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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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Beemer and Seppo (and Wes in a separate comment) had the same objection to yesterday’s post, which I’ll summarize as: “What you’re describing will only work for organizations with smart, motivated people which would probably be successful anyway. What about the rest of the organizations in the world who employ normal people?”
Admittedly, I was originally talking about an organization where I would like to work, which is why I mentioned the caveat about knowledge workers. But after thinking about it some more, I realized that some of the more successful organizations run this way right now are anything but “knowledge organizations”. For instance, the book I quoted yesterday was a book about Southwest Airlines, which dedicates itself to making its employees happy and motivated and full of esprit de corps about making Southwest’s customers happy. Another such organization is Joie de Vivre, the hotel management company run by Chip Conley, who wrote the book Peak about his philosophy. Nordstrom’s is a third example of a company where employees buy into the company mission of customer service excellence.
I think the same general model that I proposed yesterday would apply to such organizations that are not composed solely of “elite” workers. The first step is articulating the company vision and putting in place an organization that is dedicated to fulfilling that vision. That includes hiring practices (Nordstrom’s “hires the smile, trains the skill”), training practices, compensation and reward structures, etc. It also needs a culture that supports the vision, with people telling stories about others going above and beyond that set the example of what it means to be part of the organization, and employees recognizing great work and congratulating their coworkers in the moment.
Tobias Lehtipalo, the person whose email triggered yesterday’s post, observed that I hadn’t taken Hawkins’s model through to completion. As he reminded me, part of the model is that each of the cortex layers are wired together, such that “higher” layers are sending signals to “lower” layers to indicate what the “lower” layer should expect to see – our sensory apparatus is actually wired to only pass us information that matches our expectations. Lehtipalo suggests that managers in an organization serve a similar purpose – they prime their employees with what to expect, and prepare them for that situation.
This gets away from the self-organizing aspect of the organization I described yesterday (as usual, I hold anarchy as a romantic ideal) and towards an organization where the job of managers is to frame the company vision so as to make it compelling for their employees. As I quoted the Southwest CEO in yesterday’s post, employees need to “believe in the mission they are trying to accomplish and know that they are contributing to its success”. This may not be something that everybody in the organization does for themselves; instead, managers break down the company vision into team goals that are compelling and motivating for the team, and explain how those team goals contribute to the success of the company. Again, this will fail if the whole company is not aligned with that vision; if the team succeeds in its goals, it must be rewarded. Misalignments will undermine the company vision – beware the discordant element.
Framing the company vision for employees also has the added benefit of reducing the actual management that needs to be done. For instance, Nordstrom’s is well-known for its vision of customer service excellence, and the stories its employees tell each other reinforce that vision on a daily basis. So when a Nordstrom’s employee isn’t sure about what to do in a situation, they don’t have to ask their boss – they apply their understanding of the vision based on the stories they’ve heard, and do what makes the customer happiest. Similarly, when I was a software developer, it was vital to me to understand the end-goal of the software I was writing – understanding what the user wanted drove all sorts of minor design decisions I made as I wrote the code, including times when I chose the harder technical option because it was the right thing for the user.
Will this sort of vision framing work for employees who just want to show up, do their job, get paid and go home? Probably not. Such people are best suited for more hierarchical organizations, which specify the proper response to each situation in detail, and thus change more slowly because the processes need to be updated. But I think most people want to get more out of their 40 hours at work each week than a paycheck.
Giving employees the opportunity to contribute to the success of the organization (and be appropriately rewarded for their contributions) would be motivating, or at least it is for me. It’s the chance to be part of something bigger than ourselves, which I think is a fundamental impulse for people. It’s a chance for immortality, to create something that will live on after we are gone. Some satisfy this impulse by starting families, and others by pursuing scientific theories or inventions that will stand the test of time. Being part of an organization that is built to last might be similarly motivating for people as a way for them to change the world.
I don’t know if I’ve sufficiently addressed the objections to yesterday’s post, but I think that this sort of organization could be built for all sorts of companies, not just those of the “elite”. I think it requires more management than the self-organizing company I described yesterday, but management in a visionary guiding role rather than a hierarchical authoritative role. But I sure would like to see more examples of such companies, and someday even get to be part of one.
P.S. One thing I noticed is that all three of the companies I listed earlier (Southwest, Joie de Vivre, Nordstrom’s) are service organizations, which I find interesting as the deliverables are intangible and thus would seem to be more difficult to value. It seems like the principles would be even easier to apply in a manufacturing organization where the company produces tangible objects that employees can take pride in. Saturn might be one example, a company whose goal was to build a world-class compact car, and everything the company did had to contribute to that goal (disclaimer: I owned a Saturn for eight years and was very happy with it). Gore & Associates and 3M and Semco also come to mind as possible examples.
Tobias Lehtipalo asked a really interesting question on the pmclinic list, which essentially was: Can we apply the principles described by Jeff Hawkins’s model of the brain in On Intelligence to organization design?
To review, Hawkins suggests that the brain is composed of a set of pattern-recognition layers. Each layer is trained to look for certain patterns of inputs, and react accordingly. If the layer sees inputs that don’t match what it thinks it should be seeing, it passes the inputs upwards to the next layer to see if the next layer knows how to handle it, eventually filtering up to consciousness. So when we first learn an activity like biking or driving, we have to pay conscious attention, but as time goes on, our brains learn to handle most of the mundane details of such activities subconsciously without having to access higher layers.
Lehtipalo suggests an analogy for the organization:
An intelligent organization is one where employees act independently but in concert guided by management input and their own senses. As long as employee experiences matches the high level guidance no approval is needed for action. However when there is a misfit between management prediction and reality the staff experiences are communicated upward and management adjusts their model of the business and their guidance accordingly.
Employees handle most decisions at their “layer” of the organization, and only pass upwards the ones where the decision is ambiguous within the context of the high-level goals of the organization. Once those decisions are made by higher management, the team knows how to handle those situations in the future.
This could be perceived as a typical hierarchy, managed with ISO 9000 and three-ring-binders of process, but Lehtipalo is hinting at something more. Rather than treating employees as neurons capable of only routinized decisions, we need to start taking advantage of the intelligence already in place at each level of the organization.
This conception of the organization as collective intelligence fits in well with where my own thoughts on organizational design have been going. As I suggested in the social technologies post, I think “that future organizations will consist of consensus-driven vision creation, and then each person determining how they can contribute to that vision.” In other words, the organization will figure out an overall purpose that matches its strengths with opportunities, and minimizes its weaknesses, and then members of the organization figure out how they can use their own strengths to pursue that organization vision (yes, it’s a fractal organization design, where each level is self-similar, and thus could be broken into several levels of hierarchy without changing the process). The role of managers in such an organization would be to guide the vision-building process to achieve consensus, and then to guide organization members in finding the place best suited for them within that vision. If you’re a science fiction fan, it would look like Ender’s army in the book Ender’s Game.
In an interesting coincidence, this week’s book in the email business book club is Do the Right Thing, by James F. Parker, former CEO of Southwest Airlines. Today’s excerpt contained the following quote:
The ultimate success of any organization requires consistently excellent performance at every level. Vibrant and successful organizations … are built on a culture of engagement, in which employees believe in the mission they are trying to accomplish and know that they are contributing to its success. People who are given the room to succeed usually will.
As usual, I see the same patterns everywhere once I start looking, but I think this is congruent with the other thoughts above. Successful organizations have a compelling vision that employees value and to which they want to contribute. They find ways to contribute to that vision appropriate to their level (at Gore and Associates, people are not given specific responsibilities when hired, and just wander around the factory until they can figure out what they should be doing to help). This means that managers don’t have to tell their employees what to do – they just have to make sure that employees are put in situations where their decisions will match up with the organization vision. On the flip side, if there isn’t a good match between a given employee and the vision, then perhaps the employee and organization may not be a good fit with each other and should part ways (Zappos believes this so strongly that it offers new employees $1000 to quit).
I should include a caveat here that this is meant to describe organizations of talented “knowledge workers”, full of employees who are comfortable in a free agent world where they move freely between organizations as opportunities arise. I don’t know if it would work as well in a more prosaic environment such as manufacturing, although Ricardo Semler seems to be making it work.
To really make your head spin, we can take it a step further and think about how this all ties into Latour’s theory of the collective. In Latour’s world, a collective is confronted with a new situation or new inputs that are not part of the current collective (he calls this “Perplexity”). The collective undertakes a period of Consultation to decide how to respond to the new inputs. Once a decision has been made with appropriate inputs from all relevant stakeholders, a new Hierarchy of the collective is formed, and then the Hierarchy is Institutionalized to preserve the new order. Or, to put it in the terms of a recent post, learn a new behavior, then latch it.
Intelligent organizations need to streamline their learning and latching process so as to be able to respond faster when confronted with new situations. At the same time, to be successful, such organizations need to properly handle the “Consultation” period and make sure all relevant stakeholders are properly represented, which is more difficult in an ever-more-interlinked world (who would have guessed twenty years ago that a multinational corporation like Nike could be threatened by grassroots organizations?). To accelerate the learning process while ensuring the right things are learned, organizations need to figure out better ways to take advantage of the collective intelligence of their employees, such that all available intelligence is concentrated on the problem at hand, with each employee thinking about the problem at their level.
I still haven’t quite figured out how this all ties together yet, and whether the type of organization I’m describing is realistic, but I do think that the vision is starting to coalesce. There are many practical questions still ahead – as Lehtipalo asked in a followup email:
Is it possible through the structure of the organization, through processes, reward systems and with the help of various communication tools to make intelligent behavior the *natural* thing for the organization – i.e. make it the path of least resistance?
In other words, how do we set up the incentives of the organization such that employees do the right thing? It’s a hard question, so I’m going to leave it for another time.
P.S. 10 posts in June! Unsurprisingly, this is the most posts in a month since last summer. Amazing how not having classes gives me more time to blog.
Picking up on yesterday’s post and Seppo’s comment, another topic that has been coming up in my conversations is the idea of “social technology”. This doesn’t mean social software, where technology is applied for social purposes like Facebook or LinkedIn, but instead the idea of creating better social patterns that we can use. In this sense, democracy and monarchy would be two different social technologies, as would consensus-driven and hierarchical decision making. Social technology is the counterpart to physical technology, like telecommunications advances or increased computing power, a distinction observed in Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth.
In particular, I’m interested in the question posed by Clay Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody: with the new physical technologies that have emerged over the past decade (e.g. always-on access, mobile access, zero cost to publish media worldwide), how will our social technologies evolve? What new social patterns will emerge and prove useful in this world? Or to ask a more focused question, what social technologies will let us manage ourselves more effectively? Before we can get to that, we need to take a step back and look at existing social technologies.
I’m going to start by talking about a social meta-technology, which is the idea of learn and latch: “For continued successful adaptation of an entity, whether it’s a person, a genome, a corporation or a society, you need elements that are going and trying new things all the time, but you also need elements that are preserving the successful changes so that they don’t need to re-tried by the next generation.” I see this as the larger pattern that many social (and physical) technologies are designed to implement (although I may be suffering from Architecture Astronaut syndrome).
One effective social technology is stories. I love talking about stories as I think they are the key to many aspects of human behavior, from community to identity. In this case, I think that stories serve the function of “latching” in the “learn and latch” pattern. Stories preserve what has been learned by previous generations in a form that is compelling and easy to remember.
Another latching social technology is process. I tend to be dubious about process, but process is essentially a more restrictive form of stories. Instead of telling the general lesson learned, process maps out a specific set of steps that lead to the desired result. Note that process is a more effective latching mechanism in an unchanging world, as the steps will often change when the world changes. But in such a world, it is very effective at creating a standard level of competence (what Neal Stephenson refers to as the “three-ring binder” used to operate a franchise like McDonald’s). Bureaucracy is another form of process that has the same advantages and disadvantages.
The learning side of the “learn and latch” pattern is harder to characterize. A couple ways in which a person or organization learns are copying from others (but who comes up with the idea first?) and trying new things (which is often a waste of time since most new things will be worse than the status quo). One broken social technology for learning is status meetings – with the advent of new communication technologies, a meeting is possibly the least efficient way to transfer information among people (then again, I hate meetings). Note that doesn’t mean that meetings in general are useless – meetings which are used for discussion and brainstorming are using the interaction power of meetings and are thus a good social technology in that context.
I’ve written several posts about the importance of feedback, but I hadn’t thought about how feedback as a social technology embodies the “learn and latch” pattern. The general process of feedback is to let somebody do something, and then offer them feedback on how they did and what they could do better. They learn from the feedback, try again, and latch the new behavior. Without feedback, the person may be learning bad habits and fall prey to the aphorism, “Practice doesn’t make perfect – practice makes permanent”. This is also why I believe rapid prototyping is a useful social meta-technology, as it embeds constant feedback into a development process.
Having reviewed a few existing social technologies, it’s time to think about which social technologies are appropriate in today’s world. This is a question of both capabilities (what social technologies are available given new physical technologies?) and appropriateness (what social technologies apply in a rapidly changing innovative world?). To put it another way that addresses Seppo’s comment, how does one make a team most effective?
I think the fundamental problem facing the deployment of existing social technologies is that the pace of change has increased. This is not a new observation by any means, but the implications are still being worked out. Many of today’s management techniques were developed in the 1950s at enduring industry titans like IBM, and it’s easy to see why such techniques may no longer be appropriate. In a rapidly changing world, the overhead of maintaining one’s social infrastructure is a drain on productivity as new situations have to not only be handled, but then the process must be updated with the new response (the “latching” part of the system takes too much effort). Organizations that can respond to situations more fluidly will be more productive. At the same time, an organization that treats every situation as new will never learn from its history (it never “latches” anything). So there must be a balance there.
I think the Built to Last authors got it right: “Preserve the core, but stimulate progress”. Or to put it another way, understand the big picture and figure out how to apply the big picture to the individual situation. Or to put it yet another way, play the infinite game such that the rules of the finite game (processes and canned responses) get updated continuously, but the greater goal of the infinite game continues. Or if you’re a geek like me, run things like Ender did, managing the big picture so that your people are always in situations which play to their strengths and they can just react and do what comes naturally.
In the strategies I listed above, a key component is making sure that everybody on the team is aligned with the larger goal, and understand how their specific roles are contributing to that larger goal. Unfortunately, despite the proliferation of communication technologies, effective communication (getting such an idea from person A to person B) has become more difficult, as we are all suffering from information overload. Having an intranet with all the relevant information or cc’ing everybody with status update emails may seem like communication, but that communication has failed if the right person doesn’t see the right information at the right time. I’m not sure that doing that part can be automated away through technology, which is why I think that good managers will continue to have a place even if they are just talking.
Another challenge is that even if the communication is in place, the team can fall apart without trust. In a high-functioning team, the team members trust each other to give a heads up about relevant new information, so they spend their time working on their piece of the project otherwise. Without that trust, each team member spends time double checking information, gossiping at the water cooler to make sure they know what’s going on, concocting theories about ulterior motives in the information being transferred (e.g. is the due date artificially early to induce us to work longer hours?), etc. All that time is wasted productivity that could be gained back if a bond of trust is established within the team.
I’ve gotten a bit distracted here from my original question of what new social technologies will look like, partially because I’m not sure what the answer is. I do see new social technologies as having to be much more fluid in response to a changing environment, but there needs to be an easy way to “latch” the knowledge gained. Using a wiki may be part of the solution, as Wikipedia has demonstrated, but that still requires people knowing to check the wiki for that knowledge. We need better technology like the Remembrance Agent to let us know that we don’t know something. For now, we are still dependent on people like me who can map new situations onto previously encountered situations and know who to ask or where to look to find the previous best response.
I also think that new social technologies will need to free the individual to use all of their capabilities. Right now, our organizations and hierarchies hire people for specific roles, and don’t know how to handle it when people expand outside of those roles. I suspect that future organizations will consist of consensus-driven vision creation, and then each person determining how they can contribute to that vision. Formal organization creates an unsustainable overhead in updating process and charts and following the three-ring binder. To take a specific example from this past weekend, there was no time wasted creating a formal plan to set up or take down chairs and tables for the reception; instead, the bride and groom just said “Hey, make it happen”, and everybody figured out how they could help. I see that sort of self-organization being the way of the future, perhaps drawing on studies of self-organizing systems or existing leaderless organizations.
I haven’t answered the question I set out to when I started this post, but I think social technologies are a fertile topic for further thought. Like Seppo, I never would have imagined myself caring about these sorts of issues ten years ago, when I was a techno-determinist. But time and experience has taught me that fixing these social issues is more difficult but also more rewarding than the technology problems I once thought were the hardest problems to solve. I look forward to when we get social tech to match our physical tech, as I think that will enable the sheer potential of human creativity to be unleashed in all directions with spectacular results. We get hints of it from DIY sites like Instructables today, but we’re at the start of this period, and I think it will be exciting to see how things evolve.
I’ve been playing with this idea for a few weeks, and it’s not quite coming together, so I’m going to ramble for a bit and see whether it starts to solidify as I go.
It started with a quip I made to a friend last month where I claimed that the winners of the last ten years were defined by technology (e.g. Google), but that the next ten years would be defined by social connections (e.g. BJ Fogg on why Facebook is bigger than you think). This is partially an extension of Nicholas Carr’s book Does IT Matter?, where he argues that IT will be commoditized (something that is starting to happen with services like Amazon’s Web Services). In a world where technology can be outsourced (heck, where even intelligence is outsourced), the only remaining differentiator will be the strong social connections necessary to more effectively and efficiently outsource tasks and thinking.
I was having coffee with a friend today, talking about the importance of trust. As a manager or coworker, I can’t outsource work to another coworker unless I trust that they will deliver what is needed. Otherwise, I have to micromanage the coworker to make sure the task gets done, and the delegation takes more total time (mine and the coworker’s) than it would have to do it myself. Outsourcing is ineffective without developing trust and a social bond.
Okay, so now let’s imagine a completely free agent world, where all services are available from a consultant. What differentiates a successful company from an unsuccessful one? It’s not the technology or the talent, as those are available to everybody. It’s the companies that are most successful at building strong social trust with others, so that effort does not have to be duplicated, and management on both sides can be kept to a minimum. Admittedly, we’re not in that world yet, but that seems to be where things are headed. People that learn to build those social bonds will have an advantage as that world takes shape.
In such a world, investing in social relationships is as valuable as investing in financial relationships, hence the quippy title of “Social Capitalist” (as opposed to venture capitalist) for this post. Social capital will be a valuable commodity, and one that can’t necessarily be bought with money (although Jofish and I once had an interesting conversation about the conversion of social capital to financial capital and vice versa). It takes the investment of time and trust, and that is a commodity where we all start equally – nobody has more than 24 hours in a day. We may take different approaches to building those relationships, but in the end, it comes down to whether one can rely on others to help advance one’s agenda.
What does it mean to invest in social relationships? To take one model, let’s look at the world of professional sports, which is truly a free agent world. Professional agents often start following potential stars as early as middle school. They cultivate relationships with these kids, talk to their parents, work for free on their behalf, all to lay the groundwork that the family might choose them as an agent when the kid goes pro. They have to invest in the relationship before the athlete is already successful in the hopes of having a stronger bond of trust when that success happens.
I wonder if a similar model would work in the coming world – investing in bonds of trust and friendship for the sake of helping the other person in the hopes of later being able to build on those bonds in a professional relationship. This is one of the reasons to go to an elite university – the bonds created there can benefit one throughout life, as they are built on social capital that was generated long before there was a financial incentive.
What traits make for good “social capitalists”?
Huh. Looks a lot like the list of traits for being a good friend (except for the last one). Funny that.
As I noted at the top of this post, I’m still noodling around with this idea of what it means to invest as a social capitalist, so I’d be curious to hear what other people think.
P.S. I keep on meaning to post more, but I keep on getting interrupted, this time due to attending the wedding of AWESOME last weekend, and then trying to see lots of people while I’m here in the Bay Area.
Continuing on my recent theme of zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum thinking in management, today I want to discuss two different communication styles, which I am calling adversarial and collaborative.
The adversarial style is essentially the Thunderdome approach to communication: “Two ideas enter, one idea leaves.” The default assumption of the adversarialist is that the other person’s ideas are wrong. The other person must prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their ideas are right. The adversarialist believes that good ideas are forged through the crucible of conflict, and that weaknesses in an idea must be attacked in order to make the idea stronger. Adversarialists like arguments and battles; in a zero-sum adversarial discussion, if one person wins, the other person loses, so every point of discussion is a skirmish in the larger battle and it is easy to keep track of the results.
The advantage of this style is that it forces every idea to be examined. An adversarial debate sparks research, as one must buttress every point in one’s argument with solid evidence to ensure that there are no weak points that can be attacked by one’s opponent. Courtrooms use the adversarial style (prosecutor vs. defendant) to ensure that every piece of evidence is considered when determining the path of justice. The adversarial style also taps into the motivating power of competition; people want to win, and being in a battle gives them incentive to do whatever it takes to do so.
The adversarial style has many disadvantages, though. For one thing, if a discussion is framed as a battle, it creates opponents of people who perhaps should be on the same side (e.g. departments within a company), making it hard for them to collaborate towards their common goals after the “battle”. The psychological principles of commitment and consistency described by Cialdini play a role here; because we want to remain consistent with what we have said previously, once we start arguing for a side, we believe in it more and become unable to see the value of the other side. This can be destructive if the sides need to work together after the decision has been made, as they will no longer perceive themselves as sharing common ground.
The adversarial style is also destructive for morale; just as it is thrilling to win, it is demoralizing to lose. People go into withdrawal after losing, and will not be as productive. A company that has to rely on the losers of the discussion to implement the decision will probably fail, as those people will not believe in the solution and not be motivated to implement it.
One last issue with the adversarial style that specifically affects managers is that it is difficult to have a true discussion if there is a power differential between the participants. The adversarial style only works if both sides are doing everything they can to win the discussion, but most employees will not dare to contradict their bosses too often. In such discussions, the boss will consistently win, believing that their idea has won on its merits, but the idea will not really be tested until it is exposed to true competition, such as when the product idea goes to the marketplace. Reading Chip Kidd’s book The Learners reminded me of Stanley Milgram’s experiment, a disquieting example of how the presence of authority can alter people’s normal reactions beyond all recognition.
Another style of discussion is the collaborative style. Participants in a collaborative style make the default assumption that the other person’s idea is right, and they just aren’t understanding the idea correctly. When there is confusion, they ask the other person to please explain the idea again, and then restate the idea in their own words to confirm that they are “getting” it. People in a collaborative discussion build off of each others’ good ideas, working together to create something new (shades of Hegel here, where the adversarial style is thesis and antithesis, and the collaborative style is synthesis). The collaborative style assumes that all participants are working towards the same goal, and they are helping each other towards achieving that goal. It’s a non-zero-sum game – everybody can win, as the final idea might include contributions from every participant.
The advantage of the collaborative style is in what happens after the discussion. Because everybody was involved in making the final decision, they feel more invested in the result and are more motivated to implement that result. There are no losers who hang their heads afterwards; even the people whose ideas weren’t used will feel that their ideas were considered fairly as everybody took the time to understand their point. By working together, people create better ideas than when they feel obliged to stick to a side.
The disadvantage of the collaborative style is that it isn’t competitive. Because people’s egos are not on the line, ideas may not get criticized as strongly as they would in the adversarial style. Issues that would have been addressed in a gladiatorial style argument may not be seen in an environment where people are trying to build on each other’s ideas rather than destroy them. While the urge to compete and win is primal, collaboration is slightly less natural to us, so developing the habits to collaborate effectively may take some practice. There is no easy way to keep score in a collaborative discussion, so it is less appealing to those who want a quantitative way to track their status.
I have an obvious bias here. I believe strongly in the collaborative communication style. I think there may be areas where the adversarial style is more appropriate, such as between organizations or in the courtrooms as I mentioned, but within a single company, the collaborative style makes much more sense to me. When everybody is nominally on the same side, and the people involved in the discussion will have to implement the decision, having a collaborative discussion seems like it will be far more effective in the long run than an adversarial discussion where half the people feel like losers afterwards.
I also think the collaborative style is far more human – we should give our fellow employees the benefit of the doubt, to believe that they are trying to contribute something of value to the discussion. We should try to understand their point and extract the value of their experience even if we don’t initially understand. This creates a more generous and motivated environment, where everybody will feel more involved in decisions being made, and the company as a whole can only benefit.
As those of you who follow my other feeds know, I’ve taken up playing ultimate frisbee again with the Manhattan Ultimate league. While the main benefit is getting back into shape after two years of class-induced neglect, I also really enjoy playing ultimate because of the philosophy baked into the rules of the game.
If you’re not familiar with ultimate, the rules are pretty simple. On a field with two end zones, two teams of seven line up, one on each end line. One team starts the point by throwing the disc to the other. The disc can only be advanced by throwing to a teammate – once you catch the disc, you can’t continue running, and must hold a pivot foot stationary. If a pass is not completed, the other team takes over going the other way. Score by catching a pass in the end zone.
These rules make ultimate a truly team-oriented sport. An individual player can’t take over the game single-handedly, the way they do in basketball or football or baseball, because every pass involves two players. The way for an individual player to excel is to make their teammates better. When they don’t have the disc, they can help their teammates by getting wide open, or by rescuing poorly thrown passes with great catches. Once they catch the disc, their teammates don’t have to get as open because a good thrower will put it right into their hands away from the defender.
The best teams use everybody on the field, creating spacing with different people going in different directions. For instance, because I’m tall and relatively fast, I often run downfield routes, where my teammates can just put the disc up high and expect me to either out-run or out-jump my defender. Other teammates who have more agility dart in and out with underneath routes. Players who have good throwing skills hang back to give their teammates an easy throw when they get in trouble. You need a good mix of skills on the field working together to achieve success.
What’s interesting to me is the management lessons that can be learned from ultimate frisbee. Different sports lend themselves to different management practices. Football is a typical hierarchy, with a coach and a quarterback leading the troops in precision maneuvers. Basketball is like a design firm, with individual superstars able to freelance their way to excellence. I think ultimate frisbee is a great model for understanding the distributed management style necessary for knowledge workers, where everybody has their own expertise to contribute.
Like the good ultimate player, good managers of knowledge workers make their employees and coworkers look good by setting things up to be easy for them. They know their coworkers’ strengths and weaknesses and find ways to accentuate the strengths and minimize the weaknesses (like me running deep in ultimate where I can use my height and speed, without worrying as much about my weaker throwing skills). They don’t need to take credit for themselves, because they know that the team being more successful is credit enough. Returning to my current non-zero-sum theme, they realize that “growing the pie” of success will reward them far more than trying to grab a bigger share of credit for the existing “pie”.
Bad managers, on the other hand, are playing the zero-sum game, trying to make themselves look good at the expense of their employees. They are the ones who take personal credit for anything their group does, but makes sure to blame mistakes on their employees. The ultimate frisbee equivalent would be prima donnas who, while having superior skills, yell at their teammates about making mistakes, and making them miserable. Soon enough, their teammates stop caring and stop running as hard, and the prima donna has created a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad teammates.
Another interesting parallel between ultimate and management is that it takes time for teams to jell. While it’s fun to play pickup games in ultimate where you choose sides and go, teams improve immeasurably by playing together and learning each other’s tendencies. You learn which routes people like to run, which throws your teammates have (which influences which routes you run when they have the disc), how to cover for each other on defense, etc. And each team and each combination of players is different – in this league, our team has actually been suffering from having too many subs for each game, as the team can’t quite settle into a rhythm because each point has a different combination of players.
A good manager needs the same sort of time to make their team most efficient. It takes time to learn how different team members think, how best to work with them and persuade them. Building a team is a long process, as each person needs to develop trust and respect for their teammates, and find a role for themselves within the team, a place where they can specialize in a way that plays to their strengths. Following Katzenbach’s formula, they must also develop a common group purpose and accountability, such that they believe in the team and will do what is necessary to make the team successful, rather than looking out for themselves in a zero-sum way.
As an aside, I just re-read the Katzenbach post and realized that good ultimate frisbee teams match up perfectly with his criteria for teams: small number (7 on the field), complementary skills (handlers, mids, and deeps), common purpose and performance goals (scoring and winning), common approach (teams that are successful work together in a coherent fashion), and mutual accountability (it’s almost funny how many people on an ultimate team try to take the blame after a close loss – everybody focuses on the mistakes they made that cost the team a couple points).
I’m not saying all managers should go out and take up ultimate frisbee (okay, that’d actually be kind of cool), but I did find it interesting that this mindset of non-zero-sum thinking about management had me seeing the same lessons so clearly on the ultimate frisbee field. This may just be another example of me taking a single perspective and seeing it everywhere, but I think that ultimate frisbee may be a good exemplar for truly distributed management techniques, the sort that would be appropriate in a knowledge worker economy.
I’ve heard great things about Ideo, often called the leading product design firm in the world. Last year, in my “Managing Innovation” class, we watched a Nightline special called the Deep Dive, where Nightline gave Ideo one week to re-design the shopping cart. It was a great look inside the company’s innovation process, and it left me wanting to learn more. So I bought The Art of Innovation, a book describing that process by one of their general managers, and finally got a chance to read it last week once classes were done.
The book starts their redesign of the shopping cart for the Nightline special as an illustration of their innovation process:
I’m a big fan of this process, as might be expected since I advocate rapid prototyping whenever possible. The knowledge gained by letting users interact with prototypes lets you hone in on what’s important and what’s not.
The rest of the book is a collection of a whole variety of techniques that Ideo uses to spur innovative thinking, and how it has created a culture conducive to such thinking. So there are chapters on each of the steps above (observation, brainstorming, prototyping, etc.), but there are other chapters on culture concepts like “Expect the Unexpected”, “Barrier Jumping”, and “Coloring Outside the Lines”.
One of my favorite ideas of the book was to create the advertisement before you create the product. Take the time to make a print ad or a 30-second video that extols the benefits of the product you are creating. This focuses the team on what they are trying to accomplish with the design. I can think of a few projects I’ve been on where asking these sorts of questions at the beginning would have saved us lots of time and effort later.
I think the book may actually work better as a reference than as a narrative. While it was well-written and easy to read, the density of ideas was overwhelming – there were too many good ideas to keep track of, so I only remember a few. I’ll definitely keep this book on my bookshelf at work and flip through it whenever I’m feeling stuck and need some inspiration. I highly recommend it.
I knew the biologists better, though, and said “Here’s a tool to dump the data to Excel, where you can graph it yourself and play with the data directly”. They started playing around, figured out the two or three critical pieces of data for what they were observing, and then I built them an analysis tool that graphed only those pieces of data. We had a working solution before the “real” software team had even completed their design of the singing, dancing, do-everything software that had been requested in their naive requirements gathering process.
Seth Godin is one of my favorite writers, but I have to take exception to his latest post called We specialize in everything:
When choice is limited, I want a generalist. When selection is difficult, a jack of all trades is just fine.
But whenever possible, please bring me a brilliant specialist.
If you’re shaking your head in agreement with this obvious point, then the question is: tell me again why you’re a generalist?
He later added a coda suggesting the idea of specializing in being a generalist, but sticks to his guns that “My point is that you never call on these people [generalists] when there’s a better specialist available.”
As somebody who has branded himself as an unrepentant generalist, I have to respond from my admittedly biased viewpoint.
I actually agree to some extent with Godin’s point. As The Only Sustainable Edge points out, specialization drives greater achievement in a given field, as monomaniacs achieve a level of focus that dabblers can not. Specialization also implies that only those who are truly passionate about a field will commit to the field and become the best in the world at what they do.
I think the flaw in Godin’s argument is revealed in his second paragraph: “If I need an animator, I can find the world’s best animator.” Here’s the subtle point: how do you know that you need an animator? That seems like a trivial question, but it gets to the heart of why generalists matter. Once you have defined the problem, and scoped it, and figured out exactly what skill set you need to solve your problem, then of course you’d hire the best person you can find with that skill set.
Specialists only know how to attack problems in one way – that’s part of specializing. To be the best at what they do, they have to ignore other ways of approaching the world and shut out other perspectives. A specialist is the proverbial hammer treating every problem as a nail.
So when you have a problem, how do you determine which specialist to use? Each specialist will tell you their skill set is the right one to solve the problem, because if they didn’t believe in the power of their specialization, they wouldn’t be a specialist. You need a generalist, somebody who can evaluate the problem from multiple perspectives. and who can ensure that the specialists picked will fix the real problem rather than a symptom.
The other absolutely vital role for generalists is in communication. Specialists see the world from their perspective, so for them to communicate with other specialists requires a generalist who knows enough of each specialization and its jargon to be able to translate between the worlds. This is a role that I have been very successful in filling at all of my different companies, especially on the interdisciplinary team of CellKey, where we had physicists, biologists, engineers and software developers all working together on the same product. Without a generalist, you have specialists talking past each other, and their effort is wasted because you can’t get them all working together and speaking the same language.
Maybe this is what Godin meant when he suggested one could specialize as a generalist, but I think that his post overestimates the value of skill alone, and underestimates the social difficulties of selecting and aligning specialists. The problems of language alignment and of picking the right team of specialists are where generalists provide value in a way that specialists can’t, precisely because they’re specialists.
As I’m finishing up my master’s program at Columbia, it’s time to reflect back on my experiences of the past two years. I wrote up an email to Frank Giardini from the comments on yesterday’s post, who asked about comparing the program to getting an MBA, and realized I might as well post my thoughts in public.
I have not pursued an MBA myself, so my perspective is admittedly biased. I’m also biased by the book Managers not MBAs, which points out how artificial the skills learned in an MBA program are when compared to the skills needed to be a manager. That being said, let me extol the benefits of the Technology Management program.
The Technology Management program has a very specific goal – it is designed to give experienced technologists the business tools they need in order to take their technology domain expertise and become successful technology executives. So we took classes in corporate finance, innovation, technology and the law, operations, knowledge management, marketing, etc. These are all standard classes that might be taken in an MBA program, but each class is taught with a technology focus so the examples and the assignments involve challenges relating the subject to a technology organization.
It’s designed for experienced professionals – most students in the program have 8-15 years experience, so the class discussions are grounded in that experience. Instead of theoretical musings, most discussions come back to “When I was in that situation, this is what I did”, which is far more useful in my opinion. For instance, in the innovation class, when we were discussing the phase-gate method of
managing innovation, I was able to offer my perceptions from having gone through a project run with that method.
The other students are definitely a highlight of the program. I have really enjoyed working with and learning from my classmates over the past two years. I also look forward to continuing to benefit from their knowledge and expertise in the future, as we plan to stay in contact via our Google Group and other social networking tools like LinkedIn.
The centerpiece class of the program, in my opinion, is Alan Morley’s class, “Behavioral Challenges in Technology Management”, or Becoming a CIO, as I like to call it. The class covers the financial and strategic tools necessary to become an effective executive and teaches how to synthesize those tools into a coherent plan. See my linked post for more details.
The master’s project itself is developing a business plan and pitch for a technology venture. Some people do an internal project at their company, while others pursue an idea for a startup. At the end of each term, each student has to present their master’s project to a panel of three mentors. They have ten minutes to give their project pitch with another ten minutes to take questions, and they are graded on whether the panel would fund the project based on that presentation. It’s a terrifying but educational experience, as these presentations (whether to boards of directors or venture/angel boards) are what executives face when getting projects funded.
The program also finds each student an industry mentor as a guide, somebody who offers feedback on the project from the perspective of somebody who is already a successful executive. My mentor was Jon Williams, who was CTO of Kaplan Test, and is now the CTO of iVillage. Other mentors are similarly distinguished, generally CIOs and CTOs from different industries in New York. I am extremely fortunate to have worked with Jon over the past two years, as he has been unstinting in sharing his advice and knowledge with me.
I highly recommend the Technology Management program, and think I learned more from it than I would have from an equivalent MBA program. It’s not right for everybody as it definitely has a technology focus, and may be a little light on general management techniques. But it succeeded in giving me new perspectives and new ways of looking at the world, which can only help me as I continue to move up in the management hierarchy.
I love being part of teams. When I’m on a good team, I work harder, I get more done, and I enjoy the activity more. My biggest career achievement thus far was achieved as part of a tight interdisciplinary team. And yet I’ve often been part of teams that never jell, and are ultimately more frustrating than inspiring. What are the qualities that make a team work, and what can prevent good teams from forming? That’s what Katzenbach (whose work I previously enjoyed in Real Change Leaders) and Smith investigate in The Wisdom of Teams.
The book is filled with inspiring stories of teams that came together under dire circumstances and achieved amazing things. Katzenbach and Smith use these stories as a way of organizing their observations about how to create high-performance teams, from details of how to get people to exchange an individual focus for a team focus, to the characteristics of good team leaders, to how to get a team unstuck from obstacles. But let’s start with determining what a team is.
The authors define a team as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” These are the key components to creating what they call a “real” team, as opposed to a group of individuals who are working together. They studied teams in dozens of organizations and determined these were the common elements among the teams that were highly successful. So let’s take a closer look at these characteristics.
The CellKey team which I enjoyed so much had all of the characteristics of a “real team”. We were 12 people, each with different skills, who were trying to build this completely new instrument. MDS Sciex gave us short-term performance goals in the form of “phase-gates” where we had to prove the viability of our research in order to continue moving forward with product development, but we held ourselves mutually accountable to a higher standard than Sciex did. And we achieved more than I would ever have thought possible when we originally started experimenting with cells in a back room at Signature.
One surprising lesson from this book is that an emphasis on teams does not create teams. No amount of team-building exercises or team initiatives will create teams… unless there is a focus on strong performance. The first “uncommonsense finding” in the prologue states that “Companies with strong performance standards seem to spawn more “real teams” than companies that promote teams per se”. When the stakes are high and things absolutely have to get done, the normal way of doing things breaks down as being too slow to change and react, so teams emerge as the method to reach those performance goals.
This observation reminds me of a paper on innovation that Scott Berkun recommended, which said that the way to spur innovation was to set a goal that was impossible to achieve by normal methods. People don’t think of new ways of doing things unless they are forced to by circumstance – why take the risk of trying something new when the old way will work? Similarly, organizations will cling to hierarchy and bureaucracy unless they absolutely have to achieve more than they have been; teams emerge to save the day.
I have to admit that I’m not entirely convinced that teams can be manufactured by applying the principles described in this book. As the Peopleware authors observe, team building is more about removing the obstacles to the team forming. I think that the observations of Katzenbach and Smith fall into a similar category – these are necessary but not sufficient conditions for a team to emerge. I suspect that you could do everything mentioned in this book and still not have a team form because of a personality conflict or some other detail.
I recommend the book as a good way to reflect on how high-performance teams can be cultivated within an organization. It’s also fun to read about teams that conquer all the obstacles before them – the epilogue tells the story of the “Killer Bees”, a basketball team in Bridgehampton that competes for the state championship every year despite a male student body of less than 20. But they work hard, they play as a team, and with an entire town rooting for them, they somehow overcome the odds to succeed. Stories like that continue to inspire long after the book is done (which isn’t surprising, since it fits all of the Made to Stick rules of being simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and in the form of a story) and only add to the enjoyment of the book. Thumbs up.
