Mayank Jha

[ http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/google_amazon_lead_disruptive_cloud_computing_wave_microsoft_again_behind_curve ]
Henry Blodget

We continue to believe that the transition to "cloud computing" is a disruptive trend that will increasingly put legacy PC- and enterprise businesses like Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL) behind the eight ball.

We see this most strikingly in email, search, and office-productivity apps, in which companies and individuals are increasingly forgoing heavyweight PC-based applications for lightweight net-based ones. We also see it in enterprise software, where software as a service (SaaS) companies like Salesforce.com (CRM) and NetSuite (N) are stealing customers from traditional enterprise software vendors. And now, we think, we're seeing it in the cloud "platform" services offered by Amazon (S3) (AMZN) and Google (App Engine) (GOOG).

We wil be the first to admit we are not experts in the technical details of this arena (at least I' ll be quick to admit it), so feel free to jump in. But once again it seems to us that Microsoft, especially, is behind the curve.
Mary Jo Foley at All About Microsoft says that Microsoft is "readying" a hosted cloud development platform, but she is skeptical they'll be able to deliver it anytime soon (Why? Same reason other disrupted companies have had trouble--because they have legacy products to produce). If Microsoft is really " readying" such a service, in other words, it is probably in the same purgatory as the cloud Office platform (vapor-land), and it might remain there for years. Mary Jo can do a better job than I can of filling in the technical picture, but here's the business challenge...

How Disruption Works
To understand why Google, Amazon web services, et al, are such a threat to Microsoft--and why Microsoft's pooh-poohing of this threat is, at best, a smokescreen--you need to understand how technology disruption works. Disruptive technologies do not destroy existing market leaders overnight. They do not get adopted by the entire market at the same time. They do not initially seem to be "better" products (in fact, in the early going, they are often distinctly "worse.") They are not initially a viable option for mainstream users. They do not win head-to-head feature tests. Initially, they do not even seem to be a threat.Disruptive technologies take advantage of a new manufacturing/business process or technology to provide a cheaper, more convenient, simpler solution that meets the needs of the low end of the market. Low-end users don't need all the features in the Incumbent's product, so they rapidly adopt the simpler solution. Meanwhile, the Incumbent canvasses its mainstream customers, reassures itself that they want the feature-rich products, and dismisses the Disruptor as a niche player in an undesirable market segment. The Incumbent may dabble with the new technology or process, but only in service of its existing business model.

Then the Disruptor improves its products, adding more features while keeping the convenience and low cost. Now the product appeals to more mainstream users, who adopt it not because it's "better" but because it's simpler and cheaper. Seeing this, the Incumbent continues adding ever more features and functionality to its core product to try to maintain its value proposition for higher end customers. And so on. Eventually, the Incumbent's product overshoots the needs of the mass market, the Disruptor grabs the mainstream customers, and, lo and behold, the technology has been "disrupted." Why is this relevant to Google et al vs. Microsoft? Because this is exactly what is happening in the office application market (and, now, it seems to us, in the web services market).Microsoft makes most of its money selling applications that Google now gives away for free (or nearly free)--applications that contain hundreds of features that the vast majority of customers will never use. Google's web-based versions aren't as feature rich as Microsoft Office, but they are simple, cheap, and convenient, and, for many users (SAI, for example), they get the job done.

For now, as Microsoft's Jeff Raikes observed a few months ago in the New York Times, most mainstream customers still say they want what Microsoft is selling. For now. But some former Microsoft customers have made the switch and others are now considering it. And Google's products are getting better all the time.
Importantly, the problem here is not Microsoft stupidity. If it were easy for incumbents to resist the onslaught of disruptive technologies, there wouldn't be disruptive technologies. Jeff Raikes, Steve Ballmer & Co. have presumably read The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen's book that analyzes the phenomenon), and they almost certainly know what is going on. The question is what, if anything, they can do about it. (Topic of a future piece.)

Handcuffed by the awesome profitability of their existing products, Ballmer, Raikes & Co. are in a really tough spot. And if history is any guide, the Google threat will end badly for Microsoft.

[by Geoffrey James]
[http://www.bnet.com/2403-13070_23-170538.html]

For years, an MBA degree has been seen as a first-class ticket to the management fast track. Some spend $100,000 or more to earn the degree, confident that it will propel their career into overdrive — and often that’s not an unreasonable expectation. To many hiring managers, an MBA on the resume is a sure sign that the candidate has long-term, corner-office potential.
To a growing number of critics, though, the once-golden MBA is quickly losing its luster. There’s a quiet revolt brewing against MBA programs, and the barbarians at the gate aren’t outsiders but rather the B-school academic elite.

When it comes to the practical value of the degree, the once-lonely voices of dissent have, in recent years, grown into a chorus of criticism. Among their accusations: The degree is over-hyped, MBA curricula are out of touch with real-world demands, and many programs have a culture that turns a blind eye to cheating. If the business world starts paying attention to these naysayers, that $100,000 tuition or the decision to pay big bucks to hire an MBA may start looking like less of a sound investment. Here’s the latest critical thinking about the MBA and implications for managers and companies that depend on them most.

Hard Truth No. 1: The ROI isn’t what it used to be.
Writing in a research piece for “The Academy of Management Learning and Education” several years ago, two business school professors, Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford and Christina Fong of the University of Washington, dropped this bomb on academia: “What data there are suggest that business schools are not very effective. Neither possessing an MBA degree nor grades earned in courses correlate with career success.”

The report debunked many of the traditional claims of B-school recruiters. Pfeffer and Fong cited multiple studies that, for instance, compared the salaries earned by MBAs with their nondegreed peers. All research concluded that although MBA grads earned higher starting salaries than college grads, midcareer MBAs saw no salary boost after earning the degree. Some studies even found that those who pursued an MBA full time suffered from the disruption in their employment.

The 2002 paper kicked up a storm of protest that hasn’t let up. Many in the business education community have cited other studies suggesting that an MBA is still a good investment. Salaries for MBA grads began to rebound in 2005, perhaps indicating the downturn had more to do with the economy than the value of the degree.

Pfeffer and Fong, however, remain unconvinced, in part because of skyrocketing costs. As Pfeffer explained to BNET, “The overall cost of education has risen so much over the past 15 years that it’s become unclear whether it makes sense to overburden yourself with expenses and loans in order to secure the possibility of a greater salary in the future.”

Indeed, many students enter into an MBA program without any idea whether it will be a decent investment, according to Anna Ivey, a former dean of admissions at the University of Chicago Law School who now counsels graduate students on career choices.

“Undergraduates in various fields frequently ask me if earning an MBA will make them more hirable or land them a bigger salary when they get their first job,” she said. “But based upon what I’ve seen, if [an MBA] is something that you’re doing because you want to make more money, rather than because you’re really interested in how businesses function, you’ll probably be disappointed.”

Hard Truth No. 2: The training has become too theoretical
It’s not just basic cost-benefit analysis that’s bringing the MBA under greater scrutiny. Some critics argue that even top business schools aren’t adequately preparing students to be effective managers.

In his 2004 book “Managers Not MBAs: A hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development,” Henry Mintzberg dropped another bomb: “The MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences,” the professor of management studies at McGill University writes, echoing concerns about the impracticality of MBA training that had been bouncing around corporate America for years.

Since then, other critics have weighed in, arguing that there’s too much emphasis on management theory and too little on developing practical skills. For instance, Howard Stevens, CEO of the HR Chally Group consulting firm, explains that “only a handful of academic institutions — around 45 out of more than 700 — offer significant training in sales, even though success in sales is the most important determinant of a firm’s ultimate success.”

Others, too, suggest that when it comes to practical versus theoretical curricula, supply and demand is out of whack: Linda Richardson, the founder of Philadelphia-based Richardson, one of the largest sales training firms in the United States, also teaches how-to sales courses at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She says MBA students are hungry for more training.

“We limit our program to 15 students,” Richardson says, “and every quarter I get dozens of emails pleading to get in and students waiting at the door to see if anybody drops out. The reluctance among some business schools to address real-world business needs is really doing a disservice to their student body.”

Business schools are beginning to respond to these concerns. In the past two years, Yale and Stanford implemented sweeping changes to their MBA curricula, allowing students to tailor their coursework based on previous work experience and career goals.

Hard Truth No. 3: Some of the people skills needed to be a manager today can’t be taught in the business school environment.
Both the Pfeffer/Fong paper and Mintzberg’s book were highly critical of how universities had, over the past two decades, repositioned the MBA concept. Originally designed to teach corporate finance and the mechanics of manufacturing and supply chains, MBA programs now promise to teach students to be competent managers.

The premise is slightly ridiculous, says Pfeffer. “If you go into law or medicine or architecture, you’re expected to go into a residency or apprenticeship before you’re allowed to practice on your own,” he explains, “Unfortunately, business schools pretend that any student with an MBA should be a great manager right out the gate, regardless of real-world experience.” He notes that while many MBA students have worked in business, many of them have never managed people and thus lack the perspective to apply the management theory that they learn.

Management is just too complex a human behavior to be effectively taught in a classroom environment, according to Ray Tsai, M.D., an MBA candidate at the Wharton School. “You could take a class titled Managing People at Work, where you discuss different theories on behavior, motivation, etc., and do reasonably well academically. But if you don’t have some significant experience working with, above, or below other people, you will not really appreciate the full extent of the material.”

In the worst cases, the notion that MBAs automatically make great managers can convince people who don’t have management potential that they have the ability when their talents would be better utilized elsewhere.

“What’s really missing in MBA programs is a sense of purpose,” says Pfeffer, citing the reasons people seek advanced degrees in law, medicine, or engineering. “With an MBA, it seems that the main motivation is the ability to max out your 401(k) contribution, and that’s just not good enough to make you a good manager.”

Hard Truth No. 4: MBA programs propagate management fads.
In 2006, an “Atlantic Monthly” article lambasted management theory, the very heart of the MBA curriculum. Authored by Matthew Stewart, the former founder of a management consulting group, “The Management Myth” poked holes in the history of management studies and made a compelling case that the attempt to turn management into a science had generated little more than a series of self-contradictory opinions. For example, he notes that all management theory tends to fall into one of two categories: rationalist (manage by the numbers) and humanist (inspire and empower), even though the two approaches result in diametrically different management behaviors.

Stewart also took MBA programs to task for promulgating what he called “such gems of vacuity as: ‘[business process reengineering] is taking a blank sheet of paper to your business!’ and ‘BPR means rethinking everything, everything!”

Academics countered with accusations that Stewart was conflating MBA training with management fads. However, the curriculum posted on the Harvard Business School website immediately reveals a wealth of Dilbertesque biz-blab. For example, one course promises to teach students how to address “cannibalization, network externalities, and globalization” and “generate superior value for customers by designing the optimum configuration of the product mix and functional activities.” Say what?

The incorporation of management fads into the MBA curriculum lessens the usefulness of the degree because, in practice, these pop theories often are more disruptive than helpful. “You know how it goes, the same company that did quality circles is now doing re-engineering,” complains Frank Ingari, chairman of Purkinje, a provider of practice management services to physicians. “Did they ever connect those two concepts?”

Hard Truth No. 5: The pressure to succeed inside MBA programs has weakened safeguards against cheating.
The year 2006 also saw publication of a landmark study, funded by the Academy of Management Learning and Education, revealing that 56 percent of MBA candidates admitted to cheating. It turns out that MBA candidates are plagiarizing, copying from other students, and bringing prohibited materials to exams in much higher numbers than nonbusiness graduate students. The implication was clear: MBA programs were unwittingly encouraging, or at least tolerating, the kind of behavior that ultimately results in Enron or WorldCom-type scandals.

The real problem may lie in the mindset that accompanies the MBA experience, according to Linda Klebe Trevino, a professor of management and organization at the Penn State Smeal College of Business and a co-author of the report on cheating. “An MBA is often seen as a ticket to more lucrative employment, so perhaps getting the degree is more important to them than the knowledge gained along the way,” she explains. “Along the same lines, it may be a ‘bottom-line’ mentality — that performance is what matters, not how you get there.”

That’s a dangerous perspective that’s made worse by the general failure of business schools to do much to catch and punish cheaters, according to Pfeffer. “If a student is caught cheating, the professor risks being accused of persecuting the student,” he explains. “The accusation is then passed through a review board consisting mostly of students. And in the unlikely event that the student is found guilty, [he or she] is simply given a slap on the wrist — like a one-quarter suspension, rather than expulsion.”

The risk to the professor’s career often is not worth the effort. Pfeffer adds, “What’s resulted is a tolerance of behaviors that, in their larger manifestations, are poisoning the American corporation.”

Evidence-Based Management
[Key ideas from the Harvard Business Reviewarticle by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Robert I. Sutton]

The Idea in Brief
Managers have tough jobs: Under intense pressure to make decisions with incomplete information, even the best among us make mistakes. The good news? Evidence abounds to help us make the right choices. The bad? Many of us ignore it--relying instead on outdated information or our own experiences to arrive at decisions. Some of us fall victim to hype about "miracle" management cures, or we adopt other companies' "best practices" without asking whether they'll work just as well for our organizations.

Result? Poor-quality decisions that waste time and money (at best) and risk your company's future (at worst).

To avoid this scenario, start an evidenced-based management movement in your company: Every time someone proposes a change, ask for evidence of its efficacy. Clarify the logic behind that evidence--looking for faulty reasoning. Encourage managers to experiment with new ideas--rewarding those who learn from these efforts, even if an experiment itself fails. And insist that managers stay current in their field--and provide continuing professional education opportunities to help them do.

Your reward? You and your colleagues face the hard truths about what works and what doesn't. You expose the dangerous half-truths that mar much conventional business wisdom. And you make smart decisions on the most pressing issues facing your company.

The Idea in Practice
To start an evidenced-based management movement in your firm:

Demand evidence.
Whenever someone makes a seemingly compelling claim, ask for supporting data.
At DaVita, an operator of kidney dialysis centers, facility administrators use disciplined measures to evaluate patient care quality and operational efficiency--and to make confident claims about DaVita's performance. Reports and meetings begin with data on patient health as well as operational efficiency--as measured by metrics such as treatments per day and employee retention. Formerly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, DaVita now lays claim to the best patient care quality in the industry.

Examine logic.
Parse the logic behind evidence presented to you, looking for faulty cause-and-effect reasoning.
A manager who has benchmarked top-performing companies' best practices recommends adopting a particular practice. You ask him: 1) Does the benchmarked company's success clearly stem from the practice you want us to emulate? 2) Are our strategy, business model, and workforce similar enough to the benchmarked firm to enable us to learn from that company? 3) Precisely how did this practice make a difference? 4) What are the downsides to implementing this practice, and how might we mitigate them?

Encourage experimentation.
Invite managers to conduct small experiments to test the viability of proposed strategies.

Gaming giant Harrah's offered one control group of customers the company's typical promotional package worth $125 (a free room, two steak dinners, and $30 worth of free gambling chips). It offered customers in an experimental group just $60 worth of free chips. The $60 offer generated more gambling revenue than the $125 offer did--demonstrating that Harrah's didn't have to spend nearly as much as it believed was needed to boost revenues.

Reinforce continuous learning.
When managers constantly expand their knowledge, they acquire increasingly more reliable evidence with which to make decisions. Encourage use of inquiry and observation to gather evidence about causes and potential cures for business problems. And provide resources for the continuing professional education of managers.

At one computer manufacturer beleaguered by poor sales, top managers initially blamed the firm's corporate sales staff--initially dismissing their claims that weak revenues were a result of poor product quality. Then senior managers were encouraged to further investigate the problem. When managers posed as customers at retailers who carried their computers, store salespeople dissuaded them from purchasing their company's product--citing the computer's excessive price, weak features, and clunky appearance. By practicing inquiry and observation, company managers learned that they needed to reexamine product quality.

[http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/10/why-rewarding-p.html]

The notion that companies ought to reward people for failure and punish them for success is, at best, a dangerous half-truth. A high failure rate is a hallmark of innovation. Whether we are talking about products, new companies, or new business processes, there is little evidence that aiming to reduce failure rates is a useful strategy.

U.C. Davis Professor Dean Keith Simonton, who has spent much of his career doing long-term quantitative studies of creative genius, has concluded that a high failure rate is a hallmark of creative geniuses -- he concludes that the most creative people -- scientists, composers, artists, authors, and on and on -- have the greatest number of failures because they do the most stuff. And he can find little evidence that creative geniuses have a higher success rate than their more ordinary counterparts; they just take more swings at the ball. Check out his book Origins for Genius , perhaps the most complete review of research on the subject.

The upshot of all this is that the most creative people -- and companies -- don't have lower failure rates, they fail faster and cheaper, and perhaps learn more from their setbacks, than their competitors. One of the biggest impediments to faster and cheaper failures is that once people have made a public commitment to some course of action and have devoted a lot of time and energy to it, they become convinced that what they are doing valuable independently of the facts. My colleague and friend Barry Staw at the Haas Business School has devoted much of his career to studying this process of "escalating commitment to a failing course of action." Barry shows through a host of experiments, field studies, and case studies that such irrational devotion can be extremely destructive and remarkably hard to stop once it starts.

One antidote to such misguided commitment is provide people incentives for pulling the plug as early as possible on failing projects. Merck, the giant pharmaceutical firm, is doing a host of things to improve their innovation process these days, and following Staw's research, Peter Kim, the new head of R&D has instituted what they call "kill fees"" at Merck, paying out serious dollars to scientists who pull the plug on failing projects. As BusinessWeek reported:

'An inability to admit failure leads to inefficiencies. A scientist may spend months and tens of thousands of dollars studying a compound, hoping for a result he or she knows likely won't come, rather than pitching in on a project with a better chance of turning into a viable drug. So Kim is promising stock options to scientists who bail out on losing projects. It's not the loss per se that's being rewarded but the decision to accept failure and move on. "You can't change the truth. You can only delay how long it takes to find it out," Kim says. "If you're a good scientist, you want to spend your time and the company's money on something that's going to lead to success."'

If you blend together research suggesting that failing faster rather than failing less often is essential to innovation, that an action orientation is essential to innovation, as well as research suggesting that so-called experts aren't very good at guessing which new ideas will succeed and fail, you can see why I proposed in "Weird Ideas That Work" that creativity is sparked when organizations "reward success and failure, punish inaction." It may sound really weird, but in addition to the evidence that supports it, Merck seems to be doing it. And so do a lot of other creative organizations.

When I really want to get executives upset, I sometimes propose that they reward failure MORE than success when they are managing creative work. I am not sure if I believe it is a good idea, but having the discussion can be pretty interesting.

Is Merck's Medicine Working?
Spurred by the Vioxx fiasco, CEO Clark is trying to revamp the drug giant's culture
[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_31/b4044063.htm?chan=search]

Richard Clark was flustered and unprepared when he was thrust into the CEO job at Merck & Co. (MRK ) on May 5, 2005. It was the darkest hour in the pharmaceutical giant's 114-year history. Merck was drowning in liability suits stemming from Vioxx, its $2.5 billion-a-year arthritis drug, which it had to pull from the market because of a link to heart attacks and strokes. Two other blockbusters worth a combined $7 billion in annual sales were facing patent expirations. And Merck's labs, which other companies once hailed as a bastion of scientific innovation, were crippled by a culture that buried good ideas under layers of bureaucracy. But in the morass, Clark saw opportunity. "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste," says the CEO.
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The 35-year Merck veteran says he had "no clue" what his turnaround plan would be. What he did know: Getting back on track would take much more than a cosmetic restructuring or slash-and-burn layoffs. Clark had watched the company degenerate into a collection of fiefdoms more focused on advancing their own agendas than on getting the right drugs to patients. To revitalize drug development he'd need to get Merck's 60,000 employees--scientists, regulatory staff, and salespeople--to work together.

Clark set out to blast open deeply blocked channels of communication. Over the years, Merck had fallen out of touch with customers. Clark wanted to get employees to stop thinking about their specific job functions and to instead focus on the diseases they were trying to conquer. So he began placing people in teams defined by therapeutic fields such as cancer and diabetes. He encouraged the teams to huddle with doctors who prescribe Merck's products, patients who take them, and even insurers that decide whether or not to pay for them. "It's a different way of doing business," says Clark, 61.

In essence, Clark turned Merck's drug development on its head. While he can't take credit for drugs that Merck discovered years ago, his disease-focused approach has pushed some products through Merck's pipeline at speeds that caught rivals by surprise. Januvia, a first-of-its-kind diabetes drug, hit the market in October, 2006, and HIV drug Isentress is on track to be approved by the Food & Drug Administration this October.

It will be years before it becomes clear whether Clark's changes will produce a reliable stream of blockbuster drugs. Still, Wall Street has hope that there's a solid growth story at Merck, despite the Vioxx debacle. The company's stock has jumped 17% since January, outpacing the American Stock Exchange Pharmaceutical Index, which is up 4%. Analysts expect Merck's top line to grow 4%, to $23.5 billion this year, an achievement considering that sales growth had flatlined even before Vioxx imploded.

DIFFERENT DYNAMIC
Virtually no one expected this from Clark. The low-key executive was promoted to CEO from a very unglamorous post at Merck: head of manufacturing. While Clark was well-known inside the company as a stickler for efficiency, outsiders feared he lacked the vision to restore Merck to its scientific glory days. "At the time we said: 'Who is he?," recalls Morgan Stanley (MS ) analyst Jami Rubin. The yawns grew wider when Clark announced plans to cut costs ($4 billion by 2009), a typical opening gambit by CEOs without grand plans. Then good news started flowing from Merck's labs, and Wall Street began to see that maybe something different was unfolding. "What's impressive is the speed with which he has galvanized an organization that was so depressed," Rubin says.

Uncertainty over the outcome of the Vioxx litigation casts a shadow over Clark's early progress, however. The company's strategy of fighting each suit separately is working so far: 10 out of 15 verdicts have gone its way. But Merck is still facing 27,250 Vioxx claims, and information expected to be released over coming weeks could bolster plaintiffs' claims against the company. Meanwhile, Vioxx has become a lightning rod in Congress, which has spent much of the summer debating tough new drug-safety legislation. Clark maintains Merck did nothing wrong in its handling of the product. Yet he acknowledges the sudden loss of the drug highlighted the company's need to find a more efficient way to fill its pipeline. "It really helped accelerate the change," he says.

Clark's struggle is emblematic of the difficult task facing all pharmaceutical CEOs. More than 70 big drugs will lose their patent protection by 2011, causing a collective loss of $100 billion in annual sales. The mapping of the human genome and advances that make it faster and easier to screen potential drug candidates should be lighting a fire under drug development, but they haven't so far. So pharmaceutical companies are grappling with new models. Pfizer Inc. (PFE ) is trying to become more inventive by looking outside and partnering with small biotechs. Johnson & Johnson (JNJ )--which has long maintained that the key to innovation is to preserve the independence of the companies it has acquired--has reconfigured its drug development operations into three business units, so it can be more tightly focused. "We're all being challenged to rethink this," says Samuel O. Thier, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Merck board member.

Despite the high-tech gloss on the pharmaceutical industry, most drug companies are still organized around an old industrial model. Typically a new product starts in research and is handed to manufacturing. Then sales comes up with a marketing plan. Finally the drug gets passed down to regional managers around the world, who develop their own sales strategies. This hand-off model can lead to mistakes: Scientists might put years and millions of dollars into a drug, for example, only to find out that the audience is not as big as they imagined it to be. Worse, managers might not devote the necessary resources to the most promising ideas, because they're blinded by the need to maximize their own units' profitability. Bringing disparate voices together from Day One "is the way work should get done in companies," says Clark, drawing grids on a legal pad to make his point. "It's not up and down. You need people to work together."

FASTER PATH
One group of Merck employees was already experimenting with a disease-focused model before Clark became chief executive. They had come together to develop a diabetes drug that ultimately failed. But after hearing Clark talk about busting up the traditional approach to drug development, the team volunteered to pilot his new plan with Januvia, which was just about to go into pivotal clinical trials. They knew they had a potential blockbuster on their hands, because the drug offers a completely new way to attack diabetes. But rival Novartis (NVS ) was way ahead of Merck in testing a similar drug called Galvus.

In the past, Merck's science types might have spent years testing Januvia in combination with every other diabetes therapy patients might be taking so that the FDA would allow the drug to be pitched to the broadest possible audience. With advice from marketing colleagues, who were in tune with what diabetes patients and doctors were demanding, the diabetes group devised a faster path to victory: They decided that initially they would only test Januvia with the two most widely used diabetes drugs and as a solo therapy. "We didn't do studies that were nice to have," says Jay Galeota, general manager of the diabetes and obesity franchise. "We did studies that really represented where the product was most likely to be used."

Gathering input from customers such as doctors earlier in the process paid off in other ways. As Januvia moved along, reports emerged that Novartis' Galvus was causing some monkeys in the trials to suffer skin lesions. Conversations with doctors convinced Merck's diabetes team to design an extra monkey study to prove to the FDA that its drug was safe. The result: The agency approved Januvia without requiring a warning about the side effect. What's more, because there were manufacturing and marketing folks on the diabetes team, constantly trading information about the approval time line and customer demand, Merck had Januvia on pharmacy shelves four days after the FDA gave it the green light. At the old Merck, it would have taken as long as a month to launch the product. Morgan's Rubin reckons Januvia and a related product will bring in $762 million in sales this year. Meanwhile, Galvus is still awaiting FDA approval.

KEY CUSTOMER
Getting better products out, faster, is crucial, but paying attention to your biggest customer base--the insurance companies--is also important. Clark should know. He served as chief operating officer and then CEO of Merck's pharmacy benefit subsidiary, Medco, from 1997 to 2002, before it was spun out as an independent company. The experience drove home to him the immense power that insurance companies wield when they decide whether a new drug is worth paying for or whether it's not much different from older, cheaper alternatives.

Merck has always talked to insurers just before drugs hit the market, but Clark believes the discussion needs to start much earlier, when a new therapy is just an inkling in a scientist's brain. That way, Merck can be sure it is designing trials that directly answer payers' questions about safety and efficacy, especially in relation to what the comparative expense of a drug might be. "The value proposition has to be from the payer's perspective," Clark says. "If you don't listen to your customers you're going to wake up someday and not have them."

Mixing scientists with insurance executives is a little extreme. With the cost of drugs growing at double digits every year, payers come to the table with a built-in bias against new products, if not a little hostility. Yet Merck research and development chief Peter S. Kim has embraced the idea. Last September, for example, 200 Merck scientists went on a retreat. Along for the ride: a patient who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and a top executive from insurer Aetna Inc. (AET )

The patient described her travails with steroids, which treat her disease effectively but also touch off side effects such as bloating. Merck is working on nonsteroid treatments with minimal side effects. Aetna suggested Merck look for clues to predict which patients respond best to which therapies. Tailoring the drug to the right audience would not only result in better outcomes for patients but also save insurers money in the long run. "As we figure out how to reinvent ourselves, understanding different perspectives is going to be a critical piece of the puzzle," says Kim, who joined Merck in 2001 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

KILL FEE
If fraternizing with insurance executives sounds bizarre, consider this: Merck is rewarding scientists for failure. One of the hardest decisions any scientist has to make is when to abandon an experimental drug that's not working. An inability to admit failure leads to inefficiencies. A scientist may spend months and tens of thousands of dollars studying a compound, hoping for a result he or she knows likely won't come, rather than pitching in on a project with a better chance of turning into a viable drug. So Kim is promising stock options to scientists who bail out on losing projects. It's not the loss per se that's being rewarded but the decision to accept failure and move on. "You can't change the truth. You can only delay how long it takes to find it out," Kim says. "If you're a good scientist, you want to spend your time and the company's money on something that's going to lead to success."

Management consultants say rewarding misses as well as hits is the right idea, and one that the entire industry will need to adopt. "The earlier you determine when something should be killed, the better," says Charlie Beaver, vice-president at consultant Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. Still, he warns, changing a corporate culture from one that thrives on success to one that also accepts failure "is a very large hurdle to overcome."

While Clark is encouraged by the results of his changes so far, he's still haunted by the culture of complacency that left companies like his stuck in an innovation rut. "If you ever feel comfortable that your model is the right model, you end up where the industry is today," he says. "It's always going to be continuous improvement. We will never declare victory."

Steve Johnson Tribune Internet critic
August 29, 2007
[http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0829hypertext3aug29,0,7306958.column]

Some cool new features have been added to Yahoo Search, the No. 2 search engine on the Web. It's all part of the general search engine quest to provide not just a lot of results but the results you are most likely to be seeking.

For instance, type in the name of a baseball player, and the first result is a box showing his picture and stats. This is even true for Barry Bonds.

Type in a movie title and you first get a box containing a link to the trailer and some reviews, and a list of showtimes in your area.

Ditto for band names, which will provide a link to music videos, lyrics and more.

Type in a restaurant and you get a Yahoo Maps map showing where it is (although when I typed "Viand Restaurant Chicago," a place located just north of Tribune Tower off Michigan Avenue, it located the restaurant near Clybourn Avenue and Halsted Street).

The service also incorporates images found on Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing site, when you search for a landmark. "Sears Tower" turned up some gems.

It's an interesting enough search evolution to make me reconfigure my Web browser's upper-right-hand-corner search box so that Yahoo, rather than Google, is the first choice.

February 25th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
[http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/02/whats-your-optimism-ratio/]

In his famous book Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman points out how our present use of language can be a fairly accurate predictor of future success. Seligman explains how he was able to predict outcomes of sporting events with reasonable accuracy by comparing the language used by the coaches and players in interviews before the event. Basically what he did was count all the positive words and the negative words in published pre-game quotes from the players and coaches, and then he calculated the ratio of positive words to negative. The team with the higher ratio was the one picked to win. There is some subjectivity in deciding whether a word is positive, negative, or neutral, but if you try it yourself, I think you’ll find that most of the time it’s fairly easy to classify words. Seligman also explains using a similar process to predict the winners of political elections.

Try this for yourself. Here’s a sentence I grabbed from Yahoo News :

"Scientists fear the avian flu that has killed 46 people in Asia could be the strain that will cause the next global pandemic but said more evidence is needed about how infectious it is in humans."

How many positive and negative words do you count? I count zero positive and four negative (fear, killed, pandemic, infectious). So this sentence has a ratio of 0/4 = 0.

Let’s try the same process on all of the headlines from Yahoo News. I count 6 positive words (eases, adds, new, found, right, wealthy) and 15 negative words (denounce, fight, die, soak, death, somber, slain, fears, concerns, dismissed, defiant, avoids, risk, pandemic, handouts) for an overall ratio of 6/15 = 0.4.

My picks are subjective of course, so yours may be different, but try it for yourself on any news site. If you find one with a ratio above 1.0, please tell me about it!

Try this on yourself as well. Go over some text you wrote recently — emails, forums posts, whatever. What’s your ratio of positive/negative words? Seligman would argue that this is a powerful predictor of future success. Some personal development experts believe that by intentionally choosing more optimistic words in the language you use, you’ll start to become more optimistic in your thinking, which will in turn lead to better results. Anthony Robbins has a whole chapter about it in one of his books; he refers to it as “transformational vocabulary.”

Have some fun and try this on your friends and co-workers. Grab something they wrote, and compute their ratio. Is their language predominantly optimistic (>1.0) or pessimistic (
What kind of boss do you work for? What about your company’s brochures? If you run your own business, how’s your marketing material, your web site, your business plan? Are you projecting confidence or self-doubt to your customers? What about your journal entries? Your to do list?

You’ll often see a pattern where like attracts like. Pessimistic news sources will attract pessimistic readers, partly because those are the best targets for advertising — negative people are more likely to believe that buying products will change their emotional state. A pessimistic company will attract and breed pessimistic employees — the high-energy positive people will go where their enthusiasm is welcome. So there’s a good chance you’ll see similar ratios to your own when you look around your environment.

Sadiq Alam
[http://mysticsaint.blogspot.com/]

God is not a Christian,
for Christ's sake understand this.

God is not a Jew,
all are His children,
not only a few.

God is not a Muslim,
Just incase you're boasting with your faith.

God is not a Hindu,
Beyond the colored idols transcend His attributes.

God never created a religion,
but the human race.

come ! truth may we all embrace.

At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity
How CEO George Buckley is managing the yin and yang of discipline and imagination
[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_best+of+bw]

Not too many years ago, the temple of management was General Electric (GE ). Former CEO Jack Welch was the high priest, and his disciples spread the word to executive suites throughout the land. One of his most highly regarded followers, James McNerney, was quickly snatched up by 3M after falling short in the closely watched race to succeed Welch. 3M's board considered McNerney a huge prize, and the company's stock jumped nearly 20% in the days after Dec. 5, 2000, when his selection as CEO was announced. The mere mention of his name made everyone richer.

McNerney was the first outsider to lead the insular St. Paul (Minn.) company in its 100-year history. He had barely stepped off the plane before he announced he would change the DNA of the place. His playbook was vintage GE. McNerney axed 8,000 workers (about 11% of the workforce), intensified the performance-review process, and tightened the purse strings at a company that had become a profligate spender. He also imported GE's vaunted Six Sigma program—a series of management techniques designed to decrease production defects and increase efficiency. Thousands of staffers became trained as Six Sigma "black belts." The plan appeared to work: McNerney jolted 3M's moribund stock back to life and won accolades for bringing discipline to an organization that had become unwieldy, erratic, and sluggish.

Then, four and a half years after arriving, McNerney abruptly left for a bigger opportunity, the top job at Boeing (BA ). Now his successors face a challenging question: whether the relentless emphasis on efficiency had made 3M a less creative company. That's a vitally important issue for a company whose very identity is built on innovation. After all, 3M is the birthplace of masking tape, Thinsulate, and the Post-it note. It is the invention machine whose methods were consecrated in the influential 1994 best-seller Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras. But those old hits have become distant memories. It has been a long time since the debut of 3M's last game-changing technology: the multilayered optical films that coat liquid-crystal display screens. At the company that has always prided itself on drawing at least one-third of sales from products released in the past five years, today that fraction has slipped to only one-quarter.

Those results are not coincidental. Efficiency programs such as Six Sigma are designed to identify problems in work processes—and then use rigorous measurement to reduce variation and eliminate defects. When these types of initiatives become ingrained in a company's culture, as they did at 3M, creativity can easily get squelched. After all, a breakthrough innovation is something that challenges existing procedures and norms. "Invention is by its very nature a disorderly process," says current CEO George Buckley, who has dialed back many of McNerney's initiatives. "You can't put a Six Sigma process into that area and say, well, I'm getting behind on invention, so I'm going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday. That's not how creativity works." McNerney declined to comment for this story.

Proud Creative Culture
The tension that Buckley is trying to manage—between innovation and efficiency—is one that's bedeviling CEOs everywhere. There is no doubt that the application of lean and mean work processes at thousands of companies, often through programs with obscure-sounding names such as ISO 9000 and Total Quality Management, has been one of the most important business trends of past decades. But as once-bloated U.S. manufacturers have shaped up and become profitable global competitors, the onus shifts to growth and innovation, especially in today's idea-based, design-obsessed economy. While process excellence demands precision, consistency, and repetition, innovation calls for variation, failure, and serendipity.

Indeed, the very factors that make Six Sigma effective in one context can make it ineffective in another. Traditionally, it uses rigorous statistical analysis to produce unambiguous data that help produce better quality, lower costs, and more efficiency. That all sounds great when you know what outcomes you'd like to control. But what about when there are few facts to go on—or you don't even know the nature of the problem you're trying to define? "New things look very bad on this scale," says MITSloan School of Management professor Eric von Hippel, who has worked with 3M on innovation projects that he says "took a backseat" once Six Sigma settled in. "The more you hardwire a company on total quality management, [the more] it is going to hurt breakthrough innovation," adds Vijay Govindarajan, a management professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "The mindset that is needed, the capabilities that are needed, the metrics that are needed, the whole culture that is needed for discontinuous innovation, are fundamentally different."

The exigencies of Wall Street are another matter. Investors liked McNerney's approach to boosting earnings, which may have sacrificed creativity but made up for it in consistency. Profits grew, on average, 22% a year. In Buckley's first year, sales approached $23 billion and profits totaled $1.4 billion, but two quarterly earnings misses and a languishing stock made it a rocky ride. In 2007, Buckley seems to have satisfied many skeptics on the Street, convincing them he can ignite top-line growth without killing the McNerney-led productivity improvements. Shares are up 12% since January.

Buckley's Street cred was hard-won. He's nowhere near the management rock star his predecessor was. McNerney could play the President on TV. He's tall and athletic, with charisma to spare. Buckley is of average height, with a slight middle-age paunch, an informal demeanor, and a scientist's natural curiosity. In the office he prefers checked shirts and khakis to suits and ties. He's bookish and puckish, in the way of a tenured professor.

Buckley, in short, is just the kind of guy who has traditionally thrived at 3M. It was one of the pillars of the "3M Way" that workers could seek out funding from a number of company sources to get their pet projects off the ground. Official company policy allowed employees to use 15% of their time to pursue independent projects. The company explicitly encouraged risk and tolerated failure. 3M's creative culture foreshadowed the one that is currently celebrated unanimously at Google (GOOG ).

Perhaps all of that made it particularly painful for 3M's proud workforce to deal with the hard reality the company faced by the late '90s. Profit and sales growth were wildly erratic. It bungled operations in Asia amid the 1998 financial crisis there. The stock sat out the entire late '90s boom, budging less than 1% from September, 1997, to September, 2000. The flexibility and lack of structure, which had enabled the company's success, had also by then produced a bloated staff and inefficient workflow. So McNerney had plenty of cause to whip things into shape.

Green-Belt Training Regimen
One of his main tools was Six Sigma, which originated at Motorola (MOT ) in 1986 and became a staple of corporate life in the '90s after it was embraced by GE. The term is now so widely and divergently applied that it's hard to pin down what it actually means. At some companies, Six Sigma is plainly a euphemism for cost-cutting. Others explain it as a tool for analyzing a problem (high shipping costs, for instance) and then using data to solve each component of it. But on a basic level, Six Sigma seeks to remove variability from a process. In that way you avoid errors, or defects, and increase predictability (technically speaking, Six Sigma quality has come to be accepted as no more than 3.4 defects per million).

At 3M, McNerney introduced the two main Six Sigma tools. The first and more traditional version is an acronym known as DMAIC (pronounced "dee-may-ic"), which stands for: define, measure, analyze, improve, control. These five steps are the essence of the Six Sigma approach to problem solving. The other flavor is called Design for Six Sigma, or DFSS, which purports to systematize a new product development process so that something can be made to Six Sigma quality from the start.

Thousands of 3Mers were trained as black belts, an honorific awarded to experts who often act as internal consultants for their companies. Nearly every employee participated in a several-day "green-belt" training regimen, which explained DMAIC and DFSS, familiarized workers with statistics, and showed them how to track data and create charts and tables on a computer program called Minitab. The black belts fanned out and led bigger-scale "black-belt projects," such as increasing production speed 40% by reducing variations and removing wasted steps from manufacturing. They also often oversaw smaller "green-belt projects," such as improving the order fulfillment process. This Six Sigma drive undoubtedly contributed to 3M's astronomical profitability improvements under McNerney; operating margins went from 17% in 2001 to 23% in 2005.

While Six Sigma was invented as a way to improve quality, its main value to corporations now clearly is its ability to save time and money. McNerney arrived at a company that had been criticized for throwing cash at problems. In his first full year, he slashed capital expenditures 22%, from $980 million to $763 million, and 11% more to a trough of $677 million in 2003. As a percentage of sales, capital expenditures dropped from 6.1% in 2001 to just 3.7% in 2003. McNerney also held research and development funding constant from 2001 to 2005, hovering over $1 billion a year. "If you take over a company that's been living on innovation, clearly you can squeeze costs out," says Charles O'Reilly, a Stanford Graduate School of Business management professor. "The question is, what's the long-term damage to the company?"

Under McNerney, the R&D function at 3M was systematized in ways that were unheard of and downright heretical in St. Paul, even though the guidelines would have looked familiar at many other conglomerates. Some employees found the constant analysis stifling. Steven Boyd, a PhD who had worked as a researcher at 3M for 32 years before his job was eliminated in 2004, was one of them. After a couple of months on a research project, he would have to fill in a "red book" with scores of pages worth of charts and tables, analyzing everything from the potential commercial application, to the size of the market, to possible manufacturing concerns.

Traditionally, 3M had been a place where researchers had been given wide latitude to pursue research down whatever alleys they wished. After the arrival of the new boss, the DMAIC process was laid over a phase-review process for innovations—a novelty at 3M. The goal was to speed up and systematize the progress of inventions into the new-product pipeline. The DMAIC questions "are all wonderful considerations, but are they appropriate for somebody who's just trying to...develop some ideas?" asks Boyd. The impact of the Six Sigma regime, according to Boyd and other former 3Mers, was that more predictable, incremental work took precedence over blue-sky research. "You're supposed to be having something that was going to be producing a profit, if not next quarter, it better be the quarter after that," Boyd says.

For a long time, 3M had allowed researchers to spend years testing products. Consider, for example, the Post-it note. Its inventor, Art Fry, a 3M scientist who's now retired, and others fiddled with the idea for several years before the product went into full production in 1980. Early during the Six Sigma effort, after a meeting at which technical employees were briefed on the new process, "we all came to the conclusion that there was no way in the world that anything like a Post-it note would ever emerge from this new system," says Michael Mucci, who worked at 3M for 27 years before his dismissal in 2004. (Mucci has alleged in a class action that 3M engaged in age discrimination; the company says the claims are without merit.)

There has been little formal research on whether the tension between Six Sigma and innovation is inevitable. But the most notable attempt yet, by Wharton School professor Mary Benner and Harvard Business School professor Michael L. Tushman, suggests that Six Sigma will lead to more incremental innovation at the expense of more blue-sky work. The two professors analyzed the types of patents granted to paint and photography companies over a 20-year period, before and after a quality improvement drive. Their work shows that, after the quality push, patents issued based primarily on prior work made up a dramatically larger share of the total, while those not based on prior work dwindled.

Defenders of Six Sigma at 3M claim that a more systematic new-product introduction process allows innovations to get to market faster. But Fry, the Post-it note inventor, disagrees. In fact, he places the blame for 3M's recent lack of innovative sizzle squarely on Six Sigma's application in 3M's research labs. Innovation, he says, is "a numbers game. You have to go through 5,000 to 6,000 raw ideas to find one successful business." Six Sigma would ask, why not eliminate all that waste and just come up with the right idea the first time? That way of thinking, says Fry, can have serious side effects. "What's remarkable is how fast a culture can be torn apart," says Fry, who lives in Maplewood, Minn., just a few minutes south of the corporate campus and pops into the office regularly to help with colleagues' projects. "[McNerney] didn't kill it, because he wasn't here long enough. But if he had been here much longer, I think he could have."

Reinvigorated Workforce
Buckley, a PhD chemical engineer by training, seems to recognize the cultural ramifications of a process-focused program on an organization whose fate and history is so bound up in inventing new stuff. "You cannot create in that atmosphere of confinement or sameness," Buckley says. "Perhaps one of the mistakes that we made as a company—it's one of the dangers of Six Sigma—is that when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M."

In recent years, the company's reputation as an innovator has been sliding. In 2004, 3M was ranked No. 1 on Boston Consulting Group's Most Innovative Companies list (now the BusinessWeek/BCG list). It dropped to No. 2 in 2005, to No. 3 in 2006, and down to No. 7 this year. "People have kind of forgotten about these guys," says Dev Patnaik, managing associate of innovation consultancy Jump Associates. "When was the last time you saw something innovative or experimental coming out of there?"

Buckley has loosened the reins a bit by removing 3M research scientists' obligation to hew to Six Sigma objectives. There was perhaps a one-size-fits-all approach to the application of Six Sigma as the initial implementation got under way, says Dr. Larry Wendling, a vice-president who directs the "R" in 3M's R&D operation. "Since [McNerney] was driving it to the organization, you know, there were metrics established across the organization and quite frankly, some of them did not make as much sense for the lab as they did other parts of the organization," Wendling says. What sort of metrics? Keeping track of how many black-belt and green-belt projects were completed, for one.

In fact, it's not uncommon for Six Sigma to become an end unto itself. That may be appropriate in an operations context—at the end of the year, it's easy enough for a line manager to count up all the money he's saved by doing green-belt projects. But what 3Mers came to realize is that these financially definitive outcomes were much more elusive in the context of a research lab. "In some cases in the lab it made sense, but in other cases, people were going around dreaming up green-belt programs to fill their quota of green-belt programs for that time period," says Wendling. "We were letting, I think, the process get in the way of doing the actual invention."

To help get the creative juices flowing, Buckley is opening the money spigot—hiking spending on R&D, acquisitions, and capital expenditures. The overall R&D budget will grow 20% this year, to $1.5 billion. Even more significant than the increase in money is Buckley's reallocation of those funds. He's funneling cash into what he calls "core" areas of 3M technology, 45 in all, from abrasives to nanotechnology to flexible electronics. That is another departure from McNerney's priorities; he told BusinessWeek in 2004 that the 3M product with the most promise was skin-care cream Aldara, the centerpiece to a burgeoning pharmaceuticals business. In January, Buckley sold the pharma business for $2 billion.

Quietly, the McNerney legacy is being revised at 3M. While there is no doubt the former CEO brought some positive change to the company, many workers say they are reinvigorated now that the corporate emphasis has shifted from profitability and process discipline to growth and innovation. Timm Hammond, the director of strategic business development, says "[Buckley] has brought back a spark around creativity." Adds Bob Anderson, a business director in 3M's radio frequency identification division: "We feel like we can dream again."

Scott Adams
[Dilbert Blog]
[http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/flying-dinosaur.html]

Once upon a time there were dinosaurs. They died and decomposed and turned into oil. Millions of years later, humans turned that oil into plastic. Recently, plastic became the major building material for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner. There’s your proof that dinosaurs can fly.

[http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/tammet.cfm]
[www.optimnem.co.uk]
[www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1409903,00.html.]
Darold Treffert, MD

Daniel Tammet first came to worldwide attention in March 2004 on international Pi Day (3/14, of course) when he recited, from memory, Pi to 22,514 decimal places. It took over five hours and set a new European record. The event, which Daniel named "Pi in the Sky", coincided with Einstein's birthday and took place in front of Einstein's blackboard at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, England.

Daniel used that event to raise funds for the National Society for Epilepsy because it was after a series of childhood seizures that his extraordinary number and memory abilities began, aligning him with that rare circumstance of the 'acquired savant' in which such exceptional skills surface following some CNS injury or disease. He is proud of the monies raised on behalf of this organization, and certainly gave this worthy cause a good deal of visibility.

In addition to number and massive memory skills, Daniel has exceptional language skills as well. He speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Esperanto and Icelandic. He learned the difficult Icelandic language in seven days which was carefully documented in the one hour film about Daniel titled Brainman.

That documentary, Brainman, which also goes by the alternative title of "The Boy with the Incredible Brain", has been shown in both the United Kingdom and the United States on various channels. Whenever that film appears in this country on the Discovery Channel it generates a number of inquiries to this Web site about Daniel and his remarkable abilities. In one scene Daniel is asked to calculate 37 raised to the power of 4. He gave the correct answer of 1,874,161 in less than one minute. Then asked to divide 13 by 97 he outdistances the interviewers computer calculator by 32 decimal places with the ability to go to over 100 decimal places if one wanted him to recite that long string of digits. The film also shows Daniel's ability to memorize the position of all the chess pieces on a particular board at a point in time, and, as mentioned, documents Daniel's acquisition of the Icelandic language in only a week's time.

Presently Daniel maintains a Web site at www.optimnem.co.uk which offers a variety of educational courses for "promoting key skill areas such as literacy and numbers through spatial learning strategies for English, Math, French, German and Spanish." The site provides the following description of Daniel:


"Daniel Tammet was born in London, in 1979, with congenital childhood epilepsy. A series of seizures as a young child changed forever the way Daniel saw the world around him. For one thing, Daniel was able to literally 'see' numbers in his head as if they were images. Not surprisingly, he quickly became proficient in number patterns, able to figure various roots, powers; even the decimal expansions for prime number fractions — often quicker than a friend with a calculator.

"A high-functioning autistic savant, Daniel outgrew his disability. His astonishing mental skills, however, remained. As an example, following an invitation from organizers, he attended the largest ever 'Memory Olympics' in London in 2000. He won a gold medal and was subsequently invited to London's Institute of Neurology to undergo tests for a landmark study of prodigious mental ability. The summarized data, co-written by some of Britain's leading brain scientists, appeared in the New Year 2003 edition of the highly prestigious Nature neuro-scientific magazine."

While filming Brainman, Daniel had the opportunity to meet and interact with Kim Peek. Both Kim and Daniel have massive memory capacity quantitatively, but the nature of that massive memory differs somewhat qualitatively. Kim has a huge store of factual material, but disqualifies himself a bit when it comes to math simply saying that is not an area of interest or strength for him. Daniel's strength, on the other hand, is not in factual storage, but rather the ability to faithfully recall huge strings of numbers (or other items) which he literally 'sees' before him as if on a tapestry of images, and in his ability to manipulate those numbers with incredible speed in various calculations and derivations. Both Kim and Daniel, however, are continually flooded with data within their areas of interest and expertise, vacuuming up such data instantly, and massively, storing it for later retrieval with incredible speed and seemingly bottomless depth.
Presently Daniel is writing a book about his life, and his special skills, which is scheduled to be published in August 2006. That book should provide a great deal of insight into a very unique and incredible memory in this very unusual, but fascinating, circumstance of 'acquired' savant skills.

There have been a number of articles about Daniel, particularly in the British press, which provide additional background and glimpses into Daniel's unique and extraordinary memory capacities. One such article can be accessed at

www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1409903,00.html.

I had an opportunity to meet Daniel on his visit to Milwaukee when filming Brainman. His digit span memory exceeded that of any one I had ever tested before and other tests of recall were, of course, entirely accurate. Daniel is a very polite, soft-spoken, gentle person; pre-occupied at times and shy, not boastful, about his enormous abilities. He described to me how he assigns a shape and color to each number, reaching into the thousands. As he remembers, or computes, these images appear as just that — images and colors — which he 'simply' recites as he views them. When computing, the images merge together and out comes the new, correct combination for his instant inner viewing. At the Calatrava art museum where we met, there was a very tall tree-like structure composed of variously shaped and colored blown-glass composite pieces, positioned together like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Daniel identified with many of those shapes and colors, each representing, one of the numbers and images continually present in his head. While it is difficult to image exactly what Daniel is experiencing as he 'sees' numbers and objects flowing before him, that tree-like composite of colors and shapes provided, for me, some reference point to better sense what that colorful, moving tapestry must be like — imbedded as it is — with the huge store of numbers which have become, by his own description, Daniel's friends.

It was a very pleasant visit. Daniel summed it up this way: "The line between profound talent and profound disability is really a surprisingly thin one." The Brainman narrator concludes, correctly, that "The way Daniel can describe his inner world is giving scientists a window into the brain that they have not seen before." But the narrator also comments, correctly, that "this journey of explanation is just beginning."

Update: July 25, 2006
"Lucky Numbers": An article about Daniel TammetDaniel Tammet's book about himself and his incredible abilities is now available in the UK. The title of the book is Born on a Blue Day and it is published by Hodder and Stoughton. The book, which contains a forward by Doctor Treffert, will be published in the US early next year by Free Press. There is an excellent article called "Lucky Numbers" about Daniel, and his book, in Scotland on Sunday, July 16, 2006 edition. That article can be accessed at
http://living.scotsman.com/people.cfm?id=1022492006&format=print.

Software Practitioner, September/October 1996
[http://www.stevemcconnell.com/articles/art05.htm]


Barry Boehm observed that numerous productivity studies have found that motivation is the largest single contributor to productivity (Software Engineering Economics, Prentice-Hall, 1981). It is hardly a coincidence, then, that the most successful software company in the world has continually succeeded in motivating its development teams to extreme degrees. Stories of 10-, 14-, even 18-hour days are common at Microsoft, as are stories of people who live in their offices for weeks at a time (Steve Maguire, Debugging the Development Process, Microsoft Press, 1995). I have seen fold-out couches, cots, and sleeping bags in offices at Microsoft. I know of one developer who had a Murphy bed custom-made to fit his office. Dave Moore, Microsoft's director of development, described a typical day at Microsoft like this: "Wake up, go to work, do some work. 'Oh, I'm hungry.' Go down and eat some breakfast. Do some work. 'Oh, I'm hungry.' Eat some lunch. Work until you drop. Drive home. Sleep" (Michael Cusumano and Richard Selby, Microsoft Secrets, Free Press, 1995).

In its local area, Microsoft is known as "The Velvet Sweatshop," which suggests that, if anything, Microsoft might be doing too good a job of motivating its employees.

How does Microsoft achieve such a high level of motivation? It's simple. Microsoft explicitly focuses on morale. Each group at Microsoft has a morale budget that can be used for anything the group wants to use it for. Some groups buy movie-theater style popcorn poppers. Some groups go skiing or go bowling or have a cookout. Some groups make T-shirts. Some groups rent a whole movie theater for a private screening of their favorite movie.

While Microsoft was still involved with OS/2, the OS/2 development group requested that the company install a washer and dryer in their building so that they wouldn't have to go home to do their laundry. Although the group never got its washer and dryer, the message was clear: this team wanted to work. It didn't ask for promotions, more money, bigger offices, or fancy carpet; it asked for management to remove every conceivable roadblock so that it could concentrate on shipping a product.

When I first began consulting at Microsoft, I was pleasantly surprised to find how much time each day I could actually spend working. Every floor in every building has a supply room stocked with common and not-so-common office supplies. You just take what you need, and you don't even need to sign anything. Most other supplies are only an email message away. If you need office equipment--bookcases, whiteboards, and so on--you just send email, put a note on the wall where you want the office furniture, and within 24 hours someone will have installed the furniture in your office. If you have a computer problem, you call the company's help desk and within an hour or two a knowledgeable computer technician will have fixed your problem. They lend you a computer if necessary, and they will even swap your hard disk into the loaner to minimize downtime.

Microsoft also makes extensive use of non-monetary rewards. I spent a year at Microsoft working on Windows 3.1. During that time, I received three team T-shirts, a team rugby shirt, a team beach towel and a team mouse pad. I also took part in a nice team dinner on the local "Dinner Train" and another dinner at a upscale restaurant. If I had been an employee, I would also have received a few more shirts, a Microsoft watch, a plaque for participating in the project, and a big Lucite "Ship-It" award for shipping the product. The total value of this stuff is probably only two or three hundred dollars, but as Tom Peters and Robert Waterman say in In Search of Excellence (Warner Books, 1982), companies with excellent motivation don't miss any opportunity to shower their employees with non-monetary rewards.

Microsoft doesn't ignore developers' personal lives, either. During the time I was there, the developer who had the office next to mine had his 10-year-old daughter come by every day after school. She did her homework quietly in his office while he worked. No one at the company even raised an eyebrow.

Motivating yourself and other employees is part of the Microsoft corporate culture. Microsoft doesn't have an explicit practice of asking team members to commit or "sign up" for a project, but it isn't uncommon for an employee who expresses doubt about meeting a deadline to be asked whether he or she is signed up. Microsoft avoids the problem of phony-sounding management motivational speeches because, as often as not, the question doesn't come from a manager; it comes from the person who will have to do the work if the person in question doesn't do it.

In addition to providing explicit support for morale, Microsoft gladly trades other factors to keep morale high, sometimes trading them in ways that would make other companies shudder (Pascal Zachary, Showstopper!, Free Press, 1994). I've seen Microsoft team managers and team leaders trade methodological purity, programming discipline, control over the product specification, control over the schedule, management visibility -- almost anything -- to benefit morale.

Whatever you might think of the effects this approach has on other project factors, the effect on motivation and morale -- and consequently on Microsoft's success -- speaks for itself.

Author Biography
Steve McConnell is the author of Code Complete (1993); Rapid Development (1996); and numerous technical articles. Both his books have won Software Development magazine's Jolt Excellence award. McConnell is currently Chief Software Engineer at Construx Software Builders where he divides his time between leading custom software projects, consulting to companies in the shrinkwrap industry, and writing books and articles. He can be reached at stevemcc@construx.com.

by Marshall Goldsmith
[http://www.strategy-business.com/press/freearticle/07113]

I have reviewed custom-designed leadership profiles at more than 100 major corporations. These documents typically feature boilerplate language that describes the leadership behavior each company desires. Such chestnuts include “communicates a clear vision,” “helps people develop to their maximum potential,” “strives to see the value of differing opinions,” and “avoids playing favorites.”

Not one profile has ever included a desired behavior that reads “effectively sucks up to management.” Although given the dedication to fawning and sucking up in most corporations — and how often such behavior is rewarded — it probably should. Almost every company says it wants people to “challenge the system,” “be empowered to express their opinion,” and “say what they really think,” but there sure are a lot of companies that are stuck on sucking up.

Not only do companies say they abhor such comically servile behavior, but so do individual leaders. Almost all the leaders I have met say that they would never encourage such a thing in their organizations. I have no doubt that they are sincere. Most of us are easily irritated, if not disgusted, by derriere kissers. Which raises a question: If leaders say they discourage sucking up, why does it dominate the workplace? Keep in mind that these leaders are generally very shrewd judges of character. They spend their lives sizing people up: taking in first impressions and recalibrating them against later impressions. And yet, they still fall for the super-skilled suck-up. They still play favorites.

The simple answer is: We can’t see in ourselves what we can see so clearly in others.

Perhaps you are now thinking, “It’s amazing how leaders send out subtle signals that encourage subordinates to mute their criticisms and exaggerate their praise of the powers that be. And it is surprising how they cannot see it in themselves. Of course, this doesn’t apply to me.”

Maybe you’re right. But how can you be so sure that you’re not in denial?

I use an irrefutable test with my clients to show how we all unknowingly encourage sucking up. I ask a group of leaders: “How many of you own a dog that you love?” Big smiles cross the executives’ faces as they wave their hands in the air. They beam as they tell me the names of their faithful hounds.

Then we have a contest. I ask them, “At home, who gets most of your unabashed affection? Is it (a) your husband, wife, or partner; (b) your kids; or (c) your dog?” More than 80 percent of the time, the winner is the dog.

I then ask the executives if they love their dogs more than their family members. The answer is always a resounding no. My follow-up: “So why does the dog get most of your attention?”

Their replies all sound the same: “The dog is always happy to see me.” “The dog never talks back.” “The dog gives me unconditional love.” In other words, the dog is a suck-up.

I can’t say that I am any better. I love my dog, Beau. I travel at least 180 days a year, and Beau goes bonkers when I return home from a trip. I pull into the driveway, and my first inclination is to open the front door, go straight to Beau, and exclaim, “Daddy’s home!” Invariably, Beau jumps up and down, and I hug and pat him and make a huge fuss. One day my daughter, Kelly, was home from college. She watched my typical lovefest with Beau. She then looked at me, held her hands in the air like little paws, and barked, “Woof woof.”

Point taken.

If we aren’t careful, we can wind up treating people at work like dogs: continually rewarding those who heap unthinking, unconditional admiration upon us. What behavior do we get in return? A virulent case of the suck-ups.

The net result is obvious. You’re encouraging behavior that serves you but not necessarily the best interests of the company. If everyone is fawning over the boss, who’s getting work done? Worse, it tilts the field against the honest, principled employees who won’t play along. This is a double dose of bad news. You’re not only playing favorites, but also favoring the wrong people!

Leaders can stop encouraging this behavior by admitting that we all have a tendency to favor those who favor us, even if we don’t mean to.

We should then compare our direct reports on three measures.

First, how much do they like me? (I know you can’t be sure. What matters is how much you think they like you. Fawning is acting, and effective suck-ups are good actors.)

Second, what is their contribution to the company and its customers? (In other words, are they A players, B, C, or worse?)

Third, how much positive personal recognition do I give them?

What we’re looking for is whether the correlation is stronger between measures one and three or measures two and three. If we’re honest with ourselves, our recognition of people may be linked to how much they seem to like us rather than how well they perform. That’s the definition of playing favorites.

And the fault is all our own. We’re encouraging the kind of behavior that we despise in others. Without meaning to, we are basking in hollow praise, which makes us hollow leaders.

This quick self-analysis won’t solve the problem. But it identifies it, which is where change begins.

Author Profile:
Marshall Goldsmith (marshall@marshallgoldsmith.com) is a leadership development trainer whose emphasis is on helping executives and their teams achieve positive change in behavior. He is the author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (Hyperion, 2007), from which this article is adapted.

Compressed air power costs €1 per 100km
Iain Thomson, vnunet.com20 Mar 2007
[http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2185958/india-build-air-car]

India's largest automobile manufacturer has signed a deal to develop a car which runs on compressed air, making it virtually pollution free.

Tata Motors has signed a deal with French company MDI, run by a former Formula One engineer, and has spent the past 10 years developing the engine.

The MDI Air Car can be powered by an external compressed air pump or by an internal compressor running on petrol.

"MDI has for many years been engaged in developing environment-friendly engines," said MDI chief executive Guy Negre.

"MDI is happy to conclude this agreement with Tata Motors and to work together with this important and experienced industrial group to develop a new and cost-saving technology for various applications for the Indian market that meets with severe regulations for environmental protection.

"We have also developed this new technology for other applications where cost competitiveness combined with respect for environmental questions has our priority."

The final car should cost around £4,000 and would have a range of around 300km between refuelling. The cost of a refill would be an almost negligible €1.5.

It would have a top speed of around 60kmh using air alone and 200kmh using an air and fuel combination engine.

The car is made of foam and fibreglass but has survived official crash tests. The 90 cubic metres of compressed air is stored at 300 bars in fibre fuel tanks built by Airbus.

The tanks are crash resistant and vent quickly and safely in the event of a collision.

Mobile search engines interprets search results to allow for better ranking
Tom Sanders, vnunet.com 21 Mar 2007
[http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2185975/yahoo-dives-mobile-search]

Yahoo has expanded its oneSearch mobile search offering to all device users. The offering previously was bundled with the Yahoo Go for Mobile application that is available on a limited number of handsets only.

The search engine makes an attempt to interpret search queries by offering result that are grouped. A search for a name for instance offers results including news articles, websites, special mobile sites, web images and Flickr photos. The results for a restaurant search offer links to listing for the company, business categories as well as web and mobile web results.

Mobile internet and mobile search is considered the next major internet growth market. Mobile phones already outship PCs by a wide margin. High speed data services meanwhile are gaining in popularity and devices such as Apple's upcoming iPhone are making it easier to navigate the mobile web.

Mobile search currently is limited. Most mobile web browsing is limited to pages that are offered directly by mobile operators. But as users are getting more comfortable with browsing the web on their mobile devices, they are expected to embrace search in the same way that they did on regular computers.

The mobile search market today is dominated by so-called white label search providers that allow operators to offer their own search engine. Microsoft in February 2006 acquired a major player in that field through the purchase of MotionBridge.

Google in 2005 launched a mobile search engine. While it favours pages written in extensible HTML that are optimised for mobile internet users when it ranks search results, it doesn’t interpret queries like Yahoo does.

Yahoo is aiming its service squarely against Google's. The company has published a PDF document that highlights the differences between the two services.

Mobile phone users can access the service by surfing to http://m.yahoo.com on their mobile device.

March 08, 2007
Great Leadership Under Fire
How one chief executive turned a disaster into record profits
by Jennifer Robison
[http://gmj.gallup.com/content/26569/Great-Leadership-Under-Fire.aspx]

In retrospect, catastrophes are rarely unexpected. There's almost always advance notice that something awful is coming, and leaders are responsible for scanning the horizon to watch for the warning signals. The ability to evaluate those signals and anticipate the consequences is one of the things that distinguishes good leadership.

When competent leaders see disaster coming their way, they take preemptive action, marshal their forces to deal with the likely effects, then dig in to repair the damage. So do great leaders. But somehow, great leaders manage to do those things in such a way that their organization winds up in better shape than it was before the tempest touched down. These kinds of leaders are scarce, and one has to search both history and business journalism to find even a handful. But one model of brilliant leadership in the face of total disaster can be found in, of all places, the small community of Wapakoneta, Ohio.


Drying up

Wapakoneta, population 9,474, is in the middle of "flyover country." But the disaster that befell it and the rest of the Midwest was of passionate interest to the people who live there. In 2002, while most people in the United States had their eyes on the Middle East, part of Middle America was experiencing drought on a scale not seen in years. The drought threatened to destroy businesses, small-town economies, and individual lives.

The hardest hit businesses in any drought are those involved in agriculture -- when there's no water, there are no crops, and there is no income. Small farms are often the first businesses to die, and second are the companies that sell agricultural products. In Wapakoneta, that company is Auglaize Provico, a farmer cooperative (more commonly called a "co-op") that buys and markets grain and sells petroleum products, livestock, farm supplies, fertilizer, seed, and spray materials.

Corn-belt co-ops were first established more than a century ago, and their structure hasn't changed much. Most are owned by farmer-members, governed by a board of elected member-directors, and meant to be non-profit -- in that profits are returned to members as cash or a greater stake in the co-op. Like many farm community co-ops, Auglaize Provico is a leading local employer, with 135 employees in 14 small towns.

Larry Hammond is the CEO of Auglaize Provico. His co-op had endured damaging weather patterns for a couple years, but when the drought intensified in the spring of 2002, he knew that the worst was just beginning. Even his most dire fears, however, were too optimistic. Auglaize projected up to a 60% decrease in grain volume due to the drought, which accounts for half of its revenue; it turned out to be 70%. By the end of the disastrous 2002 harvest, the co-op was down about $4 million in margins and service income. For a small company in a small town, a loss like that is more than devastating. It's final. But Hammond's co-op survived, and for the next three years, posted record profits.

So how did a small co-op, a remnant of 19th-century farming, turn calamity into victory -- something global mega-companies and trillion-dollar governments fail to do all the time? Actually, it wasn't all that complicated -- just incredibly hard.

The tough decisions

Before 2002, Larry Hammond had a managerial style that CEOs really shouldn't emulate. It was essentially this: Everyone and everything went to Larry. "He would operate [Auglaize Provico] almost on a paternal basis," says Barry Conchie, a Gallup leadership consultant. "Larry used to do pretty much everything." Hammond was successful because the co-op only had 160 employees at the time and because he is deeply committed to the well-being of each one of them. You can do everything if you know everybody. This style creates inefficiencies, however, and when disaster hit, Auglaize couldn't afford any weak spots.

"When we saw that the drought was getting worse, I called forty of our key people together and said, 'Guys, we have to change the model of this business,'" says Hammond. The first change was a 25% reduction in staff to cut costs -- a difficult decision in a company with near zero turnover. The reduction was handled extremely carefully, though: Some reduction in staff occurred from the resignations of part-timers and seasonal help, some near-retirees opted out early, and the rest were assisted into other jobs.

"[At the time], we had to have transparency and be honest about what we needed to do and what was going to occur," says Mike Dammeyer, a division manager at Auglaize Provico. "It may not have always been popular -- it surely wasn't what management in any phase wanted to do -- but it was what we had to do. And it went over surprisingly well."

Grain elevators were sold, and the co-op took on work outside its previous core business. Hammond asked the CFO to cut his pay as CEO, though no one knew about it at the time. "It was for me psychologically. I wasn't trying to be a martyr, but I needed to know that I was making a sacrifice, just like everyone else," says Hammond.

The biggest change was recreating the co-op's leadership structure. Instead of everything winding up on Hammond's desk, Auglaize moved to a more executive-based leadership style. Managers were given responsibilities they never had before, though they probably should have. Nonetheless, Hammond was still making the toughest decisions -- the ones that people in 14 Ohio towns were watching closely.

"There were a lot of hard decisions to be made," says Hammond. "I said 'Guys, I'm going to take charge of this. If someone has a problem, they need to come to me. This is a part of us pulling together, believing and working together.'"

Under normal circumstances, Hammond's changes would have paid off in years of increased productivity. But these weren't normal circumstances. Crops were drying up and blowing away. Staff members were nervous, and they were doing more with fewer people. The co-op's market area was anxious and aware that a lot of farmers weren't going to make it.

Hammond was forced to make difficult choices, put himself in the line of fire, and do anything he could to see his business through a bad time. That's what good leaders do. But what makes Hammond a great leader is what he did next.


The difference

In 2002, Hammond decided to go to graduate school to obtain an MBA. Given the severity of the drought, a lot of people in farm country were wondering how many businesses would be left to manage by the next harvest, and the 125 remaining Auglaize Provico employees were justifiably worried. Looking back, Hammond's decision to start graduate school seems, to be blunt, reckless -- but it was inspired.

All the changes, all the pressure, and all the worry proved to Hammond that his instinct as a manager was right. "It's about people," he says. "Managing the business is not doing the business. It's positioning the people. It's driving the culture. It's developing the initiatives. I needed to know more about managing people and my own strengths."

Hammond had attended some Gallup-sponsored summits and meetings and had read one of the organization's management books, First, Break All the Rules. So his decision to enroll in Gallup's MBA program had been a long time coming and was well-considered. Still, he was in for some surprises.

"I felt like I was a sparrow with a bunch of eagles," says Hammond. "I was in [the program] with executives like George Borst [President and CEO of Toyota Financial Services] and Rob Webb [now Head, Global Service Delivery, Citigroup Employee Services] -- guys in charge of thousands of employees. But never once did I feel like I was inadequate. Business philosophy and dealing with people are the same, no matter how many employees you have."

However, dealing with people as though they are all the same is a mistake, Hammond learned. In fact, he was so intrigued with what he was learning that long before he completed his degree, he asked Conchie, one of his instructors, to go to Ohio to implement strengths-based development, starting with the executive leadership team at the co-op. And that's what proved to make all the difference.

The strengths approach

Everyone has different talents -- natural patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. By recognizing and building on those talents with pertinent skills and knowledge, they create strengths -- the ability to consistently provide nearly perfect performance in certain tasks. Strengths are powerful; people who are applying a true strength are at the top of their game. And in organizations that take a strengths-based approach to managing their employees -- that encourage employees to leverage their innate talents -- employees can make strong contributions that drive the business forward.

The strengths philosophy was new to Auglaize's management. "They used a 'deficit' approach," says Conchie. "They spent a lot of time identifying their weaknesses and trying to work out what they should be doing to correct them. So a lot of Auglaize's management was relatively negative." That's not uncommon in any organization. But Hammond wanted to change that approach.

"If you really want to [excel], you have to know yourself -- you have to know what you're good at, and you have to know what you're not so good at," says Hammond. "And a lot of people don't. Most of us know what we're not good at because people tell us. And we also tend to want to fix it." The idea that workers should "fix" their weaknesses is endemic in American business, and it's a problem because attempts to fix weaknesses take time, attention, and energy away from maximizing naturally powerful talents.

In 2002, Auglaize Provico didn't have time or energy to waste. That's why Hammond's decision to undertake a graduate degree is, in retrospect, one of the best decisions he made for his company.

Long before Hammond graduated, Conchie was working with the CEO's employees in Ohio. "Every single employee in the organization took the Clifton StrengthsFinder [an assessment that measures a person's talents in 34 categories, referred to as "themes," then reveals the user's top five themes] and has had an individual strengths consultation at least twice," says Conchie. "I've run a number of family sessions in the evening around strengths so that spouses and kids can get involved. The board is involved. Strengths have been totally ingrained into their entire organization."

This strengths-based management approach helps employees build on what they naturally do best. And they are more productive, their customers are better served, and the organization is more successful. "I think StrengthsFinder creates a focus," says Dammeyer. "It educates you about your people, and any time you have a higher degree of understanding -- especially when it comes to relationships and people because that affects performance and sales all the way down the line -- it will lead to better outcomes."

Memories of the past

In 2002, no one at Auglaize expected a positive outcome. And at that time, they were right. The co-op's profit in 2003, which reflects the 2002 harvest, was $51,721; in 2001, before the drought began, it was almost $1 million; and in 2000, a year of decent rainfall and high yields, Auglaize's profit was $1,054,518.

In 2003, Dammeyer started the Gallup MBA program; in 2004, Randy Broady, another Auglaize employee, followed. Conchie started his second phase of strengths-based development with the co-op's management team. Ohio got a little more rain, but Auglaize Provico achieved significantly more profit: In 2004, the co-op banked more than $1,534,685. In the next two years, they posted their best results ever -- $1,630,452 in profit in 2005, and another record year of $ 1,727,067 in 2006. (See graphic "Harvesting Profits.")

"You ask Larry [Hammond] what the difference is, and he'll say that it's individuals using their natural talents," says Conchie. "He says that when you take every other factor into account, this is the only thing that is different. I'd say that he's not taking his own leadership development into account. Larry is typically self-effacing. When you combine his investment in people with the influence of the strengths work across the entire company, it makes a real impact."

Auglaize Provico has changed a lot since the dark days of 2002. The remarkable jump in profits is an indication that their sacrifices literally paid off. Employees eat lunch in the office with their colleagues instead of napping in their cars. The language of strengths has become office shorthand, and Hammond finds it much easier to explain job assignments. He has found that the 145 employees who have been through strengths-based development get an ego boost from using their inherent talents and doing something flawlessly instead of struggling against their weaknesses to produce mediocre work.

Everyone at the co-op is eager to see last year's profit statement, except one employee -- Larry Hammond. He doesn't think much about last year, or the year before. "Yeah, I'm thankful. I've learned a lot from our past, but we've got to look forward," he says. "Our vision's got to be, 'Where are we going to be in three or five years?' When the memories of your past are greater than your vision, you've lost your passion. And I'm just getting started."

Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy is Transforming America and the World
Planet India will be published by Scribner in February 2007.
[From : http://www.mirakamdar.com/]

India is everywhere: on magazine covers and cinema marquees, at the gym and in the kitchen, in corporate boardrooms and on Capitol Hill. Through incisive reportage and illuminating analysis, Mira Kamdar explores India’s astonishing transformation from a developing country into a global powerhouse. She takes us inside India, reporting on the people, companies, and policies defining the new India and revealing how it will profoundly affect our future - financially, culturally, politically.

The world’s fastest-growing democracy, India has the youngest population on the planet, and a middle class as big as the population of the entire United States. Its market has the potential to become the world’s largest. As one film producer told Kamdar when they met in New York, “Who needs the American audience? There are only 300 million people here.” Not only is India the ideal market for the next new thing, but with a highly skilled English-speaking workforce, elite educational institutions, and growing foreign investment, India is emerging as an innovator of the technology that is driving the next phase of the global economy.

While India is celebrating its meteoric rise, it is also racing against time to bring the benefits of the twenty-first century to the 800 million Indians who live on less than two dollars per day, to find the sustainable energy to fuel its explosive economic growth, and to navigate international and domestic politics to ensure India’s security and its status as a global power. India is the world in microcosm: the challenges it faces are universal—from combating terrorism, poverty, and disease to protecting the environment and creating jobs. The urgency of these challenges for India is spurring innovative solutions, which will catapult it to the top of the new world order. If India succeeds, it will not only save itself, it will save us all. If it fails, we will all suffer. As goes India, so goes the world.

Mira Kamdar tells the dramatic story of a nation in the midst of redefining itself and our world. Provocative, timely, and essential, Planet India is the groundbreaking book that will convince Americans just how high the stakes are—what there is to lose, and what there is to gain from India’s meteoric rise.

Samsung unveils chip that can be used to create 64GB flash memory cards that can hold 40 movies
[http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9003196]


September 12, 2006 (IDG News Service) -- Samsung Electronics Co. showed off its first 40-nanometer chip, a 32Gbit NAND flash memory module that can be used in memory cards able to store up to 64GB of data -- enough capacity to hold 40 movies.

The latest step into smaller chip manufacturing methods brings Samsung to the forefront of chip production, putting it ahead of other manufacturers, including Intel Corp., which has only announced chips built at 45nm. The chips are also the seventh generation of NAND flash memory to follow in a Moore's law-type theory posited by Samsung -- that the company will double the capacity of NAND flash every 12 months.

Smaller Chips Needed
Such advances are vital to the consumer electronics industry. Users are demanding ever-smaller devices that can do more than their predecessors, such as a handheld device with a built-in mobile phone, computing capability, a camera and digital music playing functions. Demand for more storage to keep photos, videos, songs and other data has expanded rapidly over the past few years, and analysts expect the trend to continue.

The 40nm chip production technique is key to making chips that are smaller, faster, more powerful and cheaper to produce. A nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter, and the measurement is a guide to the size of the transistors and other parts that are etched onto the chips. Typically, the more transistors, and the closer they are together, the faster the chip can perform tasks.

Samsung also revealed a new design technique called charge trap flash (CTF), which will allow it to eventually shrink NAND chip features to 20nm, and produce 256Gbit chips. In the 32Gbit chips, the control gate in the CTF is only a fifth as big as conventional control gates on chips in a typical floating gate structure. With CTF, there is no floating gate. Instead, data is temporarily placed in a holding chamber made of silicon nitride.

Chip for Hybrid Drives
Samsung also released a new chip for its hybrid drives, a kind of hard drive aimed at laptops that uses NAND flash as a disk cache, to speed boot-up times and reduce power consumption
The new chip, dubbed a system-on-chip because it does the work of several chips, incorporates up to 4GB of NAND flash as a data buffer and helps speed boot-up times while lengthening battery life, the company said.

The chips will be in mass production in November 2006.

Samsung is one of several companies working on hybrid drives. Seagate Technology LLC and Intel are also developing the technology for notebook computers.

From "The Innovator's Dilemma - Christensen, Clayton M"

A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is a technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or product in the market. Disruptive innovations can be broadly classified into lower-end and new-market disruptive innovations. A new-market disruptive innovation is often aimed at non-consumption, whereas a lower-end disruptive innovation is aimed at mainstream customers who were ignored by established companies. Sometimes, a disruptive technology comes to dominate an existing market by either filling a role in a new market that the older technology could not fill (as more expensive, lower capacity but smaller-sized hard disks did for newly developed notebook computers in the 1980s) or by successively moving up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents (as digital photography has begun to replace film photography).

By contrast, "sustaining technology or innovation" improves product performance of established products. Sustaining technologies are often incremental however they can also be radical or discontinuous.

History and usage of the Term
The term disruptive technology was coined by Clayton M. Christensen and introduced in his 1995 article Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave, which he coauthored with Joseph Bower. He describes the term further in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. In his sequel, The Innovator's Solution, Christensen replaced disruptive technology with the term disruptive innovation because he recognized that few technologies are intrinsically disruptive or sustaining in character. It is strategy that creates the disruptive impact.

The theory
Christensen distinguishes between "low-end disruption" which targets customers who do not need the full performance valued by customers at the high-end of the market and "new-market disruption" which targets customers who could previously not be served profitably by the incumbent.

"Low-end disruption" occurs when the rate at which products improve exceeds the rate at which customers can adopt the new performance. Therefore, at some point the performance of the product overshoots the needs of certain customer segments. At this point, a disruptive technology may enter the market and provide a product which has lower performance than the incumbent but which exceeds the requirements of certain segments, thereby gaining a foothold in the market.

disruption, the disruptor is focused initially on serving the least profitable customer, who is happy with a good enough product. This type of customer is not willing to pay premium for enhancements in product functionality. Once the disruptor has gained foot hold in this customer segment, it seeks to improve its profit margin. To get higher profit margins, the disruptor needs to enter the segment where the customer is willing to pay a little more for higher quality. To ensure this quality in its product, the disruptor needs to innovate. The incumbent will not do much to retain its share in a not so profitable segment, and will move up-market and focus on its more attractive customers. After a number of such encounters, the incumbent is squeezed into smaller markets than it was previously serving. And then finally the disruptive technology meets the demands of the most profitable segment and drives the established company out of the market.

"New market disruption" occurs when a product that is inferior by most measures of performance fits a new or emerging market segment. The Linux operating system (OS) when introduced was inferior in performance to other server operating systems like Unix and Windows NT. But the Linux OS distributed through Red Hat is supposed to be inexpensive compared to other server operating systems. After years of improvements in this easily available operating system, the functionality has improved so much that it threatens to displace all the other leading server operating systems.

Not all disruptive technologies are of lower performance. There are several examples where the disruptive technology outperforms the existing technology but is not adopted by existing majors in the market. This situation occurs in industries with a high investment into the older technology. To move to the new technology, an existing player not only must invest in it but also must replace (and perhaps dispose of at high cost) the older infrastructure. It may simply be the most cost effective for the existing player to "milk" the current investment during its decline - mostly by insufficient maintenance and lack of progressive improvement to maintain the long term utility of the existing facilities. A new player is not faced with such a balancing act.

Business implications
Disruptive technologies are not always disruptive to customers, and often take a long time before they are significantly disruptive to established companies. They are often difficult to recognize. Indeed, as Christensen points out and studies have shown, it is often entirely rational for incumbent companies to ignore disruptive innovations, since they compare so badly with existing technologies or products, and the deceptively small market available for a disruptive innovation is often very small compared to the market for the established technology.

Even if a disruptive innovation is recognized, existing businesses are often reluctant to take advantage of it, since it would involve competing with their existing (and more profitable) technological approach. Christensen recommends that existing firms watch for these innovations, invest in small firms that might adopt these innovations, and continue to push technological demands in their core market so that performance stays above what disruptive technologies can achieve.

Disruptive technologies, too, can be subtly disruptive, rather than prominently so. Examples include digital photography (the sharp decline in consumer demand for common 35mm print film has had a deleterious effect on free-riders such as slide and infrared film stocks, which are now more expensive to produce) and IP/Internet telephony, where the replacement technology does not, and sometimes cannot practically replace all of the non-obvious attributes of the older system (sustained operation through municipal power outages, national security priority access, the higher degree of obviousness that the service may be life-safety critical or deserving of higher restoration priority in catastrophes, etc).

In our own hectic Daily lives, what can we “so Called intelligent people” learn from this??
It was a sports stadium. Eight Children were standing on the track to participate in the running event.

* Ready!
* Steady!
* Bang!!!

With the sound of toy pistol, all eight girls started running. Hardly have they covered ten to fifteen meters, one of the smaller girls slipped and fell down, due to bruises and pain. She started crying.

When the other seven girls heard this sound, they stopped running, stood for a while and turned back, they all ran back to the place where the girl fell down.
One among them bent, picked and kissed the girl gently and enquired ‘Now pain must have reduced’.

All seven girls lifted the fallen girl, pacified her, two of them held the girl firmly and they all seven joined hands together and walked together and reached the winning post.
Officials were shocked.

Clapping of thousands of spectators filled the stadium.

Many eyes were filled with tears.

YES. This happened in Hyderabad, India, recently !

The sport was conducted by! National Institute of Mental Health. All these special girls had come to participate in this event and they are spastic children.

Yes, they were mentally retarded.

What did they teach this world?

Teamwork?
Humanity?
Equality among all?

This excerpt from "The No Asshole Rule" provides another example of how dumping on employees can drive down the stock price, although the CEO kept his job and seemed to learn something from the experience:

Neal Patterson, CEO of the Cerner Corporation, learned this lesson in 2001 when he sent out a “belligerent” email that was intended for just the top 400 people in this health care software firm. According the The New York Times, Patterson complained that few employees were working full 40 hour weeks, and “As managers -- you either do not know what your EMPLOYEES are doing; or you do not CARE.” Patterson said that he wanted to see the employee parking lot ''substantially full'' between 7:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. weekdays and “half full on Saturdays, and that if it didn’t happen, he would take harsh measures, perhaps even layoffs and hiring freezes. Patterson warned, ''You have two weeks,'' he said. ''Tick, tock.''

Patterson’s e-mail was leaked on the internet, provoking harsh criticism from management experts including my Stanford colleague Jeff Pfeffer who described in it The New York Times as “the corporate equivalent of whips and ropes and chains.” Pfeffer went a bit overboard for my tastes. But investors weren’t pleased either, as the value of the stock plummeted 22% in three days. Patterson handled the aftermath well. He sent an apology to his employees, admitted that he wished he had never sent the e-mail, and the share price did bounce back. Patterson learned the hard way that, when CEO’s who come across as bullies, they can scare their investors, not just their underlings.

January 11, 2007

What the New Congress Means for Business

With Nancy Pelosi & Co. taking over this month, Gallup's chief economist predicts how changes in Washington will affect the economy
A GMJ Q&A with Dennis Jacobe, Ph.D., Gallup’s chief economist

[http://gmj.gallup.com/content/26074/What-the-New-Congress-Means-for-Business.aspx]

GMJ: The federal deficit is almost $9 trillion. Will a Democratic Congress have any effect on the debt, do you think?

Jacobe: Well, there are split opinions about what kind of effect that debt has on the economy. And, I think this is another issue that goes across party lines. The federal budget deficit and the national debt have been issues for many, many decades. Still, there remains an ongoing argument about whether or not economic growth or higher taxes is the best answer to reducing the federal budget deficit.

There are many economic debates that surround the federal budget deficit and the national debt. Our investor surveys say that the budget deficit is now one of the biggest issues that concerns investors as a group. As energy prices have declined as an issue, international concerns and the federal budget deficit have come up to about the same level as concerns over energy prices. [See "Investor Optimism Surges to Match High for the Year" in the "See Also" area on this page.]

One side's argument is like that made by [former Treasury Secretary Robert] Rubin -- that we need to increase taxes to reduce the debt -- but there's a very strong group of people who are opposed to any increase in taxes. Republicans tend to be split on the issue. Some Republicans are with the pro-growth group, finding increased taxes an anathema, while other Republicans find the lack of federal budget discipline to be the major problem. Democrats tend to be split too. They have a variety of spending priorities, but some Democrats believe that those have to be paid for, while other Democrats are not as concerned about getting higher revenues to pay for their spending priorities.

Whether you can get a true return to federal budget discipline is a completely different issue. At one time, Congress got the deficit way down; it eliminated it by cutting spending in some areas to increase it in other areas -- the "paygo" idea. And that concept is attractive. Whether you can get a political coalition behind it is another issue.

January 11, 2007
Stretching the Brand Until it Breaks?
Marketers, beware: Extending your brand offerings may bring big profits -- but also big trouble

by William J. McEwenAuthor of Married to the Brand(Gallup Press, 2005) and coauthor of the Harvard Business Review article "Inside the Mind of the Chinese Consumer"

[http://gmj.gallup.com/content/26047/Stretching-the-Brand-Until-it-Breaks.aspx]

As companies around the globe search for ways to grow, they aggressively explore new markets and new products. Whether it's Wal-Mart opening stores in China, General Motors developing electric vehicles, or United initiating flights to Kuwait, it's evident that businesses are driven to expand their scope.

New markets promise the potential for additional sales volume and ever-greater income. And since investment analysts demand evidence of a company's continuing growth prospects, new market volume speaks directly to the apparent value and vitality of the company.

But growth can be expensive. New product launches and market development activities require investment. Many companies look to enter new markets while relying on the existing brand franchises they've created, hoping to reap the returns that expansion can offer while leveraging their already considerable investment in brand building. It's more efficient -- and far simpler -- to make use of an established brand name and its supporting materials, which can include logos, store signage, and packaging as well as employee uniforms and consumer communications.

When designing new-product and market-expansion outreach programs, companies typically assess their brand's appeal among the new market segments they hope to attract. And to enhance their appeal to these new segments, they may tweak their brand promise and add attributes to their product or service offerings.
For example, to attract a new, environmentally conscious audience, an automaker might include a more fuel-efficient hybrid engine. A fashion retailer might add hot colors and hip styles and adjust its sizing to entice a teen audience. And to interest fast-food customers in India, a restaurant might add masala spices to its fried potatoes.

However, as a company's brand promise is adjusted or expanded and its product offerings are changed to accommodate new needs, it must address a vitally important matter: What should the company do about its current customers? After all, their loyalty and passion built the brand to the point where it could afford to reach into new territories.

Dance with the one who brought you
Companies can redefine their brand promise and seek to expand their markets. But if they ignore their current customers, they do so at their own peril. Companies may be essentially abandoning their existing customers while failing in their efforts to attract new ones.

Consider the dilemma faced by St. John Knits, a venerable West Coast marketer known for traditional knit fashions for women. As described in a story that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, St. John trumpeted its new collection at its annual fashion show in August. Its loyalists were there, proudly wearing their classic St. John suits. Instead of updated versions of the classic suits they expected to see, they were treated to new ads featuring Angelina Jolie and the company's newest array of "clingy, plunging cocktail dresses" with a much less forgiving fit. As one disappointed loyalist stated, "I wish I was skinny." In the words of another, "They didn't want us anymore. Isn't that awful?"

These two customers aren't the only ones expressing disappointment. Sales have reportedly suffered. And as a result, St. John has shifted its emphasis back to the familiar styles that made the company a long-term success. In the words of a senior designer at the company: "The new direction was too far from what our customer relies on." Lesson learned.

Other companies are learning the very same lesson. An article in The Detroit News reported that Saks Fifth Avenue is returning to its classic roots and its core customer base after chasing younger customers with styles that didn't attract them and that seemed to turn off its older, loyal customers. However, many lessons are learned only after the fact, making them quite expensive -- particularly when the merchandise is considerably pricier than a new suit.

Staying true to the brand
In the automotive world, Volkswagen proudly announced the arrival of what was proclaimed by its then-chairman as "the best car in the world." The VW Phaeton, by all accounts a very fine car, was a rather resounding flop in the United States. Only 1,433 Phaetons were sold in 2004, followed by dismal sales of 820 in 2005; the Phaeton reportedly has been withdrawn from the American market.

The Phaeton may well be a superb car, but it also comes with a premium price tag of about $70,000 and, more to the point, a large VW emblem on the grille. And unlike the launch of Toyota's Lexus brand, the Phaeton was sold and serviced by VW dealers, in VW showrooms. That's not necessarily a $70,000 brand experience. What's more, while vainly pursuing customers who remained more attracted to the BMW 7-series or the Lexus LS, VW was diverting its precious resources -- and the attention of its dealers -- away from the Jettas, Rabbits, Beetles, and GTIs for which VW was known and loved.

St. John, Saks, and VW have something in common, and it's enormously important. In the eyes of their customers, they are well-defined brands. And the brand, for any company, represents a promise.

A brand tells your prospects and customers who you are, what you stand for, and what makes you different from competing brands. And, in pronouncing who you are, the brand also affirms who you are not. That basic fact must be kept in mind whenever companies set out to embrace an expanded consumer universe.

A brand that heads off in new directions may be sending unintended messages to its current customers. It may be telling them that the company isn't particularly excited by, or proud of, what it now offers -- or who it now does business with. But brand relationships, like marriages, require evidence of mutual commitment.

That brings us to a critical question: When a brand is redefined, what does it now stand for? A brand that attempts to mean all things to all people -- or new things to new people -- may wind up meaning nothing to anyone. Is a VW a sensible, small, fuel-sipping car or a large, leather-seated, gas-guzzling luxury vehicle? Or is it none of the above?

Brand meanings aren't infinitely elastic. Like the value of the brand itself, those meanings aren't defined in the company's boardroom. Their home is in the hearts and minds of the brand's customers.

A clearly defined brand makes a statement to the world -- and this world also includes the people who work for the company. For companies like St. John, Saks, or VW, the brand serves as a compass, aiding those who design the products and those who support and serve the brand's customers. The brand promise informs and guides the delivery of the brand experience.

This does not mean that marketers should abandon their existing brands in the aggressive pursuit of new markets. Growth is, after all, one hallmark of a great company. And there are companies that have managed to extend their brands -- but they've always done it while remaining true to what the brand really stands for.
Ivory soap has always meant "pure and gentle," even as it extended its product line into liquid hand soaps. Virgin maintained its focus on youthful and slightly irreverent fun as it moved from a record label to an airline. And Tiffany retained its characteristic blue packages and air of sophisticated elegance when it expanded from Fifth Avenue to the Ginza and beyond.

But smart companies know when the brand meaning gets stretched too far. Thus, when Toyota sought to attract upscale buyers with a new luxury auto offering, it did so by creating Lexus, a totally new brand entity that would promise a distinct brand ownership experience. In much the same way, Hilton reinforces the intended differentiation of brand experiences in a family that ranges from Hampton Inn to The Waldorf-Astoria. And Yum! Brands uses Taco Bell to sell tacos and Pizza Hut to sell pizza; it doesn't attempt to sell both through a single brand.

Clearly, companies must pay close attention to the real owners of the brand -- their customers. And that means that management must understand the deep emotional bonds that have been created with those customers. When new directions represent a strong fit with the core message the brand conveys -- as Kellogg's Special K fits with weight-watching and Starbucks fits with coffeemakers and classic CDs -- the growth opportunities are impressive. However, success isn't inevitable, and mistakes are all too common, even among the great and powerful. In many ways, VW's Phaeton isn't all that different from New Coke. Strong brands build strong bonds, to be sure. But those bonds, like the brands themselves, are well-defined. They can be stretched too far. And they can be broken.

January 11, 2007
Making Employees' Opinions Count

To decrease wait times at a prestigious Toronto hospital, a manager needed a clear picture of how friction between two teams was decreasing employee engagement

by Rodd Wagner and James K. HarterAdapted from 12: The Elements of Great Managing(Gallup Press, December 2006)

[http://gmj.gallup.com/content/26044/Making-Employees-Opinions-Count.aspx]

The 10-year-old girl carried along a small stuffed cat as technologist Matt Fry escorted her to the large magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. The patient knew the territory. She had a brain tumor removed three years earlier and was what the staff calls a "frequent flier" of the Diagnostic Imaging unit at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children.

Still, she had been sobbing in the staging area. Fry was ready to offer tissues and some of his tried-and-true reassurances, such as, "It's just a big camera."

"Can I borrow your tiger for just a second?" he said. She reluctantly surrendered it. Fry held it to the side of the MRI machine to ensure it contained no metal and quickly returned it. The technologist invited the girl to climb onto the gurney. "Do you fall asleep sometimes?" he asked. She nodded. "I always fall asleep," he said, hoping to calm her fears by reminding her that he had been in the MRI many times.
Fry gently arranged her on the gurney and asked twice if she was warm enough as he engaged the motors that moved her into the center of the magnetic circle. He positioned the tiger on her stomach so she could see it through the mirror inside the "doughnut."

The technologist backed away to the control room and began the imaging session. "Remember, you will be able to hear me talk to you through the microphone," he told the girl. "She'll be fine," he remarked. "When I left her on the table, she had a big smile on her face."

Technology meets tigers and tears every day at the hospital nicknamed "Sick Kids." The unique challenges of treating seriously ill children mean it often takes a little more -- more explanation, more reassurance, more time.

Time, however, is in short supply. The patients and staff who entered the hospital that day walked past National Post newspaper boxes bearing the lead headline, "Provinces Set New Wait Times: Patients should receive new hip within 6 months, cardiac bypass in 2 weeks." In June 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that long waits for medical care in Quebec violated that province's charter of rights, intensifying a national debate on the issue.

A few years ago, patients needing a non-emergency MRI appointment at Sick Kids had to wait an average of more than nine months. Sometimes the delay was more than a year. By increasing its hours of operation, refining its patient scheduling and -- maybe most crucial -- fostering an atmosphere of greater respect among the different professions who work in the imaging centers, Sick Kids was able to reduce its average wait time to four weeks. Ensuring that employees knew that their opinions matter was the linchpin to the turnaround, the staff say.

Looking inside
The Hospital for Sick Children is one of the leading pediatric healthcare and research facilities in the world. It employs a staff of more than 5,000, plus another 1,200 in its research institute. It handles more than 90,000 patient days, more than 23,000 operating room hours, 47,500 visits to the emergency room, and more than 300,000 visits by patients who don't need to be admitted for a hospital stay. The government-run hospital spent $538 million (CAN) in its 2004/2005 fiscal year.

Although the facility serves the Toronto area, treating relatively minor ailments such as earaches and stitching deep cuts, many of the patients are among Canada's most seriously ill children. A steady procession of heart-wrenching troubles comes through the door. Some are severe traumas, such as a teenaged boy hit by a truck and flown to the hospital. Some have congenital abnormalities, such as a heart on the wrong side of the chest, and some require organ transplants. Others have cancer or are recovering from surgery to remove tumors.

At the beginning and throughout the process, it's crucial that the doctors look inside the bodies of their young charges. The Diagnostic Imaging department brings a number of different technologies to the task, from traditional X-rays to ultrasound to CT (computed tomography) scans and MRIs. The beauty of all the methods is that they allow a detailed view without any incisions. It also means Diagnostic Imaging is under tremendous demand, becomes a bottleneck, and is therefore an area of continuous pressure. "You're not able to do that hip surgery, that oncology treatment, that cardiac surgery, or that ophthalmology work without first having a diagnostic imaging done," says Ellen Charkot, chief technologist and a 30-year employee of the hospital.

Diagnostic imaging requires the combined efforts of at least four types of professionals: nurses, technologists, anesthetists, and radiologists. The coordination of the "techs" and nurses seems to make the greatest difference in increasing patient flow without sacrificing the quality of the images.

Strategies for maximizing production through a bottleneck are well established and taught at most business schools. But those solutions assume a higher degree of control over the "inputs" than children allow. With most adult patients, the process of obtaining scans can be sped up by their understanding of what's required of them. An MRI session can last 30 to 60 minutes, maybe more. The patient must lie still for long stretches of time inside a sometimes claustrophobia-inducing space. An adult is less emotional, more tolerant of pain, and far less wiggly. Wiggling is the bane of a clear image.

How long does it take to get a good CT scan or MRI of a child? "It depends on the kid. It depends on the day," says tech Christine Billanti. Every patient is different. The decision many patients pose for the staff is complicated.

One certain way to get a clear picture is to sedate the patient so she doesn't move while in the MRI or CT scan machine. But sedation takes a while to wear off. It ties up nurses in the recovery area, and it slows down the process. It's better if the patient can remain still long enough without sedation. Going without sedation also carries risks. If the child moves, the procedure must be repeated. That slows down the process, and, in the case of a CT scan, the child receives a double dose of the radiation that creates the image.

At Sick Kids, the difficulty of these decisions was made worse by disagreements and a lack of respect between the techs, who were concerned most with getting a crisp image, and the nurses, who were primarily responsible for the medical care of the child during the procedure.

Nurses were more likely to argue against sedation. Techs were more likely to favor it, in hopes of getting a good picture on the first try. "From the tech's perspective, it's a safety issue. Say a child tries (to lie still) and fails. They have already [been] given a radiation dose because they've attempted to scan," says Catherine Pratt, clinical leader of the nurses in Diagnostic Imaging. On the other hand, "If they really are truly still, they can get a good (CT) scan in maybe three to four minutes. So the nurse is thinking, 'Why am I going to sedate a kid for two hours for a 10-minute process?'"

This led to a pervasive animosity between the two camps -- the techs feeling that the nurses "bulldozed" through the process, and the nurses seeing the techs as "button-pushers." Neither felt like the other side respected their expertise.

Because of these disagreements, other forms of cooperation also broke down. Neither side was eager to jump in and help with shared responsibilities. The techs stayed in their control rooms next to the imaging machines, and the nurses stayed at the nursing station. Communication broke down, so the two groups were not properly coordinating when one patient would be done and the next should come in.

"What people had not realized," says Charkot, "is when you throw a diverse group of people together in one situation without looking at the dynamics, without planning how they'll work together, what happens -- especially among professionals -- is a little bit of a turf war, a little bit of territory guarding, and really a misunderstanding of what the other person is doing." None of this helped reduce the wait times.

"How to put it nicely?" ponders nurse Marie Little as she watches a sedated patient undergo an MRI. "Have you ever seen the movie Babe, where all the animals want to do someone else's role, where the duck wants to be the rooster and wake up the farmer in the morning? That's what it was like. The problem came from not knowing or respecting each other's roles."

The third time's a charm
Hospital Vice President Brendan Gibney hired three successive managers in the search for someone who could make a difference. The third time was the charm. In May 2001, Susan Jewell had a nursing background and six years of management experience, but she had not worked in what's traditionally called radiology. Nonetheless, "She was a very vital type of person -- very committed to the hospital," Gibney says. "She had lots to learn, but she had the vitality, the interest, the dedication, and the personality I thought would really work."

The new managing director of Diagnostic Imaging had her work cut out for her. She sensed that her colleague and key partner, Radiologist-in-Chief Dr. Paul Babyn, didn't feel included in her hiring and didn't know what to expect. Many in the hospital didn't understand her department or its constraints. The hours of operation weren't long enough, but she was in no position to ask more from a staff that was fairly disengaged already; the best could simply quit and have their pick of jobs anywhere in Canada or the United States.

The patient wait times were unacceptable by any standard. "I met with Paul Babyn and asked him what he would like to see me focus on in the first year," says Jewell. "He said, 'I want you to reduce the MRI wait list.' And I said, 'How long have you been working on it?' He said, 'As long as I can remember.'" At that time, the average wait to get a CT scan with anesthesia was 27 weeks. For an MRI appointment, it was 41 weeks. "It was horrible," she says.

And then there was the tension between techs and nurses. "It was absolutely an entrenched culture that was, according to them, an impenetrable, long-standing issue, and it couldn't be fixed," she says.

Jewell spent her first months in Diagnostic Imaging listening to people, trying to understand their opinions, and gathering facts about the wait-time problem. Among her conclusions: Some of the people currently managing employees had lost credibility with the staff and needed to be let go or reassigned; she needed to be a strong advocate for the department to the rest of the hospital; several areas needed to be remodeled to improve patient flow; and the working hours of the imaging machines needed to be lengthened. But ultimately, nothing was going to improve much with the dissension between techs and nurses.

"I knew that we could say, 'Okay, we have to extend the hours until eleven at night,' and I might as well just shoot myself and leave, because that was not going to go over well," Jewell says. "I had to get really engaged, enthusiastic people to really appreciate what we needed to do."

Dr. Babyn agrees that employee engagement was a prerequisite to improved efficiency. "You have to have motivation of the employees to encourage them to recognize that we may need to go through a little bit of pain to get to the next level," he says.

Putting the moose on the table
Among the meetings Jewell convened was one between Pratt, who leads the nurses in the CAT scan area, and Guila BenDavid, who manages the techs. The director said she wanted them to exemplify the cooperation she expected between the two professions. "We have to leave that baggage aside. I want to see you two hand-in-hand, skipping down the CT hallway." To coincide with renovations in the CT area, the three of them decided they needed to hire a facilitator and organize a retreat in hopes of getting the techs and nurses working together better.

Those who attended the meeting that day say it started like the typical all-day session. There were ice-breaking exercises to help the group begin to feel comfortable interacting. There were ground rules -- one speaker at a time, no blaming, speak in headlines, give constructive feedback. And, the facilitator emphasized, say what needs to be said: "Put the moose on the table."

One technique that seems to have worked was a role-playing exercise in which the techs played the part of the nurses and vice versa. Through exaggerated misperceptions and a certain amount of ribbing, the two groups got to some of the real issues between them. "Oh, could you try this kid without sedation? He's really cute," said one tech pretending to be a nurse. Another tech-turned-nurse sat down and began reading a magazine. Not to be outdone, one of the nurses playing the role of a tech deadpanned, "I don't care. Sedate them!"

Jewell and her managers pounced on the dramatic play. "I see that you guys are making jokes about this, but there must be some truth to it," said BenDavid. "There's no joke that doesn't come from somewhere, right?" Using the humor as a springboard, the techs and nurses started discussing the real issues: why they recommended for or against sedation in certain situations, how both professions felt a lack of respect, where a failure of communication or courtesy interfered with the work, and how they could make improvements.

BenDavid recalls feeling hopeful when one of the toughest nurses, who could be expected to put up brick walls in defiance of change -- "It's just her personality; it's who she is" -- started voicing support. "She was all for getting the group to work better. She wasn't about taking the soapbox or saying, 'Nurses are this' and 'Nurses are that.' I was really, really shocked and happy to see it," BenDavid says. Jewell noticed a sense of relief that people had a chance to acknowledge the problems and address them.

Much of the discussion focused on who should be responsible for various aspects of the process. In the end, they agreed that only one function -- sedation -- was the sole domain of nurses, and only one other -- scanning -- had to be done by a tech. "Other than those two distinct roles, everything else should be fluid," says Pratt. "It isn't a tech's job to make up the bed following a scan any more than it's solely a nursing job to do some other task." They made a pact to stop hanging back and work as one team rather than as two autonomous groups. They agreed to communicate better.

They pledged less negativity and more praise in the department. When they took an assignment to write a short note of praise to the people on either side of them, "Everybody was really shocked, and I think a few people were kind of really floored by what the people beside them wrote," says BenDavid. The department secretary, who thought no one noticed her work, was stunned to get a note that said the department could not get through the day without her.

"I think they really learned about each other," says Jewell. "Then we really put some tangible plans together around how they were going to work together better and what specifically they were going to do in terms of combined roles, communication, and expectations. I've got to say that retreat was probably the turning point."

Jewell's staff credits a willingness of nearly all the employees to stick by the agreements of that day to their subsequent success. "Everyone assumes you want to be on the same page, but it's different to actually try to do it," says Billanti.

Many small gestures, such as nurses hanging around the control room with the techs and members of both professions meeting the other more than halfway, ensured that the good feelings of the retreat were translated into action. "It's like any other relationship; it was the little things," says Billanti. "But it was a huge difference," adds tech Nancy Padfield.

X-ray vision
The employees say glowing things about Jewell's leadership. "It's Sue's X-ray vision," says Pratt, no pun intended. "It's as though she can see inside and knows where you thrive and where you don't and doesn't want you to be in something that you don't love doing every single day." Dr. Babyn praises her ability to help a team focus on the right goals. Gibney, her boss, says simply, "I think she has an innate management style."
"She has the ability, whether she knows it or not, to have people feel like they're important, that they count," says Charkot. "And she did that in a very subtle way. It's not like she came in and everybody suddenly began to feel like it's a great place to work and 'I want to stay here, and I know that my input will be valued.' It happened gradually, but it happened very significantly. I don't think there's anyone who could say that they feel like she doesn't see them as a person who is contributing to the entire system."

Only when she had an engaged group did Jewell approach them with the need to extend Diagnostic Imaging's hours to handle more patients. Once the friction inside the group was reduced, most of the employees could better focus on their passion for helping their young patients, a fervor evident in many of the small touches throughout the department. The overhead curve of the CT scanner is peppered with stickers for the kids to stare at. Stickers are the common currency to entice non-sedated patients to hold still. If that's not enough, a disco ball hangs in the corner. One of the techs uses bird whistles. Others sing. Every nurse and tech has his or her favored technique for relaxing a nervous child. "I usually say, 'You're going into the doughnut, the Tim Horton's doughnut,'" says tech Maria De Stefano Reusse. (Tim Horton's coffee and doughnut shops are as common in Canada as Starbucks are in the United States.)

At one point, the team decided to hold a special Saturday clinic for eight children who, because of breathing problems or other issues, could not be sedated. They would have to either hold still long enough for a good image or go under a general anesthetic -- a slower, riskier process.

Pratt brought in her grandchildren to allay the patients' fears. "Somehow, with a kid talking to a kid, you can get them to do things," she says. "So my granddaughter would say, 'Come on! Come for a ride with me!' And she'd lie there, and the bed would move in and out." The staff painted the kids' faces and gave toys as rewards. One patient dressed as his favorite comic book hero, prompting the tech and patient to sing the familiar "Spiderman! Spiderman!" theme as the boy was being readied.

"It was a fun day, and we had eight-for-eight success, so that was really good," says Pratt.

Life has improved for the employees as well. "Before the meeting, it was organized chaos," says Padfield. "Now, there's not an 'us' and a 'them.' We have to work together. Everyone is just more courteous toward each other." Instead of leaving the building separately, they take Friday lunches together in the control room. The chief radiologist says he's noticed the difference in the work atmosphere: "It's a louder environment."

Increasing engagement and dissipating the nurse-versus-tech animosity was key to reducing wait times. Although they bounced up a bit, MRI wait times declined from 41 weeks to four weeks at one point. CT wait times dropped from 27 weeks to three days.

Without making the employees feel like their opinions count, "We never would have reduced the wait list in MR and CT. Never!" says Jewell. "There would have been no reason for the staff to put out the extra effort, because they didn't look to their immediate leader or to me, frankly, as somebody who cared enough to make their environment better. So why would they bother?"Because of the stakes for their patients and how deeply most of the employees feel about their work, the improvement is a major accomplishment. The staff talks about how the patients' young ages can mean many sad stories, but their youth also means there's a chance to help change an entire life. "I couldn't see myself doing anything else," says Jewell. "These kids mean everything to us."

A Story Greenspan Would Not Tell
Sean Corrigan

Let me conclude my remarks tonight by asking the question – somewhat in line with behavioural finance – what’s so terribly "wrong" with financial markets, that we have to mind so much about them. The answer is of course deeply rooted in some basic features of human behaviour, which to some extent at least are well illustrated in the following story that plays in the United States.

The winter is approaching in a western state of the US, and the chief of a tribe of Native American Indians is wondering how to prepare for it. So he calls a junior member of his tribe to collect fire wood in the forests. The young man asks the chief how much wood was needed for the coming winter. The chief ponders about this important question and conservative as he is advises the fellow to gather just a little bit more than what was burned during the preceding winter. The young man goes in the forest, comes back with the wood and asks the chief whether the amount he brought was enough. The chief ponders about this important question and decides to call the government weather forecast service to be on the safe side. The service informs him that according to their forecast the weather will just be a little bit colder than last year. So, the chief instructs his fellow to go back in the forest to collect some more wood. The fellow does it and upon return asks whether it was now enough for the winter. The chief again takes the phone and checks the latest weather forecast. He receives the answer that according to the latest information the winter will be significantly colder than last year. So, the "ceremony" repeats itself and his fellow has to have another trip to the woods and upon return the chief again checks with the government weather service. Now the news is that this year’s winter will be extraordinarily cold. The chief is astonished and impressed and asks the lady on the phone, how is it possible that you know this so accurately. The lady paused a moment whether she was authorised to provide this information and then answered that her colleagues had reported that Native American Indians were collecting a lot of wood in the forest…

Source - http://www.mises.org/blog/archives/001977.asp

Retaining good people requires much more than just a heavy pay packet
Dataquest

Everybody complains about how software developers jump from job to job. The salaries keep rising, the facilities keep improving and yet they continue to leave. Mercenaries, we call them. No value system. Only interested in money and going abroad.

Having abused them, their family backgrounds, the education system and the economy, we tend to relax a bit and feel better. In the meanwhile, another half a dozen people resign.

This article is about why and how people leave and what you could do to retain them. It is not based on any research or study, but on two decades of personal experience as an employee and an employer. It is about the bittersweet relationship of giving and taking.

The probability of leaving an employer
There is always a chance you will leave your job. This could happen because of many reasons. What is the probability that you will leave your present job? I think that depends on many things and can't really be calculated exactly at any given point in time. However, there are some points in time when one can estimate the probability of leaving a job rather well. In what follows, I have tried to estimate these times and probabilities for a standard software worker. I took software workers because I understand them well, maybe the theory will hold just as well for any other profession. The exact value of the probability is not really important for the purpose of this article, only how it rises or falls.

Well, to start with, let's take the probability of your leaving a job the day you join. This is zero, unless you are using your employer as a parking place. So we can estimate one number pretty accurately.

We can know another number quite easily. The day you leave a job and walk out of the office for the last time, the probability of your leaving is 100%. The question now is, how does the probability of leaving a job rise from zero (nil) to one (100%) in the time you are in employment?

How employees leave
There are three extreme ways in which the probability of an employee leaving can rise from zero to one. The first way is if it was the one to start with. This is an employee who knew that he was going to leave from the moment he joined. Perhaps he already had a job and was just using the organization as a parking spot till it was convenient for him to leave. The second way is if the probability suddenly goes from zero to one at some time. This is a drastic departure. Maybe the employee was sacked or just walked out. The third way is when the probability rises steadily and in a straight line from zero to one. This is an employee who is more dissatisfied every day till he leaves.

Expectation mismatch
Employers tend to create a larger than life image of their organizations to prospective employees. As soon as the employee joins, this becomes evident to her. She is a little disillusioned and the probability that she will leave rises. But it is still small, and she is not even thinking about it. But it is not zero anymore.

When Mina joined her new job, she felt a lot safer. Here was the economic independence she was so desperately looking for. The elderly man at the interview was most reassuring. They put her through a wonderful training program that was full of new things, outings, and public talks.

The first day at work was a bit of a come down though. The people here were not as friendly as in the training school. And they could not find her a place to sit! Maybe because my boss is not in town she thought. It doesn't really matter. The next day she met her boss, the big B. He was very suave and diplomatic. She got her workstation, one of those that line the passage. People keep bumping into her here. I guess they'll change it to a better one as I become senior, she thought.

The big B explained her work to her. She was to make 150 HTML pages this month. The pages were similar he explained, so it should be a breeze for her. The computer was very slow and would hang once in a while. I could write a program that would generate the pages, she said, hoping he would be impressed. But he wasn't really listening and did not hear her. He must be very busy and distracted she thought. I'll do it manually anyway, thought Mina. After that they'll give me a really interesting project, like the ones they described in the interview.

A week later, Mina had done 30 pages. It could have been a few more, but she was making sure there would be no errors. The big B came around for a weekly review. It's not bad, he said, but the other girl who joined with you did more than 40. You should speed up a bit. Mina bit her lip. It wasn't very fair because the other girl was getting her boyfriend to do some pages for her from his office. But how would the boss know that, dummy, she said to herself. Her son was not too well. She herself had a cold. Maybe I am not street smart enough, she thought. Maybe I should leave.

It was a really bad day, exactly three months after she joined. The first project had gone off well and the company had an even bigger job. 500 pages this time and only three months to do it in. The other girl who had joined with her had left to join her boyfriend's company and she was alone to do the whole thing. Still with her old computer and the inconvenient seat near the passage. This time she was determined to automate the process. She had got herself a pirated Visual Basic CD and bought a very expensive book to learn from. She had been staying back an extra hour after office to try the different approach. The big B came around from one of his meetings and stood behind her for a while. What are you up to? Mina explained the new method she was going to try. She thought he would be impressed, but he wasn't really listening, like always. His meeting had not gone well and, in any case, he didn't know any programming.

Something gave way in the big B's head. You haven't been hired to learn here. This is not a training school. Try and do what you have been told to do. I would like a detailed report on your HTML page productivity tomorrow at 9 am, he told Mina.

Mina went cold. She didn't respond, only nodded. She packed up her things and went home. The baby was crying, he could sense his mother's mood. Mina put the Visual Basic book and CD in her steel cupboard, alongwith her favorite bracelets. She sang the baby to sleep. Then she looked out of the window and thought about nothing.

There are always some circumstances that first bring the thought of leaving to an employee. This is where the probability of leaving begins its upward climb. It is an important and mostly unnoticed event that eventually impacts the employee and the organization significantly.

Two months later, something happened that Mina would refer to as 'the incident' for the rest of her life. It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon and she was miserable about her son and about those goddamned HTML pages. The baby had started to get really upset around 4 pm everyday, her maid told her. He would cry to bitterly. Sometimes he would bang his little fists on the glass door of the living room. Mina was worried he might hurt himself. She wanted to come home early one day, just to see how much difference it would make.

Can I leave at four today? She asked the big B. He wasn't listening. She repeated in a meek sort of voice. Can you make it five? He asked. Five would be fine, he said and smiled. Mina nodded. He probably thinks I am trying to cheat on time and he is happy he got an extra hour, she thought. When she got home at five-thirty, she found the neighbor's wife in the house. Her son was screaming from a jagged piece of glass stuck deep in his hand. The door was smashed and there was blood and glass all over the floor. The next few hours passed in a haze for Mina. The doctors, the stitches, the injections and the fear were like something that was happening in a movie. When at last her son fell into a troubled sleep, she took the Sunday paper out of the garbage and turned to the appointments page. Then she cried.

Many employees will think about leaving but not do anything about it. The thought merely increases the probability of their departure, but not too significantly. What turns the probability curve sharply upward is an incident of some sort. It is usually an insensitive act from the organization. It generally has very little to do with money.

Resignation and departure
Mina used the computer and her internet connection in office to get a job. She felt no remorse about doing so. When she got her first offer, she resigned. The big B called her and spoke to her for almost an hour. He was most concerned for her career, he said. Her future here was going to be glorious. She may be due for a promotion. Mina kept looking at his worried face. She felt sorry for him.

By the time the employee begins to actively look for other jobs, the probability of leaving has already reached a high value. By the time the resignation letter arrives, it is generally too late. Most organizations begin to take notice only at these stages. They then spend time and energy trying to recover from a hopeless situation that they themselves have helped create. The probability curve is now snaking toward the 100% mark and it is very difficult to pull it down.

But, by now she had decided to leave. The new job seemed good, there was more money too. I supposed they too must be over-projecting themselves like this organization, she thought. But, at least, I know it now. I won't be hurt again.

Retaining an employee
To retain an employee, it is generally a good idea to keep the probability curve under control from the early days. It is much easier to prevent the thought of leaving than to persuade an employee to withdraw a resignation. It needs sensitivity, understanding, friendship and respect. Most people in India don't know about these things or think that they are a waste of time. As a result the subordinates, their families and often their lives are full of unhappiness. Here is what could have happened to Mina.

The first day at work was fantastic. The training school had scared us for no reason at all, thought Mina. Her boss was not in town but he had left a note welcoming her. He was sorry he had not been able to get a place for her to sit, but would she mind using his office for the day?

When her boss, the small B, came in the next day, he was most apologetic. He introduced her to the team and they all went to the cafeteria for lunch. He said there is a lousy seat near the passage and a real bore of an HTML job he is stuck with. Will she help out? Treat it like ragging in the first month in college, he said and winked. Mina laughed and said it was OK. I'll help him out, she thought, after all I get paid a lot for doing HTML.

A week later, Mina had done 30 pages. It could have been a few more, but she was making sure there would be no errors. The small B came around for a weekly review. He was impressed. How did you manage 30 he asked. Well, I could do a lot more if I wrote a program to automate part of the process, boasted Mina. Small B looked interested and gave her some ideas about how the program could be written fast. But please try and do 40 this week, any way you can, he requested. I'll try the program after office hours, said Mina. And I'll do 40 or more, don't worry, she said.

The program didn't work too well but she stayed back and did 70 pages that week, often going home to play with her son and then coming back to office late in the evening.

It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon and she was miserable about her son and about those goddamned HTML pages. The baby had started to get really upset around 4pm everyday, her maid told her. He would cry bitterly. Sometimes he would bang his little fists on the glass door of the living room. Mina was worried he might hurt himself. She wanted to come home early one day, just to see how much difference it would make. Can I leave at four today? She asked the small B. Is something the matter? He said. Mina explained about the child. Small B looked worried. What are you doing at the moment, he asked. Mina said she was trying to finish 10 more pages. I'll tell you what, said small B, why don't you teach me quickly how to do a page and leave. I'll try and make the 10 pages. That way you can leave at three instead of four.

Mina felt most embarrassed the next day. He had managed to do three really nice pages before getting called away for a meeting. I don't have any right to waste his time like this, she thought. I'll buy a computer at home and work nights. When she went to thank him, she told him her idea.

You're crazy, he laughed, but it just might work. In fact I can get you a computer from office so you don't spend your money. It's bad enough you are using your own time for office. And your son can play games on it, when you are not around. Mina flushed. She remembered the delighted smile of her son when she had reached home at three. Thank you, she said. I don't know anyone who would do this.

Oh, by the way, I found the address of a child counsellor, he said, maybe he can help. I'll never leave this job, thought Mina.

Solving the problem
Now, some of this is larger than life, I realize, but I am sure you get the idea. Is it possible to institutionalize affection? I don't think so, but you could encourage it. Here is a possible way. Ask your managers to list their employees and write down the probability of each one leaving in the next three months. This way they have to think about every employee and, perhaps realize how little they know about the people under them. At the end of three months, compare with the actual results. Over a period of time, you will know who can predict accurately. The others will realize that some managers know enough about their employees to predict more accurately than others. Reward them for accurate prediction, not for reducing resignations. The problem just might solve itself.

SUGATA MITRA,
Head (R&D),
NIIT.
sugatam@niit.com

November 08, 2006
Gallup Publishes Long-Awaited Follow-Up to Bestselling Management Book
12: The Elements of Great Managing builds on concepts that were introduced in the widely acclaimed First, Break All the Rules

More than a decade ago, The Gallup Organization combed through its database of more than a million people to figure out what the world's best managers did differently. What emerged was First, Break All the Rules, a New York Times bestseller with a million copies in print. The book, which challenged prevailing business wisdom, first identified the 12 Elements that all great managers share.

Now, Gallup brings readers the long-awaited follow up -- 12: The Elements of Great Managing by Rodd Wagner, a principal at Gallup, and James K. Harter, Ph.D., chief scientist for Gallup's international workplace management practice. 12 paints a compelling and vivid portrait of real-life managers as they harness employee engagement to save a failing call center, turn around a hotel's finances, improve care at a hospital for sick kids, build a better car, and maintain a factory's production while battling power outages. The book also addresses what the authors call "an element unto itself" -- the problem of pay, which explains why higher salaries don't always mean better work.

The new book draws on the famed Gallup data bank, which has grown tenfold since the publication of First, Break All the Rules. Along with the data, Wagner and Harter use the latest insights from brain-imaging studies, genetics, psychology, behavioral economics, and other scientific disciplines to reveal what drives good managers. They also packed their bags and hit the road, traveling from a fiberglass factory in Brazil to a sporting goods store in West Virginia; from an automotive design facility in India to a hotel in Dallas; from a paper making plant in Poland to an international grocery distributor in Brussels. The stories they tell of the problems, pain, struggles, and ultimate triumphs of everyday managers around the globe will forever change the way you think about work.

"Ultimately," say Wagner and Harter, "what emerged are the 12 elements of work life that define the unwritten social contract between employee and employer. Through their answers to the dozen most important questions and their daily actions that affected performance, the workers were saying, 'If you do these things for us, we will do what the company needs of us.'"

Cogent, compelling, and full of personal and professional insight into human behavior, 12 is poised to become the definitive manual for today's frontline managers.


The 12 Elements of Great Managing

To identify the elements of worker engagement, Gallup conducted many thousands of interviews in all kinds of organizations, at all levels, in most industries, and in many countries. These 12 statements -- the Gallup Q12 -- emerged from Gallup's pioneering research as those that best predict employee and workgroup performance.

1. I know what is expected of me at work.
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
8. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
9. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
10. I have a best friend at work.
11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

 

From the Gallup Management JournalA GMJ Q&A WITH CURT COFFMAN
Co-author of First, Break All The Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster, 1999) and Follow This Path: How the World's Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential (Warner Books, 2002)

When employees join an organization, they're usually enthusiastic, committed, and ready to be advocates for their new employer. Simply put, they're highly engaged.But often, that first year on the job is their best. Gallup Organization research reveals that the longer an employee stays with a company, the less engaged he or she becomes. And that drop costs businesses big in lost profit and sales, and in lower customer satisfaction. In fact, Gallup estimates that actively disengaged employees -- the least productive -- cost the American economy up to $350 billion per year in lost productivity.What can managers do to enhance employee engagement? What are the signs that employees are becoming disenchanted, and what can managers do to reverse the slide? We asked Curt Coffman, Global Practice Leader for Q12 Management Consulting and co-author of Gallup's best-selling book on great managers, First, Break All the Rules, and Follow This Path, to share strategies from the world's great managers.

GMJ: What can managers do to boost engagement levels in their work groups?

Curt Coffman: First, it's important to note that most managers aren't against employee engagement. These managers (great, good, or average) want their employees to feel that they're a significant part of the business. In fact, almost everyone joins an organization as an engaged employee. What managers do from that point on determines the path the employee will take -- toward continued engagement or toward the ranks of the "not engaged" or "actively disengaged" groups.

GMJ: Define those terms.
Coffman: Since 1997, Gallup has studied the responses of about 3 million employees that have participated in the Q12 survey, Gallup's 12-question assessment of employee engagement levels. We've found that employee responses to these crucial 12 items tend to fall into three distinct categories.Employees who are "not engaged" aren't necessarily negative or positive about their company. They take a wait-and-see attitude toward their job, their employer, and their co-workers. They hang back from becoming engaged, and they don't commit themselves.The "actively disengaged" employees are the "cave dwellers." They're "Consistently Against Virtually Everything." They're not just unhappy at work; they're busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, actively disengaged workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

GMJ: How do engaged employees differ?
Coffman: "Engaged" employees are builders. They want to know the desired expectations for their role so they can meet and exceed them. They're naturally curious about their company and their place in it. They perform at consistently high levels. They want to use their talents and strengths at work every day. They work with passion, and they have a visceral connection to their company. And they drive innovation and move their organization forward.

GMJ: Most people join an organization as engaged employees. What do their managers need to do to keep them engaged?
Coffman: To start with, employees must have a strong relationship with, and clear communication from, their manager. They need a manager who will clear a path for them, so they can concentrate on what they do best, and do more of it. They also need strong relationships with their coworkers. They must feel a commitment toward their coworkers and from them, because that commitment enables them to take risks and stretch for excellence.Managers also have to challenge employees within their areas of talent, then help them gain the skills and knowledge they need to build their talents into strengths. And managers should help employees develop ownership of their goals, targets, and milestones, so employees can enhance their contributions to the company and increase their impact.

GMJ: But we know that some employees' engagement levels deteriorate. Gallup's most recent research suggests that 29% of the U.S. workforce is engaged, 55% is not engaged, and 16% is actively disengaged. Why does this happen?
Coffman: One reason is that engaged employees tend to get the least amount of focus and attention from managers, in part because they're doing exactly what their manager needs them to do. They're not "squeaky wheels." They set goals, meet and exceed expectations, and charge enthusiastically toward the nearest tough task.Some managers mistakenly think they should leave their best employees alone. Great managers do just the opposite. Great managers tell us again and again that they spend most of their time with their most productive and talented employees because they have the most potential. If a manager coaxes an average performance from a below-average employee, she still has an average performer. But if she coaches a good employee to greatness, she gains a great performer.The challenge comes when managers see some of the first symptoms that an engaged employee is wavering toward the "not engaged" category. Then they need to act immediately.

GMJ: What are those symptoms?
Coffman: One is that the relationship between the employee and the manager begins to diminish, and it isn't meeting the employee's needs. The second is that the employee begins feeling that their potential is being wasted -- that they don't make full use of their talents and strengths in their role.

GMJ: What should managers do when they spot an employee whose engagement levels are slipping?
Coffman: Go back to the basic principles of the Q12. Start with expectations. Has the employee lost clarity about his role? Is he confused about what the manager, and the business, need him to contribute every day? Then make sure he has the right materials, equipment, and information to move toward those outcomes.Next, refocus on that employee -- on his skills, knowledge, and talents. Employees who get to do what they do best every day move toward engagement. And last but not least, catch him doing things right. Recognize him for excellence. Recognition is personally fulfilling, but even more, recognition communicates what an organization values, and it reinforces employee behaviors that reflect those values.Set clear expectations, give employees the right materials, focus on the employee, and recognize your best performers -- those are the strategies that drive engagement.

-- Interviewed by Barb Sanford

Is Your Company Bleeding Talent?
How to become a true "employer of choice"

By Curt Coffman
The Gallup Management Journal

What does the phrase "becoming an employer of choice" mean? For many organizations, it refers to their strategies to attract talented employees. And once an organization has done the hard work of recruiting top performers, the next step is to figure out how to keep them.

A few years ago, The Gallup Organization decided to initiate a multi-year research project to try and define a great workplace. First, we needed to define what "great" was. We decided that a great workplace was one where employees were satisfied with their jobs. However, it couldn't really be considered "great" if it didn't produce positive business outcomes.

Using a technique called meta-analysis, we sifted through data from approximately 200,000 employees in 36 organizations and across 21 different industries to find links to five business outcomes: retention, productivity, profitability, customer loyalty and safety. We identified 12 questions that most effectively measured the links (the Gallup Q12). The results of our research are summarized in the table below.

http://www.govleaders.org/Q12.gif

Let's focus on the issue of retention. Our analysis found that retention is strongly related to six of the Q12 items.

Know what is expected of me at work
First, do your employees know exactly what is expected of them? When they walk in the door everyday, can they measure their progress against well-defined goals? If they can't, they may never have a sense of achievement in their role. If expectations are unclear, employees will inevitably face frustration, and will be open for other opportunities where they do know what's expected of them, and where their contributions are measured and recognized.

Materials and equipment
Do you supply the right tools to support the skills, experience and talents of your employees? Even Tiger Woods would find it difficult to get the ball close to the green with a sand wedge from 270 yards. He obviously has the talent, but he would not have the right tools. Similarly, your employees need the right tools and equipment to perform their jobs at an optimum level.

Do what I do best every day
Are your employees cast in the right roles? Just because an individual is gifted in a particular area, it does not mean he has a full array of talents for any and every role. Big talent sometimes is very specialized and narrow, and knowing each employee's boundaries and limitations is key to avoiding burnout. For example, if an individual is an excellent speaker, do you also assume she is a great teacher? Some individuals do combine both these abilities, but the performance demands for these roles are very different. Knowing the critical demands for every role is a key to ensuring that talents fit those demands.

Supervisor/Someone at work cares
Do your valued employees know that someone at work cares about them -- preferably their manager or supervisor? If they don't, your company will find it difficult to retain them. Your employees' relationship with their manager or supervisor is critical in turning talent into lasting performance and excellence. In addition, is there an ongoing dialogue and solid communication with your best employees? Do your managers spend most of their time with their most productive talent? Many managers give their greatest degree of attention to employees who are falling behind. Talented, productive people crave time and attention from their managers, and will leave your company if they have a weak relationship (or no relationship) with their manager or supervisor.

Co-workers committed to quality
Do you surround your stars with other individuals who are constantly driving standards of quality to a higher level? Many companies arbitrarily put teams together without considering that employees only psychologically commit to teams if they perceive their team members will support their high level of commitment and performance. Talented employees set high standards and depend upon those around them to support their growth toward excellence.

Opportunities to learn and grow
Does your company create an environment that encourages employees to drive towards innovation or to create better systems for more productive results? Talented employees need to be "stretched" in just the right ways to fully engage them. We all need to look back and see that we are truly progressing and learning, and that we're achieving new levels of personal and professional growth. Great managers always ask what skills and knowledge need to accompany talent to result in the greatest outcome for each person.

According to our research, there is nothing very complicated about retaining great talent -- these six elements are the keys. If you want to keep the talented employees you recruit, your company must:

• Be clear about what you expect from your employees
• Provide employees with the materials and equipment they need to perform their jobs
• Give employees opportunities to do what they do best, every day
• Ensure that your employees have a manager or supervisor who cares about them
• Surround talented employees with co-workers who have a similar drive for quality
• Provide opportunities for employees to learn and grow

Companies who can do these things will be successful in keeping their most talented employees. Those who cannot will continue to bleed talent, and their quest to become an "employer of choice" will continue to be hazardous to their health.

Curt Coffman is Global Practice Leader for Q12 workplace consulting with The Gallup Organization and is co-author of Gallup’s best-selling book on great managers, First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon and Schuster, 1999). Coffman’s latest book is Follow This Path: How the World’s Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential (Warner Books, 2002).

Colin Powell’s principles of leadership described in the book include the following:

• Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
• The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
• Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.
• Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard.
• Never neglect details. When everyone’s mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant.
• You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.
• Keep looking below surface appearances. Don’t shrink from doing so (just) because you might not like what you find.
• Organization doesn’t really accomplish anything. Plans don’t accomplish anything, either. Theories of management don’t much matter. Endeavors succeed or fall because of the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds.
• Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing.
• Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.
• Fit no stereotypes. Don’t chase the latest management fads. The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team’s mission.
• Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
• Powell’s Rules for Picking People: Look for intelligence and judgment, and most critically, a capacity to anticipate, to see around corners. Also look for loyalty, integrity, a high energy drive, a balanced ego, and the drive to get things done.
• Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.
• Part I: Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired. Part II: “Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut.
• The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.
• Have fun in your command. Don’t always run at a breakneck pace. Take leave when you’ve earned it: Spend time with your families. Corollary: surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves, those who work hard and play hard.
• Command is lonely.

Everyone wants programmers to be productive. Managers of programmers want maximum productivity -- it gets the work done faster and makes the managers look good. All other things being equal, programmers like being productive. They can get home earlier, reduce stress during the workday, and feel better about their finished products. Programming productivity is even in each country's national interest, since it advances the country's position in the worldwide software industry.

Unfortunately, the standard definitions of software productivity are incorrect. They miss the essence of software development. This article examines some of the usual definitions for programmer productivity, shows why they are wrong, and then proposes an alternate definition that accurately captures what programming is really about.

Lines of code per day -- This is the classic definition of software productivity for individual programmers. Unfortunately, as other authors have noted as well, the definition makes little sense. Image a programmer named Fred Fastfinger who writes 5000 lines of code, on average, each workday. Now assume Fred's code is of such poor quality that, for each day of work he does, someone else must spend five days debugging the code. Is Fred highly productive? Certainly not. What we want is many lines of good code.

Lines of correct code per day -- This definition adjusts for the problem of a programmer producing lousy code. In the above example, using the new definition, Fred's productivity becomes 833 lines/day (5000 lines, divided by one person-day to write the code plus five person-days to fix it). But even this definition is lacking. Suppose Fred cleans up his act and begins to produce 1000 lines of correct code per day by himself. Imagine his code is completely bug-free, but contains no comments at all. Is Fred productive now? Probably not. The code may be correct based on the current specification, but we know software requirements always change. The next programmer to take over Fred's code will find it impenetrable, and possibly will be forced to rewrite the code in order to add any new features. (Even Fred will likely find his code opaque in a few months.)

Lines of correct, well-documented code per day -- This definition gets closer to what we want, but something still is missing. Imagine both Fred and another programmer, Danny Designer, are given similar assignments. Fred now writes comments and he completes his program by writing 1000 lines of well-documented, correct code per day for five days. Danny also completes his assignment in five days, but he writes only 500 lines of code per day (all correct and well-documented). Who was more productive? Probably Danny. His code is shorter and simpler, and simplicity is almost always better in engineering. Danny's code probably will be easier to extend and modify, and likely will have a longer lifespan, because of its compactness.

Lines of clean, simple, correct, well-documented code per day -- This is a pretty good definition of productivity, and one many experienced, savvy technical managers would accept. There is still something about this definition though that misses what software engineers ultimately are trying to do. Imagine Fred, Danny, and a third programmer, Ingrid Insightful, are given similar assignments. Fred and Danny head right to their desks and begin writing good code. Something about the assignment bothers Ingrid however, so she decides to go outside for a walk. After a lap around the park, she buys a decaf mochaccino, sips a little, and lies down under a tree. Soon she falls asleep. A half-hour later, Ingrid wakes up with a start and realizes what bothers her about the programming assignment: this new feature is suspiciously like an existing feature. She strolls back to her desk, nods to Fred and Danny, and looks over the code base. Sure enough, the new feature she was asked to create is actually a generalization of another special-case feature.

Ingrid opens up the source code for the existing feature and begins deleting large sections of it. Before long, she has generalized the existing feature so it is simpler, more intuitive, and includes the new capabilities she was asked to add. In the process, she has reduced the code base by 2000 lines. Around 3:00, Ingrid says goodbye to Fred and Danny, and heads to her health club to work off the mochaccino.

Who was more productive on this day? Certainly Ingrid. Fred and Danny are not even finished creating their features yet. Ingrid's feature works completely, she has simplified the entire program, and the user interface is improved by reducing the apparent feature count. But note Ingrid's productivity included writing negative 2000 lines of code and spending little time in the office. While this example may seem fanciful, it is actually quite realistic. Getting away from a problem sometimes is a good way to solve it. And programmers who understand the big picture make smarter decisions, because they are able to reuse code and combine features effectively.

Ability to solve customer problems quickly -- This is the true definition of programmer productivity, and is what Ingrid accomplished in the example. I use the term customer very loosely. The customer may be a group of users in the same organization, a fighter pilot whose aircraft depends on the software, the world at large (for open source programmers), or yourself when writing a software tool. What software engineering really is about is solving problems for the people who will use the software. Any other definition of programmer productivity misses the mark.

This definition raises a difficult question though: If a programmer can be highly productive by writing a negative amount of code, how do we measure productivity for software engineers? There is no easy answer to this question, but the answer surely is not a rigid formula related to lines of code, bug counts, or face time in the office. Each of these measures has some value for some purposes, but managers should not lose site of what software engineers are doing. They are creating machines to solve human problems.

About the Author
Charles Connell is president of CHC-3 Consulting, teaches software engineering to corporate and university audiences, and writes frequently on computer topics.

Agile is in -- and it's all because of e-business.

Evidence comes from all around us in the info technology world. But let's focus on two organizations that illustrate the disparate meanings of the words "agile" and "agility" in today's e-business environment: Microsoft, which you've heard of, and the Agile Software Alliance, which you probably haven't.

Microsoft is concerned with software platforms, while the Alliance is focused on methods of software development. While agility -- that is, the ability to change quickly in response to market forces -- has always been important, the rapid pace of business in the online era raises the bar, making it essential to e-business success.

In this month's column, I'll start the discussion by looking at the Microsoft example. Next month, I'll consider the Agile Software Alliance.

Platform agility might best be understood in terms of what it isn't. If each time you add or change application software, you have to change your platform, your platform's not agile. If every time Web traffic increases by an order of magnitude, you have to change your platform, it's not agile. If every time you change your database server or each time the business changes, you have to change your platform -- well, you get the picture.

In short, if your platform isn't stable, reliable, extensible, scalable, and flexible, it's not agile. There's no question that platform agility is an asset in any business environment, but the demands of e-business make it essential.

As the pace of business increases -- faster time to market, round-the-clock customer support, integrated supply chains, etc. -- the platform must keep pace. It must be there to support changing business requirements.

Setting aside hardware issues, this means that infrastructure software such as operating systems, application servers, database servers, and Web servers must be able to accommodate growing business demands. It also requires software development tools that give developers the power and flexibility to deliver applications that use the infrastructure.

Microsoft recognized the need for platform agility, and it began casting a marketing message along those lines. The gist: existing Microsoft products already provide the agility to power today's e-businesses, and the company's latest initiative, .NET, will provide even more.
More significantly, Microsoft customer Home Shopping Network (HSN) Interactive has described what an agile platform has meant. Not too long ago, HSN Interactive had a "mixed solution" platform for its shopping site -- meaning infrastructure software bought from different companies.

"The mixed solution decreased our agility," said Stan Antonuk, HSN Interactive's director of site operations. "It took longer than it should have to respond to changing market requirements. We had performance and availability problems, and the mixed solution made it more time consuming for our developers to fix problems. Having multiple vendors and support organizations added complexity that we didn't need, and staffing was also more difficult in that we needed to recruit people with expertise in two very different systems."

Sounds like the description of a plodding platform.

After installing a Microsoft platform, Scott Mitchell, HSN Interactive's chief technology officer, listed four benefits of its increased agility: "First, it enables us to rapidly change in response to market forces. Second, it affords me access to a more robust labor market. Third, it greatly simplifies vendor management. Finally, solution homogeneity enables better performance and scalability."

The point here is not that Microsoft is the solution, but that the company's focus on agility should be the focus for all e-business platforms. Solid platform architecture, good operating practices, using application service providers and other outsourcers when appropriate -- all contribute to platform agility, and to e-business success.

Of course, an agile platform will make a difference only if it's supported by agile methods. That's where we'll continue next month.

Chris Pickering is president of Systems Development Inc., an IT research and consulting firm. He also is a senior consultant for the Cutter Consortium. His latest industry study, Survey of E-Business and IT Practices, may be ordered at www.cutter.com. He may be reached at cpickering@mail.planetkc.com

Good Managers Focus on Employees' Strengths, Not Weaknesses
Published: June 29, 2005 in Knowledge@Wharton

Marcus Buckingham knows enough about good management to know he's not a good manager.

Before launching a career as a management consultant and author of such books as First, Break All The Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently and The One Thing You Need to Know...About Great Managing, Great Leading and Sustained Individual Success, Buckingham served as head of The Gallup Organization's strengths management practice. He was a manager, and he didn't much care for it. "I wasn't terrible, but I had no appetite for it," said Buckingham, who spoke about management and leadership at the Wharton Leadership Conference on June 9. The conference was sponsored by Wharton's Center for Leadership and Change Management and Center for Human Resources.

According to Buckingham, the best managers share one talent -- the ability to find, and then capitalize upon, their employees' unique traits. "The guiding principle is, 'How can I take this person's talent and turn it into performance?' That's the only way success is possible." And yet not everyone has that knack, Buckingham said. If he has learned anything from his years spent interviewing the best minds of the business world, it is this: Truly great managers, and truly inspiring business leaders, are rarer than many think. "Some of you in this room may not have that talent," he said. "If not, management can become a thankless task."

Checkers vs. Chess
How to tell a good manager from a bad manager? According to Buckingham, it's simple: Bad managers play checkers. Good managers play chess. The good manager knows that not all employees work the same way. They know if they are to achieve success, they must put their employees in a position where they will be able to use their strengths. "Great managers know they don't have 10 salespeople working for them. They know they have 10 individuals working for them .... A great manager is brilliant at spotting the unique differences that separate each person and then capitalizing on them."

It may sound elementary, but a quick glance around the business world indicates that many companies have yet to grasp this simple concept of putting people's strengths to use, Buckingham said. That's because the business world -- and the world at large -- is obsessed with weaknesses and finding ways to fix them. Buckingham cited a recent poll that asked workers whether they felt they could achieve more success through improving on their weaknesses or building on their strengths. Fifty-nine percent picked the former.

"A great manager sees the folly in this," said Buckingham, who has interviewed some of the business world's most successful leaders for his books. "A great manager knows he or she will get the most return on investment by working on strengths." Buckingham has seen this management style work. He just doesn't see it often enough, and he believes too many workers spend too much of their time doing things they don't like to do or simply aren't good at doing.

Buckingham co-authored his book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, in hopes of kick-starting a management revolution that will push mangers to focus on strength. In the book, Buckingham and co-author Donald O. Clifton describe 34 distinct worker profiles -- "Learner," "Achiever" and "Developer," among others -- and offer advice on how those personalities can best be put to use. "Most people are not using their talent at work at all," Buckingham said.

So how can managers tap into the talent they have in their organizations? Buckingham said a good first step is to determine what employees are good at. The tasks they learn quickly, the talents they naturally exhibit and the jobs they feel good about doing are hints about their inherent strengths. Once those strengths are uncovered, a good manager will put them to use. "You can only win as a company when you get your people into positive numbers," Buckingham said.

Optimism and Ego
Managing employees successfully is a rare talent. Even rarer, Buckingham said, is the ability to lead. And all good managers are not necessarily good leaders.

"I do think there is a rather keen and distinct difference between managing and leading," Buckingham said. The chief responsibility of a leader, for example, "is to rally people for a better future. If you are a leader, you better be unflinchingly, unfailingly optimistic. No matter how bleak his or her mood, nothing can undermine a leader's belief that things can get better, and must get better. I believe you either bring this to the table or you don't."

Along with that optimism, great leaders can also bring big egos -- and that's not a bad thing. While some have blamed the business world's recent string of scandals -- Enron, WorldCom and others -- on bloated executive egos, Buckingham disagrees. It's not ego that ruined Ken Lay, but rather a lack of ethics. There's a big difference, Buckingham said. And considering the responsibility facing business leaders to build a future for their companies, a big ego might be what is needed.

"If you are going to lead, you better have a deep-seated belief that you should be at the helm, dragging everyone into that better future," he said. "Virtually nothing about a leader is humble. I'm not saying they are arrogant, but their claims are big." Buckingham said successful leaders must find a "universal truth" to rally their followers. These universal truths stem from the basic human needs, fears and desires that unite all people, across all cultures. They also happen to be great tools for leadership.

Take, for example, one of the great human fears -- fear of the future. "We all share a fear of the unknown," Buckingham said. "The problem for the modern-day leader, of course, is that you traffic in the future." Buckingham says some the best leaders can overcome this fear -- and build confidence among their followers -- with a weapon of their own: clarity.

By presenting a clear message, and backing up their message with actions that support it, top managers of such companies as Tesco, Best Buy and Wal-Mart have rallied employees to their cause and enjoyed bottom-line success as a result, Buckingham noted. "The best way to turn anxiety into confidence is this: Be clear. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear." Former New York City Mayor Giuliani provided a good example of effective leadership through clarity, Buckingham said. When Giuliani took office in 1993, he could have turned his attentions just about anywhere; America's largest city certainly had its share of problems.

But Giuliani set one specific, clear and focused goal for his administration. He would reduce crime and improve quality of life for residents. Then he laid out three simple ways he was going to start making that happen: He announced he would get rid of the window washers who pestered New York City drivers; clean subways of graffiti and then keep the vandals away; and make all cab drivers wear collared shirts. The issues were, on their surface, minor. But they were relevant to his citizens. And by setting three immediate goals -- and then achieving them -- Giuliani was able to build trust among residents and respect among his workers. That trust carried over as he tackled larger challenges, and within a few years of his arrival, the FBI named New York the safest big city in America. "You can do a lot worse than pick just a few areas you want to take action on right now," Buckingham said.

Clarity of purpose has also been a driving factor in the success of Tesco, the British food giant that has more than 2,000 stores and 360,000 employees worldwide. When Terry Leahy took over as CEO in 1997, he decreed the company's focus would be, from that point forward, to serve the housewives of the world. Then he went out and did something to prove he believed in his focus: He added more checkout lines in all his stores, a move that led to significantly higher labor costs but also won over his customers and sent a message to his employees that they were there, as Leahy had proclaimed, to provide courteous, efficient service.

"That kind of clarity builds confidence in people," Buckingham said. Today, Tesco is one of the three largest retailers in the world, and Leahy's success provides a handy leadership lesson. "When you want to lead, start with the future." Buckingham said. "Get specific. And get vivid."

First Things First - by Stephen R. Covey
http://www.stephencovey.com
January 1994

I've learned that the good is the enemy of the best when the first things in our lives are subordinated to other things. My daughter, Maria, recently had a new baby. A few days after she delivered, I visited with her, expecting to find her happy. Instead, I found her frustrated. She told me, "I have so many other projects and interests that are important to me. But right now, I have to put everything on hold. I'm spending all my time just meeting the physical needs of this new baby. I can't even find time to be with my other two children and my husband."

Seeking to understand, I replied, "So, this new baby is consuming you?" She continued, "I have other work to do. I have some writing projects that need my attention. I have other people in my life." I asked her, "What does your conscience tell you to do? Maybe right now there is only one thing that matters your baby." She said, "But I have so many other projects and plans." She showed me her organizer. "I schedule time to do these other things, but then I'm constantly interrupted by my baby." I talked to her about the concept of a compass, not a clock. "You're being governed by your internal compass, your conscience, and you're doing something of enormous good. Now is not the time to be controlled by the clock. Throw away your planner for a few weeks. Only one thing is needful. So, relax and enjoy the very nature of this interruption to your life."

"But what about life balance and sharpening the saw?" she asked, knowing I teach these principles. "Your life is going to be imbalanced for a time, and it should be. The long run is where you go for balance. For now, don't even try to keep a schedule. Forget your calendar; take care of yourself; don't worry. Just enjoy the baby, and let that infant feel your joy." I reminded her: "The good is often the enemy of the best. You won't get much satisfaction from fulfilling scheduled comitments if you have to sacrifice first things and best things. Your satisfactions are tied to your role expectations. Maybe the only role that matters this entire day will be mothering your new baby. And if you fulfill that role well, you will feel satisfied. But if you schedule other commitments when you have no control of the demands your baby is going to make, you'll only be frustrated." Maria has since learned to relax and enjoy her baby more. She has also involved her husband and other children more in caring for the new baby, sharing with them all that can be shared.

Identify Your First Things
What are the first things in your life? One good way to answer that question is by asking other questions: "What is unique about me? What are my unique gifts? What is it that I can do that no one else can do? For instance, who else can be a father to your child? A grandparent to your grandchildren? Who else can teach your students? Who else can lead your company? Who else can be a mother to your baby? In a sense, we all have our "babies," meaning some demanding new project or product.

Each of us has unique talents and capabilities and an important work to do in life. The tragedy is that our unique contribution is often never made because the important "first things" in our lives are choked out by other urgent things. And so some important works are never started or finished. In our new book, First Things First, co-authored with Roger and Rebecca Merrill, we suggest that the path to personal leadership follows the stepping stones of vision, mission, balance, roles, goals, perspective, and integrity in the moment of choice. It's an ecological balancing process. We invite readers to think very carefully through this process. "What my responsibilities in life? Who are the people I care about?" The answers become the basis for thinking through your roles.

Your goals are then set by asking, "What is the important future state for each relationship or responsibility?" Setting up win-win agreements with people and maintaining positive relationships is not an efficient process; in fact, the process is usually slow. But once a win-win agreement is in place, the work will go fast. If you're efficient up front, you might be taking the slowest approach. Yes, you might drum your decision down someone else's throat, but whether or not he is committed to live by that decision and to carry it out is a different matter. Slow is fast; fast is slow. Peter Drucker makes the distinction between a quality decision and an effective decision. You can make a quality decision, but if there isn't commitment to it, it won't be effective. There has to be commitment to make a "quality decision" effective. An executive may be highly efficient working with things, but highly ineffective working with people. Efficiency is different in kind from effectiveness. Effectiveness is a results word; efficiency is a methods word. Some people can climb the "ladder of success" very efficiently, but if it's leaning against the wrong wall, they won't be effective.

Efficiency is the value you learn when you work with things. You can move things around fast: you can move money, manage resources, and rearrange your furniture quickly. But if you try to be efficient with people on jugular issues, you'll likely be ineffective. You can't deal with people as if you're dealing with things. You can be efficient with things, but you need to be effective with people, particularly on jugular issues. Have you ever tried to be efficient with your spouse on a tough issue? How did it go? If you go fast, you'll make very slow progress. If you go slow and get deep involvement doing what is necessary through synergistic communication based on a win-win spirit you'll find that in the long run it's fast because then you have total commitment to it. You also have a quality decision simply because you have the benefit of different creative ideas interacting, creating a new solution that is better and more bonding.

Subordinate Clock to Compass
For many executives, the dominant metaphor of life is still the clock. We value the clock for its speed and efficiency. The clock has its place, efficiency has its place - after effectiveness. The symbol of effectiveness is the compass a sense of direction, purpose, vision, perspective, and balance. A well-educated conscience serves as an internal monitoring and guidance system. To move from a clock to a compass mind-set, you focus on moving the fulcrum over by empowering other people. But the empowerment process itself is not efficient. You can't think control; you think of releasing feelings seldom expressed and interacting with others until you create something better and you don't know what it is at the beginning. It takes a lot of internal security, a lot of self-mastery, before you can even assume that risk. And the people who like to control their time, money, and things, tend to try to control people, taking the efficiency approach, which in the long run is very ineffective. Effectiveness applies to self as much as to other people. You should never be efficient with yourself either.

For example, one morning I met with a group in our training program. Someone said, "Creating a personal mission statement is a tough process." And I said, "Well, are you approaching it through an efficiency paradigm or an effectiveness paradigm? If you use the efficiency approach, you may try to bang it out this weekend. But if you use the effectiveness approach, you'll carry on this tortuous internal debate on every aspect of your nature, your memory system, your imagination system, your value system, your old habits, old scripts. You'll keep this dialogue going until you feel at peace." Why do executives find it easy to schedule and keep appointments with others, but hard to keep appointments with themselves? If people can make and keep promises to themselves, they will significantly increase their social integrity. Conversely, if they learn to make and keep promises to others, they will have higher self-discipline. The private victory of keeping appointments with ourselves doesn't just mean that we spend some private time alone; it might also mean that we promise ourselves not to overreact, or to apologize in the middle of a mistake. Keeping these promises enormously increases our sense of integrity.

For example, I saw my son the other day chewing out his little sister for rearranging his office. He had everything laid out to work on his project, but she thought it was messy and she wanted to help her brother. In the middle of his tirade, he caught himself and said, "I apologize. I'm just taking my frustrations out on you, and I know you meant to do well." He did it right then. He kept an appointment with himself to live by his values even in the heat of the moment. I admired him enormously. Knowing that people and relationships are more important than schedules and things, we can subordinate a schedule without feeling guilty because we superordinate the conscience, the commitment to a larger vision and set of values. We subordinate the clock approach of efficiency to the compass approach of effectiveness. When using the compass, we subordinate our schedules to people, purposes, and principles. The "mega priorities" of the compass subordinate the "mini priorities" of the clock. When your projects are worthy ones, then your purpose will transcend petty concerns and matters of secondary importance.

What Charles Dickens learned from writing A Christmas Carol is that a transcendent purpose subordinates the old scripts of scarcity and independence. It may not totally erase them, but at least it subordinates them. Dickens got a strong sense of purpose about writing a story that would bless the lives of families, particularly children, when he reflected on the time when he worked in the factories 12 hours a day, every day of the week, and his father and other members of his family were in debtor's prison for several months. He remembered those times of scarcity and recognized them as scripts. And as he combined the images of the present with the past, he experienced an enormous burst of creative energy that subordinated all of his present problems, his depression, and the possibility of financial ruin, to get out this magnificent story.

Without valuing interdependence and abundance thinking, you won't be able to keep first things first. Some people never understand these realities. They fall back into independence and scarcity thinking. Those perspectives are more a function of scripting than of anything else. But we can change the script.

From Urgency to Importance
When we are guided by an internal compass, a highly educated conscience, we may decide to dedicate an entire morning to one person or to focus on one project and subordinate an earlier schedule we'd set up, unless we have strong commitments to meet with certain individuals, then we work around those. Or we may decide to set aside an afternoon to keep an appointment only with ourselves. During that time, we might sharpen the saw by exercising one or more of the four dimensions of our personality: physical, mental, social, and spiritual. We use self-awareness to know what to do and when. I recommend a time management credo that says: "I will not be governed by the efficiency of the clock; I will be governed by my conscience. Because my conscience deals with the totality of my life. And since it is well educated from study and from experience, it will help me make wise decisions." Under the influence of a well-developed conscience, you make decisions on a daily, hourly, and moment-to-moment basis to be governed by principles. If you are immersed in an extremely productive or creative work, don't let anything interrupt. Can you imagine a surgeon taking a telephone call in the middle of surgery? Most people are buried in urgency. Most production and management jobs call for quick reactions to what is urgent and important. The net effect of a reactionary, urgent lifestyle is stress, burnout, crisis management, and always putting out fires. If you're into daily planning and prioritizing, then by definition you live with urgencies and crises. Important but not urgent activities are easily pushed out by daily planning. When you are guided by an internal compass or set of principles, you begin to see that the idea that I am in control is an arrogant concept. You have to humbly submit yourself to natural laws that ultimately govern anyway. If you internalize those laws and principles, you create a highly educated conscience. And if you are open to it, you will keep first th ings first.

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505


This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

by Marcus Buckingham Harvard Business Review - March, 2005
Great leaders tap into the needs and fears we all share. Great managers, by contrast, perform their magic by discovering, developing, and celebrating what's different about each person who works for them. Here's how they do it.


"The best boss I ever had." That's a phrase most of us have said or heard at some point, but what does it mean? What sets the great boss apart from the average boss? The literature is rife with provocative writing about the qualities of managers and leaders and whether the two differ, but little has been said about what happens in the thousands of daily interactions and decisions that allows managers to get the best out of their people and win their devotion. What do great managers actually do?

In my research, beginning with a survey of 80,000 managers conducted by the Gallup Organization and continuing during the past two years with in-depth studies of a few top performers, I've found that while there are as many styles of management as there are managers, there is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: They discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it. Average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess. The difference? In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same way; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements, certainly, but they all move at the same pace, in parallel paths. In chess, each type of piece moves in a different way, and you can't play if you don't know how each piece moves. More important, you won't win if you don't think carefully about how you move the pieces. Great managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they learn how best to integrate them into a coordinated plan of attack.

This is the exact opposite of what great leaders do. Great leaders discover what is universal and capitalize on it. Their job is to rally people toward a better future. Leaders can succeed in this only when they can cut through differences of race, sex, age, nationality, and personality and, using stories and celebrating heroes, tap into those very few needs we all share. The job of a manager, meanwhile, is to turn one person's particular talent into performance. Managers will succeed only when they can identify and deploy the differences among people, challenging each employee to excel in his or her own way. This doesn't mean a leader can't be a manager or vice versa. But to excel at one or both, you must be aware of the very different skills each role requires.



The Elusive "One Thing"
It's bold to characterize anything as the explanation or solution, so it's a risky move to make such definitive assertions as "this is the one thing all great managers do." But with enough research and focus, it is possible to identify that elusive "one thing." I like to think of the concept of "one thing" as a "controlling insight." Controlling insights don't explain all outcomes or events; they serve as the best explanation of the greatest number of events. Such insights help you know which of your actions will have the most far-reaching influence in virtually every situation. For a concept to emerge as the single controlling insight, it must pass three tests. First, it must be applicable across a wide range of situations. Take leadership as an example. Lately, much has been made of the notion that there is no one best way to lead and that instead, the most effective leadership style depends on the circumstance. While there is no doubt that different situations require different actions from a leader, that doesn't mean the most insightful thing you can say about leadership is that it's situational. With enough focus, you can identify the one thing that underpins successful leadership across all situations and all styles. Second, a controlling insight must serve as a multiplier. In any equation, some factors will have only an additive value: When you focus your actions on these factors, you see some incremental improvement. The controlling insight should be more powerful. It should show you how to get exponential improvement. For example, good managing is the result of a combination of many actions – selecting talented employees, setting clear expectations, catching people doing things right, and so on – but none of these factors qualifies as the "one thing" that great managers do, because even when done well, these actions merely prevent managers from chasing their best employees away. Finally, the controlling insight must guide action. It must point to precise things that can be done to create better outcomes more consistently. Insights that managers can act on – rather than simply ruminate over – are the ones that can make all the difference.

The Game of Chess
What does the chess game look like in action? When I visited Michelle Miller, the manager who opened Walgreens' 4,000th store, I found the wall of her back office papered with work schedules. Michelle's store in Redondo Beach, California, employs people with sharply different skills and potentially disruptive differences in personality. A critical part of her job, therefore, is to put people into roles and shifts that will allow them to shine – and to avoid putting clashing personalities together. At the same time, she needs to find ways for individuals to grow.

There's Jeffrey, for example, a "goth rocker" whose hair is shaved on one side and long enough on the other side to cover his face. Michelle almost didn't hire him because he couldn't quite look her in the eye during his interview, but he wanted the hard-to-cover night shift, so she decided to give him a chance. After a couple of months, she noticed that when she gave Jeffrey a vague assignment such as "Straighten up the merchandise in every aisle," what should have been a two-hour job would take him all night – and wouldn't be done very well. But if she gave him a more specific task, such as "Put up all the risers for Christmas," all the risers would be symmetrical, with the right merchandise on each one, perfectly priced, labeled and "faced" (turned toward the customer). Give Jeffrey a generic task, and he would struggle. Give him one that forced him to be accurate and analytical, and he would excel. This, Michelle concluded, was Jeffrey's forte. So, as any good manager would do, she told him what she had deduced about him and praised him for his good work.

And a good manager would have left it at that. But Michelle knew she could get more out of Jeffrey. So she devised a scheme to reassign responsibilities across the entire store to capitalize on his unique strengths. In every Walgreens, there is a responsibility called "resets and revisions." A reset involves stocking an aisle with new merchandise, a task that usually coincides with a predictable change in customer buying patterns (at the end of summer, for example, the stores will replace sun creams and lip balms with allergy medicines). A revision is a less time-consuming but more frequent version of the same thing: Replace these cartons of toothpaste with this new and improved variety. Display this new line of detergent at the end of the row. Each aisle requires some form of revision at least once a week.

In most Walgreens stores, each employee "owns" one aisle, where she is responsible not only for serving customers but also for facing the merchandise, keeping the aisle clean and orderly, tagging items with a Telxon gun and conducting all resets and revisions. This arrangement is simple and efficient, and it affords each employee a sense of personal responsibility. But Michelle decides that since Jeffrey was so good at resets and revisions – and didn't enjoy interacting with customers – this should be his full-time job, in every single aisle.

It was a challenge. One week's worth of revisions requires a binder three inches thick. But Michelle reasoned that not only would Jeffrey be excited by the challenge and get better and better with practice, but other employees would be freed from what they considered a chore and have more time to greet and serve customers. The store's performance proved her right. After the reorganization, Michelle saw not only increases in sales and profit but also in that most critical performance metric customer satisfaction. In the subsequent four months, her store netted perfect scores in Walgreens' mystery shopper program.

So far, so very good. Sadly, it didn't last. This "perfect" arrangement depended on Jeffrey remaining content, and he didn't. With his success at doing resets and revisions, his confidence grew, and six months into the job, he wanted to move into management. Michelle wasn't disappointed by this, however; she was intrigued. She had watched Jeffrey's progress closely and had already decided that he might do well as a manager, though he wouldn't be a particularly emotive one. Besides, like any good chess player, she had been thinking a couple of moves ahead.

Over in the cosmetics aisle worked an employee named Genoa. Michelle saw Genoa as something of a double threat. Not only was she adept at putting customers at ease – she remembered their names, asked good questions, was welcoming yet professional when answering the phone – but she was also a neatnik. The cosmetics department was always perfectly faced, every product remained aligned, and everything was arranged just so. Her aisle was sexy: It made you want to reach out and touch the merchandise.

To capitalize on these twin talents, and so accommodate Jeffrey's desire for promotion, Michelle shuffled the roles within the store once again. She split Jeffrey's reset and revision job in two and gave the "revision" part of it to Genoa so that the whole store could now benefit from her ability to arrange merchandise attractively. But Michelle didn't want the store to miss out on Genoa's gift for customer service, so Michelle asked her to focus on the revision role only between 8:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., and after that, when the store began to fill with customers on their lunch breaks, Genoa should shift her focus over to them.

She kept the reset role with Jeffrey. Assistant managers don't usually have an ongoing responsibility in the store, but, Michelle reasoned, he was now so good and so fast at tearing an aisle apart and rebuilding it that he could easily finish a major reset during a five-hour stint, so he could handle resets along with his managerial responsibilities.

By the time you read this, the Jeffrey-Genoa configuration has probably outlived its usefulness, and Michelle has moved on to design other effective and inventive configurations. The ability to keep tweaking roles to capitalize on the uniqueness of each person is the essence of great management.

A manager's approach to capitalizing on differences can vary tremendously from place to place. Walk into the back office at another Walgreens, this one in San Jose, California, managed by Jim Kawashima, and you won't see a single work schedule. Instead, the walls are covered with sales figures and statistics, the best of them circled with red felt-tip pen, and dozens of photographs of sales contest winners, most featuring a customer service representative named Manjit.

Manjit outperforms her peers consistently. When I first heard about her, she had just won a competition in Walgreens' suggestive selling program to sell the most units of Gillette deodorant in a month. The national average was 300; Manjit had sold 1,600. Disposable cameras, toothpaste, batteries – you name it, she could sell it. And Manjit won contest after contest despite working the graveyard shift, from 12:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., during which she met significantly fewer customers than did her peers.

Manjit hadn't always been such an exceptional performer. She became stunningly successful only when Jim, who has made a habit of resuscitating troubled stores, came on board. What did Jim do to initiate the change in Manjit? He quickly picked up on her idiosyncrasies and figured out how to translate them into outstanding performance. For example, back in India, Manjit was an athlete – a runner and a weight lifter – and had always thrilled to the challenge of measured performance. When I interviewed her, one of the first things out of her mouth was, "On Saturday, I sold 343 low-carb candy bars. On Sunday, I sold 367. Yesterday, 110, and today, 105." I asked if she always knows how well she's doing. "Oh yes," she replied. "Every day I check Mr. K's charts. Even on my day off, I make a point to come in and check my numbers."

Manjit loves to win and revels in public recognition. Hence, Jim's walls are covered with charts and figures, Manjit's scores are always highlighted in red, and there are photos documenting her success. Another manager might have asked Manjit to curb her enthusiasm for the limelight and give someone else a chance. Jim found a way to capitalize on it.

But what about Jim's other staff members? Instead of being resentful of Manjit's public recognition, the other employees came to understand that Jim took the time to see them as individuals and evaluate them based on their personal strengths. They also knew that Manjit's success spoke well of the entire store, so her success galvanized the team. In fact, before long, the pictures of Manjit began to include other employees from the store, too. After a few months, the San Jose location was ranked number one out of 4,000 in Walgreens' suggestive selling program.


Great Managers Are Romantics
Think back to Michelle. Her creative choreography may sound like a last resort, an attempt to make the best of a bad hire. It's not. Jeffrey and Genoa are not mediocre employees, and capitalizing on each person's uniqueness is a tremendously powerful tool.

First, identifying and capitalizing on each person's uniqueness saves time. No employee, however talented, is perfectly well rounded. Michelle could have spent untold hours coaching Jeffrey and cajoling him into smiling at, making friends with, and remembering the names of customers, but she probably would have seen little result for her efforts. Her time was much better spent carving out a role that took advantage of Jeffrey's natural abilities.

Second, capitalizing on uniqueness makes each person more accountable. Michelle didn't just praise Jeffrey for his ability to execute specific assignments. She challenged him to make this ability the cornerstone of his contribution to the store, to take ownership for this ability, to practice it, and to refine it.

Third, capitalizing on what is unique about each person builds a stronger sense of team, because it creates inter-dependency. It helps people appreciate one another's particular skills and learn that their coworkers can fill in where they are lacking. In short, it makes people need one another. The old cliché is that there's no "I" in "team." But as Michael Jordan once said, "There may be no 'I' in 'team,' but there is in 'win'."

Finally, when you capitalize on what is unique about each person, you introduce a healthy degree of disruption into your world. You shuffle existing hierarchies: If Jeffrey is in charge of all resets and revisions in the store, should he now command more or less respect than an assistant manager? You also shuffle existing assumptions about who is allowed to do what: If Jeffrey devises new methods of resetting an aisle, does he have to ask permission to try these out, or can he experiment on his own? And you shuffle existing beliefs about where the true expertise lies: If Genoa comes up with a way of arranging new merchandise that she thinks is more appealing than the method suggested by the "planogram" sent down from Walgreens' headquarters, does her expertise trump the planners back at corporate? These questions will challenge Walgreens' orthodoxies and thus will help the company become more inquisitive, more intelligent, more vital, and, despite its size, more able to duck and weave into the future.

All that said, the reason great managers focus on uniqueness isn't just because it makes good business sense. They do it because they can't help it. Like Shelley and Keats, the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, great managers are fascinated with individuality for its own sake. Fine shadings of personality, though they may be invisible to some and frustrating to others, are crystal clear to and highly valued by great managers. They could no more ignore these subtleties than ignore their own needs and desires. Figuring out what makes people tick is simply in their nature.


Fine shadings of personality, though they
may be invisible to some and frustrating to others,
are crystal clear to and highly valued by great managers.


The Three Levers
Although the Romantics were mesmerized by differences, at some point, managers need to rein in their inquisitiveness, gather up what they know about a person, and put the employee's idiosyncrasies to use. To that end, there are three things you must know about someone to manage her well: her strengths, the triggers that activate those strengths, and how she learns.

Make the most of strengths. It takes time and effort to gain a full appreciation of an employee's strengths and weaknesses. The great manager spends a good deal of time outside the office walking around, watching each person's reactions to events, listening, and taking mental notes about what each individual is drawn to and what each person struggles with. There's no substitute for this kind of observation, but you can obtain a lot of information about a person by asking a few simple, open-ended questions and listening carefully to the answers. Two queries in particular have proven most revealing when it comes to identifying strengths and weaknesses, and I recommend asking them of all new hires – and revisiting the questions periodically.

To identify a person's strengths, first ask, "What was the best day at work you've had in the past three months?" Find out what the person was doing and why he enjoyed it so much. Remember: A strength is not merely something you are good at. In fact, it might be something you aren't good at yet. It might be just a predilection, something you find so intrinsically satisfying that you look forward to doing it again and again and getting better at it over time. This question will prompt your employee to start thinking about his interests and abilities from this perspective.

To identify a person's weaknesses, just invert the question: "What was the worst day you've had at work in the past three months?" And then probe for details about what he was doing and why it grated on him so much. As with a strength, a weakness is not merely something you are bad at (in fact, you might be quite competent at it). It is something that drains you of energy, an activity that you never look forward to doing and that when you are doing it, all you can think about is stopping.

Although you're keeping an eye out for both the strengths and weaknesses of your employees, your focus should be on their strengths. Conventional wisdom holds that selfawareness is a good thing and that it's the job of the manager to identify weaknesses and create a plan for overcoming them. But research by Albert Bandura, the father of social learning theory, has shown that self-assurance (labeled "self-efficacy" by cognitive psychologists), not selfawareness, is the strongest predictor of a person's ability to set high goals, to persist in the face of obstacles, to bounce back when reversals occur, and, ultimately, to achieve the goals they set. By contrast, self-awareness has not been shown to be a predictor of any of these outcomes, and in some cases, it appears to retard them.

Great managers seem to understand this instinctively. They know that their job is not to arm each employee with a dispassionately accurate understanding of the limits of her strengths and the liabilities of her weaknesses, but to reinforce her self-assurance. That's why great managers focus on strengths. When a person succeeds, the great manager doesn't praise her hard work. Even if there's some exaggeration in the statement, he tells her that she succeeded because she has become so good at deploying her specific strengths. This, the manager knows, will strengthen the employee's self-assurance and make her more optimistic and more resilient in the face of challenges to come.

The focus-on-strengths approach might create in the employee a modicum of overconfidence, but great managers mitigate this by emphasizing the size and the difficulty of the employee's goals. They know that their primary objective is to create in each employee a specific state of mind: one that includes a realistic assessment of the difficulty of the obstacle ahead but an unrealistically optimistic belief in her ability to overcome it.

And what if the employee fails? Assuming the failure is not attributable to factors beyond her control, always explain failure as a lack of effort, even if this is only partially accurate. This will obscure self-doubt and give her something to work on as she faces up to the next challenge.

Repeated failure, of course, may indicate weakness where a role requires strength. In such cases, there are four approaches for overcoming weaknesses. If the problem amounts to a lack of skill or knowledge, that's easy to solve: Simply offer the relevant training, allow some time for the employee to incorporate the new skills, and look for signs of improvement. If her performance doesn't get better, you'll know that the reason she's struggling is because she is missing certain talents, a deficit no amount of skill or knowledge training is likely to fix. You'll have to find a way to manage around this weakness and neutralize it.

Which brings us to the second strategy for overcoming an employee weakness. Can you find her a partner, someone whose talents are strong in precisely the areas where hers are weak? Here's how this strategy can look in action. As vice president of merchandising for the women's clothing retailer Ann Taylor, Judi Langley found that tensions were rising between her and one of her merchandising managers, Claudia (not her real name), whose analytical mind and intense nature created an overpowering "need to know." If Claudia learned of something before Judi had a chance to review it with her, she would become deeply frustrated. Given the speed with which decisions were made, and given Judi's busy schedule, this happened frequently. Judi was concerned that Claudia's irritation was unsettling the whole product team, not to mention earning the employee a reputation as a malcontent.

An average manager might have identified this behavior as a weakness and lectured Claudia on how to control her need for information. Judi, however, realized that this "weakness" was an aspect of Claudia's greatest strength: her analytical mind. Claudia would never be able to rein it in, at least not for long. So Judi looked for a strategy that would honor and support Claudia's need to know, while channeling it more productively. Judi decided to act as Claudia's information partner, and she committed to leaving Claudia a voice mail at the end of each day with a brief update. To make sure nothing fell through the cracks, they set up two live "touch base" conversations per week. This solution managed Claudia's expectations and assured her that she would get the information she needed, if not exactly when she wanted it, then at least at frequent and predictable intervals. Giving Claudia a partner neutralized the negative manifestations of her strength, allowing her to focus her analytical mind on her work. (Of course, in most cases, the partner would need to be someone other than a manager.)

Should the perfect partner be hard to find, try this third strategy: Insert into the employee's world a technique that helps accomplish through discipline what the person can't accomplish through instinct. I met one very successful screenwriter and director who had struggled with telling other professionals, such as composers and directors of photography, that their work was not up to snuff. So he devised a mental trick: He now imagines what the "god of art" would want and uses this imaginary entity as a source of strength. In his mind, he no longer imposes his own opinion on his colleagues but rather tells himself (and them) that an authoritative third part has weighed in.

If training produces no improvement, if complementary partnering proves impractical, and if no nifty discipline technique can be found, you are going to have to try the fourth and final strategy, which is to rearrange the employee's working world to render his weakness irrelevant, as Michelle Miller did with Jeffrey. This strategy will require of you, first, the creativity to envision a more effective arrangement and, second, the courage to make that arrangement work. But as Michelle's experience revealed, the payoff that may come in the form of increased employee productivity and engagement is well worth it.

What You Need to Know About Each of Your Direct Reports
• What are his or her strengths?
• What are the triggers that activate those strengths?
• What is his or her learning style?


Trigger good performance. A person's strengths aren't always on display. Sometimes they require precise triggering to turn them on. Squeeze the right trigger, and a person will push himself harder and persevere in the face of resistance. Squeeze the wrong one, and the person may well shut down. This can be tricky because triggers come in myriad and mysterious forms. One employee's trigger might be tied to the time of day (he is a night owl, and his strengths only kick in after 3 pm). Another employee's trigger might be tied to time with you, the boss (even though he's worked with you for more than five years, he still needs you to check in with him every day, or he feels he's being ignored). Another worker's trigger might be just the opposite – independence (she's only worked for you for six months, but if you check in with her even once a week, she feels micromanaged).

The most powerful trigger by far is recognition, not money. If you're not convinced of this, start ignoring one of your highly paid stars, and watch what happens. Most managers are aware that employees respond well to recognition. Great managers refine and extend this insight. They realize that each employee plays to a slightly different audience. To excel as a manager, you must be able to match the employee to the audience he values most. One employee's audience might be his peers; the best way to praise him would be to stand him up in front of his coworkers and publicly celebrate his achievement. Another's favorite audience might be you; the most powerful recognition would be a one-on-one conversation where you tell him quietly but vividly why he is such a valuable member of the team. Still another employee might define himself by his expertise; his most prized form of recognition would be some type of professional or technical award. Yet another might value feedback only from customers, in which case a picture of the employee with her best customer or a letter to her from the customer would be the best form of recognition.

Given how much personal attention it requires, tailoring praise to fit the person is mostly a manager's responsibility. But organizations can take a cue from this, too. There's no reason why a large company can't take this individualized approach to recognition and apply it to every employee. Of all the companies I've encountered, the North American division of HSBC, a London-based bank, has done the best job of this. Each year it presents its top individual consumer-lending performers with its Dream Awards. Each winner receives a unique prize. During the year, managers ask employees to identify what they would like to receive should they win. The prize value is capped at $10,000, and it cannot be redeemed as cash, but beyond those two restrictions, each employee is free to pick the prize he wants. At the end of the year, the company holds a Dream Awards gala, during which it shows a video about the winning employee and why he selected his particular prize.

You can imagine the impact these personalized prizes have on HSBC employees. It's one thing to be brought up on stage and given yet another plaque. It's another thing when, in addition to public recognition of your performance, you receive a college tuition fund for your child, or the Harley-Davidson motorcycle you've always dreamed of, or – the prize everyone at the company still talks about – the airline tickets to fly you and your family back to Mexico to visit the grandmother you haven't seen in ten years.

Tailor to learning styles. Although there are many learning styles, a careful review of adult learning theory reveals that three styles predominate. These three are not mutually exclusive; certain employees may rely on a combination of two or perhaps all three. Nonetheless, staying attuned to each employee's style or styles will help focus your coaching.

First, there's analyzing. Claudia from Ann Taylor is an analyzer. She understands a task by taking it apart, examining its elements, and reconstructing it piece by piece. Because every single component of a task is important in her eyes, she craves information. She needs to absorb all there is to know about a subject before she can begin to feel comfortable with it. If she doesn't feel she has enough information, she will dig and push until she gets it. She will read the assigned reading. She will attend the required classes. She will take good notes. She will study. And she will still want more.

The best way to teach an analyzer is to give her ample time in the classroom. Role-play with her. Do postmortem exercises with her. Break her performance down into its component parts so she can carefully build it back up. Always allow her time to prepare. The analyzer hates mistakes. A commonly held view is that mistakes fuel learning, but for the analyzer, this just isn't true. In fact, the reason she prepares so diligently is to minimize the possibility of mistakes. So don't expect to teach her much by throwing her into a new situation and telling her to wing it.

The opposite is true for the second dominant learning style, doing. While the most powerful learning moments for the analyzer occur prior to the performance, the doer's most powerful moments occur during the performance. Trial and error are integral to this learning process. Jeffrey, from Michelle Miller's store, is a doer. He learns the most while he's in the act of figuring things out for himself. For him, preparation is a dry, uninspiring activity. So rather than role-play with someone like Jeffrey, pick a specific task within his role that is simple but real, give him a brief overview of the outcomes you want, and get out of his way. Then gradually increase the degree of each task's complexity until he has mastered every aspect of his role. He may make a few mistakes along the way, but for the doer, mistakes are the raw material for learning.

Finally, there's watching. Watchers won't learn much through role-playing. They won't learn by doing, either. Since most formal training programs incorporate both of these elements, watchers are often viewed as rather poor students. That may be true, but they aren't necessarily poor learners.

Watchers can learn a great deal when they are given the chance to see the total performance. Studying the individual parts of a task is about as meaningful for them as studying the individual pixels of a digital photograph. What's important for this type of learner is the content of each pixel, its position relative to all the others. Watchers are only able to see this when they view the complete picture.

As it happens, this is the way I learn. Years ago, when I first began interviewing, I struggled to learn the skill of creating a report on a person after I had interviewed him. I understood all the required steps, but I couldn't seem to put them together. Some of my colleagues could knock out a report in an hour; for me, it would take the better part of a day. Then one afternoon, as I was staring morosely into my Dictaphone, I overheard the voice of the analyst next door. He was talking so rapidly that I initially thought he was on the phone. Only after a few minutes did I realize that he was dictating a report. This was the first time I had heard someone "in the act." I'd seen the finished results countless times, since reading the reports of others was the way we were supposed to learn, but I'd never actually heard another analyst in the act of creation. It was a revelation. I finally saw how everything should come together into a coherent whole. I remember picking up my Dictaphone, mimicking the cadence and even the accent of my neighbor, and feeling the words begin to flow.

If you're trying to teach a watcher, by far the most effective technique is to get her out of the classroom. Take her away from the manuals, and make her ride shotgun with one of your most experienced performers.


Differences of trait and talent are like
blood types: They cut across the superficial variations
of race, sex, and age and capture each person's uniqueness.


We've seen, in the stories of great managers like Michelle Miller and Judi Langley, that at the very heart of their success lies an appreciation for individuality. This is not to say that managers don't need other skills. They need to be able to hire well, to set expectations, and to interact productively with their own bosses, just to name a few. But what they do – instinctively – is play chess. Mediocre managers assume (or hope) that their employees will all be motivated by the same things and driven by the same goals, that they will desire the same kinds of relationships and learn in roughly the same way. They define the behaviors they expect from people and tell them to work on behaviors that don't come naturally. They praise those who can overcome their natural styles to conform to preset ideas. In short, they believe the manager's job is to mold, or transform, each employee into the perfect version of the role.

Great managers don't try to change a person's style. They never try to push a knight to move in the same way as a bishop. They know that their employees will differ in how they think, how they build relationships, how altruistic they are, how patient they can be, how much of an expert the need to be, how prepared they need to feel, what drives them, what challenges them, and what their goals are. These differences of trait and talent are like blood types: They cut across the superficial variations of race, sex, and age and capture the essential uniqueness of each individual.

Like blood types, the majority of these differences are enduring and resistant to change. A manager's most precious resource is time, and great managers know that the most effective way to invest their time is to identify exactly how each employee is different and then to figure out how best to incorporate those enduring idiosyncrasies into the overall plan.

To excel at managing others, you must bring that insight to your actions and interactions. Always remember that great managing is about release, not transformation. It's about constantly tweaking your environment so that the unique contribution, the unique needs, and the unique style of each employee can be given free rein. Your success as a manager will depend almost entirely on your ability to do this.


Marcus Buckingham (info@onethinginc.com) is a consultant and speaker on leadership and management practices. He is the coauthor of First, Break All the Rules (Simon & Schuster, 1999) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (Free Press, 2001). This article is copyright 2005 by One Thing Productions and has been adapted with permission from Buckingham's new book, The One Thing You Need to Know (Free Press, March 2005).


The Research

To gather the raw material for my book The One Thing You Need to Know About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, from which this article has been adapted, I chose an approach that is rather different from the one I used for my previous books. For 17 years, I had the good fortune to work with the Gallup Organization, one of the most respected research firms in the world. During that time, I was given the opportunity to interview some of the world's best leaders, managers, teachers, salespeople, stockbrokers, lawyers, and public servants. Those interviews were a part of largescale studies that involved surveying groups of people in the hopes of finding broad patterns in the data. For my book, I used this foundation as the jumping-off point for deeper, more individualized research.

In each of the three areas targeted in the book – managing, leading, and sustained individual success – I first identified one or two people in various roles and fields who had measurably, consistently, and dramatically outperformed their peers. These individuals included Myrtle Potter, president of commercial operations for Genentech, who transformed a failing drug into the highest selling prescription drug in the world; Sir Terry Leahy, the president of the European retailing giant Tesco; Manjit, the customer service representative from Jim Kawashima's top-performing Walgreens store in San Jose, California, who sold more than 1,600 units of Gillette deodorant in one month; and David Koepp, the prolific screenwriter who penned such blockbusters as Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, and Spider-Man.

What interested me about these high achievers was the practical, seemingly banal details of their actions and their choices. Why did Myrtle Potter repeatedly turn down promotions before taking on the challenge of turning around that failing drug? Why did Terry Leahy rely more on the memories of his working-class upbringing to define his company's strategy than on the results of customer surveys or focus groups? Manjit works the night shift, and one of her hobbies is weight lifting. Are those factors relevant to her performance? What were these special people doing that made them so very good at their roles?

Once these many details were duly noted and recorded, they slowly came together to reveal the "one thing" at the core of great managing, great leading, and sustained individual success.

The Art of Innovation
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_art_of_inno.html
By Guy Kawasaki.

I'm getting tired of writing about lies, so today I'm covering truths. Specifically, the truths of innovation. I hold these truths to not be self-evident; hence we see so little innovation.

Jump to the next curve. Too many companies duke it out on the same curve. If they were daisy wheel printer companies, they think innovation means adding Helvetica in 24 points. Instead, they should invent laser printing. True innovation happens when a company jumps to the next curve--or better still, invents the next curve, so set your goals high.

Don't worry, be crappy. An innovator doesn't worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness if it's truly innovative. The first permutation of a innovation is seldom perfect--Macintosh, for example, didn't have software (thanks to me), a hard disk (it wouldn't matter with no software anyway), slots, and color. If a company waits--for example, the engineers convince management to add more features--until everything is perfect, it will never ship, and the market will pass it by.

Churn, baby, churn. I'm saying it's okay to ship crap--I'm not saying that it's okay to stay crappy. A company must improve version 1.0 and create version 1.1, 1.2, ... 2.0. This is a difficult lesson to learn because it's so hard to ship an innovation; therefore, the last thing employees want to deal with is complaints about their perfect baby. Innovation is not an event. It's a process.

Don't be afraid to polarize people. Most companies want to create the holy grail of products that appeals to every demographic, social-economic background, and geographic location. To attempt to do so guarantees mediocrity. Instead, create great DICEE products that make segments of people very happy. And fear not if these products make other segments unhappy. The worst case is to incite no passionate reactions at all, and that happens when companies try to make everyone happy.

Break down the barriers. The way life should work is that innovative products are easy to sell. Dream on. Life isn't fair. Indeed, the more innovative, the more barriers the status quo will erect in your way. Entrepreneurs should understand this upfront and not get flustered when market acceptance comes slowly. I've found that the best way to break barriers is enable people to test drive your innovation: download your software, take home your hardware, whatever it takes.

“Let a hundred flowers blossom.” I stole this from Chairman Mao. Innovators need to be flexible about how people use their products. Avon created Skin So Soft to soften skin, but when parents used it as an insect repellant, Avon went with the flow.

Apple thought it created a spreadsheet/database/wordprocessing computer; but, come to find out, customers used it as a desktop publishing machine. The lesson is: Don't be proud. Let a hundred flowers blossom.

Think digital, act analog. Thinking digital means that companies should use all the digital tools at its disposal--computers, web sites, instruments, whatever--to create great products. But companies should act analog--that is, they must remember that the purpose of innovation is not cool products and cool technologies but happy people. Happy people is a decidedly analog goal.
Never ask people to do what you wouldn't do. This is a great test for any company. Suppose a company invents the world's greatest mousetrap. It murders mice better than anything in the history of mankind--in fact, it's nuclear powered. The problem is that the customer needs a PhD to set it, it costs $500,000, and has to drop off the dead, radioactive mouse 500 miles away in the middle of the desert. No one at the company would jump through those hoops--it shouldn't expect customers to either.

Don't let the bozos grind you down. The bozos will tell a company that what it's doing can't be done, shouldn't be done, and isn't necessary. Some bozos are clearly losers--they're the ones who are easy to ignore. The dangerous ones are rich, famous, and powerful--because they are so successful, innovators may think they are right. They're not right; they're just successful on the previous curve so they cannot comprehend, much less embrace, the next curve.

Written at: Marriott Hotel, San Francisco, California