Unintended Consequences

In business, we often talk about actions we take and the “unintended consequences” of those actions. That phrase is a curious one because, in many instances, it’s really just another way of saying, “we didn’t think it all the way through” without, you know, actually admitting that we didn’t think something all the way through.

The user of this phrase is seeking to deflect or avoid responsibility for his or her actions, or for a poor result. In some organizations, unfortunately, this skill is actually more important than getting work done.

Mastery, particularly in communicating, seeks to anticipate, understand and address all the consequences, intended and unintended. 

So let’s just call unintended consquences what they are — errors, shortcuts, and cheap leadership.

Update on Thursday, December 22, 2011 by Joe Fusco

Ohhhh, here’s a deliciously mealy-mouthed companion phrase, uttered by the New York Racing Association after it was found to have overcharged bettors by $8.6 million: “NYRA, in a press release, called the incident an ‘unintentional oversight’” [italics mine].

Yes, We Have No Messages

Are you or your organization, company or political candidate looking for a “message”? Are you feeling the need to “get the message out”? Are you sitting around in meetings, facing a crisis or problem, asking, “what’s our message?”

Well, stop it.

There is no discernable market among human beings — employees, customers, the public — for “messages.” Nobody is looking or hungry for messages. People want the truth.

People want a relationship. They want to be talked to honestly, with humility and without agenda or “spin.”

Organizations love the illusion of control. Crafting a “message” implies you have control over what people will think and how they’ll react. You don’t. The only control you have is whether or not you’re honest, humble, love or care about people, and whether or not you’re living your values, beliefs and your mission.

The worst message is half a truth.

Cheap Leadership, Continued

As a company — any organization, really — grows larger, it seeks to maintain order, control and predictability in the “cheapest” way possible: by building a bureaucracy, a mechanistic system of rules, processes, procedures and policies.

At this point it has essentially bought into a lie — that it’s not possible to have order and clarity by trusting, motivating and inspiring people to organize themselves to solve problems at a high level of mastery to deliver the results the organizations wants and needs.

Or, even if it believes it’s possible, it also usually believes it’s too hard, messy, complex and unpredictable.

In other words, too costly.

We Are Imperfect People

Human nature is flawed. We are not gods, or God, by any stretch of the imagination.

And so we drag our imperfections and our flaws to our work, our relationships, and our organizations. They show up in how we treat each other, and treat ourselves. They show up in the decisions we make. They guide what we value, and what we dismiss. 

I see a lot of leaders struggle to hide or lie to themselves about their imperfections and flaws, afraid that those flaws disqualify them to lead.

Great leaders waste no such energy. Great leaders embrace their imperfections as a fact of life, an inescapable feature of human nature. They understand that being imperfect and being ineffective are not the same thing. 

Great leaders aren’t perfect — they’re effective. They simply don’t allow their own personal flaws to destroy the effectiveness and motivation of others. Leadership, in many ways, is about getting ourselves and others where we need to go in spite of our imperfections. 

More simply, we must work daily to rob our imperfections of the power to make us ineffective.

Our success in life and work — and, ultimately, our happiness — depends on our ability to transcend our flaws, not to reach some unattainable state of perfection, but to get things done well, and move others to get things done well.

Two Vastly Different Missions...

“Management” is about protecting and projecting order and predictability. It is about conforming. It is about survival. 

It is the attempt to limit the downside.

“Leadership,” well, that’s the act of unleashing the upside.

"I'm a simpleton..."

Maybe it’s too easy to succumb to the charm, or his infamous reality distortion field, but this clip of Steve Jobs presenting plans for a new Apple office campus to the Cupertino, Calif. city council is just wonderful.

Most striking is the disarming humility, candor and utterly “human-scale” personality of the leader of the world’s most valuable technology company. This is a great communicator — and rare business and organizational leader — at work.

What’s also striking is what’s missing — the all too common mask many CEOs wear, the one that demands (or pleads for) deference, creates an air of inaccessability, and fails to connect as a human being with other human beings from whom they need commitment, trust and understanding.

What we know about Mr. Jobs is that he loves to create great products and do great things. Evidently, this desire consumes far more of his intellectual energy than the need most mortals have for large quantities of smoke to be blown at their posteriors.

Update on Wednesday, June 8, 2011 by Joe Fusco

BONUS!: We also get a glimpse of Jobs’s political thinking, which may lean libertarian/conservative. A member of the city council lifts him up by the ankles and shakes him to see what might fall out of his pockets when she asks if he’d consider providing free wi-fi to the city as part of the construction project. He replies:

“I’ve always had this view that we pay taxes, and the city should do those things. If we can get out of paying taxes, I’d be glad to put up a wi-fi network.”

Clear as a bell, and unshrinking, as usual. You can view this exchange around 13:15 in the clip.

BONUS BONUS!: When did Lloyd from “Entourage” become chairman of the Cupertino, Calif. City Council?

Big Brain, Tiny Heart

You are very smart. You are very good at thinking, as a matter of fact. You are filled with knowledge gained in classrooms and from experience. You know what works and what doesn’t.

You manage with your head — your brain. You solve problems. You design and implement processes and systems. You research markets and customer attitudes and behaviors. You understand and work within generally accepted accounting principles. You can work the right buzzwords into conversations, and meetings.

When something goes wrong, you are very good at analyzing it, and understanding what happened, and how. You love numbers; they are comforting, and clear.

You are very smart.

But people solve problems with more than just their brains, don’t they? Are they moved by the spreadsheet only? Do they come to work each morning looking to bring their blood, sweat and tears to a process or a system?

They want to believe. They want to bleed for the right mission, the right product, the right person. They want to win, to taste the fruit of an investment of their talents, their knowledge and their experience. They want to stretch, trust, and be trusted. They want to feel, and to love, and to commit.

These things don’t fit on your spreadsheet. They are not a system or a process, nor is summoning them a system or a process. They are messy and unpredictable, discomforting and hazy.

They are faith, and faith doesn’t live in your brain. It lives in your heart. While it takes brains to solve problems every day, don’t forget people and organizations achieve mastery with their heart as well. It’s a genuine competitive advantage.

“Big brain, tiny heart” is the most common mistake organizations — and leaders — make. “Tiny brain, big heart” is the second most common.

You manage with your brain, and you lead with your heart. You have to do both — deliberately and intentionally — to be great. Simply doing one, or the other, alone makes you and your organization mediocre.

Moments of Mastery

“Groundhog Day” is the greatest movie about leadership ever made. Its lesson? We build mastery in our lives one moment at a time.

A great life, and great leadership, is really just a collection of smaller moments of mastery. Bill Murray’s character unlocks this secret about three-quarters of the way through the film, and no longer sees the day he’s condemned to repeat as an endless hell, but as an opportunity to master his life — to build one small victory at a time, one encounter at a time. 

It is a wonderful metaphor for our daily lives. We are condemned to repeat everything, everyday unless we change. Unless we change, or achieve mastery, we are each living the same hellish day over and over again, with the same results, the same undesirable outcomes. Yet, each day, in as many conscious moments as possible, we’re given opportunities to rise above and set aside our ineffective beliefs and behaviors, and strive to live and lead against a standard — not perfection, but an ideal — of what it means to be as effective a person as humanly possible.

Every conversation, every thought, every decision is an opportunity to choose mastery, to elevate ourselves and others.

Then, one day, with hard work and perseverance, we find that we’re able to string these moments — like one bead after another — together in a work of leadership and behavior art. And we become free.

This is the journey of a leader, regardless of the definition, or the set of leadership principles you and I have chosen to follow.

Leadership is a Love Affair with The Truth

It’s so much more comfortable, most of the time, to live in the fantasy of who we think we are, how we see ourselves and how we think others see us. “My people love me. My people think I’m a great leader.”

The higher up the leadership pyramid you go, you create a fantasy for everybody else. “The boss said we should do this, the boss says it’s a great idea.” The boss’s fantasies become everyone else’s fantasies. The boss says, “we’re a great customer service organization.” And no one challenges the boss’s fantasy because, well, he’s the boss.

All organizations think they’re great at customer service. They got the posters and the talk down pat.

What is the point of these motivational posters? “Commitment. All it takes is all you’ve got.” Nice sentiment. Take it down. No one believes it anyway. The posters are instead like good luck charms; if we hang them there long enough, maybe they’ll become true!

You have to embrace the truth no matter what, no matter how painful, no matter how uncomfortable it is to assault your own biases, your own fantasies, your own ego.

Cheap Leadership

The common.

The unremarkable.

The crowd.

Fear.

Paralysis.

Faithlessness.

Cynicism.

The selfish.

Grasping, hoarding.

Focusing on emotional needs instead of the quality of the solution to the problem.

Love of the title.

Relying on the title for compliance.

Love of one’s own power, influence and control.

“Me first…”

Telling yourself lies.

The perceived immunity of title, power, and position.

Lip service to values and ideals.

Lip service to hard choices on leadership and personal growth.

Superficial attention to improving yourself.

Superficial attention to improving others.

Short-term horizon.

Instant gratification.

Giving up too soon.

Moving on too quickly.

Giving up upon resistance or failure.

Yielding to the demands of unimportant issues. 

Entropy.

Gravity.

Unconsciousness.

How to Give People Something They Can't Get Enough Of

Being a source of something scarce makes you valuable to the people in your life — family, friends, your employer, your community.

So, speaking of scarcity in today’s environment, here’s something very valuable you can do:

Be someone who starts and encourages upbeat conversations.

People are gloomy. The news is gloomy. The sky is falling.

Be the person in your environment who’s the optimist, who celebrates what is going well (it’s there — look for it…). Encourage people, pat them on the back.

Talk about how the world is being reinvented. Talk about all the opportunities on the other side of the anxiety and disruption. Tell funny stories. Laugh a lot.

I guarantee you will be very nearly alone in that effort. This makes you the source of something scarce. This makes you valuable, and valued, among the people you care about most. 

How To Be Safe -- In Good Times or Bad -- For the Rest of Your Life

Great problem solvers are among the scarcest things in the world. There simply aren’t enough of them, and there never will be.

What do the laws of economics teach us about scarcity? That the things of which there are very little or never enough, but which are in great demand, are the most valuable things in the world.

If there’s anything the world needs desperately right now, it’s people who are great at solving problems. In fact, if there’s anything the world always needs, in good times and bad, it’s people who are great at solving problems — in short, who are great at what they do.

No matter what you do, you have an opportunity to be great at it — to solve the problems and challenges you encounter on a daily basis with a high level of skill, and with passion and enthusiasm as well.

Almost without exception, the people in organizational life that I encounter are feeling exceptionally insecure — worried, understandably, about their jobs. A great deal of their energy is spent fretting about their short-term professional safety and security.

I tell them that the only thing they can control — in a time when it seems so much is beyond our control — is their ability to solve problems. It’s also the only genuine source of personal security and safety.

So, put your energy into:

One. Building your problem solving skills. Learn, grow, practice, experiment. It’s the best investment you can make, in good times and in bad.

Two. Embracing the opportunities created by today’s problems. The whole world is being reinvented. It’s painful, of course, but the more innovative and clever you can be, the more adaptive you prove yourself, the better off you’ll be in the long run.

Three. Understanding that the better you and your colleagues are at solving today’s problems right now, the safer and more secure you’ll all be — personally and organizationally.

Four. Being great at helping others be great problem solvers. This is the essence of leadership. 

Of course, being a great problem solver is no guarantee of personal economic security in today’s environment. Many people are suffering what is, we hope, short-term pain.

You simply have to have faith that, over the long-term, there is always a place in the world for a great problem solver.

When Clichés Collide...

Sometimes, I think folks’ mouths run about a hundred yards out in front of their brains. And our conversations are more colorful for it.

I was in a group discussion recently when someone, in pointing out a dilemma, announced that there were “two sides to the knife.”

I guess this now means that the coin cuts both ways.

Especially if the penny has been pinched.

Why My Son Should Hope Natural Selection is Just a Theory

In just a few days, the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth will be upon us. In one of those wonderful historical coincidences, it is the same day as the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln — which, to me, is the more exciting and consequential celebration.

But I digress.

My son — 16 years old and some change — is a bright, hard-working boy who has been fortunate enough to travel to many interesting and sophisticated parts of the world. He is a member of the National Ski Patrol at Killington, trained in both rescue and outdoor emergency care, and gives his every winter weekend to the task of serving and protecting tender-footed suburbanites from Bergen County, New Jersey.

He is a thoughtful, clear-headed young man. But he had better hope the Theory of Natural Selection called in sick the other day.

We had had a significant mid-week snowstorm, and I asked the boy to park his car for the night in a parking area on our lower driveway, so our snowplow guy could easily clear our upper driveway overnight.

When he went out to his car the next morning to go to school, there was approximately 8 inches of snow around his car. Not enough to scare most folks in this neck of the woods; with good snow tires and front-wheel drive, he should be able to just drive away.

Of course, he simply assumed he was stuck. A small error in judgement — which we will excuse. But what came next boggles the mind.

He got in the car, and started the engine. Then, he put it in gear — “D” for drive. He got out of the driver’s seat and went to the back of the car.

And then he pushed.

Twenty minutes later, as I was leaving for work, I found him frantically trying to dig the car out of a snowbank. Or should I say, trying to dig the snowbank out from under the car, as the front wheels were no longer touching the ground.

I nearly lost it — not because of the car or its situation, but from the complete inability to comprehend how any human being could have thought what he did was a good idea. And, (mostly) from the fear that I and mine might have a genetic marker for “boneheadedness” and that the Theory of Natural Selection might come knocking on our door sooner rather than later.

So, happy birthday, Charles. If you don’t mind, I’ll just tell everyone he’s adopted.

Things You Can't Afford

It’s been a cost-cutting frenzy in the business world lately, hasn’t it?

As the leader of an organization, you may also be feeling immense pressure to scour your cash flow statements looking for opportunities to cut expenses. Remember, however, there are costs — things you can’t afford — that lurk all around you, but never show up on a spreadsheet:

• people in your organization who are unwilling or unable to work collaboratively
• people who are more concerned with turf-building than problem solving
• people who are unwilling to build themselves, or build others around them
• people who — because they’re nervous or jittery about the economy — are even more self-preserving or obsessed with their own personal agendas than usual

You really can’t afford them anymore, can you? No less than disappearing revenue or bloated expenses, these things destroy companies. Combined with today’s challenging economic environment, they’re deadly.

The best leaders in the world know that a spreadsheet or an income statement aren’t the only places to find the things his or her organization can’t afford.

He or she is relentlessly examining the organization’s culture and its people, looking for the really, really expensive things.

Ask people to change, and show them how to change. The ones that can’t, or won’t? Well, then show them the door.