The Leader's Guide to Radical Management

More or less innovation? Duh?

In relation to my previous post on Patrick Lencioni’s astonishing call for “less innovation”, a colleague challenged me:  Could the job of a checkout clerk at a supermarket ever be transformed into a job that would be innovative?

At the outset, I am willing to concede that this job, as traditionally designed, has low knowledge content. Hence the difference between the best and the worst performance is likely to be quite small. The potential gains from innovation in that particular job will be constrained by this fact.

Yet a moment’s reflection will also show that the traditional role of a checkout clerk is one to which intelligence has yet to be applied. In my local Safeway, this position is becoming increasingly unnecessary as the task of holding products in front of a scanner is something that the customers themselves do. Instead of standing in a tedious queue watching a bored checkout clerk stumble through the work, now I do it myself: I am no longer bored and I get the job done faster. The job of the checkout clerk then becomes one of helping customers master the task, resolving any problems, gathering intelligence about what customers would really like from the supermarket, and finding new ways to delight clients—including not bothering those who prefer to shop in silence.

This leads on to the Toyota principle: there is no such thing as unskilled labor; there is only work to which intelligence has yet to be applied. When intelligence is applied to any job, it can become innovative.

Then the discussion moves on to whether we WANT a world in which every job is innovative. When I read the defenses of traditional management carefully, I get the distinct feeling that these people ENJOY a world in which only a few people are seen to have the brains to be innovative, and everyone else just follows orders. They don’t really want to change the status quo, in part because they have so much invested in it.

So it was with medieval medicine. Medicine in medieval times consisted of blood-letting, exorcism of devils, spells, incantations, and a proscription of bathing. It didn't work. In fact, like traditional management, it made things worse. Doctors who had been taught to do it believed in it. The establishment defended it. The universities kept teaching it. So people went on doing it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It took hundreds of years before these counter-productive practices were set aside in favor of modern medicine. Eventually, people awoke from their collective delusion.

So it is with traditional management. We have known for some time the social and moral disasters that it leads to. It is only recently that we have been able to quantify the astonishing amount of economic damage that it is doing, with the rate of return on assets of US firms only a quarter of what it was in 1965, and the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 now down to 15 years and heading towards 5 years, if we continue on this path: The Power of Pull.

The underlying economics will eventually force change, whether those who have so much invested in the status quo want it or not. The dynamics reflected in these remarkable statistics will force a transition to continuous innovation, whether entrenched interests defend the status quo or not. The only question is whether it will happen elegantly and intelligently and quickly, or slowly and clumsily and painfully.

For those who want to learn how to make the change happen elegantly and intelligently and quickly, learn more about radical management:

http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

New defense of traditional management: firms need less innovation!

I wrote not so long ago about a ridiculous HBR article defending traditional management with the title, Stop Trying to Delight Your Clients.

Now in the same vein is a remarkable new defense of traditional management in Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Patrick Lencioni’s article entitled, “Why Companies Need Less Innovation.” 

According to Lencioni, most of the people working in an organization should just do their job with enthusiasm and consistency. Leaders have to realize that only a limited number of people in any company really need to be innovative. These are the few people at the top, who call the shots and define what products and services should be delivered.

The movie set

“Think about a movie set,” writes Lencioni. “For every writer or director or actor on the payroll, there are hordes of people who have to be technically proficient, consistent, patient, and disciplined in their responsibilities. If they innovate, the project turns to chaos.”

Apparently, Lencioni hasn’t studied successful movie companies like Pixar, where daily meetings are held in which everyone is encouraged to make suggestions.  Read for example Ed Catmull’s article, How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity (HBR, September 2008). The guy at the top is brilliant, but the emphasis is still on collective creativity.

The restaurant

Similarly, according to Lencioni, the most creative restaurant “requires the work of a single chef to design a fabulous menu, and dozens of cooks and waitresses and waiters and dishwashers who will do their jobs with commitment, consistency, and dutifulness. If the cooks innovate, consistency is gone and customers can't rely on what they're going to get.” Has Lencioni never studied those restaurants where the whole staff are encouraged to deliver consistent performance and make creative contributions, like the Inn at Little Washington. Read for example, Taking the Measure of Mood by Patrick O’Connell (HBR, March 2006)

The Surgical Team

The consequences were of Lencioni’s traditional top-down management approach to innovation were graphically described by Atul Gawande in his wonderful book, Complications , (pp. 29–30) when he wrote about two different leaders approached the introduction of a new surgical technique. One was a fast-learning team and the other was slow-learning. A study was conducted to find out why.

The surgeon on the fast-learning team was actually quite inexperienced compared with the one on the slow-learning team—he was only a couple of years out of training. But he made sure to pick team members with whom he had worked well before and to keep them together through the first fifteen cases before allowing any new members. He had the team go through a dry run before the first case, then deliberately scheduled six operations in the first week, so little would be forgotten in between. He convened the team before each case to discuss it in detail and afterward to debrief. He made sure results were tracked carefully. And as a person, Bohmer noted, the surgeon was not the stereotypical Napoleon with a knife. Unbidden, he told Bohmer, “The surgeon needs to be willing to allow himself to become a partner [with the rest of the team] so he can accept input.” . . .

At the other hospital, the surgeon chose his operating team almost randomly and did not keep it together. In his first seven cases the team had different members every time, which is to say that it was no team at all. And he had no pre-briefings, no debriefings, no tracking of ongoing results.

Whereas the poorly performing team was the top-down leader who is “sometimes wrong but never in doubt,” the team that did well benefited from the ideas of all the people on the team. Collective innovation is what did the trick.

The automobile manufacturer

Those who think that collective innovation is limited to knowledge work might want to peruse Matthew May’s wonderful book, The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation. Toyota implements around a million innovations a year. Very few of these come from the top. Everyone in the organization including factory workers on the line are continually looking for ways to do better.

Lencioni: Innovation is for the few

Lencioni will have none of this. Innovation in an organization is for few, in particular for the leadership team at the top. They are the people with the brains. They are “responsible for determining the boundaries of change that are acceptable and, perhaps most important of all, identifying the handful of others within their departments who have the invitation and freedom to innovate.”

For the multitudes of middle managers and their lower level munchkins, they should focus on something he calls “creatonomy”, which means that employees are meant to take responsibility for their work and above all be enthusiastic about it. “Sure, they're encouraged to share their ideas about new ways to work, but most of what they are known for is being great at what has already been defined as the product or service that their company offers.”

The message of creatonomy is straight from Dilbert-cartoon style management. Do what you’re told but be enthusiastic about it. Do your jobs and don’t ask too many questions. Make a suggestion if you must, but don’t expect many suggestions to be taken seriously: that’s the job of those the top. Get on with your job as defined and, above all, put on a happy face. Keep those customers happy!

This is the world of traditional management where only one in five workers is fully engaged in their work, the rate of return on assets is one quarter of what it was in 1965, and the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 is down to 15 years, and heading towards 5 years.

If you’re happy with that, as Lencioni and the “most leaders he  knows” seem to be, then fine. Forget innovation. Continue with your Dilbert-cartoon-style management. Join the ranks of traditional organizations heading for an early demise.

On the other hand, if you are tired of this medieval medicine and want to have a bright future and to be like Pixar, The Inn At Little Washington, Gawande’s winning surgical team or Toyota, then learn more about radical management here:
http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

What values are driving your organization?

"Every organization is “values-driven.” The only question is, what values are in the driver’s seat?"
                              Shawn Callahan

One of the questions that has bothered me for some time (and others) is: why hasn’t traditional management already died?

On August 21, 2010, the Wall Street Journal published Alan Murray’s article, “The End of Management”.

In February 2009, Harvard Business Review published Gary Hamel's article “Moon Shots For Management” that declared traditional management’s day was done.

Excellent books like “Reinventing Management” by Julian Birkinshaw (2010) declare that “management has failed”.

And yet, in established organizations, traditional management (aka Dilbert-cartoon style management) grinds on, seemingly triumphant.

Why?

THE CALL FOR CHANGE IS NOT NEW

The question is even more puzzling because the call for change has been made repeatedly.

In the 1920s, Mary Parker Follett was giving lectures at Harvard Business School and Oxford University about the need for a different type of management based on the principle of noncoercive power sharing and emphasizing “power with” rather than “power over.”

In 1930s, Elton Mayo was urging that work based on a team which gave itself wholeheartedly and spontaneously to cooperation

In 1938, Chester Barnard argued that to survive, an organization had to satisfy the motives of its members while attaining its explicit goals, and foster cooperation among its members.

In 1943, Abraham Maslow made the case for self-actualization in the workplace.

In 1960, MIT professor Douglas McGregor questioned the assumptions of traditional hierarchy that people are lazy, which he labeled Theory X. McGregor urged managers to explore Theory Y: that people want to do a good job and wanted to have responsibility.

In 1971, the report by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Work in America, commissioned by the Nixon administration, concluded that the workplace would have to change to fit the aspirations, attitudes, and values of workers. Job redesign and increased participation of workers were necessary for America to be competitive.

In 1982, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman announced in their book, In Search of Excellence, that it was attention to employees, not work conditions themselves, that has a dominant effect on productivity.

In 1993, Michael Hammer and James Champy wrote that American companies had become “bloated, clumsy, rigid, sluggish, non-competitive, uncreative, inefficient, disdainful of customer need and losing money.” A new kind of management was required.

So the idea that there is something terribly wrong with traditional management is not exactly new.

During the 20^th Century, these calls were largely based on an intuitive feeling that something was amiss. Today, we know more.

THE BOTTOM LINE: TRADITIONAL MANAGEMENT DOESN’T WORK

Deloitte’s Center for the Edge published its magisterial study of 20,000 US firms from 1965 to the present. The results are mind-boggling:

•         The rate of return on assets of US firms is one quarter of what it was in 1965.

•        The life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 has declined from around 50 years to 15 years and is heading towards five years if we continue in this fashion.

•         Only one in five workers is fully engaged in their work.

SO WHY DON’T THINGS CHANGE?

Yet despite these pleas, and despite this evidence, traditional management—hierarchy, bureaucracy, economies of scale, downsizing, outsourcing, exploitation of “human resources”, attempts to manipulate customers—remains the norm in Fortune 500 companies, in business schools, in management textbooks and journals.

In a world that is supposedly rational, why is there no change?

IT COMES DOWN TO VALUES

Some insight comes from a recently published book, which examined all of these phenomena, and concluded: “There is nothing wrong with traditional management. It can be highly efficient and profitable in a stable and predictable business environment.”

The values here are clear: if you can make money, it’s ok. There’s nothing wrong if:

•       The rate of return on assets is steadily declining.

•        The life expectancy of the firm is decreasing.

•        The employees are more and more disengaged from their work

•        The customers are increasingly frustrated by the cost-cutting measure.

•        The profits that are being made are bad profits, i.e. being made at the expense of customer satisfaction, by cutting corners, adding charges, doing whatever it takes to make the quarterly dollar target.

The bottom line looks good. Nothing wrong here!

Well, actually there’s a lot wrong.

These firms are destroying their own future, undermining the livelihood of their people, and even putting national economic independence in question.

If your central value is making money, then all of these negative consequences flow

THE VALUES OF THE 21^ST CENTURY ORGANIZATION

By contrast, if your central value is delighting customers, as in radical management, then a lot of positive things flow:

•         You end up having loyal customers

•         You have inspired workers

•         Productivity is high

•         Innovation is continuous

•         You make a lot of money

TRADITIONAL MANAGEMENT IS NOT JUST WRONG, IT’S STUPID

Why do large numbers of seemingly smart people go on acting in a way that is utterly counter-productive to their own interests, as well as the interests of society? You can offer excuses by pointing to the business schools that continue to teach traditional management, the management textbooks that continue to regurgitate its principles or to Wall Street that rewards short-term profits. What we have is vast numbers of people living a collective delusion. How long will it take for people to awaken from the delusion? History gives some pointers.

MEDIEVAL VS MODERN MEDICINE

Take the practice of medieval medicine. Medicine in medieval times consisted of blood-letting, exorcism of devils, spells, incantations, and a proscription of bathing. It didn't work. In fact, like traditional management, it made things worse. But everyone believed in it and they went on doing it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It took hundreds of years before these counter-productive practices were set aside in favor of modern medicine. Eventually, people awoke from their collective delusion.

MEDIEVAL VS MODERN SCIENCE

The principles of modern science were discovered in the early 17^th Century, when people like Francis Bacon started saying that we have to stop taking on faith what Aristotle said and find out what actually happens. Did people accept this right away? On the contrary. Initially there was fierce resistance, particularly in the universities. Many people’s livelihoods were threatened by the suggestion that everything they were doing and saying was counterproductive. It took decades before rigorous observation was embodied consistently in scientific practice. But eventually it happened. Eventually people awoke from their collective delusion.

IT TAKES TIME FOR A WHOLE SOCIETY TO CHANGE ITS VALUES

We may be sure therefore that eventually we will all awaken from the collective delusion that traditional management is the way to run organizations. But if history is any guide, it may take an agonizingly long time. Values don’t change rapidly.

That's no reason not to get started on the change. We can all help hasten the awakening by asking the question: "what values are driving our organization?" and spreading the word. Traditional management doesn’t work! There is a better way!

To learn more about radical management, go here:

http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

The biggest difference between 20th and 21st Century Management

Management in the 20^th Century was about achieving a finite goal: delivering goods and services, to make money.

Management in the 21^st Century is about the infinite goal of delighting customers; the firm makes money, yes, but as a consequence of the delight that it creates for customers, not as the goal.

The finite goal of delivering goods and services, in order to make money, was utterly boring and dispiriting, as noted in Gary Hamel’s wonderful blog post here. Because that goal dispirits those doing the work and often frustrates those for whom the work is done, it is inherently unsustainable.

The infinite goal of delighting customers is inherently inspiring: helping other people is the essence of moral thinking. It is inherently uplifting for those doing the work, and invigorating to those for whom the work is done. Hence the goal is inherently sustainable.

The 20^th Century goal of delivering goods and services so as to make money is a linear goal. It can be accomplished in its entirety. Through economies of scale, “the system” enables it to be done progressively more cheaply. Through outsourcing and downsizing, the economies can be continued, albeit with declining returns. Rules can be put in place. Processes can be established. Structures can be built. Mistakes can be eliminated. If mistakes do occur, people can be blamed and punished. A predictable and reassuringly linear environment can be built. “The system” operates as a closed universe. The customer is a thing to be manipulated (rather than a person with whom the firm has a relationship) to buy the products and services generated by “the system”. Similarly, the employees are treated as "human resources" to be mined and exploited and discarded as necessary. The entire scheme is antipathetic to innovation, because any significant innovation risks de-stabilizing the simple, linear, finite world that has been created.  “The system” has become an end in itself. For much of the 20th Century, this worked well enough.

Only problem? The world changed. In a stable world like that of the 1950s and 1960s, with strong demand, established firms in control of the marketplace could get away with manipulating customers. Today, that world is gone. Today, as a result of a variety of factors, the customer is in charge. There has been a fundamental shift in the balance of power between sellers and buyers. Now, unless a firm is delighting the customer, and providing a continuous stream of new value added, and ensuring enhanced customer outcomes, the customer can—and will-go elsewhere.

Tah-dah!

New ballgame!

What is the nature of the new ballgame? First of all, let's grasp the magnitude of the change. It’s not a minor shift at the periphery. It’s not a new process or structure. It’s not a new management gadget. This is a phase change. One is tempted to say “paradigm shift”, if Kuhn’s term hadn’t been so misused.

The new goal of delighting customers is a radical shift in the difficulty of what a firm is undertaking. The goal of a firm is no longer simple and linear and finite. Now the goal of the firm is difficult and complex and infinite. Now continuous innovation becomes a requirement, rather than a distraction and a de-stabilizer. Now we are in a world of continuous experimentation, to find out what works and what doesn’t, in terms of adding new value for clients. Now mistakes, instead of being elements that can be eliminated, are an essential element of the learning process. Now mistakes become crucial and welcome elements of the learning process. Instead of mistakes being punished, now mistakes are welcomed as essential opportunities for learning. Now everyone in the firm is focused on what can be done to add additional value to customers and clients.

Now outsourcing and downsizing are seen in their true light as destroying the medium term capacity of the firm to compete. Now economies of scale are recognized as hiding the true costs of delivering value to customers in a more timely fashion. Now structures and rules and processes are formulated so as to enable and reinforce the creativity and energies of the people doing the work, rather than undermining them.

Now the customer and employees are no longer treated as things to be manipulated, or quasi-children to be ordered around, but rather as adults with whom the firm has an adult-to-adult relationship, engaging in real conversations. Instead of the entire way of operating being antipathetic to innovation, now everyone in the organization is responsible for finding new ways to add value to customers and delight clients. The firm is no longer an end in itself. The firm is now “other directed”: it is focused on meeting the needs of the clients and stakeholders whom it is purporting to serve.

The 21st Century firm has structures and processes, but they are structures and processes that create a space to liberate the talents and energies of those doing the work, rather than crush those talents and energies. The structures and processes are designed to delight customers rather than frustrate them. As a result, the 21st Century firm is very good at getting things done.

None of this is particularly difficult to understand. All of it is obvious if we think about things seriously for even a few minutes.

Why isn’t 21^st Century management—aka radical management—happening already? Sadly, organizations have gotten into some very bad habits. The ways in which they made money in the past are being continued, even though they are destroying the very capacity of those organizations to compete in today’s business context.  Business schools keep teaching the old ways. Management textbooks reinforce that. Entrenched interests find it easier to continue status quo, rather than explore the new.

But in the end, the economics will be inexorable. The rate of return on assets of US firms is already one quarter of what it was in 1965. Astonishing! The life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 has declined from around half a century to 15 years, and is heading toward 5 years, if nothing changes. Mind-boggling! These dynamics will force the transition to radical management, whether entrenched interests want it or not. The only question is whether it will happen elegantly and intelligently and quickly, or slowly and painfully and stupidly.

The choice is there.

To learn more about radical management, go here.

http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

For more on the difference between finite and infinite activities, read James Carse's wonderful book, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility.  

 

 

Some thoughts on WSJ’s “The End of Management” by Alan Murray

The Wall Street Journal has had a big week of "endings". On August 16, they published a piece entitled "The End of American Optimism". The WSJ announcing the end of American optimism is the UK announcing they are getting rid of the Queen. You can read my take on that piece here.

The "end of American optimism" piece by Mortimer Zuckerman gives a fairly accurate summary of the travails of the US economy. We are not just in a trough of the business cycle. We are in the midst of a phase change of some kind. The main recommendation for doing something about it seems to be give more visas to foreigners. Sensible though this is, it's not going to go very far towards solving the problems of the US economy. The idea that something is amiss with management itself didn't make the cut in that article.

However by week's end, the light had dawned. In the WSJ's "end of management" piece by Alan Murray, there is a recognition that 20th Century management has come to the end of its useful life:

“…everything we learned in the last century about managing large corporations is in need of a serious rethink. We have both a need and an opportunity to devise a new form of economic organization, and a new science of management, that can deal with the breakneck realities of 21st century change.”

The article suggests that allocation of resources is a major problem for today's organization. The new organization will need to be “flexible, agile, able to quickly adjust to market developments, and ruthless in reallocating resources to new opportunities.”

In effect, it will have to be good at continuous innovation, which is partly an issue of resource allocation.

“In corporations, decisions about allocating resources are made by people with a vested interest in the status quo. ‘The single biggest reason companies fail," says Mr. Hamel, "is that they over-invest in what is, as opposed to what might be.’”

However the article—I think rightly—sees the issue more broadly as going beyond economic decision-making in terms of resource allocation. It sees “an even bigger challenge” in creating structures that motivate and inspire workers.

“The new model will have to instill in workers the kind of drive and creativity and innovative spirit more commonly found among entrepreneurs. It will have to push power and decision-making down the organization as much as possible, rather than leave it concentrated at the top. Traditional bureaucratic structures will have to be replaced with something more like ad-hoc teams of peers, who come together to tackle individual projects, and then disband.”

It also notes that the new organization will have to be ultra responsive to customers and to shifts in the marketplace.

“New mechanisms will have to be created for harnessing the "wisdom of crowds." Feedback loops will need to be built that allow products and services to constantly evolve in response to new information. Change, innovation, adaptability, all have to become orders of the day.”

So the new organization will have to be:

1.      Good at continuous innovation

2.      Able to inspire workers

3.      Responsive to customers and clients and to shifts in the marketplace

In other words, this is sounding eerily like radical management.

This is an excellent article, but it is not served well by its title or its subtitle.

The article is not really talking about “the end of management” as its title suggests, but rather the birth of a radically different kind of management that can do things that traditional management couldn’t.

Equally misleading is the article’s subtitle in suggesting that “managers should act like venture capitalists,” because venture capitalists are only good at one dimension of radical management—resource allocation. They are not generally known for their ability to deal with the other dimensions of the new management.

The management that is needed is thus multi-dimensional. We need high productivity and continuous innovation and job satisfaction and client delight, all at the same time. This is not about finding individuals with super-human capacities, but rather a radically different mental model of how you go about the task of management.

To learn more about radical management, go to: http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

 

Is radical management a methodology?

Radical management reflects a worldview that enables positive, growth enhancing links between customers and suppliers who share it.

At the same time, when we are all under pressure in the current climate it is very easy for people to default to management 101, rather than invest time in the original thinking and reflection that enables radical management to blossom.

Radical management is more than a process. It’s more than a system. It’s more than a methodology. It’s more than a way of organizing. It’s an invitation into another world where things happen differently. It’s a set of values, principles and practices that spark the passion, the excitement, and the insights of the people who work there. It ignites delight in those for whom the work is done. It also happens to be much more productive than traditional management. It means having serious fun.

To learn more about radical management, go here:
http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

Is radical management just a new form of corporatism?

One reader wrote to me about my forthcoming book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, and asked:

What is the frame for the ideas in this book? It seems to support corporatism, today's dominant ideology, which squelches opposition to its interests by controlling elected officials through lobbying and by using propaganda and rhetoric to obscure facts and deter communication among citizens.

I broadly agree with the thesis that left-brain rationalist analytic thinking is driving corporations and corporations are driving the world. The question is: what do we do?

My book puts goal-driven people-centered thinking at the center of corporations. I am suggesting a new goal for corporations that is ethically sound as well as superior in business terms: delight clients.

Because it is superior in business terms, economics will drive its success.

Because it is superior in ethical terms, society will support it.

Organizations that are run in this way will provide citizens with a good life--emotionally, psychologically and socially satisfying.

This is a business book about organizations and I am targeting organizations, because organizations have such a large role in determining what happens in the world. But throughout the book, I give many non-business examples. So this is not just about business. This is not just about running companies. This is about what we want to do with our lives.

Radical management reflects a worldview that enables positive, growth enhancing links between customers and suppliers who share it.

At the same time, when we are all under pressure in the current climate it is very easy for people to default to management 101, rather than invest time in the original thinking and reflection that enables radical management to blossom.

Radical management is more than a process. It’s more than a system. It’s more than a methodology. It’s more than a way of organizing. It’s an invitation into another world where things happen differently. It’s a set of values, principles and practices that spark the passion, the excitement, and the insights of the people who work there. It ignites delight in those for whom the work is done. It also happens to be much more productive than traditional management. It means having serious fun.

Other aspects of what the book is about include:

• Paradigm Shift: It is a paradigm shift in the way organizations are managed. The phrase has been over-used, but in this case, it is a real paradigm shift.
• The Science of Delight: The book is about systematically studying what’s involved in delighting clients, time after time.
• Not Just Another Day at the Office: This is not just another quick fix to “business as usual.”  This is about changing everything. Everything is different—and better.
• The Thrill of Continuous Innovation: Doing something new is at the heart of doing something interesting. When the innovation is focused on pleasing others, you have a virtuous circle of worker satisfaction, high productivity and client delight.
• Breaking the Black Box: This is a book about a radically different way of managing. It’s about pulling apart the black box of traditional management and putting the pieces together in a way that creates continuous innovation and client delight. It involves a wholly different way of thinking, speaking and acting at work. It leads to workplaces that are more productive and more fun. These workplaces feel different.
• The Completely Obvious and Seldom Used Strategies for Continuous Innovation: None of the seven principles is new—all have a long history. What is new is putting them together in an integrated, interlocking fashion.
• Reinventing the workplace from first principles: By itself, “re-inventing the workplace” doesn't seem to have a purpose. Most management changes have made jobs worse. This is about inventing a workplace that has a clear purpose—delighting clients.
• The Joy of Innovating: At one point, we considered this as a subtitle. It is reasonably apt since the book is about generating serious fun in the workplace. It is intuitively comprehensible. It clearly puts the book "in the innovation bucket". It is active. It is short--only four words. It draws an analogy to the books, The Joy of Cooking and The Joy of Sex, two classic books what were very practical and sold well. Alas, it didn’t appeal to business types.
  
• It’s the Journey Not the Destination: The title on the map is not the territory that will be explored. It’s the content that's important. It’s the organizational journey not the destination on the map that matters. This is about enticing exploration.
• The Courage To Be: The book is about having the courage to live a meaningful life, being given responsibility and accepting responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions—at once thrilling and frightening.

To learn more about radical management, go here:

http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

Leadership: How to say “no” while also inspiring people

Leadership is all about focusing energy on achieving an important goal. In achieving focus, leadership is implicitly saying “no” to all the other less-important things that might be attempted at this time. In this sense, “saying no” to trivia and distractions is the essence of leadership.

I was reminded of this by a recent Twitter posting from Mark Fritz (@markfritz) to this effect:

THE POWER IN SAYING NO: The people who are afraid to say NO will never create enough focus (POWER) on the important.

At the same time, when a leader says “no” to a follower who has passionately put forward an alternative way of doing things, the sound of “no” can deliver a spirit-crushing blow. It can carry dead the weight of hierarchical authority, the stench of soul-destroying command-and-control. It can imply an adult-child relationship, (“I’m the boss and I know better than you,”) rather than an adult-adult relationship in which leaders and followers have a reciprocal responsibility to listen to each other’s ideas and converse, rather than to command. Even when reasons are given in support of “no”, the sound of “no” can be interpreted as disrespect, or even contempt. Hardly the kind of feelings that will lead to an energized and inspired workforce.

In traditional management thinking, there tends to be a tug of war between two types of people: “leaders” who try to inspire their followers by saying “yes”, and “managers” who keep things running on track and on time by saying “no”. But when the managers say “no”, they crush the enthusiasm that the leaders may have inspired. The net result of the tug of war is a global workforce where only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her work.

So what’s a leader to do? How does a leader practicing radical management say “no” while maintaining focus, enthusiasm and inspiration?

The trick is to use one of three, and only three, answers, when a follower proposes doing things differently:

1.      “Yes!”: Ideally, of course, if the follower’s idea is a good one, the leader should embrace the idea with enthusiasm. That may not be the case. So the leader has to go to the second or third response.

2.      “Not yet!”: If the idea has promise, but the timing isn’t right, or if more work needs to be done on it before it can be implemented, a “not yet” answer can recognize the merit in the idea, while not allowing it to distract from higher priority action items.

3.      “I have a better idea!”: This answer involves the leader taking the trouble to understand the substantive merit behind the follower’s proposal and then come up with a better way of achieving the same result. There can then ensure an adult-adult conversation about the merits of the proposal.

What if the follower’s idea has no merit at all? What if the idea puts forward something that is illegal and unethical? Does the leader still not say, “no!”? In this instance, the leader’s “better idea” will be to suggest trying to achieve the result while doing only things that legal and ethical; alternatively, if the follower is adamant in pursuing the idea, the leader’s “better idea” may be to suggest that the follower pursue the ideas in a different organization. With such a response, the leader is of course implicitly saying “no”, but the tonality of the discussion is very different: it is interactive and respectful, rather than dismissive and hierarchical.

The impatient traditional manager may well find such advice preposterous and say, “Why waste time? Why beat around the bush? Why not just say no!” The answer is that abruptly saying “no” appears to save time in the short run, but when you look at the time and effort involved in inspiring an engaged workforce, every instance where the follower’s spirit is crushed by a quick “no” will require many subsequent efforts to rebuild morale. Hence the short run saving of time in an abrupt conversation will be a long run loss of time in repairing the damage to morale.

“No” can thus be a very expensive word to use. If a leader can maintain focus without having to say “no”, the gains to the work will be major.

To learn more about The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, go to: 

http://www.stevedenning.com/Books/radical-management.aspx

 

 

 

 

Who Can Tell A Story?

Many people question their own ability to tell a story in an organizational setting. At a keynote presentation that I gave for a large organization yesterday, I addressed the question directly: Who can tell a story? (3 minute video):

Pre-order The Leader's Guide to Radical Management at Amazon

Amazon is now taking pre-orders for my forthcoming book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century. It is being published by Jossey-Bass and will deliver around October 25, 2010. Secure your copy now!