Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1338

Are Most CEOs Too Old to Innovate?

How to Improve Your Business Writing

A List of Goals Is Not a Strategy

What High Performers Want at Work

The 7 Laws of Regenerative Enterprises

Managing baffles us with its complexity. Leaders looking to improve managing do not know where to start, much less where to finish. So even though the gales of creative destruction continually threaten their enterprises, they do not necessarily see radically revising their managing as the obvious solution. But that’s exactly what their enterprises need.

In his recent HBR article Gary Hamel described traditional-enterprise ailments as being inertial, incremental, and insipid. He goes on to point out, “Until we challenge our foundational beliefs, we won’t be able to build organizations that are substantially more capable than the ones we have today.” How true! But it’s hard to challenge current beliefs when managing itself remains a bit of a mystery. For too long now, we have gone without an actionable framework for managing that guides us in shaping enterprises toward specific ends so very needed – such as vitalization rather than optimization, constant regeneration over episodic transformation, and internal creative destruction versus preservation of stability.

The host of stories researchers continue to crank out for business leaders will never tell them what they need to know in order to break out of their management malaise. Management advisors are self-defeating when they extract principles from the practices they study, fooling us by pretending that correlation equals causation. And as readers we are also saps for well-crafted stories, pretending they make sense of it all regardless of their underlying truthfulness.

Until now managing’s design, innovation, and transformation has not been effectively carried out because no framework made sense of it. No wonder business leaders have not charged forth boldly to develop and adopt new and better ways of managing. No wonder the long hard slog through the wilderness of finding a new way of managing continues. No wonder so few companies truly thrive, and rarely for longer than a decade or so.

Leaders today need a better approach. We need first to understand enterprises, along with the humanity and activities that make them up. And this understanding must be developed in light of (1) economic value creation – the primary function of a business enterprise – and (2) accepting the challenge that an enterprise ought to be able to thrive forever, if it chooses to. (For if your enterprise does not plan on thriving forever, expect it to fail eventually.)

Identifying the aspects of value creation from this simple real-world perspective yields the following comprehensive framework, with its clear answer for each major question:

Humanity:

Who creates value for the enterprise? The workers who choose employment in the work offered by the enterprise.
Why do people come together to create value within the enterprise? To satisfy personal needs while meeting others’ needs.

Activities:

Where does the enterprise create value? In enterprise-filled ecosystems.
How does the enterprise create value? Through capabilities of people and activities.
What value does the enterprise create? Economic offerings, bought by customers, which satisfy human needs through the businesses it establishes.
When does the enterprise create value? In its decisions that operate, form, reform, and perpetuate the enterprise.

The Enterprise:

In What Way do these aspects collectively create value? When integrated and unified.

So let’s formulate this collection of questions and answers as seven laws of managing. While we do not have space to develop them here – as we did from first principles, not from anecdotes and stories – you will see their connection to the aspects of value creation outlined above.

Humanity:

The Law of Potential: Only the enterprise that unleashes potential, through meeting its workers’ innate needs, induces human engagement to its fullest.
The Law of Meaning: Only the enterprise that infuses meaning, through a shared purpose, effects alignment among fully engaged workers.

Activities:

The Law of Creativity: Only the enterprise that liberates creativity, through applying intuition and exercising free will, regularly discovers opportunities for surprising wealth-producing innovations.
The Law of Learning: Only the enterprise that invigorates learning – through exploring, exploiting, and orchestrating – generates the knowledge necessary to persistently create new value among infinite possibilities.
The Law of Humanity: Only the enterprise that enriches humanity, through the knowledge embedded in its business activities, creates offerings of unquestionable economic value.
The Law of Vitality: Only the enterprise that attains vitality, through its incessant destructive recreation, produces the wealth necessary to survive.

The Enterprise:

The Law of Coherence: Only the enterprise that sustains coherence in all its aspects, through ongoing orchestration, regenerates itself to thrive indefinitely.

The beauty of this system of laws of managing is that it leaves nothing out. They collectively address leadership, management, and governance. They provide the lens for sorting out the practices that lead to mediocrity from those that leading to thriving. They enable workers to reach their fullest potential as they perform in every aspect of enterprise value creation. Adhering to these laws produces a regenerative enterprise, an enterprise destructively recreating itself in the face of the creative destruction of its ecosystems. In following these laws, meaning & orchestration become the hallmark of managing, finally supplying the replacement for the old command & control that everyone knows doesn’t work, but that so many still practice in one way or another.

Accepting these laws opens the door for executives to challenge and replace the current managing practices holding back the vitality of their enterprises. You now have the framework required to tackle transforming managing with confidence. You can now develop, retain, and eliminate practices in accord with the laws. The regenerative enterprise – one that thrives forever – now becomes a real possibility.

An Easy Way to Make Your Employees Happier

To Motivate Employees, Help Them Do Their Jobs Better

Why Citi Got Rid of Assigned Desks

It may seem odd to use a dystopian world as a model for an office workspace, but that’s just what Citi did.

Susan Catalano, Citi’s Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of HR, was reading the Divergent series — about a future society broken up into five social factions cultivating different virtues — around the same time she was asked to assist with an open floor plan for the HR group’s new workspace and the book influenced the end product. “We created what we call neighborhoods — a compensation neighborhood, a learning and development neighborhood, etc. — to help individuals feel they ‘owned’ their space, even though no one has a designated workspace and no one has a private office,” she explains.

Workspace is an emerging dimension of what the Families and Work Institute has identified as an effective workplace. The physical environment, if done right, can foster elements of an effective workplace like collaboration and autonomy, work-life fit and opportunities for learning. However, as many of the articles in the special section on office space in the October issue of HBR makes clear, this is easier said than done.

The issues that Catalano and her team faced in designing the new space ranged from minor — Where do employees put their personal items such as knapsacks or handbags? How do we stop people from speaking too loudly? to major — How can we be open and collaborative if people are separated by specialties?

The space is a pilot in an initiative called CitiWorks, which is meant to optimize the company’s workspaces. It addressed two problems. First, people had been scattered in different offices throughout the metropolitan area, creating a fractured feeling. Second, an internal study showed that some offices, like most workplaces, were underutilized because of travel, vacation, illness and flexible working arrangements.

The end result for the HR team is a consolidated space in Long Island City — an entire floor that overlooks New York City. The periphery of the space includes rows of workstations, each with large double-screened computers. In the center of the spaces are larger conference rooms, smaller meeting rooms, and private spaces for focused work. There are cozy seating areas scattered throughout the space as well as areas where people can meet or have lunch together.

The design intends for no one to have an assigned desk and there are only 150 spaces for 200 people. For those who were initially resistant to losing their assigned space, Catalano says, “it was hard to argue with real data that the old space was underutilized.” Employees have a locker where they put their personal belongings, and then they set up in the morning where they want to work. There are sanitized wipes on every desk so that the shared workstations are left clean. The entire space is “green” so the window shades, lights and temperature are programmed to respond to usage and conditions, such as the amount of sunlight streaming into the space.

Despite the beautiful space, old habits die hard. Karyn Likerman, Head of Inclusion Programs and Work-Life Strategies, admits, “Even though the space is completely unassigned seating, I typically sit in the same place each day and so do most of my colleagues.”

The color-coded “neighborhoods” are in smaller sections of the larger space, enabling a sense of belonging, and also fostering a healthy sense of identity.

One of the biggest benefits of the more-open space is innovation. People talk to others whom they might not have known before and as a result, are coming up with new ideas. Likerman relays one example:

We have a new colleague, who came in thinking his job would be mostly focused on affirmative action reporting and auditing. A conversation with someone who sits on the other side of the floor in recruiting got him thinking about how to involve our employee networks in diversity recruiting. After that conversation, he rolled his chair over to me, since I oversee our networks and we came up with a new, innovative, and more formal recruiting approach to expand the network’s involvement.

 Other benefits include a greater sense of fun and camaraderie. Now more people eat lunch together, instead of alone at their desks. The office neighborhoods have started planning fun, informal events — breakfasts or Friday afternoon mixers. “Many of these are people I have worked with for years but I never met them in person. Now, we get a chance to connect on a more personal level, and it’s fun,” says Likerman. And the smaller footprint has saved millions of dollars in Citi’s HR budget.

To be clear, the new space alone didn’t create these results. The workspace has to be carefully managed — as does the transition to it. Here are some of the lessons learned from Citi’s experience:

Use technology that supports the space. Among the most important features is a white noise machine that evens out the sounds so that the workspace is quiet enough for people to be able to concentrate. In addition, everyone is given headsets to allow for hands-free talking. When employees log in to their computers, their desktops and phone numbers follow them.


Create new norms. Susan Catalano and the CitiWorks team are working on a playbook that lays out guidelines for how to best work in the new space. At the same time, they know that the playbook will evolve and change, as people get used to the space. 


Allow people to personalize. When groups wanted to personalize their neighborhoods, Catalano didn’t stand in their way. One neighborhood showcases a collection of snow globes that an employee has gathered from colleagues’ travels. The Diversity team displays the awards Citi has received, which is a great source of pride for the group.

 

Emphasize problem solving. When issues arise, Catalano emphasizes that everyone, not just leaders, are involved in addressing the kinks. For example, Likerman says that people used to call or email each other even if their offices were next door. Now they simply turn around and talk. Despite the white noise machines, booming voices can sometimes cause problems. “We need to enable people to feel comfortable to remind others that they are speaking too loudly,” she says.

While neighborhoods have helped the HR group, the new setup is a work in progress. Catalano and her team remain focused on creating neighborhoods that give different groups a sense of belonging while ensuring they don’t inhibit a fully open and collaborative workspace. “I think,” Catalano surmises, “over time people will continue to come together as the neighborhood lines blur.”

Setting the Record Straight on Job Interviews

You scored a job interview, and now it’s time to get ready. Before you start prepping, you have to consider whose advice to take. Should you believe your colleague when she says that you have to wear a suit even though you’re interviewing at a tech start-up? Or do you trust your friend who says, “Just be yourself”? There’s so much conflicting advice out there, it can be hard to decide on the best approach for you. So we asked readers (and our own editors) what advice they hear most often and then talked with two experts to get their perspectives on whether the conventional wisdom holds up in practice and against research.

 1. “Always wear a suit.”

“In some ways, Britain is more formal but this advice has gone out the window even in the UK,” says John Lees, a UK-based career strategist and author of How to Get the Job You Love and Job Interviews: Top Answers to Tough Questions. Wearing a suit when everyone at the office is dressed more casually sends the message: I don’t understand your culture. This is especially true in laid-back Silicon Valley, says John Sullivan, an HR expert, professor of management at San Francisco State University, and author of 1000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent. “If you go to an interview at Facebook in a suit, you’re going to look like an idiot,” he says.

You want to overdress but only by a little. “Wear one or two notches smarter than what people wear in the office,” says Lees. It’s much easier now than it’s ever been to find out how formal or informal an office is. Go to the company’s website. Look on glassdoor.com or vault.com. Sullivan says you can even go as far as calling the receptionist or an intern and asking how people dress. “If necessary, bring an extra set of clothes and then walk in and ask the receptionist, ‘Is this going to embarrass me?’ If he or she says yes, then go out to your car and change.”

This is just one part of better understanding your potential employer. “You shouldn’t go near a job interview without decoding the organization, the people you’re talking to, the hidden agenda of what the job is about. Definitely don’t go into an interview without having spoken to someone who works there and finding out what kinds of people they like to hire,” says Lees.

2. “Be yourself.”

This one is particularly irksome to Lees: “The is a useless piece of advice. It’s like saying, ‘sit there and look handsome’.” Sullivan agrees: “That’s a good way to not get hired.”

It’s important to remember that “a job interview isn’t a natural slice of life, it’s a performance,” says Lees. Sullivan says you should demonstrate that you can give the company what it needs: “You want apples, I’ve got apples. You want oranges, I’ve got oranges.”

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be authentic, nor should you lie. But it’s your job as the candidate to figure out what the hiring manager is looking for and tell a story that shows you meet those requirements. Sullivan encourages candidates to figure out in advance what questions the interviewer will ask (again this can be easy using the internet and social media) and what answers they’re looking for. Then write scripted responses. “Don’t memorize them but know what you’ll say,” he advises. He also suggests that you practice by videotaping yourself to see how you come across.

The first 90 seconds of the interview are particularly crucial. “The myth is that you have 45-60 minutes to get to know each other. The reality is that first impression matters most. And it’s almost content free. It doesn’t have to do with skills and experience and knowledge; it’s about whether you look like a good colleague,” says Lees. Studies have shown over and over (see this one and this one and Malcolm Gladwell’s findings in Blink) how quickly we make judgments about people and how important it is to make a good first impression. So don’t fool yourself into thinking you can just be who you are. You need to nail those first few seconds by carrying the right props (think sleek briefcase or purse, not disheveled backpack), sitting in the right place (across from the interviewer not next to her), and handling the handshake properly (make it firm). And don’t forget that you need to be good at small talk too. As you walk from reception to the interview room, you want to be sure you “talk naturally, in a normal speed of voice, look someone in the eye, and exchange pleasantries,” says Lees. “You are trying to create the impression of someone who is comfortable with themselves.”

3. “Remember they’re not just interviewing you. You’re also interviewing them.”

Generally speaking, this doesn’t really hold up. “It’s not a conversation. One side is scared to death,” says Sullivan. And Lee concurs: “I see this piece of advice a lot and I really don’t like it. It encourages lack of preparation and passivity. When you’re in the interview room you should act and behave as if the is the only job you want.”

But Sullivan also says that the approach can sometimes work in certain settings. “I call it the Joe Montana interview where you ask, ‘Why should I play for your team?’ And it’s ok to say ‘I’m in demand’ but then you have to be able to back it up.” This is a tricky thing to pull off though so it’s probably better to focus on demonstrating what you can give the employer rather than expecting them to sell you on the role. Generally, that’s the power dynamic in the room. Though it can shift, depending on the industry, the region, and the health of the economy. Recent surveys show that power has slipped to the applicant.” In fact, a 2014 survey of recruiters showed that 81% felt that today’s job market is driven by candidates, not employers.

4. “When asked what your greatest weakness is, give one that’s really a strength.”

“Don’t admit you have weaknesses” is bad advice. Claiming that you’re “too much of a perfectionist” or “too passionate” has become a cliché – your interviewer has probably heard this many times. This not only means you may come across as not 100% genuine; it also means you’re missing an opportunity to demonstrate self-awareness and a willingness to adapt. Sullivan says that you want your answer to follow this logic: “I, like everyone else, have weaknesses. But unlike everyone else, I find them, recognize them, and fix them.” Of course you don’t want to admit a weakness that would really count against you. Avoid saying something like, “I really don’t read people well.” But point out something that you’re genuinely working on. “That will show that you’re able to learn and develop,” says Lees.

5. “Don’t talk about money until you have an offer in hand.”

You don’t want to start talking about money until the time is right. “Companies don’t hire people who put money — or vacation time ­— first,” says Sullivan. “They want to know what you’re going to contribute not what you want.” If you can, delay asking or talking about money or benefits until you have an offer. “The best time to talk salary is when you have leverage, and you have leverage when they’ve fallen in love with you,” says Lees.

Of course, the hiring manager or recruiter may ask you about salary requirements. This is not an easy question to dodge, even though that might be in your best interest. Lees advises candidates to prepare short, professional responses and several lines of defense. First, have a general answer ready, something like “My requirements are negotiable”. If pushed, be prepared to go deeper and say something along the lines of: “This is roughly what I’m currently making but the job you’re interviewing me for is obviously different.” And, then, have a third answer ready if the interviewer pushes you further. Lees likes this kind of answer: “Well, I’m being interviewed for jobs paying…” He says it’s effective because “it’s a projection of where you see yourself in the marketplace.”

6. “Don’t ever admit you’ve been fired before.”

The good news is that employers’ attitudes toward switching jobs has changed. In fact, 55% of employers in a recent survey said they have hired a job-hopper and 32% said they have come to expect candidates to move jobs frequently. The bad news is that hiring managers still don’t want another manager’s rejects. So if you were fired or laid off, Sullivan advises avoiding the “f-word” if you can. “Your response should be short, uncomplicated, and as positive as possible,” says Lees. You can say “I didn’t expect to be there forever” or “I learned a lot on that job and then I moved on to the next opportunity”. And be sure not to criticize your former employer. That just reflects badly on you. Of course, if you’re asked directly if you’ve been fired, you have to be truthful. “The trick is to move on to the present by saying something like, ‘I was lucky because it gave me a chance to…’ and then bring the focus back to the present,” says Lees.

 

Interviews are rarely fun for anyone involved. Hiring managers don’t like to conduct them, candidates don’t like going to them, and in reality, they don’t seem to help to either side. “Interviews are horrible predicting devices,” says Sullivan, pointing to research by Google and academics that shows that interview performance wasn’t linked to job performance. That’s why many firms are moving toward testing candidates by giving them actual work to perform. “It’s like hiring a chef. Do you want to talk to him or taste his cooking?” says Sullivan.

But unfortunately, the interview is probably here to stay — at least until someone comes up with a better alternative. In the meantime, it’s your job as an applicant to recognize the process is flawed but do your best to shine anyway.

 

For more on interviewing, see:

Stand Out in Your Interview

Signs That You’re a Micromanager