Category Archives: Business / Leadership

Business / Leadership

Those Freakonomics Guys Guest Blog on Google

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While browsing the Google Blog yesterday I ran across a post written by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner of Freakonomics fame about a presentation they gave for Google.

The thing that struck me most was the description of the Google environment. Aside from the actual description of the buildings at the beginning of the post, the following section really hit me as something worth noting:

After our talk, we spent a few minutes hanging around with miscellaneous Googlers. This was the most impressive slice of the day; not only were they all smart and inquisitive and friendly, but they were so damn happy. For instance, there’s surely no company in the world where so many employees wear t-shirts with their company logo, which we took to be a sign of deep pride (or perhaps simply a deep discount).

It struck me (and I guess given the bloggers identity that it might be helpful to find the data and look at it) that one of the reasons they don’t see more employees wearing t-shirts with their company logos is that many companies are still in the mindset in which their self-importance push dress codes on their employees in which t-shirts aren’t even part of the dress code. I think the value that a casual dress code brings to those who do not necessarily have physical customer contact is note quite what companies think it is. What it normally does for those people who have no customer or vendor contact is irritate them, which in turn, has a negative effect on morale of the departments rather than the expected behavior of “causing employees to act more professional”.

Some of the most energetic IT shops I’ve worked in have had casual dress codes and have been run like small, independent companies. The casual dress code changes peoples attitudes for the better, in my opinion, because it removes the possibility that you are being judged by how you dress and more for what you DO, which is the most important part of our industry anyway.

Just one more example of how Google “gets it”. It’s must be pretty damn cool to have the Freakonomics guys think that the most “impressive slice of their day” was hanging out with a group of employees that seemed invested (in the emotional sense), happy, and proud and know it was your company they were talking about.

The New Art of the Leader by William A. Cohen

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New Art of the LeaderI am currently enrolled in an executive development program for future IT leaders, which runs for a few months with sessions designed to help future IT leaders network with each other and learn about leadership. One of the requirements of the course is to read the book New Art of the Leader by William A. Cohen.

New Art of the Leader is extremely well written and keeps you engaged throughout with its numerous examples taken from history going all the way back to Winston Churchill, Eisenhower, Grant, and Napoleon. The examples are perfect for the subject matter the author is trying to address and gives you real life illustrations of the principles he is talking about in action, in a way you can relate to them.

The book begins by outlining and explaining the eight universal laws of leadership that the author defines in describing the “combat model of leadership”. Military leadership is used as the primary illustration of these principles because warfare is the “worst case scenario” in which these principles and laws are practiced.

These laws consist of the following:

  1. Maintain Absolute Integrity
  2. Know Your Stuff
  3. Declare Your Expectations
  4. Show Uncommon Commitment
  5. Expect Positive Results
  6. Take Care of Your People
  7. Put Duty Before Self
  8. Get Out In Front

Once the eight laws are defined, the book goes through a number of interesting topics, with many illustrations of them from both business and military scenarios. The topics covered include (lifted straight from the table of contents):

  • How To Attract Followship
  • The Four Direct Influence Tactics
  • The Four Indirect Influence Tactics
  • Developing Self-Confidence as a Leader
  • Building An Organization Like A Winning Football Team
  • Building High Morale and Esprit de Corps
  • How to Coach Your Winning Team
  • Secrets of Motivation
  • Seven Steps To Taking Charge in Crisis Situations
  • Seven Actions To Develop Your Charisma
  • Leadership Problem Solving and Decision Making

Here’s the most interesting thing about this book. As you are reading through it, most of it seems like common sense. I spent a lot of time ruminating over how completely obvious these principles are as I walked through my experiences in leadership situations. Unfortunately, I also spent a lot of time noticing how hard these principles are to practice and how many times I had failed to do what, as I read the book, “seemed obvious”.

These are hard principles to live by. Many times you find yourself reacting contrary to the way a leader should react in order to ensure a successful team. If nothing else, this book calls your attention to where your shortfalls are as a leader and lifts these principles as a priority in your mind, making you more conscious of what your role is in regards to the people and organizations you are responsible for. It calls your attention to the fact, if nothing else, that your primary job is to value your people, build them up, and most importantly, go first. People follow those who lead by example – not those who lead by positional authority alone.

This book is extremely enlightening and a must read for those in leadership positions. For some, it could change your whole perspective on your job, calling your attention to things you may not have thought was a part of leading a team to success. For me, it called attention to things that I had already known intellectually, but many times fail to practice in every day life.

Both scenarios are an advantage to increasing your effectiveness as a leader. The illustrations from history and real life experiences of the author help in bringing these principles into something “real” that the reader can relate to, rather than a bunch of theory that seems either impossible or impractical to practice in real life. One can tell by the book that the author has done his research.

If your looking for a book that describes leadership in its base form, with real life examples to illustrate each point, this is the book for you. Grab it, read it, and take what the author has to say to heart. It very well could change your life and the lives of the people who work for you or with you at a peer level.

Googles Summer of Code

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It’s June and school is out. Every morning I’m watching the boys not get ready for school and have to admit I’m a little jealous. I think when we were younger we really took for granted the idea of summer vacation and I really miss it a lot.

Now, watching the boys sleep late and watch cartoons in the morning instead of rushing around to get to school apparently isn’t enough. Google also launched their Summer Of Code program at the end of May, an effort in which students on summer vacation can earn money by contributing to Open Source projects.

I think this is a really great thing for Google to do, and boy do I wish there was a Google around when I was a kid and had the whole summer to spend familiarizing myself and contributing to an Open Source project and being able to feel like I made a difference. What a great opportunity to do something great for the summer.

This is yet another example, in my opinion, of what a great company and contributor Google is. They could just be sitting back and doing what they do, but they choose to give back to the community by contributing money and time to help build the next generation of Open Source developers.

Back in the ‘old’ days, I had my pet projects that I did. Shareware programs that I created that I didn’t make money on (and never cared if I did), projects to add functionality to friends bulletin board systems, and things like that. All done for free and with no expectation of being paid. I did it for the sheer satisfaction of being done and knowing that I contributed something if someone happened to send me an email or the program was included in a freeware/shareware catalog or even reviewed by an independent shareware reviewer. Man, that was great.

Sometimes I really miss that. There’s nothing like coding for the sheer pleasure of it and working on something you are passionate about just because you are passionate about it — and being able to release it for others to use.

I hope a lot of kids take advantage of this opportunity. Once programming becomes a job, sometimes you have to work on things you just don’t care about, or you put extra hours in just to get something done that you don’t see the importance in doing. Sometimes you have to put everything you have into something you absolutely don’t believe in.

This is a great time in your life when you actually have the time and the opportunity to make a difference, no matter how small — and its a time you’ll never get back.

And this time you can get paid for it.

As for me, I will just continue to spend my free time trying to plug through Negotiating Skills for Managers and wishing I could join you.

20% Time At Google and Built To Last

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Found this on Slashdot a while back. Joe Beda talks about 20% time at Google and how it works.

Its really cool to see a company initiate this kind of environment from the top. In my experience, some of the best work that I have done and the work that, in my opinion, has provided the most benefit, is the work which was started in 20% of my home time due to lack of an official policy like this at work. Oddly, all the benefits that were later realized were not deemed important at the time the ideas were presented at work in many cases.

The idea of allowing innovation to happen by focusing on it as part of ones normal work life rather than having to spend “extra time at home” on it is not new. Jim Collins mentions a number of companies in his book Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Harper Business Essentials). There is a whole chapter called Try a Lot of Stuff And Keep What Works in which he outlines how companies such as 3M (with their 15% rule) stimulated innovation by encouraging technical people to spend time experimenting with new things in order to find new markets or new ideas to sell. These companies understood that in order to evolve you have to try a lot of different things and figure out which ones work and which ones do not. They also realized that the most effective place to get new ideas was from their technical staff — not the management team.

Unfortunately, many companies do not understand that in order for a new idea to be proven or disproven you have to have something people can see and touch. The only way to get that is to try it out and then show it to people. Similarly, benefits of a given process or automation effort is not able to be articulated as well as it can be demonstrated. In other words, you won’t be able to express the benefit until you can point to it and subsequently point to the waste that used to be there (or in many cases, the empty space that this new “thing” now fills) in order to really justify the “cost” of doing the work.

“Traditional” companies have a lot to learn from newer companies like Google and the histories of companies like those in Built to Last. Some of the greatest cost savings and “revenue generators” may come from just letting your people play with new ideas rather than contracting people to come up with new ideas for you. After all, who knows your business better than your people working in it?

One thing that Joe Beda points out in his article that is really important is that this is not just a “thing” to implement. It is a philosophy towards running your business. You don’t just do it, you live by it. If you just try to do it without making the philosophy a core part of who you are, you are likely to fail, as your core values tend to override all of your good intentions. It’s just human nature.

I find it really admirable that companies like Google are implementing the ideas laid out in the Good to Great and Built to Last books. I personally think these books are gems and would encourage managers and non-managers alike to read these books and to take the ideas expressed in them to heart. Once you are done reading them, look around for companies like Google who are actually implementing the ideas in the books and start asking yourself what would happen if you did the same thing.

You might be really surprised.

Why Business People Speak Like Idiots

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Why Business People Speak Like Idiots : A Bullfighter's GuideI just finished reading the book Why Business People Speak Like Idiots : A Bullfighter’s Guide by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky.

The book is an entertaining look at the communication styles of what they call “business idiots” and how to recognize them and, most importantly, why you should not use them. Just to give you an idea of the entertaining way in which the book was written, it was actually dedicated to Mr. T. The dedication reads "He said it best: Don’t gimme none of that jibba-jabba!".

While being extremely entertaining to read (unlike most business books), the book is extremely informative. The authors split the book into four parts to address the four “traps” that happen in business communication:

  1. The Obscurity Trap – This trap is explained as those who use a lot of empty words in order to communicate vaguely and avoid accountability. This trap is characterized by a lot of empty phrases like "best of breed", "synergy", "center of excellence", "innovation", "best practices" — all of those phrases that you hear in "kick off meetings" that fail to get to the point of why you are listening to the person you are talking to or cannot be defined as something concrete. The obscurity trap forces the listener to work really, really, hard to figure out exactly what is being talked about. It is also a mechanism that "business idiots" use to avoid accountability, as what they are communicating and whether they are responsible is hidden in the long diatribe you are currently listening to. Surprisingly at the end of the book where they have a glossary of these phrases, the phrase "go live" – a popular term in the SAP world – is defined as well. The meaning of " go live" as described in this glossary is "Captures the intense drama of using a new computer system on Monday. Also says a lot about whoever thinks this is an exciting event". This section is all about the disease in business today of indirect and obscure communication.
  2. The Anonymity Trap – This trap is all about being templatized. In the business world it is quite common to be "coached" around appearance and communication, so that you look and communicate like everyone else — you know, so you are "playing the game". The communication coaching usually centers around communicating in the way outlined in the obscurity trap which automatically ensures you are not committing to anything. It is frowned upon to speak your mind, as you have to blend in with the rest of the company — you know, be a "team player". This trap focuses around the sad use of Powerpoint and templates these days and the use of these communication tools and how they have effected both the vaguety (is that a word?) of communication and make you, well, forgettable.
  3. The Hard-Sell Trap – I’ve said for years that the best way to sell someone something is to let them decide without pressuring them. I’ve even written about my ideas of a good salesmen and the way I dispise the “hard sell” and will normally walk out of places without buying anything when people attempt to sell me something this way. This chapter confirms (to me anyway) that my ideas were valid. Enough said. Good chapter to read and digest.
  4. The Tedium Trap – This trap is all about conforming to the culture so much that you lose yourself in the process. Once you’ve hit the tedium trap, you might as well hang it up, because anything uniquely you is gone in your communication. This chapter explains the Tedium Trap and gives some good ideas as to how to get out of it and start bringing yourself back into your communication.

In the last chapter of the book, there is a paragraph that sticks out as why you should read it. I’ll quote it here:

“If you’ve made it this far, you probably don’t want to check your soul at the door. If you take anything away from this book, it should be that you don’t have to check anything at the door but the four traps. There is an amazing opportunity for you to rise above your peers, further your career, sell your ideas, and get what you want just by being yourself.”

That sums it up. I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot about why I have, in the past, gotten frustrated in business, especially when I have been told that my communication is "too direct".

I highly recommend reading this one if you are just starting out in the business world (although it’s not too late for those who are already up to their ears in it) so that you can see how important it is not to get caught up in trying to be "like everyone else" and that the unique thing you bring to business is — well — YOU.

It Takes A Lot More Than Attitude … To Lead a Stellar Organization

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It Takes a Lot More Than Attitude... To Lead a Stellar Organization I just finished reading It Takes a Lot More Than Attitude… To Lead a Stellar Organization by Stever Robbins.

This is a very straight ahead and easy to understand book that covers all of the key areas of leadership. I like to compare this book to other leadership books the way Total Cereal is compared to other cereals. You need at least 20 other books to get all of the information in this one book on leadership.

Some of the concepts I found most useful:

  • Defining the role of a CEO
  • Creating a Compelling Vision
  • Corporate Culture – Things both visible and invisible that define it (much having to do with the leaders behavior)
  • Differences between Management and Leadership
  • The Leaders Responsibility to Take Responsibility
  • The concept of Leadership as seduction – a pull vs. push model
  • Time Management

Chapter 24 was particularly interesting. It is subtitled “How Every Day Business Language Lets Us Engage in Deception”. The basic premise is that the way people in the business community communicate is many times a way of avoiding responsibility. Oddly enough, the next book my reading queue is one called Why Business People Speak Like Idiots : A Bullfighter’s Guide, which deals with the same subject. As I said, Stever covers a ton of information that you can find piecemeal in multiple books.

This is a great book to pick up and read to get a handle on the essentials of leadership and some practical (and doable) advice for handling situations you may run into. For those who do not have a lot of time to sit and read — don’t worry. This book moves very quickly due to Stevers great conversational writing style and short, succinct examples. There’s no long stories in here. Stever is very good at getting to the point and illustrating what he is trying to communicate.

Stever also writes the The Leadership Workshop, a column on the Harvard Business School site.