I hate the word ’empowerment’. I much prefer ‘job ownership’ . A key to giving people control over their own jobs is to stop thinking the manager’s job is to approve things. Here’s my friend Henry Stewart talking about ‘pre-approval’ – how he gets out of the way of people innovating by telling them their ideas are pre-approved:
Henry Stewart on Pre-Approval (from The Thinkers 50 website)
The Telegraph ran this letter to Richard Branson a while ago – I’m late in noticing it. I like the eventual response – Branson rang him up (he does that – he did it to me once when I worked for The Independent) and offered him the chance to select the food and wine for future Virgin flights. I also used to work for The Telegraph and haven’t read it for ages and was more than surprised at the praise it lavished on this letter. Yes, it’s funny, but why go on about how it is ‘almost universally praised’ – Their news journalism used to be good. That’s just hype. Which is why I gave up on journalism for the most part…
REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008
“I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.
Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at thehands of your corporation.
Look at this Richard. Just look at it: [see image 1, above].
I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?
You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they…
There’s been a tendency in recent years to downplay getting something perfectly right and apply the Pareto Principle of 80/20 instead. If you wait to get it perfectly right, we’re told, you miss the boat. Up to a point. I actually don’t like that way of thinking but can see that it’s necessary. I prefer extremists – ‘monomaniacs’ Peter Drucker used to call them – who obsess over making every detail perfect.
When it comes to a customer experience, it’s the detail that will make or break you. There are no small things. That’s what I’m uneasy about with the ‘go when it’s 80% right’ approach. Or the ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach, as Tom Peters puts it. I guess you can bring the two approaches together – Launch something at 80% then refine it while it is ‘out there’, using customer feedback in real time to adapt it to reach 100%, then keep on going to improve it.
It’s a strategy of ’emergence’, which fits fast-changing times.
Anyway, what sparked off that thought is a blog post on the BNET network, which is itself fast-emerging as a great portal that aggregates sources from around the net then puts a layer of distillation on top in an attractive way. On this occasion by working with commentators from Harvard. No, I have no affiliation with BNET whatsoever, I just like their output.
Here’s the blog post, from Sean Silverthorne, on working with perfectionist and extremist leaders to produce a stand out innovative customer experience – James Cameron and Steve Jobs: Passionate Leadership .
Don’t you just hate bloggers who stop blogging? Business demands exploded (in a good way), wife’s longterm illness going through a very difficult phase so had to recruit a bigger care team, etc. etc. yadda yadda…enough excuses. Apologies.
This is from the website of Mac Anderson and his team, Simple Truths, which has some really nice ‘encapsulated’ leadership tools – clips and short books that distill things down to their essence. Renee Stevens at IHG put me onto them and I think much of what they do is great.
“For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”
~Rudyard Kipling
“The Wolf Credo written by Del Goetz truly captures what the wolf is all about:
Respect the elders
Teach the young
Cooperate with the pack.
Play when you can
Hunt when you must
Rest in between.
Share your affections
Voice your feelings
Leave your mark.
© Del Goetz”
I know C K Prahalad has a picture of wolves above his desk and says we can learn a lot about leadership from how they work together, with different members of the pack taking the lead at different times. And I’ve always liked this, which is completely a different point but mentions wolves, so I throw it in here anyway:
More on wolves and leadership in a book on Mac Anderson’s Simple Truths site here
It’s so often big organizations that let us down on customer service, isn’t it. Because their policies are too rigid to fit every circumstance, usually. So, if they don’t allow the frontline to practise common sense, use some discretion, we, as non-standard customers not fitting the policy, don’t exist and don’t get served. I’m thinking of the recent case of the Bank of America customer who was born with no arms, but found himself standing in front of a cashier who said that no, without a thumb print, he couldn’t cash the cheque he wanted to cash. Because that’s the policy.
Bill Taylor, in his Practically Radical blog, over at Harvard, says that the lesson here is that size, as a strategy in itself, is no longer enough. Companies get big because it’s a sign of success and it gives them the muscle, the clout, to carry on getting bigger – their buying power increases, economies of scale kick in, suppliers offer them favourable prices, competitors can’t match their marketing power, blah, blah, blah.
But, says Taylor, if you haven’t figured out how to harness the smarts of the loads of people that work with you, then you are part of the ranks of ‘big and stupid’ companies. And your days are numbered because you aren’t close enough to the customer.
Taylor doesn’t explicitly say this, but when you get really big, you have enough critical mass in terms of brain power to be able to do the ‘wisdom of crowds’ thing – as long as you simplify, streamline, strip out bureaucracy, keep people close to reality so they aren’t cushioned from the world by your very size, then bigger and smarter is what you become.
Only very few big companies do that. Most remain big and dumb. But, they don’t care. Because they think they are big and strong and the odd customer here and there who doesn’t fit their ‘customer service policy’ doesn’t matter. Yeah, right.
“Pete Carril, the Hall of Fame basketball coach, has a trademark expression that sums up the relationship between size and success. ‘The strong take from the weak,’ he likes to say, ‘but the smart take from the strong.’ If you can figure out, as Jack Welch did, how to add to your company’s muscles without atrophying its brain, then maybe you’re not too big to succeed. But most big-company leaders, who don’t share Welch’s fervor for staying close to customers, better figure out how to make their organizations smarter — or they will keep getting weaker.” – Bill Taylor
I’ve always had a problem with Harvard and other academic organizations’ ‘case studies’ approach to learning how to lead and run a business. The problem is that people treat it as a blueprint. There’s the other problem which is it takes them so long to produce the case studies that the company has changed a lot. And is producing a case study of a company now, at this moment, when you don’t know how successful they will be seen to have been from the future (you still with me?) a valid thing to do? You know where I’m going here – Enron was a Harvard case study.
So, anyway, when I try explaining to colleagues that I have reservations about using case studies as training material because people get hung up in the particularities, the detail, which is non-transferable, and that we should tell stories, yes, about what companies do, but don’t be naive enough to think that if you present enough facts, figures, analysis, charts, graphs, cobbled together as a case study then you have done something scientific.
You haven’t.
As usual, Seth Godin explains it better than me. They’re analogies (stories in other words), stoopid, he says.
From Tom Peters’ blog…
“Airline service”—I’ve called it the ultimate oxymoron for years and years and then more years. Well, that was before I met Kingfisher Air on a roundtrip to Mumbai last week. First there were the “butlers,” I guess you’d call them, that carried our bags on and off the plane for those of us lucky enough to be in business class.”
Peters goes onto say how the attendant in business class walked down the aisle asking passengers if they needed their glasses cleaned before leaving the plane.
Here’s the post.
Every day, President Obama reads ten letters from the public in order to stay in tune with America’s issues and concerns. This clip reminded me of the importance of communicating, unmediated, with customers and employees to stay in touch with what’s really happening. Yes, OK, from the clip you can see that there is some mediation going on in how the letters are selected. But, what I mean is that if all the customer information you receive comes in the form of market reports and all the employee insight you have comes in the form of employee survey results, then you aren’t really in touch with what’s really happening. Because it’s only when your emotions and your feelings are engaged that you get real insight. And that comes from personal real stories, not from aggregated statistics.
Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story in six words and eventually sent this in to the magazine that challenged him to do it:
For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.
Isn’t that evocative, sad, moving, all in just six words?
It’s prompted a couple of people since then to use this ‘six-word’ exercise to focus you sharply on how you see yourself – who you are and how you lead.
The latest is John Baldoni, who in his Harvard Blog, says this:
“Clare Booth Luce once told President Kennedy that “a great man is one sentence.” It may feel impossible to sum up your accomplishments in a handful of words but it’s a good exercise in self-reflection. Ask yourself what you want to be remembered for, whether you left the organization or the world better than you found it, and how you influenced others. This exercise can guide your decisions about what you want to achieve and help you understand more clearly what work means to you.”
I remember Dan Pink doing something similar on his blog recently, prompted by the book “Not quite what I was planning: six word memoirs by writers famous and obscure“. He collected a whole load of comments from people summing up their life so far in six words or less.
How you apply it to distilling the essence of how you lead / how you live/ who you are is a neat challenge. What would yours be? Here are a couple of thoughts to start you off:
I’d like my legacy (though that sounds pompous) to be, maybe
“Brought out the best in others.”
Or, phrased in terms of my purpose, to…
“Bring out the best in others“.
Actually, I really like:
“Extraordinary performance levels from ordinary people”
…as I think that’s what we are all here for – to inspire ‘ordinary’ people to realize they are capable of extraordinary things. That includes ourselves.
But, I also always want to bring out the best in myself (it’s lurking in there somewhere), so those words aren’t the complete picture. They are also a bit generic and could apply to anyone. Maybe that’s the limit of a six-word thing – it won’t cover everything.
I had to do a ‘three word’ exercise once. The profile field I was filling in on an online community said “Three important words.” For me, the answer was “No-one is ordinary.”
If you apply the six word exercise to famous leaders from history, it’s actually easier, as you are summing up their legacy and achievements. So, Baldoni reports that Peggy Noonan, the columnist, says Lincoln’s six words would be:
“Preserved the Union. Freed the slaves.”
One that popped into my head this morning is Julius Caesar:
“I came. I saw. I conquered.”
In Latin it’s down to three words – Veni. Vidi. Vici.
So, what about you? Who are you or what do you want your legacy to be – what people would ‘label’ you as when looking back on you – in six words or less?
Here’s the John Baldoni blog to prompt your thinking.
Here’s the Dan Pink blog where lots of reader comments contributing their six words should jog your brain cells into coming up with six words for yourself.
Nice post from Joanna Higgins here on Six Services That Drive Customers Crazy. Here’s a preview of what she calls the ‘repeat offenders’:
1. The ‘home delivery’ service that struggles to deliver to your home, between the hours of 6am and 8pm, requires the promise of your firstborn before it can re-direct a parcel to your workplace and whose ‘network’ of depots exist each in a separate galaxy. If your parcel finds its way to one of these depots, pack a change of socks,and don’t forget to write.
2. Air miles. Surely the most glorious proof of loyalty a customer can demonstrate. But try redeeming any of your 90,000 air miles and you’ll find that the next available flight is four years hence, leaving PoDunk airport at 3am, has more legs than a centipede and lands you at your destination 24 hours later than were you to row yourself across. By this time, the last cabbie in the world has clocked off for the night.
3. Voice activated train timetables. You say tomato, it hears banana.
More here .
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