No matter how fun or creative your job is, there’s always the office space issue to deal with. Cubicles, frustrating fax machines, a copier that seems to run out of toner only for you, fluorescent lights and the scent of old coffee grounds. One of the best ways to cope with these conditions is humor–and sometimes pranks. My dad used to send his brother letters, to his office, in envelopes addressed to Our Preferred Preparation H Customer, complete with logo and official design. From time to time at 800-CEO-READ HQ, people have returned from vacation to find their belongings wrapped* in bubble wrap or aluminum foil, or suspended from the ceiling. Recently, Jon returned to find his entire desk area housed in a cardboard shanty**.
There’s a new book out called Cubicle Warfare: 101 Office Traps and Pranks by John Austin. Just a few pranks suggested:
“Pickled Chair” – adding a food smell to someone’s office chair
“Walkie-Talkie God” – planting a walkie talkie in the ceiling tiles above someone’s desk, then transmitting music, the news, or the gospel from a secure location
“Industrial Velcro” – velcro everything to the desk
“Elevator Fun” – post warnings like “Warning- Cables Are Rusting, Please Do Not Jump”
“Paper Hole Door” – place chads from the 3-hole punch along the top of a door
“Decaf Espresso” – not funny
Now, I don’t condone carrying out any of the pranks suggested in this “Tactical Manual,” but you will certainly enjoy a chuckle or two reading it.
* Meg’s desk
** Jon’s shanty
Just an interesting tidbit: Jon worked in the shanty for an entire week.
June 4, 2008
Cubicle Warfare – office fun for the summer
April 14, 2008
An essay from John Hammergren on health care reform
Thanks to John Hammergren, author of Skin in the Game: How Putting Yourself First Today Will Revolutionize Health Care Tomorrow, for offering us this article on his views about the role of business in health care reform. Hammergren is a leader at McKesson Corporation, a 175-year-old heath care company. He writes passionately about the need for corporations to consider and take seriously their role in the health care issues this country is facing.
In This Political Season, Health Care Reform is a Business Issue
It would be easy, in this long run of important presidential primaries, to be convinced that the problems we have with our health care system can only be resolved through government action and the political process. After all, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain have each made health care reform a central issue of their campaigns. Political races are all about emphasizing stark differences between positions. But I am encouraged by how much today’s political leaders recognize that our health care crisis — despite that word “care” — is fundamentally a business problem.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of those politicians who understands the urgency for reform. The health care company I lead, McKesson Corporation, turned 175 years old this year. To help us celebrate that proud milestone, Governor Schwarzenegger spoke passionately and convincingly about the opportunities we have before us to bring the health care industry to another level of excellence.
I believe he’s right. Historically, every twenty years or so, we have a debate in this country about health care reform. So what’s different now? We’ve enjoyed incredible advances in medical practice and technology over the last few decades. That’s one reason why overall costs have risen but it’s also why American health care, despite the criticism currently in vogue, is the envy of the world. On the other hand, with the best of intentions, the political solutions traditionally put forward to make health care cheaper and more accessible — like artificially capping costs, regulating the services providers offer and restricting consumer choice — have had the opposite effect. Nobody who runs a business is surprised about that. What computer maker or car dealer would worry about price, access or quality if there was no competition for the customer and no reward for distinctive service?
Business leaders across the country are keenly aware of these issues. I am a member of the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform, a group of more than 50 companies advocating solutions to the health care crisis. In regular conversations with top executives, I hear the same concerns frequently. First, because health care costs are soaring, our employer-based health insurance system is hurting American businesses and the economy. Every product or service an American company offers is more expensive than it should be because employee health care costs are added to the mix. In a global economy, this is making it harder to compete with companies abroad. Second, business leaders, with their background in competitive markets and customer service, look at our health care system and think, “What other industry could operate like this and survive?”
In most industries, top performing businesses excel by being the low cost producer, putting out the best product, and meeting or beating customer expectations. The market works because consumers are able to choose the services that meet their needs best. In the health care industry, costs are distorted by government interference in the market and quality differences are disguised by a lack of consumer information and choice. Moreover, while we can argue that “customer” is another word for patient, would the customer in any other market make critical decisions without concern for cost or quality and put up with the inconveniences, inefficiencies and high error rates of health care?
The three remaining presidential candidates understand that effective health care reform means preserving our enviable ability to innovate while making the health care industry more market-oriented and customer friendly. The stump speech talking points about access and cost containment don’t always highlight this. But if you view the details of their proposals, a different picture emerges. Each candidate’s agenda emphasizes business fundamentals like quality, transparency, and paying for outcomes. They also understand that the current health care information technology boom is about to revolutionize the way care is delivered, reducing medical errors and administrative waste while making efficiency, informed choice, lifelong care and customer-orientation the new paradigm.
What’s more, all three candidates see the same critical areas that need our most urgent attention. Chronic diseases account for most of our health care expenditures and require coordinated rather than episodic care. We need to incentivize and organize providers to manage long-term illnesses better. The fear of medical malpractice suits are driving up costs by encouraging unnecessary treatment. We need sensible reform to reduce the preponderance of defensive medicine. Quality of care and outcomes need to be the new measuring sticks by which we assess, select and pay providers for their health care services. We need greater transparency to give primary care physicians and health care consumers the ability to choose the best doctors, hospitals, insurance providers and technicians, while also creating industry-wide standards for the latest in best practice.
No matter which candidate prevails in November, the popular concerns we have about health care right now are going to evolve rapidly once the next administration begins. As a business leader, I support universal access through tax incentives and individual choice (not a de facto expansion of Medicare) because I believe that having everyone in the insurance pool is fundamental to reducing costs and creating a competitive insurance market. But as Governor Schwarzenegger learned when the California Senate Health Care Panel rejected a bill mandating health care for all state residents, sweeping reform is even more difficult when economic times are tough.
The will for reform is real and the political process is critical in building and maintaining the health care industry we deserve. But as the candidates for president realize, the kinds of forces that make American business so competitive can make health care work better, too. Higher quality, lower costs, greater transparency, and better customer service are not contradictory goals, they’re outcomes that go together. We don’t need to control the health care market through mandates and cost containment legislation, we need to unleash it by giving people the ability to make better informed choices. After all, health care is the one product all consumers need, guaranteed.
Author
John Hammergren is CEO of McKesson Corporation, the Fortune 18 health care services leader. McKesson serves customers at every point of health care and is helping transform the industry into a modern, efficient, and quality-driven system. McKesson has seen industry-leading performance under Hammergren’s leadership. During his tenure, the company has more than doubled its revenues and experienced a cultural and business renewal. Hammergren is an HP board member and the recipient of numerous awards for leadership. He is the author of Skin in the Game: How Putting Yourself First Today Will Revolutionize Health Care Tomorrow.
March 6, 2008
New Excerpt – from Pricing with Confidence
There’s a new excerpt up on the Excerpts blog. It’s the summary of the book Pricing with Confidence: 10 Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table by Reed Holden and Mark Burton.
Holden and Burton show you how you can get everyone in your firm to feel 100% confident in your pricing–no matter what customers are saying or how fierce the competition. By following the 10 simple rules outlined in Pricing with Confidence, you will be able to hold steady or even raise prices while your customers experience increased value for every dollar they spend. The result? Increased revenues and profits.
Pricing with Confidence is a roadmap for senior leadership in sales, marketing, finance and pricing to work together to outperform competition. Pricing with Confidence is organized into ten simple and practical rules to help senior leaders tackle rampant price discounting, negotiate with poker-player like customers, and protect the value a company works so hard to create.
Read about the authors’ ten rules here: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/007768.html
February 20, 2008
Excerpt from Leadership Brand – 2 of 2
The following is the second of two excerpts from the book Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood.
Leadership Brand details the authors’ six-step process to leadership brand–”a shared identity among your organization’s leaders that differentiates what they can do from what your rivals’ leaders can do.” This second excerpt focuses on the process of training.
You can read the first excerpt here.
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Process. How to make sure the training experience delivers what you intend. A number of process choices are required to make sure that the training experience furthers a leadership brand.
- Faculty. Faculty should embody the brand they are communicating. One executive dictated that his direct reports all engage others in their organization and share decision making with them — even though that was just one of many arbitrary demands that he made in the absence of any shared decision making on his part. His hypocrisy in demanding that others be participative led to cynicism. Those who address leaders in training sessions should embody and live the message they are communicating. With this generic caveat, four categories of faculty can be enlisted to help make the most of training: inside experts, outside experts, line managers, and external stakeholders (customers or investors, or both).
- Inside experts. Training departments often have people who prepare and deliver excellent training modules. These individuals need to be credible both for how they present and for what they have done earlier in their careers. It is especially useful to present internal instructors who have had experience in line management positions where they were successful, and who can focus on technical areas in which they have deep expertise. They may also be certified in the program at hand (such as Six Sigma black belts) and thus able to help others become certified. Often, as internal experts move into an instructional mode, they receive coaching in presentation skills to increase their impact on an audience. They know the company and culture and they can talk with confidence and experience about how to turn ideas into action in the trainees’ own environment.
- Outside experts. External instructors bring new ideas and knowledge. They transmit practices that have worked in other settings . However, to make knowledge productive, they should also know enough about the immediate business to see how their knowledge will help further the firm leadership brand. They should adapt their ideas to the specific requirements of the organization. They can be paired with internal managers and instructors so that their ideas will have maximum impact.
- Line Managers. In recent years, line managers have been increasingly used to design and deliver training. One colleague responsible for developing leadership told us that the best thing he could do was to have the senior leaders of the company train other leaders, if only because that forced those doing the training to model the behavior they advocate and teach. EDA found that 75 percent of leading companies used senior executives as presenters for at least part of the training. PepsiCo has been one of the leaders in this area. Its senior leaders do many things to make the training relevant to PepsiCo’s situation, including individual coaching of future leaders. This mentoring role goes beyond the confines of the classroom to being accessible to learning leaders once they return to their day-to-day work. They focus their instruction on how to make things happen — for real, at PepsiCo — through leadership action. They have informal conversations over meals or in the evening where they communicate PepsiCo values through stories. They share their own personal journey of leadership at the company and encourage learning leaders to craft their own. They work to be consistent in their day-to-day leadership with what they are teaching future leaders to do. All these ideas help participants in a training experience learn the leadership brand by observing it firsthand. Depending too much on line managers has the limitations of not sourcing ideas from outside the company and becoming insular, training future leaders on what present leaders have done without focusing on what could be, and not having quite as innovative a pedagogy or teaching style (line managers are expected to be gifted teachers).
- Customers or investors. For an organization to shift leader training to building leadership brand, it is critical to involve outside stakeholders in the design, delivery, or presentation of the training experience. Customers and investors may participate in each of these steps through their presence (bringing them into the room in person or on video) or their essence (making sure that their concerns are being addressed). Customers can be present at instructional design meetings and voice opinions about what should be taught, or the design team can research customer expectations and make sure that they are infused throughout the design. Customers and investors can help deliver a program as expert faculty, participants in a live case study focused on their own needs, or members of a panel sharing their encounters with the company. Customers can also join a program as participants, working to make sure that their expectations (which are at the heart of firm brand) are understood and translated into action through leadership investments while they also derive the personal benefits of the program itself. Including customers and/or investors in training experiences increases the likelihood that participants will be more than tourists, will not only understand what their leadership brand needs to be but find ways to actually do it.
When the four faculty groups form an integrated team, the training will have innovative content (led by outside experts), adapted to the organization (led by internal experts), with relevance to the organization’s success (because of customer or investor participation, or both), and with accountability for its application (because of line manager participation).
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value. Copyright 2007 Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood.
February 19, 2008
Excerpt from Leadership Brand – 1 of 2
The following is an excerpt from the book Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood.
Leadership Brand was published last September and has been on our best seller list several times. The book is the authors’ six-step process to leadership brand–”a shared identity among your organization’s leaders that differentiates what they can do from what your rivals’ leaders can do.” This first of two excerpts deals with training design and methods, and the second, to come, focuses on the process of training.
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Training Design and Methods: Enormous research has been done on how to train with impact. Here are some specific tips that will increase the impact of your investment in building leadership brand, as opposed to developing leaders:
- Offer an integrated model for the experience. We continue to see many training events as parades of stars, with each day or module taught by a thoughtful presenter (either outside faculty, line manager, or customer), then another module from another face, and then another. With little integration, each training module is an isolated event. Branded training requires an integrated message (what our leaders need to know and do to demonstrate a leadership brand consistent with a firm brand) that has distinct modules woven around the brand theme.
- Use a host of training pedagogies. Since adults learn differently from another, different methodologies can and should be used. A mix of lecture, small group discussion, written case studies, live case studies, action learning projects, team presentation, video snippets, technology-based learning, simulations, assessment tools, and so forth can be woven into the training experience to ensure that regardless of each participant’s learning style, all will find some methods that work well. Bear in mind that with adult learners, the faculty should be talking about 60 or 70 percent of the time. If faculty allow their participation to fall below 50 percent of the talking time, participants are in a problem-solving session and wonder what the faculty add; if faculty do 85 percent or more of the talking, participants are more likely to be listening than internalizing what is taught.
- Design modules to follow the concept-illustration-action (C-I-A) rational. During a training experience, a host of modules may be woven around the integrated C-I-A theme. Each module should have a clear set of concepts. Concepts represent the research-based theory and principles that frame an issue, or just the commonsense ideas that clearly apply without rich theory and research. These concepts should align specifically with the firm’s brand and how it relates to leadership brand. But with content, there must also be illustration, or examples of what others have done with the principles taught. The illustrations may be written case studies of successful (or unsuccessful) firms, live case studies (as when customers attend and share problems), or video cases. Whatever the choice, participants learn by seeing how ideas were actually implemented. Then application follows. Application generally reinforces ideas with personal impact as participants adapt the concepts and illustrations to their personal situation. With the use of C-I-A logic in each module, a personal understanding of the leadership brand begins to emerge that participants can understand, observe, and practice.
- Build recursive lessons (self-reflective and self-learning) into the training. The half-life of knowledge is getting increasingly shorter, so all concepts taught in training need to be analyzed and updated consistently. For example, when IBM CEO Lou Gerstner wanted to increase organization capabilities of speed and collaboration, he sponsored a training experience called Accelerating Change Together (ACT). The ACT process was designed to achieve a fast and collaborative approach to leading the business, with a focus on team-based action learning projects. Each team identified eight-, ten-, and twelve-week problems to solve, and then worked collaboratively to identify the right people in the world to solve each problem (and then give them eight, ten, or twelve weeks to solve it). As the teams went through this training experience, they continually unlearned and learned how to improve their projects. Getting an individual leader to understand and adapt a leadership brand may require that the leader be knowledgeable about what the brand requires and reflective about how well he currently lives the brand. Leadership brand is less likely to take hold when forced on individual leaders and more likely to take root when individual leaders experience it through both training and work experiences.
Copyright (c) 2006 Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value. Copyright 2007 Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood.
November 14, 2007
Jack Covert Selects – Two books! – One Foot Out the Door – and – Giving Notice
One Foot Out the Door: How to Combat the Psychological Recession That’s Alienating Employees and Hurting American Business by Judith M. Bardick, Ph.D., AMACOM, 240 pages, $24.95 Hardcover, October 2007, ISBN 9780814480588
Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay by Freada Kapor Klein, Jossey-Bass, 240 pages, $27.95 Hardcover, October 2007, ISBN 9780787998097
Two books out this fall address a serious issue facing employers: a nation of disengaged workers. In June I wrote about Off-Ramps and On-Ramps, a book that challenged the current career model and its shortcomings for women–and, consequently, a major brain drain in this country’s businesses. These two books, One Foot Out the Door and Giving Notice, delve deeper into the reasons all types of employees are feeling dissatisfied in their work, and draw attention to a growing problem that has the potential to shape new generations entering the workforce.
In One Foot Out the Door, Judith M. Bardwick, a former professor of psychology and now a highly-regarded management consultant, begins by giving an overview of the economic ups and downs of the past half-century. She points to the economic recessions of the late ’70s and early ’80s as the time when our economy’s unwritten “social contract”–employees work hard and employers take care of them–fell apart. As cutbacks were made, work was outsourced and people were laid off, the workforce became disengaged and discouraged as they saw their job security vanishing before their eyes.
Today, the author claims, as many as two thirds of American workers are in what she calls a psychological recession: “an emotional state in which people feel extremely vulnerable and afraid for their futures…[and] expect the worst to happen, so they see no reason to give it their all.” They’re either actively looking for new jobs or are going through the motions in current positions. Bardwick calls for a “twenty-first century safety net that will reduce the fear by providing financial support and a good sense of community, while avoiding a reinstatement of entitlement attitudes.”
On another front, Freada Kapor Klein, co-founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, looks into discrimination that drives knowledge workers out of the well-intentioned corporations that don’t fully realize the assumptions and stereotypes that continue to plague their corporate culture.
To show the cost of bias, financial and human, and to bring to life the types of discrimination and unfair treatment many people face, the author profiles three fictional characters “as they negotiate life in a high-end corporate workplace.” Then, she offers a framework corporate leaders can follow to identify and uproot those barriers.
If you’re looking for ways to recruit or retain talented people, both Bardwick and Klein offer strategic, smart suggestions for establishing a workplace that is welcoming to a diverse set of people and committed to their job satisfaction and growth.
October 31, 2007
We Are Smarter Than Me on Morning Edition
Tomorrow, Thursday, morning, Barry Libert and Jon Spector will be on NPR’s Morning Edition to talk about We Are Smarter Than Me. It starts at 8:50 ET.
Tune in tomorrow. If you miss it, it will be archived on the website: www.npr.org
On Strategy: Paralyzing Fear
One trend that has come up in various conversations I’ve had lately has been the barriers to productivity. There are, of course, the literal barriers of corporate red tape, financing and other practical matters. I also had an invigorating conversation earlier this week about weaknesses as barriers with Dave over at The Freak Factor. Dave’s a champion for acknowledging weaknesses and finding the right context to use them to foster productivity.
Another barrier to productivity is fear. I think one of the things we fear is innovation. And I’m not speaking of the changes that come with it. More so the literal shaking in your boots over the decision of what step to take next.
We live in an innovative world. Millions of ideas are accessible at our fingertips. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the influx of new ideas (think 6,000 business books are published each year). Sometimes too many ideas can become paralyzing.
Paralysis is Dan and Chip’s message in their latest Fast Company piece [side note: I highly recommend checking out the Heath brothers' book if you haven't already].
A simple strategy can breath life into a paralytic state, making decisions relatively easy to make. Simplicity allows people to act, say Dan and Chip. Take an Australian Credit Union:
Even a one-liner can ease paralysis. The scrappy Savings & Loans Credit Union in Adelaide, Australia, has an internal strategic motto: “We don’t want to be first but we sure as hell don’t want to be third.” The strategy is to stand back and let the first mover take the risk and grab the glory of innovation, then come in right behind and make a copy that’s crisper than the original. The lessons for employees are clear. Constantly scan the environment for good ideas. Don’t be first, be best. Look for new employees who are good, quick executors, not creative pioneers. And reserve the incentives for people who are improvers, not inventors.
Paralysis is caused by fear. A simple strategy can help reduce some of the fear and ambiguity associated with any decision. One spot to go for helping define strategy is the book Purpose. From Todd:
Nikos’ thesis is four types of purpose matter for the business/competitive world. There are the discoverers who thrive finding the new. There are the helpers who are believe the world is a better place when those around them are happy. The strivers believe in excellence above all else. Heroes are the larger than life companies change the course of history, for better or worse.
For us, it’s about being helpful. Everything we do is built around being helpful to authors, publishers, readers and businesses. That’s built into our strategy and everything we do runs past that litmus test.
For Costco, it’s about saving people money. For Apple, it’s about being innovative. What’s your strategy?
[As a side note here, a friend of mine sent me a post from Kathy Sierra on fear the other day. It's an older post as Kathy stopped writing awhile back. It's on understanding fear and overcoming it. Worth a look.]
October 24, 2007
Chip Conley on Maslow
I have a new podcast posted where I interview Chip Conley, author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow.
October 16, 2007
New Excerpt – from Recruit or Die
There’s a new excerpt up over on the Excerpts Blog. It’s taken from Recruit or Die: How Any Business Can Beat the Big Guys in the War for Young Talent by Chris Resto, Ian Ybarra and Ramit Sethi. More than money and perks, the authors say, fresh-out-of-school candidates are looking for opportunities to stand out, move around quickly, and build up a strong resume of experiences and achievements. They offer college recruiters the strategies for finding the talented people you need while at the same time–and by following good practices–building a diverse and dynamic staff.
Here’s a snippet of the excerpt, wherein the authors discuss the difficulties of recruiting minorities:
Diversity is one of the most difficult, and sometimes controversial, aspects of college recruiting. Competition is fierce, and the number of quality minority candidates is disproportionately low. Consider the plight of employers in the technology sector. Of all engineering students across the country, only 6.6 percent are African American, 7 percent are Hispanic, and less than 1 percent are Native American. One recruiting manager from a medium-sized software company said, “It makes me pull my hair out.”
Check out the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/007418.html
