”

Except what about the executive who doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to actually face up and admit it to the other party.  Have you ever met him (or her)? I have, and it isn’t pretty.

I once served a senior executive who, when faced with people who would not comply with his wishes, would literally say, “They are dead to me.”

Get it?  They won’t take my advice?  “Dead to me.”

Won’t see things my way?  “Dead to me.”

Said no to me? “Dead…”

It’s a hollow way of looking at the world, to be sure; it is, quite possibly, one of the most self-centered utterings out there.  And imagine when it’s done by people in senior positions, but without it being stated to the party who has just died!!!

That means that not only is the other party “dead,” but that he or she is still walking around the organization with a death mark hung on them.  Their career in the organization might be over, and their opportunities for advancement might be nonexistent, but the senior exec doesn’t have the nerve to admit it.   He may have just created a dead man walking, and stated so to other influential people, but he lacks the courage to counsel the dead man out.

In life, we have the opportunity to do two things with our disappointments about other people.  We can backbite and undermine, or we can work them out in front of those who disappoint us.

If you know a dead man walking, then you probably work for or with a person whose moral compass is haywire.

If you’re going to voice your displeasure, have the courage to put the knife in their belly–not their back.

 

Have it M.A.D.E. With Your Team

/0 Comments/in /by

A short primer on how to lead yourself and your team.

Remember when you followed somebody else who really wasn’t great at managing process? Remember how you used to talk about how no one knew what to do or where to go next?

Remember when you finally had to lead other people, and you realized how hard it is to manage other people toward a goal?

Yeah, me too.  I have found that the best leaders combine a keen intellect–thought leadership–with a keen sense of process leadership.

You can find process leaders out there who are world class, and you can find thought leaders out there who are world class, but the Venn diagram doesn’t overlap as much as you would think.  A world class leader understands the content, intent, steps, and closure point for an initiative.

And…everything is an initiative.

But how can us mere mortals define reality for our teams?  I’ll put it in four points you must define.

First is your mission.  The mission is the message.  What is the intended result…not the action steps, but the outcome.  You have to start with this.  We expect to increase margins by 200 basis points.

Second is, oddly enough, the activities.  You have to give at least some definition to the steps you will take.  They may not be exactly right, but you have to prime the pump. We will investigate discounts offered on our key accounts by pulling the last 6 months’ data.

Third is the deliverable.  Yes, it’s an aggravating word for me as well, but it’s a useful one.  What are you going to deliver?  We will propose specific actions to achieve the mission.

Finally, you need to define the endpoint.  When is the word actually done, because the deliverable isn’t always it. We will consider ourselves finished when changes to key accounts are accepted by the key accounts manager. 

Mission
Activities
Deliverable
Endpoint

It’s a simple framework for leading pretty much anything.  You might say you can have it M.A.D.E. when you use such a simple process to define reality for your teams.

Good luck out there.