Blog Posts

Power Rules

By Jeffrey Pfeffer on February 18, 2011

Here are some commonsense, yet often violated, rules about power that can help make you more successful--and, even better, equip you to cope with today's organizational realities:

You need to take care of yourself. Companies have been telling employees this for decades. The implication: don't worry about the company, because it isn't worrying about you. You are responsible for attracting the support that will make you successful and building your personal brand. Companies (and many people) worry more about what you can do for them in the future than what you have done for them in the past. VC partners who have made their colleagues billions are thrown out unceremoniously. Same for law partners, management consulting partners, public accounting firm leaders. Don't expect thanks for all you have done for your company or your colleagues in the past. Your job is to ensure that you are useful--through your role, the resources you control, your contacts and network, your reputation--to those around you as they contemplate their future. The minute you aren't, your influence will be either gone or substantially diminished. Perception is reality--so get a public relations strategy and get help where you need it. I...

A Millennial Map to the Future

By Jeremy Clark on February 16, 2011

In his latest HBR blog post, Letting Gen Y Lead a Management Makeover , MIX Maverick (and CEO of HCL) Vineet Nayar celebrates the bold creativity displayed by the entrants in the HCL MBA M-Prize challenge . As Vineet says, ideas like these can be unsettling to senior executives, and he knows why:

“... keep in mind how alien most organizational environments must seem to [Gen Y workers]. Used to the web's meritocracy, they face rigid hierarchies. Comfortable with the transparency of social networking sites, they bump up against information silos and knowledge hoarding.”

The entries so far submitted to the M-Prize challenge certainly display that desire to substitute openness and transparency for hierarchy and boundaries. Vineet calls out some of the themes he has found most interesting so far:

Increasing democratic influence on the appointment of leaders. (" The Organization Structure as Free Market") . Giving people the chance to shape their work and organizations (" Ideas.com "; " The Management Tree "; " Internal bidding for task assignment "). Creating ways to bypass the filters that impede direct communications ("Can your organization handle the truth?" ;...

When Best Practices Aren't Good Enough—Putting the Performance Review on Review

By Polly LaBarre on February 15, 2011

It's one of the toughest—and most important—questions in business: How do you mobilize and unleash the best gifts of every single person in your organization? And how do you create an environment and systems for work that ignite extraordinary passion, imagination, and initiative?

Few leaders would discount that imperative, yet it's still remarkable to encounter an organization in which people practices are built around human flourishing rather than designed to satisfy systems. Which is why it's so refreshing and instructive to spend a little time with the companies and individual represented in our outstanding batch of semifinalists for the HCI Human Capital M-Prize . They offer up so many insights and lessons for our collective project here on the MIX.

Take, for instance, the eight-year-old Australian software company Atlassian . Founded with the intent to become "a different kind of software company," Atlassian has also developed a very different way of working. The result: the company stands out as much for its fresh, energetic, relentlessly clever approach to engaging and unleashing people as it does for the software development and collaboration tools it makes.

...

The Hole in the Soul of Business

By Gary Hamel on February 9, 2011

I’m a big fan of New Yorker cartoons. There’s usually at least one in every issue that provokes a wry smile or a wince of self-recognition. While I’ve never actually participated in the magazine’s weekly caption competition, I occasionally gin up a prospective entry. Last week, the contest featured a drawing of a couple sitting in a living room. The husband (perhaps?) was perusing a newspaper on the sofa while his wife lounged in a nearby armchair. She was a mermaid—naked from the waist up, her large flipper resting demurely on the floor. With her head angled towards her companion and her mouth open in mid-sentence, I imagined her to be saying: “After ten years, I think you could have learned to scuba dive,” or “Hiking in the Alps again? I thought we could take a beach holiday this year.”

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows an office worker slumped against the wall, clutching his chest. As worried colleagues rush to aid the stricken employee, he mumbles: “Don’t worry, it was just a fleeting sense of purpose.”

These sardonic portraits of the human condition resonate with us because they capture something deep and true. The mermaid-out-of-water...

A Better Way to Win: Profiting from Purpose

By Raj Sisodia on February 7, 2011

"I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." —Oliver Wendell Holmes

When it comes to managing their costs most companies operate with a simple model. They start by trying to maximize their gross margins so that they have a high cushion for spending in areas where they feel they need to spend heavily in order to compete, such as advertising and promotions. But a growing number of high-performing companies are showing that there is a better way to manage spending and improve performance. These companies live and operate on the other side of complexity.

Over the past several years, we have studied a group of companies that defy conventional wisdom and at first glance seem to perform financial alchemy. These companies pay their rank-and-file employees much better than their peers, have suppliers who are profitable, invest heavily in their communities, pay taxes at a higher rate, provide terrific customer service, invest in making their operations more environmentally sustainable and do not externalize costs onto society. With all this spending, it would seem that there would...

10 Ways to Unleash the Best and Ignite Passion in Your People

By Polly LaBarre on January 31, 2011

We’re delighted to announce the semifinalists for the HCI Human Capital M-Prize —a rich set of bold and original Hacks and inspiring and instructive Stories.

We asked MIXers to tackle one of the toughest—and most important questions in the realm of management innovation: How do you mobilize and unleash the best gifts of every single person in the organization? And how do you create an environment and system for work that ignite extraordinary passion, imagination, and initiative?

And they answered! We received some 85 entries—so many of which surprised us, stretched us, and inspired us. Together they begin to map a future in which organizations are as human as the human beings inside them. Needless to say, it was no easy feat to whittle so many superb contributions down to just ten semifinalists.

A hearty thanks to everyone who entered this M-Prize. This is by no means the end of the road. We plan to keep the conversation going and to continue to cultivate a community of passion around the topic of communities of passion and unleashing capability. We hope you’ll continue to engage around these and other management moonshots. Stay tuned here on the...

True collaboration embraces conflict

By Leigh Weiss on January 26, 2011

Editor's note: Research by McKinsey & Company's Organization Practice finds that better collaborative capabilities help companies achieve superior ﬁnancial performance. These results are supported by academic research, which shows that the ability to collaborate in networks is more important than raw individual talent to innovativeness; it also boosts employees’ overall performance and loyalty. 1

This is the first in a series of posts from McKinsey about healthy collaboration and how managers make it work successfully. 2 In coming months, McKinsey authors will discuss different types of collaboration and the places where it happens, such as knowledge sharing, informal & social networks, talent mobility, and formal communities of collaborative practice. We'll also explore the hypothesis that the proper type of collaboration depends on the type of organization and can take various forms across geographic and vertically integrated groups.

Effective collaboration is essential for creating value. Indeed, it's one of the reasons we create corporations, because organizations are more effective than individuals at allocating resources. But knowing and doing are two different things. As organizations grow, collaboration can suffer—particularly across silos, as people...

The Art of Impossibility

By Umair Haque on January 17, 2011

Here’s a thought to chew on while you’re considering your new year’s resolution: if it’s not laughably impossible, hopelessly impractical, preposterously insurmountable—stop. Start over. You’re not doing it right.

Let me explain, with a little parable. In 2007, Blackberry-maker RIM was king of the mobile hill. Yet when word of a disruptive new phone—from an industry outsider, no less—began to spread, RIM didn’t just downplay the news, it discounted it almost entirely. RIM seemed to think that Apple’s nascent iPhone was literally, well, impossible . RIM had access to the same chips and circuits, the same mobile networks and carriers, the same raw materials and currency, as Apple did. Of course, the iPhone wasn’t impossible—it was very real. And the rest, as they, say, is history.

So here’s the question: why do most companies have such a narrow, blinkered view of the possible? Why don’t they even attempt the impossible? And why, when rivals do attempt the impossible, do most organizations (like RIM) have a kind of organizational cognitive dissonance—why are they so mentally threatened by the sudden, stark violation of their own most cherished beliefs that they refuse to believe anyone else...

It's Time for Some New Habits--the Year of the Meaning Organization

By Umair Haque on January 3, 2011

This time of year we tend to subject ourselves to tough review. We zero in on our practices and tendencies and resolve to take up new, positive habits--and, more importantly, to break the bad. It can be a productive exercise if approached with a clear eye and dedicated follow-through. My question: why don't we subject our institutions to the same ritualistic rigor?

As I've argued in my new book , instead of creating enduring, authentic value for people, our institutions--corporations, banks, governments--consistently, systematically, one might say, habitually, extract wealth from them. The result is the game of musical chairs that is the crisis, writ large.

What, then, are the habits of this set of industrial age institutions? They're the stuff we live and breathe, practice and do: strategy, marketing, finance, and the rest of the drear, dismal, passionless stuff that makes most of us snooze through meetings, dread Monday mornings, and that embezzles joy, plenitude, and significance from our days. When you think about it, those habits were deliberately designed to reduce our emotional, creative, and ethical intelligence, our sense of bigger purpose and our shared, enduring ideals.

Argue with me if you like, but I'd...

Moving Past Austerity—Let's Make 2011 the Year of Honesty, Humanity and Generosity

By Polly LaBarre on December 30, 2010

The authorities at Merriam-Webster have declared “austerity” the defining word of 2010 . That may be an appropriate reaction to all that’s transpired this year (and built up over this decade), but the word—and, more to the point, the feeling —that permeates this shabby, hangdog year is loss.

Look back and all you find are holes: gaping maws opened up in the earth (the penetrating devastation in Haiti followed closely by disaster in Chile), the ocean (the maddening, staggering oil spill in the Gulf), the economy (the evaporation of billions upon billions of dollars, millions of homes foreclosed upon and jobs lost), and our collective soul (as we’ve become almost accustomed to the rampant self-dealing, fractious incivility, and outright venality among the leaders of our most powerful institutions). Not to mention the crater left in Cleveland’s heart when LeBron James decided to take his talents to South Beach.

We are literally leaking—money, jobs, oil, state secrets, and, worst of all, integrity. (If you really want to make your blood boil go see double feature of Fair Game and Inside Job and watch some of our most high-profile and highly-compensated leaders weasel...

Seven counterintuitive truths for managers

By Simon Caulkin on December 24, 2010

How do you get customers to send bouquets to staff for great service (literally) yet cut costs at the same time? By discarding (almost) everything you think you know about management and doing the opposite. Here are seven counterintuitive business truths, distilled from nine uplifting (how often can you use that term in connection with a management event?) success stories recounted at a Vanguard Leaders Summit last month—included among them, M-Prize winner Owen Buckwell .

Manage value not cost.
Most managers assume that improving service increases cost. Wrong. Cost reduction is a by-product of focusing on value as defined by the customer. By working to deliver the right service at the right time with minimum effort managers release capacity, boost productivity and reduce overall cost. Directly trying to manage cost drives cost up; managing value drives cost out.

Economies of flow not scale.
Economy of scale is inseparable from standardization and mass production. Even in manufacturing, it’s obsolete, killed off by Japanese companies that do quality, volume and variety on the same assembly lines. In services, where demand is infinitely variable, it’s...

Who's Really Innovative?

By Gary Hamel on December 17, 2010

If you were compiling a list of the world's most innovative companies, which businesses would top your list? No one would be surprised if you picked Google, Apple or Amazon, but what about Wal-Mart? (Huh?) Or PG&E (a utility, for crying out loud)? Surely there must be some mistake! Or how 'bout the Chinese data equipment maker Huawei (umm, who are they)? While a few of these companies might not have made it onto your top 10 list, all of them were featured in Fast Company's 2010 ranking of innovation all-stars.

The list toppers:

1. Facebook
2. Amazon
3. Apple
4. Google
5. Huawei
6. First Solar
7. PG&E
8. Novartis
9. Wal-Mart
10. HP

As you might expect, BusinessWeek has its own list of innovation standouts:

1. Apple
2. Google
3. Microsoft
4. IBM
5. Toyota
6. Amazon
7. LG Electronics
8. BYD
9. GE
10. Sony

Apple, Google and...

Lucy Kellaway on the Do's and Dont's of Firing Memos

By David Sims on December 14, 2010

I've long been a fan of Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway's talent for skewering corporate speak and the hubris that lies behind it. Her Martin Lukes columns were gems of satire, illustrating ways managers should never behave through the squirmingly embarrassing -- though hilariously entertaining -- Blackberry missives of a fictional British marketing exec in the would-be "Masters of the Universe" mold.

Her Monday column in this week's FT is a timely (given the season) contrast of awful and somewhat-better ways to deliver bad news in corporate memos. The first obscures the bad news of 1,400 layoffs at State Street in a chorus of chest-thumping pomposity about the company's invincibility, while the second delivers a clear and honest explanation of why a senior executive is leaving Gawker.

"Two memos divided by understanding " is worth a read over at the FT's site. (Free registration required.)

What is organizational health?

By Colin Price on December 14, 2010

We're at the end of an eight-year period, which was marked in the beginning by the demise of Enron and marked at the end by the demise of Lehman Brothers. During that near decade, the quasi-religious mantra of business was shareholder value: Focus on performance and on performance alone. That's what real managers did. They decomposed activity to work out the value creation potential and they focused on performance. Everything else was stuff that needed to be done to run the machine.

We now know what that philosophy of management produced: an apparent growth in global GDP followed by an even larger decline in global GDP. It produced a lack of sustainability of corporate earnings. The same is true in the public sector. Focusing exclusively on performance simply does not produce long-term shareholder value, sustainable competitive advantage, or an ability to achieve the mandates of the organization in the public sector.

So, how can we focus instead on longer term organizational health? For me, health is the capacity of the organization to compete not only today, but tomorrow. I think of it as having three elements:

One part of health is the degree of...

Hire "athletes", not experts

By David Sims on December 13, 2010

Elad Gil, head of Geo at Twitter, has a great new post on Tech Crunch, "The 5 Myths of Building A Great Mobile Team." Gil, who has experience building teams at Google and a handful of startups, hammers on the need to hire great engineers who can be flexible as their tasks change. That tagline for his first principle is, "Hire great athletes; mobile 'experts' will be useless in 6 months."

While Gil's post describes building teams of engineers who can develop mobile apps, his points are widely applicable. As organizations learn they must reinvent themselves perennially (some would say constantly), teams and individuals need to be able to as well.

So maybe we just need a new type of expert: someone who is adept at reinventing themselves by spotting new opportunities, learning new skills, and bringing them to the table to create new products and processes.

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