Interest or Commitment: Knowing the Difference Could Change the Way You Manage

One of my clients recently sent me this quote from Peter Drucker that has had me reflecting on its true message and how it is applied, especially in business:

“There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you are interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstances permit. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.”

For me, being interested implies a passive mindset whereas commitment seems active, which is confirmed by dictionary definitions: “the trait of sincere and steadfast fixity of purpose”. While interest is associated with curiosity about someone or something, commitment is the “act of binding yourself (intellectually or emotionally) to a course of action.” Interest is more cerebral perhaps while commitment is both cerebral and visceral. Isn’t commitment what we want and need in our organizations to be successful? When leaders talk about connecting to the ‘heart and the mind’ aren’t they referring to commitment?

I have a few thoughts on how to listen for and instill commitment day-to-day in our businesses:

Strategy: is business strategy a story that inspires people to bind themselves to the direction in which you want to go?

Leadership: before employees are committed, leaders have to demonstrate their steadfast fixity of purpose. It’s a trait not a slogan (“We are committed to our employees.” “We are committed to our customers.”)

Culture: is the business environment a community that binds people together to achieve a common purpose or a federation of possibly interesting activities?

Employees: is the hiring process geared more toward uncovering interests than discovering commitment?

Customers: do we expect commitment from our customers while only being interested in what they can do for us?

The late Peter Drucker’s ideas and writing continue to provide enduring lessons of what motivates people and moves organizations toward a higher level of performance. As I said to my client as we exchanged emails, Drucker was a no nonsense thinker who understood the duality of our 'heart and mind' selves.

Does anyone have a favorite Drucker thought?

"If You Can't Explain in Plain English What You're Doing, You're Probably Doing Something Wrong"

Many of us are guilty of it. Using multisyllabic words, acronyms and jargon to explain our ideas. The quote in the title is from the late Alfred Kahn, an economist who loved words as much as numbers. To the listener or reader this type of doublespeak comes off as smug and annoying. Is this code for “we are in a club that knows what you don’t”?

For those who are trying to convey important ideas and thoughts, it’s downright counterproductive. If your audience doesn’t understand your meaning, what’s the likelihood that you will get what you want from the exchange?

I know, sometimes we just forget who is in on our jargon and acronyms; but that’s not an excuse. Do we really need to rename books “reading containers” as the VP of Amazon Kindle did recently? Is it more clever to describe a strategy to grow rapidly as being “in a delivery window for new growth”, which is what Royal Dutch Shell has done? Is being opaque a tactic to confuse the competition or the analysts? Heaven only knows what employees and shareholders make of this type of statement. More importantly who can engage with it?

Alfred Kahn probably had the best advice on the topic: “If you can’t describe what your model says in plain English without provoking derisive laughter, it probably doesn’t say anything of value.” Perhaps it sounds somewhat harsh but most of us who write and speak for a living probably could use a wake-up call from time-to-time.

So, the next time you have to present to or communicate with those not in your Acronymic Jargon Club, think about the objective of the exercise before you unleash HIPPA, CRM, BI, up-skilling, Title VI, VOC and the thousands of other “welcome-to-my-exclusive-world” concepts on an unsuspecting audience.

For a cringe-worthy read of other verbal and written disasters, I offer Lucy Kellaway’s article, My Awards for Management Guff on FT.com. It just makes me wonder how we got this way and whether there is any therapy for it.

To Prune or Not to Prune? It's Not Only For Gardens

I’m a wanna-be gardener; so I listen avidly almost every Saturday to a popular local radio talk show about gardening. Last week, a caller offered three reasons for pruning and he suggested that these reasons apply to every day living, too.

So, we prune in a garden:

• To protect health

• To encourage a different direction

• To promote growth

I used to be afraid of pruning; scared I’d forever damage the shape and dimensions of trees that were planted long before I arrived. I’ve learned, though, to step back and look at my subject from its totality and to see limbs that didn’t survive a winter storm or that were growing against others and would eventually cause disease. With fewer boughs and branches, more light reaches the interior and making the cut at the right place encourages growth in the right direction. The future shape of the tree is determined by my own eye, hand and perspective.

Not to belabor this metaphor too long, but the gardener had the right idea, about trees -- and people and businesses, too. Here are my thoughts on the business side:

To Protect Health:

• Have the right tools to do the job and get advice and input when you need it.
• Use your wisdom developed through experience and maintain the courage of your convictions. Then, make an informed decision.
• Look at the shape of your organization: is it hindering the way things need to be done today?

To Encourage a Different Direction:

• Take a step back and view the totality of your business or operation. Don’t wait until there is a crisis or an economic meltdown to act. You get no points for that.
• Set a course with your strategy, have a back-up plan and review often. Things happen too fast to set anything in stone.

To Promote Growth:

• Shine a light on your internal processes, management practices, customer relationships and organizational culture. What is holding you back?
• To know where you’re going, you need to know where you’ve been and where you are. It’s going to take a lot of good data to provide insight that leads to great business decisions. This is the time to bring Business Intelligence from the IT department to the entire operation.

What kind of business gardener are you? Are you promoting health; steering a new direction and encouraging growth? It's a great time of year to start pruning.

Why We Love Predictions So Much & 3 of Mine

Have you had enough of the look-backs at 2010 and the predictions for 2011? Apparently, most people haven’t, which is just as well, judging by the number of blogs and articles hitting my RSS feeds, Google Alerts and email box. Why do we love predictions so much?

Humans are unique in the animal world in that we can detect and make meaning from complex patterns all around us that result in decisions about how we should behave, think, live our lives and so on. Predictions – our own and others’ – are aggregates of these patterns so we find them confirming or interesting or sometimes just weird but we pay attention to them.

We have a strong need to exercise individual control, some of which is cultural and some of which is human. Getting a handle on the possibilities for the future, gives us a sense of mastery, self-esteem and even optimism. We tuck these predictions away in our memory banks and they become part of our pattern recognition process.

According to Dr. Shelley E. Taylor, a professor of Health Psychology at UCLA, “positive illusions” about the future are mentally and physically healthy; they improve the ability to care for and about other people and they increase the capacity for creative and productive work.

As predictions seem to be so important to our general well being, I’ll offer three of mine for the business environment:

• CEO’s will be more open to experimentation at work BUT these experiments will be verified by analytics. Managing risk is still hugely important in this fragile economy. Trust but verify.

• Social capital will become a key hiring criteria for positions that influence business performance. The quality of a person’s relationships will become as important as her experience and skill set.

• Customers will be more quixotic than ever and companies will make even larger technology investments to try to predict their moods, behaviors and buying intentions. Whether these investments pay off will depend upon:
• Business Strategy
• Organizational Culture
• Quality of Leadership
• Employee Fit
• The Right Data, Metrics and Analytics

As a recent blog from IBM stated, there is no ROI from Business Intelligence unless someone uses it to make decisions.

Happy New Year and let’s get 2011 started!!

What are some of your predictions for 2011?

5 Predictions About Analytics, 4 Tips to Get Started & 3 Cautionary Thoughts

This is the time of year for predictions and there is no shortage of them in the analytics arena. As business owners and managers are redoubling their efforts to find competitive differentiation amid tepid growth projections for 2011, analytics is seen by many leaders as a way to gain an edge.

There are a few key predictions that are shared by seasoned analytics champions and neophytes alike:

• Organizational data is proliferating at an alarming rate, both in terms of volume and complexity. How to make sense of all of this data will be a challenge for those not on the analytics bullet train.

• Desktop analytics will dominate the business environment, making large servers and high cost analytic languages no longer able to return the desired ROI.

• Mobile applications will be hot topics. Devices like iPads, smart phones and tablets will bring analytics into end users’ hands like never before.

• The gap between heavy analytics users and laggards will continue to widen and it will become apparent in areas like innovation and product development as well as bottom line results.

• Privacy regulations could make the collection of personal data more restrictive. At the same time, individuals may balk at the idea of how much of their private information is in the hands of third parties.

Michael Lock of the Aberdeen Group and Caroline Seymour of IBM’s Mid-Size Business unit have some helpful pointers for companies that are taking their first steps into business analytics:

Get Control of Your Data: This means bringing disparate buckets of data into a consistent environment so it’s easier for more people to perform multi-dimensional analysis.

Analyze Data in a Business Context: Data analysis in isolation provides no insight and therefore has limited value to the business. Analytics works for the organization when there is a business strategy to address outside pressures, an assessment of capabilities and analytical needs and the ability to use analytics across the organization.

Think Big – Start Small: This is what Michael Lock calls the Land and Expand strategy. Start with one unit or one pain point and work up to the enterprise level of data consistency. Match resources to the company’s budget.

Empower Non-technical Users: 77% of the Best-in-Class companies measured by Aberdeen Group have what they call “pervasive Business Intelligence with self-service usage”. Only 10% of the Laggards have it. End users have the business knowledge, the business context and the ability to create insight from data.

I’ve been involved in so many fads du jour, from reengineering to knowledge management. All of the concepts were stellar but became hijacked by (gasp!) consultants selling technology or off shoring services or some effort to gain short-term advantages. The problem seemed to be either that the ROI assumptions were inaccurate or that consultants rarely stayed around to see the business through the painful change that inevitably comes with disruptive innovations.

Now for the words of caution...

Leaders Drive Change. That’s what GE’s CEO Jeff Emmelt says and I believe him.

Culture Trumps Strategy. Becoming an analytics-based business means behaviors change across the board. This is often left off the To-Do list.

The Collective Mindset Needs to Shift. If data is a source of power in the organization; if people think they’ve been successful making “gut” decisions; if collaboration isn’t in your vocabulary, you have some work to do to build a successful analytics-based company. But, the rewards are going to be huge.

Business is Unforgiving. Get Used to It

“Life isn’t just about what you want to be. It’s about what you are.” I read this quote from John Rowe, the CEO of Exelon, a Chicago based energy provider in a recent BusinessWeek. His comment got me thinking about how important it is in strategy development to know your starting point.

I’m a right-brained thinker so big ideas, conceptualizing and embracing change are my natural starting points. Nothing is more exciting than new flip charts, fresh white boards and eager faces, ready to brainstorm the heck out of the future.

But wait…that’s a ready/fire/aim approach and because business owners and leaders are more risk averse than ever, it’s essential to use a structured process for evaluating strategic issues in the right sequence to give equal prominence to all aspects of thinking about the present and the future.

1. Frame the issue(s): this first step includes asking the “where are we now” question as well as understanding why we are considering a change in direction (what we want to be).

2. Generate ideas that answer the above questions.

3. Evaluate the options based on facts (resources, competition, etc.)

4. Consider the options based on perceived level of organizational change required and amount of buy-in necessary to be successful. (Do we really want to change and can we sell it to others?)

5. Develop “what-if” scenarios for each option to refine the degree of difficulty and to assess the risk management/risk mitigation challenges. (Where are our back-up plans?)

6. Agree on best course of action based on Steps 1 through 5.

7. Create an action plan designed for implementation, that is, one with timelines, accountabilities, ownership and success metrics.

In the current business climate, we can be too timid, because the future has so many unknown variables OR too bold because our strategic process doesn’t start with "what we are now". Being clear about our present doesn’t diminish our ability to generate innovative ideas for our future; being grounded in reality actually ensures that ideas become more than dreams.

5 Tips to Take Your Strategy Beyond "Hope"

I just returned from a two-day planning session with my business partner. As I said in a recent blog, a plan is nothing; planning is everything. This is the season of the budget and also, hopefully, strategy development, so I’d like to offer my perspective on the things that can make your strategy discussions more productive:

Get away if you can: staying in the office is a terrible idea, mostly because there is a clash of priorities; and the immediate and urgent (but not necessarily the critical) almost always win.

Begin with the end in mind: Thank you, Stephen Covey. For our business, this meant going out to 2014 for a lot of good reasons, including succession planning. Many initiatives can take several years to get right and leaving them until they are urgent is risky in today’s business environment.

Swim into a Blue Ocean: even if it’s going to take longer than 12 months (which may be a long time in American business), dare to create scenarios where your business is doing new and innovative things. This kind of activity expands your thinking and generates more options. Without ideation, your "ocean" gets redder by the minute, as the sharks circle the boat. By the way, reading Blue Ocean Strategy is good preparation for a strategic retreat.

Bite the bullet and take on the tough stuff: Effective strategic thinking means putting the skunk on the table. If you don’t talk about what’s hard, opportunities may never present themselves and, at the same time, challenges are never articulated until they rear up and bite you. Then you’re stuck spending a lot of useless time cleaning up after the skunk.

Boil down your strategy into a memorable sentence: a strategy statement by its nature can be complex and the risk is that a critical piece of your business becomes lost in verbiage. Try explaining two paragraphs of strategic direction to your employees and watch their eyes glaze over. We got ours down to “In It to Win It”. It means something to our company and it’s a lot easier to make decisions when judging them against an easy-to-recall strategy sentence.

The first step in any strategic thinking is to leave the spreadsheets and PowerPoints at the office and focus on the future. Whether your company is large or small; whether you head up a department or the entire business, strategy demands attention and dialogue. Are you using this budget season to take your thinking about your company to a new level?