The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Leadership

Leadership is an insanely important discipline. Here you’ll find the thought, tools and tricks of the trade of great leaders.

  • Happy at work at Microsoft

    Michael Brundage has written a very interesting piece on what it’s like to work at Microsoft.

    The good includes personal freedom, the top leaders, free soft drinks and the fact that Microsoft contrary to popular belief is not evil. For instance:

    Microsoft gives software developers a lot of personal freedom over both the work and the work environment. I order my own supplies, customize my office as I see fit, schedule my own trips and meetings, and select my own training courses. I choose when I show up for work and when I leave, and what to wear while I’m there. I can eat on campus or off, reheat something from home in the kitchen or scavenge leftovers from meetings. I can even work remotely from home (within reason).

    The bad: mid-level managers, internal “cults” and bad work-life balance.

    Compare this with Paul Thurrott’s highly critical analysis of Microsoft’s failure to deliver Windows Vista on time or even with all the feature they promised.

    Two and a half years later, Microsoft has yet to ship Windows Vista, and it won’t actually ship this system in volume until 2007… Microsoft’s handling of Windows Vista has been abysmal. Promises have been made and forgotten, again and again. Features have come and gone. Heck, the entire project was literally restarted from scratch after it became obvious that the initial code base was a teetering, technological house of cards. Windows Vista, in other words, has been an utter disaster. And it’s not even out yet. What the heck went wrong?

    It almost seems like Microsoft is an example of a company that has a huge, tremendously talented and motivated staff, but still manages to create enormous problems for itself. Does this contradict my claim that a happy organization is also a successful one?

    UPDATE: John Dvorak weighs on on the issue.

    All of Microsoft’s Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer. If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column—billions.

    So they’re happy at Microsoft but they make really bad top-level decisions..?

  • The cult of overwork

    Tired

    Some years ago CNN asked 12 well-known leaders including Carlos Ghosn of Nissan, Marissa Mayer of (then) Google and Wynton Marsalis how they manage their time and stay efficient.

    My favorite answer is this one:

    I know that it’s expected of executives to start the day extremely early, but frankly I feel I make better decisions and relate better to people when I’m well rested. So I usually get up around 8 after a good night’s sleep.

    I also make sure to almost always work a standard 40-hour week and never work on the weekends. This is important to me for two reasons. First of all, I have a life outside of work. I have a family who likes to have me around and friends and hobbies that I also want to have time for. I find that the time I spend outside of work recharges my batteries, expands my horizons and actually makes me more efficient at work.

    Secondly, if I’m always seen arriving at the office at 6 in the morning and leaving at 9 in the evening, not to mention taking calls and writing emails late at night and all weekend, it’s sure to send a signal to my employees that this is what the company expects, that this is “the right way”. But it isn’t.

    It’s a simple fact that for most leaders and employees, the first 40 hours they work each week are worth much more to the company than the next 20, 30 or 40 hours. But those extra hours spent at work can harm your private life, your family and your health. Which in turn becomes damaging to the company.

    Frankly, if you can’t structure your time so your work fits inside a 40-hour week, you need to get better at prioritizing and delegating.

    Refreshing words. Guess which of the executives said that?

    Come on, take a guess!

    NONE OF THEM! Not one.

    Instead, there’s a lot of “I get up at 5 and arrive at the office at 6” and “I work 16 hours a day” and “I take a lot of calls on the drive in to the office” and “I usually leave the office at 7 and then work a few more hours in the evening at home.”

    I fully expected one of them to go “I get up at 4 in the morning, half an hour before I go to bed, and work a 27-hour day, only stopping for a 3-minute lunch break in which two assistants stuff food down my throat like a foie-gras goose.”

    I know it’s normal to view people working this hard as heroes of the organization, but still I think they would be more efficient and enjoy life more if they cut down their time at work. They may find that they become more open, less stressed, have more fun AND are better role models for their employees. This cult of overwork has got to stop.

    The school of “work your butt off, everything else comes second” is bad for business and bad for people. Can we please retire this tired idea once and for all?

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  • Do you follow?

    Ducks in a row

    Are you the kind of person who always takes charge?

    Whether it’s the next crucial corporate project or just the sunday family barbeque, are you always in the thick of it, organizing, planning and making decisions?

    That makes you a natural leader, but how are you as a follower?

    Leaders can’t always lead. Once in a while we all need to take the backseat and let someone else drive. Their way.

    And here’s the thing: Good leaders can be true pests as followers. If they aren’t careful, they end up taking over. Of course, the real fun comes when there are two or more compulsive leader in a project, fighting each other to take over and do things their way.

    Apart from good leadership, leaders must display good followership when this is called for, which is difficult because it goes against their nature.

    Leaders who also know how to follow can use these situations to inspire followership in others by being good followers themselves, but it means that they must take extraordinary care to stay in the backseat and not inadvertantly take over. Here’s how to do it.

    Let them do it their way
    It may not be your way, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work. Hey, it may work even better than what you have in mind.

    Let them fail or succeed
    Remember that even when you’re 100% positively sure they’ll fail – they might still make it work.

    Accept their truth
    You may see the task differently, but you may be wrong. Wait and see who turns out to be right.

    Volunteer for the crappy tasks
    Andy Reid of What If Innovation, the highly successful London-based innovation agency, told me that their executives are not above doing menial office tasks like cleaning the toilets. This sends a powerful message, and raises everyones motivation to just get the boring stuff done – as opposed to having interminable office feuds over who should do it.

    Simply put, leaders should be even better than regular followers and take even more care not to lead too much.

    When leaders practice followership they also teach the people around them leadership (remember this simple formula), by giving them a real, un-interrupted chance to lead and learn.

    Great leadership requires great followership. And for most leaders, good followership takes practice.

  • The artist as a young geek

    A couple of weeks ago I posted this list of the top 10 mistakes managers of geeks make, which instantly became one of the most read posts on the site.

    Mike Wagner (of Own Your Brand) has a lot of experience working with geeks, and he emailed me his take:

    Some of the mistakes I remember making with Geeks or seeing others make are:

    1. Treating their work and its results like a hammer when Geeks see it as a work of art. Managers must respect the different perspective each brings to IT development. Business managers see it as a tool. Geeks see it as a work of art. This is one reason Geeks often feel undervalued in the corporate culture. Geek temperament is really an artistic temperament.

    2. Building on this; managers must understand the cynical feelings Geeks have towards commerce in general. Like artists who resent people putting a dollar value on their art, a Geek feels that all the business manager wants to do is make money. This is big time Geek turn off.

    3. Geeks respond to critique and suggested changes of their “creations/code” like an artist. When a manager or client says we want you to change the functionality or code – it is like saying “can’t the Mona Lisa have blonde hair instead? Blonde tested better with the focus group.”

    All of this can be worked with in a positive way IF the manager can practice empathic understanding – but if not, well…that’s the rub.

    Great insights, Mike! People are increasingly approaching their work as art. It’s not that their painting or sculpting at work, it’s just that the nature of work has changed, so that the way people approach work is looking more and more like the way an artist approaches art.

    This is true for geeks and for many other employee groups, and it profounfly changes the nature of work. Thanks Mike, for your great (as usual) input.

  • Links

    Even CNN says that you should take it easy, and not work to hard.

    Great website on strength-based leadership. I am deeply envious of a last name as cool as “Zinger”.

    Philip Greenspun has an excellent piece on early retirement. I say we should all do this intermittently, and work a couple of years, retire for a year or two and then stage a come-back. Semco’s part-time retirement scheme is also cool.

  • Make your business happy and rich

    Happy SprayIt pays to be happy. Studies show that businesses with happy employees consistently outperform their less happy competitors in the marketplace and in the stock market.

    Considering the challenges that modern organizations face, creating a happy organization is the number one strategic imperative and the only way to long-term success.

    This article will tell you why happiness is so important for businesses today, and how you can make your business a happy one.
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  • My lazy life

    Some books get you thinking and Fred Gratzon’s The lazy Way to Success definitely did that to me. Damn you, Fred!

    I have seen the light. I now realize that my ingrained laziness has not only been one of the major forces shaping my life, it’s been a boost to almost every important area of my life.

    Lazy me
    Me, doing what I do best: Nothing.

    Here are some random thoughts on how laziness has helped me in my university studies, in my work in IT, in leadership and in entrepreneurship.

    The lazy student

    When I started studying at the University of Southern Denmark (I graduated with a masters in computer science in 1994), I was always envious of the over-achievers. You know them – they’re the people who are always prepared for today’s lecture, have done their homework and never need to do any last-minute, aaaaargh-exams-are-only-two-weeks-away studying. Like I did. Every. single. semester.

    I used to beat myself up for not being like them, but in the end I accepted, that I’m just not that person. The final realization came to me while I was writing my masters thesis (on virtual sensors for robots, if anyone wants to know), and I discovered that some days I can’t write. I literally can’t put two words together and have anything meaningful come out. I can frustrate myself nearly to death trying, but I won’t get anywhere.

    And other days, writing is totally effortless and both the quantity and the quality of the output is high. I am in fact having one of those days today, I can’t seem to stop writing. What I realized was that this is me. It’s the way I work, and I have go with that.

    So I adopted the lazy approach to writing, which is that I write whenever I feel like it. And my output on a writing day easily outweighs the x days where I didn’t get any writing done.

    Incidentally, the thesis still got done on time and it got me an A. So there!

    The lazy developer

    Masters degree in hand I went on to become an IT consultant and developer, and I quickly learned this: If I’m programming something and it feels like work, I haven’t found the right solution yet. When the right solution presents itself, the task becomes fun and easy. I also get to admire the beauty of an efficient, simple solution.

    Good code is a pleasure to maintain, tweak and refactor. Bad code is hard work. Also laziness means only doing things once, instead of repeating yourself all over the place – another hallmark of good code.

    The lazy leader

    After my IT days I went on to leadership and learned this: If leading people feels like hard work, you’re most definitely not doing it right. The lazy leader adapts his leadership style to the people around him to the point where it feels like he’s doing almost no work and people are leading themselves. I refer you to this classic Lao Tzu quote as proof that this notion is more than 2500 years old.

    When I spoke at the Turkish Management Center’s HR conference in Turkey, one of the other speakers was Semco’s CEO Ricardo Semler. He said in his presentation that Semco recently celebrated the 10th. anniversary of Ricardo not deciding anything in the company. It started when he took 18 months out to travel the world, and discovered that the company ran just fine without him. If that ain’t laziness on a very high plane, I don’t know what is and you can read all about it in Ricardo’s excellent book The Seven-Day Weekend.

    The lazy entrepreneur

    As an entreprenur, my approach has been this: Start a lot of small projects and see which ones grab me. Rather than try to analyze my way to an answer to which opportunity is the best/will make me the most money/will be the most fun, I float a lot of ideas in a lot of places. Some happen, most don’t. The ones that happen are by definition the right ones, and they are always fun to work on. Always.

    Conclusion

    It’s common to think that success only comes with hard work, but I’ve found the opposite to be true for me. In my case, success has come from NOT working hard, and my laziness has definitely done me a lot of good. The only difficult part has been to let go of the traditional work ethic and accept my laziness. To work with it instead of against it.

    Will the lazy approach work for you? Maybe not. Maybe you get more success from working long and hard, from putting your nose to the grindstone and applying yourself. But if you’ve never tried the lazy approach, how can you know that that doesn’t work even better? Give it a shot, you might like it!

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  • The easy leadership formula

    It’s easy to recognize good, bad and great leaders. Just remember this formula:

    Bad leaders create no followers
    Good leaders create many followers
    Great leaders create more great leaders

  • Video game leadership

    Joi Ito learns something about good leadership by playing the World of Warcraft game:

    I think that the ever-evolving user interface and communication tools that we are developing might impact the future of management in the real world. My feeling is that what we are doing in WoW represents in many ways the future of real time collaborative teams and leadership in an increasingly ad hoc, always-on, diversity intense and real-time environment.

    The race is on: Who will be first to offer management training based on playing WoW :o)

  • How NOT to lead geeks

    Tie and T-shirt

    When the geeks at NCR in Australia threatened to go on strike, it was a move that could have paralyzed ATMs, supermarket cash registers and airplane check-in. This underlines the fact that IT has become so central to almost all corporations, that any disruption may cost a lot of time and money, which again means that keeping the geeks happy at work is an absolute requirement for a modern business. Happy geeks are effective geeks.

    The main reason IT people are unhappy at work is bad relations with management, often because geeks and managers have fundamentally different personalities, professional backgrounds and ambitions.

    Some people conclude that geeks hate managers and are impossible to lead. The expression “managing geeks is like herding cats” is sometimes used, but that’s just plain wrong. The fact is that IT people hate bad management and have even less tolerance for it than most other kinds of employees.

    So where does it go wrong? I started out as a geek and later became a leader and an IT company founder so I’ve been lucky enough to have tried both camps. Here are the top 10 mistakes I’ve seen managers make when leading geeks:
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