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One of our main recommendations is to engage more frequently in thoughtful action. Spend less time just contemplating and talking about organizational problems. Taking action will generate experience from which you can learn.
Great companies get remarkable performance from ordinary people. Not-so-great companies take talented people and manage to lose the benefits of their talent, insight, and motivation.
It is interesting how uncommon common sense is in its implementation.
most of the knowledge that is actually used and useful is transferred by the stories people tell to each other, by the trials and errors that occur as people develop knowledge and skill, by inexperienced people watching those more experienced, and by experienced people providing close and constant coaching to newcomers.
Kentucky, describes it as having three levels: techniques, systems, and philosophy.
What is important is not so much what we do—the specific people management techniques and practices—but why we do it—the underlying philosophy and view of people and the business that provides a foundation for the practices.
Attempting to copy just what is done—the explicit practices and policies—without holding the underlying philosophy is at once a more difficult task and an approach that is less likely to be successful.
Soldiers engage in staged battles, drills, and other realistic simulations designed to have them observe, perform, and repeat the actions they will need to carry out in real combat.
Thus, at one level, the answer to the knowing-doing problem is deceptively simple: Embed more of the process of acquiring new knowledge in the actual doing of the task and less in formal training programs that are frequently ineffective. As one comprehensive study of the development of executives concluded, “One learns to be a leader by serving as a leader.”44
In surgery, there is an old, nearly true saying describing how a resident learns a new procedure: “Hear one, see one, do one.”45
ONE OF THE MAIN BARRIERS to turning knowledge into action is the tendency to treat talking about something as equivalent to actually doing something about it.
The leaders had forgotten an important truism in organizations: A decision, by itself, changes nothing.
At this firm, recruiting is “seen as a second tier responsibility.” People who are seen as having real economic value do transactions, not recruiting. This certainly does not send a message of respect for the analysts the firm tries to recruit.
BHP is great in planning but poor in operations and financial performance. In contrast, the AES Corporation, which builds power plants intended to last 40 years, has no central planning or strategy function. By reacting with “disciplined opportunism” to opportunities as they present themselves, the firm has grown at a prodigious rate in what is often considered to be a relatively stable industry.
Existing research on the effectiveness of formal planning efforts is clear: Planning is essentially unrelated to organizational performance.
Appearing smart is mostly accomplished by sounding smart; being confident, articulate, eloquent, and filled with interesting information and ideas; and having a good
She summarized her findings by noting, “Only pessimism sounds profound. Optimism sounds superficial.”15
If all that has happened is that those with the courage to actually propose something have been devastated in the process, the organization will be filled with clever put-down artists and with inactivity. This situation arises because the people are so clever, and so determined to appear clever, that they will succeed at critiquing everything to death.
Whenever an informal dominance order establishes itself, we can usually work out the rank of the individuals involved by measuring the length of time that they are allowed to talk. As a rule, the most influential person will be allowed the most talking time.... On a busy occasion, those at the bottom of the hierarchy are likely to find that they can barely get a word in edgewise. An individual who talks more than others feel he deserves will gradually be ignored.18
My general concern about class participation increased throughout the week.... My urgency was heightened by the fact that grades (and First Year Honors! And McKinsey! ...) depended so heavily on in-class commentary.... The opportunity to speak was such a precious commodity that most people were terrified about blowing it by saying something shallow, repetitive, or ... stupid when they were finally called on.19
So, one can be a plant manager and make, depending on the firm, the industry, and the size of the plant, between $80,000 and $100,000. Or one can be in the business of
giving advice to the plant manager and make about twice as much. Not only does this pose an interesting career choice, it sends a message about the value the economy currently places on being able to actually run something compared with being able to talk about running something.
Players and coaches talk about what plays they should design or practice and what new coaching techniques or exercise regimens they should implement, but they often don’t get around to doing these things.
“I always know what time it is. It is always NOW. And NOW is when you should do it.”20
Talk is also valued because, as noted earlier, the quantity and “quality” of talk can be assessed immediately, but the quality of leadership or management capability, the ability to get things...
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If I must appraise you more rapidly than I can reliably assess how well you are actually doing in terms of job performance, one of the few things I can use in my assessment of you is how competent you make yourself sound.
Few senior executives would describe their strategy as Dennis Bakke, the CEO of the enormously successful global independent electric power producer AES, did: “We try a bunch of stuff, we see what works, and we call that our strategy.”
You’re Likely to Find Talk Substituting for Action When • No follow-up is done to ensure that what was said is actually done • People forget that merely making a decision doesn’t change anything • Planning, meetings, and report writing become defined as “action” that is valuable in its own right, even if it has no effect on what people actually do • People believe that because they have said it and it is in the mission statement, it must be true and it must be happening in the firm • People are evaluated on how smart they sound rather than on what they do • Talking a lot is mistaken for doing
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“actual part, actual place, actual situation,”22
Simple, clear, logical principles can be communicated more readily and can be more easily implemented in a consistent fashion than complex or vague ones.
Have career systems that bring people into senior leadership positions who actually have an intimate knowledge of the organization’s work processes because they have performed them themselves and have grown up with or been promoted from within the organization • Have a culture that values simplicity and does not reward unnecessary complexity—a culture in which calling something “common sense” is a compliment rather than an insult, and in which the language used is simple, clear, and direct • Use language that is action oriented and, even more important, have follow-up processes to ensure that
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Sometimes when I talk to people about the lessons the turnaround taught us, they say, “Well, Greg, those seem simple enough.” ... Saving Continental wasn’t brain surgery. The actions to revive a moribund company usually aren’t.... The fact is, you can’t afford to think too much during a turnaround.25
Rhetoric that mobilizes action generally has some combination of the following elements: “An imaginative vision of the future, a realistic portrayal of the present, and a selective description of the past which can serve as a contrast to the future,”28
Reframe the task from being one of merely finding all the problems or pitfalls for a particular course of action to one in which the task is not only to uncover problems but also to solve them. This reframing transforms talk about how something that may be useful and necessary can’t be done into talk about how to do it. An example illustrates the process.
High level of achievement and contribution • Conducting business with uncompromising integrity • Achieving common objectives through teamwork
Professor Barry Staw from the U.C. Berkeley Business School has shown that, at least initially, people and organizations respond to problems by clinging even more tightly to what they know how to do best and have done in the past. At the same time, these external threats cause people to resist trying new things; even when they do try, their anxiety makes it difficult for them to learn. Staw calls this the “threat-rigidity effect,” as threats and difficulties cause people and firms to do what they have done repeatedly in the past and, therefore, to engage in even more “mindless”
This pattern of creating physical, structural, and psychological barriers that make it difficult for people to act on the basis of history and difficult for outsiders to create pressure for following precedent, is a hallmark of new organizations that are not bound by history.
And, you might think that firms would recognize the commonsense wisdom expressed in a line from Otis Redding’s song “Sitting by the Dock of the Bay” on the need for fewer, focused measurements: “Can’t do what ten people tell me to do, so I guess I’ll remain the same.” Yet, firm after firm fails to implement these well-known and commonsense principles.
“measures are simple, visual indicator systems to operationalize the goals so everyone can tell at every moment whether or not their actions are producing the desired results.”20
Too many leaders confuse feedback with paperwork. “Filling out a form is inspection, not feedback,” says Kelly Allan ... “History has taught us that relying on inspections is costly, improves nothing for very long, and makes the organization less competitive.”29
Competition will mean the disappearance of the lazy and incompetent, be they workers, industrialists, or distributors. Competition promotes progress. Competition determines who will be the leader.... It is a hard taskmaster.... If some way could be found so that competition could be eliminated from life, the result would be disastrous. Any nation and any people disappear if life becomes too easy. There is no danger from a hard life as all history shows.3
