Tag Archives: Management

The End of Management

Posted on by

My favorite nuggets from a piece by WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray:

“Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.”

“The big companies failed, not necessarily because they didn’t see the coming innovations, but because they failed to adequately invest in those innovations. To avoid this problem, the people who control large pools of capital need to act more like venture capitalists, and less like corporate finance departments. They need to make lots of bets, not just a few big ones, and they need to be willing to cut their losses.”

“The new model will have to instill in workers the kind of drive and creativity and innovative spirit more commonly found among entrepreneurs. It will have to push power and decision-making down the organization as much as possible, rather than leave it concentrated at the top. Traditional bureaucratic structures will have to be replaced with something more like ad-hoc teams of peers, who come together to tackle individual projects, and then disband.”

Mr. Murry’s new book is “The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management.”

“A business model in decay”

Posted on by

“…the creation of content that will be supported by ads is a business model in decay. Abundance isn’t the problem; it’s that the advertisers are now in the content business themselves, and this is a rapidly-growing sector of the advertising world. Advertising is in a full-blown revolution, as company after company discovers they don’t need media the way they used to, because they’ve become media companies themselves.”

Terry Heaton says there is no “content business” anymore and that’s not the business we (his clients) were in anyway.

“We’ve always been in the advertising business, although it sure looked and felt like we were in the content business. Our bottom lines were/are determined by advertising, and that’s the real business we’re in. Media companies need to accept that and move on to finding creative ways to enable commerce in our markets.”

Since posting the excerpts above, I’ve been remembering my days in small-market radio during the ’70s and early ’80s. I was an announcer and program director, but never in sales. We thought of ourselves as “talent.”

It was clearly understood by us that the advertising was the means to the end of creating the information and entertainment (mostly recorded music). We had to pay for all this wonderful stuff we were doing.

What the sales people believed –an management knew– was the news and music and all the rest was merely a way to attract ears for the commercials we sold to advertisers. We were not in the music business or news business… we were in the advertising business.

If you doubt that, go back and listen to this interview with Congressman Paul C. Jones to built the radio station. Or read the recollections of Joe Bankhead, who was one of the stations first salesmen. It was clearly about serving the businesses in the area. They were more than willing to put on any kind of programming that would attact enough listeners to satisfy a sponsor.

How flat is your organization?

Posted on by
Reply

This interview with Cristobal Conde, the president and CEO of SunGard, is a good example of why I’ll be willing to pay for the New York Times, when that day comes (couple of weeks?). The Q & A covers several very basic and interesting areas and I encourage you to read the entire piece. Here are a few bits to whet your appetite:

“You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

On leadership:

“I think too many bosses think that their job is to be the leader, and I don’t. By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.

On micromanagement:

“If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave. If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.

Instead, the trick is to get truly world-class people working directly for you so you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing them. I think there’s very little value I can add to my direct reports. So I try to spend time with people two and three levels below because I think I can add value to them.

PowerPoint:

“I actively despise how people use PowerPoint as a crutch. I think PowerPoint can be a way to cover up sloppy thinking, which makes it hard to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas. I would much rather have somebody write something longhand, send it in ahead of the meeting and then assume everybody’s read it, and then you start talking, and let them defend it.

Advice to young people:

“My advice to young people is always, along the way, have a sales job. You could be selling sweaters. You could be selling ice cream on the street. It doesn’t matter. Selling something to somebody who doesn’t want to buy it is a lifelong skill. I can tell when somebody comes in for an interview and they’ve never had any responsibility for sales.”

Print this interview and slide it under the bosses door. Wear gloves and don’t get caught.

“The Bad Managment Stimulus”

Posted on by

The always brilliant Scott Adams on entrepreneurship:

“The Dilbert Principle observes that in the modern economy, the least capable people are promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work. It’s hard to design software, but relatively easy to run staff meetings. This creates a situation where you have more geniuses reporting to morons than at any time in history. In that sort of environment you’d expect the geniuses to be looking for a way out, even if Plan B has a low chance of success.

Big companies with bad managers are the ideal breeding ground for entrepreneurs. Employees are exposed to a wide variety of business disciplines, and can avail themselves of excellent company-paid training and outside education. When you add broad skill development to the inevitability of eventually getting a moron for a boss, thanks to frequent internal reorganizations, it’s no wonder that big companies spray entrepreneurs into the environment like the fountains at Bellagio.”

Mr. Adams’ book, The Dilbert Principle is the last management book I read and gave me the courage to begin planning my escape from management.

Tribes by Seth Godin

Posted on by

Picture_1I’ve read most of Seth Godin’s books and I’m a daily reader of his blog. But his latest book, Tribes, really spoke to me. When I read, I highlight or underline, make notes in the margins and, in recent years, post my favorite parts here.

I struggled to find one pull that captures the idea behind Tribes and decided on this one. Lots more after the jump. Continue reading →

Obama’s management style sounds familiar

Posted on by

This NYT story reminded me one of my favorite management stories (The Cleanest Tastee Freeze in Town). A couple of grafs in particular:

“No state was more important to his candidacy than Iowa, but when (Senator Obama) arrived there for campaign visits he stopped aides who tried to give detailed accounts of developments.”

“I’d get in the car with him and talk a mile a minute,” recalled Paul Tewes, who was the campaign’s state director. Mr. Tewes recalled that on the candidate’s fifth visit to the state, Mr. Obama interrupted one of his detailed updates, saying: “You know what, Paul? All I want from you is for you to do your best, and I trust you and you know what you’re doing.”

In the years that I reported to Clyde Lear, I heard him say (to me and others) almost those exact words, more times than I can count. I’ve heard many talk the talk in this regard, but only a few that could walk the walk. Nice to know Senator O is one of them.

Newsletters and blogs

Posted on by

In the last 4 or 5 years, I’ve had many occasions to talk with clients about their monthly/quarterly newsletter. Usually in the context of, "We want to email these suckers to everyone and (somehow) make them read them."

I try to persuade them that a blog is a better tool but requires a shift in perspective. More on that in a bit.

Here are Three Truths I’ve discovered about newsletters:

  1. Managers love newsletters.
  2. The people who have to "write" newsletters hate them.
  3. The people who receive newsletters are bored by them and –for the most part– never read them.

Why do managers love newsletters?

Managers love newsletters because they don’t have to write them… but do get to proof (several times) every word and every piece of clip art.

Managers see the newsletter as benign propaganda. A great tool for recognizing workers who put in a bunch of extra hours on a project, for no extra money.

Newsletters say "we are one big happy family and here’s what we’ve been up to since the last newsletter."

Why to the people who write the newsletters hate them?

Because they don’t really get to write them. They have no real say about the content and they can’t/don’t try for a human voice because it isn’t really coming from them. It’s from the boss (although she doesn’t write them either) or some middle manager who proofed all the life and fun out of the thing before letting it out the door.

Pulling together a newsletter every quarter (or every month, god forbid!) is the worst kind of cat herding. They beg and plead with department heads to submit something for the newsletter and they’re always late, so the "editor" is scrambling right up to deadline to pull the thing together. And it reads like it.

But, most of all, they hate the newsletter because they know that few, if any, read the damned thing.

Why do the recipients rarely read newsletters?

First and foremost, there is almost never anything "new" in them (see #2 above). In today’s wired, mobile, always connected world… something that happened 4 or 5 weeks ago is ancient history. And everyone knows that management would never allow anything really interesting to find it’s way into the newsletter anyway.

Why is a blog better?

To understand why a well written and maintained blog is a better communication tool, let’s look through the other end of the telescope.

Readers like blogs for all the reasons they hate newsletters. They have news. Usually every day. They’re written by real, live, flesh-and-blood people. With opinions and perspective and insights. They care about what they’re writing about, so I care too. And because I care, I subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed get the latest post when and where I want it, while it’s still fresh and relevant.

The person writing the blog loves doing it. They care about the subject and their passion and interest comes across in every post. They’ve been empowered and entrusted to communicate with their readers and they take the responsibility seriously. And because they post whenever some new or interesting comes along, it takes less time (or seems to). No tedious Page Maker layout or agonizing html hassles. Today’s blogging tools make posting as simple as an email.

Which brings us back to the manager. Why does he/she hate and fear the blog? In my experience it’s all about control. Specifically, the loss thereof. With a newsletter, the boss can edit and re-edit and edit again. Until he gets the perfect sanitized, homogenized, safe-for-all-pay-grades piece of corporate-speak.

Blogs don’t work that way. Blogs are living, breathing things. Which is one of the reasons they are fun to read. And so damned scary to "the people in charge." What if somebody writes something that gets us in trouble?

These days, I don’t waste a lot of energy trying to sell blogs over newsletters. When a client says, show me how to do this blog thing… I’m happy to show ’em the ropes. But if I see that they really aren’t there, I encourage them to go back to the newsletter. And I always get a mental image of a C130 flying low over a village, dropping leaflets ("Put down your weapons. We are here to help you"). The villagers never read these but they hang on to them because you never know when you’re gonna need some extra paper.

Toxic Employees

Posted on by

“Toxic employees are usually afraid, poorly managed and underappreciated. They can rarely be bullied into changing their behavior, often because they themselves are bullies. Managers can hire the non-toxic, re-assign the toxic and be really clear with themselves that they’re willing to pay almost any price to keep toxic employees away from everyone else. And if toxic employees appears to be a pattern, my bet is that it’s your fault, not the employees.”

— Seth Godin

Mark Cuban: “Blogging is personal, traditional media is corporate.”

Posted on by

“Traditional media has become almost exclusively corporate while blogging remains almost exclusively personal. (People in traditional media) get hired for a specific job and they have to do that job. They get hired by a corporation that is most likely public, which means their senior management , the people they ultimately report to, have to put getting the stock price up above all else. That is really what blogging vs traditional media in 2006 has come down to. Bloggers drive blogs, share price drives traditional media. Blogging is personal, traditional media is corporate. Which is exactly why blog readership is going up, while traditional media is consolidating, if not contracting. Traditional media goes to work, bloggers live their work.”

I encourage you to read Mr. Cuban’s full post. Say what you will, Mark Cuban has always been about five minutes ahead on the old “Information Highway.” And he understands blogging as only a blogger can. [via Scripting.com]

You = Your iTunes

Posted on by

Tom Peters says his #1 belief about management is: You = Your Calendar.

“All we have is our time. The way we distribute it is our ‘strategic plan,’ our ‘vision,’ our ‘values.’ Period. So how’d you spend your precious time today? Tell me, and I’ll tell you what you actually care about — it’s simple and unerring.”

Maybe. But I don’t want to be my calendar. Nobody has to guess what bloggers care about. It’s all right here. But if I weren’t a blogger, you could look at my iPod and get a sense of who I am. In fact, here’s what you can do in lieu of a memorial service for smays: Plug my nano into a good sound system…put it on shuffle… and let it play until the battery runs down. Friends can stop by for a few minutes and listen.