Category: Management

“The Least Hospitable Environment on Earth”

 

   Source of the book image:  http://images.usatoday.com/money/_photos/2007/03/26/cubicle-bookx-large.jpg

 

Office humor is an oxymoron. At least that was the prevailing view until Scott Adams’s "Dilbert" comic strip and, more recently, British television import "The Office" opened up this fertile ground for mainstream ridicule. The latest entry in the growing corpus of workplace-whacking is "The Cubicle Survival Guide: Keeping Your Cool in the Least Hospitable Environment on Earth," by first-time author and Web-site production coordinator James F. Thompson.

Mr. Thompson’s target: the cubicle, or "cube," as it is not so fondly known. It’s surprising to learn that this ubiquitous steel-and-fabric prison was not invented until the 1960s, the dubious brainstorm of a Colorado fine-arts professor named Bob Probst. His goal, according to Mr. Thompson, was to encourage co-workers to "freely exchange ideas and inspiration" — and not, as commonly believed, to breed a legion of the undead who feel they are somehow unworthy of, say, a door.

 

For the full review, see: 

MARTIN KIHN.  "BOOKS; The Best Way to Labor Away in Our Little Boxes." The Wall Street Journal  (Weds., March 14, 2007):  D9. 

 

The reference to the book, is: 

James F. Thompson.  THE CUBICLE SURVIVAL GUIDE.  (Villard, 216 pages, $12.95)

 

Should Netscape Be Viewed as a Failed Company, or as a Successful Project?

 

(p. 53)  Recall the story of Netscape, once the darling of the New Economy.  Netscape was formed in 1994.  It went public in 1995.  And by 1999, it was gone, purchased by America Online and subsumed into AOL’s operation.  Life span:  four years.  Half-life:  two years.  Was Netscape a company—or was it really a project?  Does the distinction even matter?  What matters most is that this short-lived entity put several products on the market, prompted established companies (notably Microsoft) to shift strategies, and (p. 54) equipped a few thousand individuals with experience, wealth, and connections that they could bring to their next project.

And Netscape is not alone.  A University of Texas study found that between 1970 and 1992, the half-life of Texas businesses shrank by 50 percent.  Likewise, a Federal Reserve analysis of New York companies found that the type of firm that created the most new jobs (microbusineses with fewer than ten employees) often had the shortest life span.  The life cycle of companies has been that jobs, too, have diminishing half-lives.  Ten years ago, nobody ever heard of a Web developer.  Ten years from now, nobody may remember Web developers.

Most important, at the very moment the longevity of companies is shrinking, the longevity of individuals is expanding.  Unlike Americans in the twentieth century, most of us today can expect to outlive just about any organization for which we work.  It’s hard to imagine a lifelong job at an organization whose lifetime will be shorter–often much shorter–than your own.

 

Source:

Pink, Daniel H. Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live. New York: Warner Business Books, 2001.

 

Pushing the Flywheel of Business (and Life)

 

FlywheelGiant.gif   A flywheel lathe from the mid-1700s.  Source of image:  http://www.stuartking.co.uk/articles/lathe.htm

 

In Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, I really liked his flywheel analogy, that makes the point that in business (and life), success often is mainly due to the day-in-day-out exertion of effort and care.  The version below is from a Collins article, based on his book.

 

Now picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It’s about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum — mass times velocity — is what will generate superior economic results over time.

Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving, you make a tremendous effort. You push with all your might, you make a tremendous effort…and finally you get the flywheel to inch forward. After two or three days of sustained effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. It takes a lot of work, but at last the flywheel makes a second rotation. You keep pushing steadily. It makes three turns, four, five, six turns. With each turn it moves faster, and then – at some point, you can’t say exactly when – you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren’t pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing.

 

Source: 

Jim Collins.  "Good to Great."  Fast Company 51 (September 2001):  90.

 

“Solitude Serves as a Refreshing Balm”

The WSJ summarizes an April 2007 Psychology Today article.  The study that is discussed sounds relevant to the one-sided push for more collaboration and team production in business, and co-authorship in academics.  The benefits of collaboration should not blind us to the costs.

 

Amanda Guyer, a psychologist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., has found that individuals who withdraw from other people’s company are more sensitive than extroverts to a wide range of positive emotional cues. Situations rife with emotional triggers, such as parties, can be wearying for such people, while solitude serves as a refreshing balm.

 

For the full story, see:

"Informed Reader; PSYCHOLOGY; Loners May Not Fear Others, They Just Need Some Solitude."  The Wall Street Journal  (Thurs., March 1, 2007):  B7.

 

Give People Something Better than What They Say They Want

(p. 205)  The picture palaces were a commercial success.  Between 1914 and 1922, four thousand new Palace Theaters opened in the United States.  Movie-going became an increasingly important entertainment event for Americans of all economic levels.  As Roxy pointed out, "Giving the people what they want is fundamentally and disastrously wrong.  The people don’t know what they want . . . [Give] them something better."  Palace Theaters effectively combined the viewing environment of opera houses with the viewing contents of nickelodeons—films—to unlock a new blue ocean in the cinema industry and attract a whole new mass of moviegoers:  the upper and middle classes. 

 

Source: 

Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005.

Jim Collins on How Boeing Leapfrogged McDonnell Douglas

(p. 202)  Wisely, through the 1940s, Boeing had stayed away from the commercial sphere, an arena in which McDonnell Douglas had vastly superior abilities in the smaller, propeller-driven planes that composed the commercial fleet.  In the early 1950s, however, Boeing saw an opportunity to leapfrog McDonnell Douglas by marrying its experience with large air-(p. 203)craft to its understanding of jet engines. 

 

Source:

Collins, Jim. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap. And Others Don’t. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001.

 

The New York Times Bests the Wall Street Journal at Business

 

We had a major winter storm in Omaha on Thurs., March 1st.  Schools were closed on Thursday and again on Friday.  Throughout the storm, the Omaha World-Herald got a paper delivered every day. 

The New York Times missed Thurs. and Fri., (there is no Saturday delivery).  The Wall Street Journal missed Thurs., Fri., and Sat.

The main difference is that in the end, the New York Times made good on eventually delivering me all the papers that I had paid for.

After a half hour wait to get through to a customer service person, the Wall Street Journal told me that they could not get me copies of the Thursday and Saturday papers.  They were all out, and I "should go to the library."  (During the long wait, every couple of minutes, an automated voice would come on to tell me how important my call was to them—if the call is so important, why don’t they hire enough people so that customers don’t have to wait for a half hour?)

The weather problem was not a secret.  Wouldn’t a good business anticipate publicly known problems, and have a contingency plan for dealing with them?  Wouldn’t they increase their production in order to be able to make good on the papers their logistical operation was incompetent to deliver?  Even if they did not have a clue at the beginning of the storm, couldn’t they have acquired a clue by Saturday, three days into the storm?

If the Omaha World-Herald can deliver, and the New York Times can make good when it can’t deliver, then the Wall Street Journal should be able, at least, to do as well as the New York Times.  The Wall Street Journal insults its customers when it tells them to "go to the library." 

It’s no way for the nation’s leading business newspaper to run its own business.

 

“Market Research Rarely Reveals New Insights”

   Source of book image:   http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/1591396190.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

 

(p. 69)  Competition in an industry tends to converge not only on an accepted notion of the scope of its products and services but also on one of two possible bases of appeal.  Some industries compete (p. 70) principally on price and function largely on calculations of utility; their appeal is rational.  Other industries compete largely on feelings;  their appeal is emotional.

Yet the appeal of most products or services is rarely intrinsically one or the other.  Rather it is usually a result of the way companies have competed in the past, which has unconsciously educated consumers on what to expect.  Companies’ behavior affects buyers’ expectations in a reinforcing cycle.  Over time, functionally oriented industries become more functionally oriented; emotionally oriented industries become more emotionally oriented.  No wonder market research rarely reveals new insights into what attracts customers.  Industries have trained customers in what to expect.  When surveyed, they echo back:  more of the same for less.

 

Source:

Kim, W. Chan, and Renée Mauborgne. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005.

 

 

 

“Good to Great” is Good, but Not Quite Great

  Source of book image:  http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/7770000/7775266.jpg

 

When Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts spoke to my Executive MBA class a few years ago, I mentioned to him that I had heard from Bob Slezak that Ricketts was a fan of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma.  Ricketts said that was true, but that the recent business book that he was most enthused about was Jim Collin’s Good to Great.

Ricketts is not alone.  Good to Great has become a business classic since it came out.  Recently I finally got around to reading it.

Well, I think it’s good, but not quite great.  I like the empirical, inductive methodology mapped out at the beginning.  And some of the conclusions ring true.  For example the importance of facing the "brutal facts."  And the importance of developing a thought-out "hedgehog" concept.  And the importance of getting the right people on the bus.  And the importance of slowly, consistently building momentum.

But I’ve got some big bones to pick, too. 

Maybe the biggest "bone" is Collins’ assumption that our goal should be the survival and greatness of a firm.  Instead of almost viewing firms as ends in themselves, why can’t we view firms as vehicles for getting great things done? 

Maybe great things can be done through firms that last and are lastingly great.  Or maybe great things can be done by shooting star firms, that are glorious while they last, but don’t last long.  Collins says it must be the former.  But either way works for me.

A smaller "bone" is the conclusion that "level 5" leaders tend to be modest.  Well maybe.  But some of that conclusion is derived from Collins’ defining "great" in terms of high growth of stock value.  A modest leader will be unappreciated by Wall Street, and her company’s stock value will show higher growth when she succeeds.  But has she thereby accomplished more than if she had built exactly the same company, but been more transparent and enthused about the company’s future prospects, and hence generated more realistic expectations from Wall Street?  Remember, the value of a stock grows, not by the company doing well, but by it doing better than investors expected.  (On this issue, Collins should read the first couple of chapters of Christensen and Raynor’s The Innovator’s Solution.)

But don’t get me wrong:  this is a very good book.  Those interested in how the capitalist system works, should read it, as should those who want to manage well.

 

The book is:

Collins, Jim. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap. And Others Don’t. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001.

 

New Book on Wiki (Quick) Process

   Source of book image:  http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/1591841380.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V37439749_.jpg

 

A new book is out on the wiki ("quick") phenomenon.  Chris Anderson has some stimulating comments on this phenomenon in his The Long Tail.  The Wikinomics book appears to be less profound, but may still be of interest.  (It appears to be a quick-read, management guru-jargon type book.)

The wiki issue that interests me is how wiki collaboration processes might substitute for rigorous editing and peer-review, as a way to get a lot of high-quality information out there fast.  (This is what Anderson claims, and the more I use the Wikipedia, the more plausible I find the claim.)

 

The reference to the book is:

Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Portfolio, 2006.

 

“The Referee Should Not Be Too Quick With His Whistle”

I found the following wise comments while reading a short review of an old book by Edgar Monsanto Queeny, who followed his father as CEO of the Monsanto corporation, and who wrote a book called The Spirit of Enterprise which Schumpeter praised in a letter to Queeny.

(The abbreviation T.N.E.C. stands for the Temporary National Economic Committee, which I believe was an ad hoc congressional committee during part of F.D.R.’s presidency.)

Mr. Queeny does not give us a satisfactory analysis of the T.N.E.C. reports but his observations are always commonsensical and suggestive.  What emerges, and what is important, is that the positive Liberal State should not aim at too subtle a plan for freedom.  The referee should not be too quick with his whistle nor too ready to order players off the field.  The rules of the game may well allow for a little hurly-burly.  Economists like Professor Hutt, who are working out the rules of the game of free enterprise, deserve the highest praise.  But they should realize that refinement has its price as well as simplicity, and of the two simplicity costs the less.

Shenfield, A. A. "Review of the Spirit of Enterprise by Edgar M. Queeny." Economica 12, no. 48 (November 1945): 264.

 

The reference to Queeny’s book is:

Queeny, Edgar M. The Spirit of Enterprise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943.