Leadership is an insanely important discipline. Here you’ll find the thought, tools and tricks of the trade of great leaders.
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.
It 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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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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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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
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)
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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Most modern countries are seeing a steady rise in the amount of time people spend at work. There is some evidence, however, that this trend contributes neither to the bottom line nor to our overall well-being.
Esther Derby euthanizes the idea that long hours are a sign of employee commitment. She cites some alternative reasons people stay late at the office, including:
- One woman’s marriage was disintegrating and she stayed late to avoid tension at home.
- Another woman was using company assets to run a side business… and it was easier to hide it when people weren’t around.
- Two people who were having an affair stayed late at work to be together.
Via Jason Yip’s excellent blog.
As for productivity, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in one of her books mentions an IT copany that were in big financial trouble. Rather than lay some people off they switched to a 30-hour work week and a corresponding pay cut, and experienced no reduction in production. They did the exact same amount of work in 30 hours a week as in 40.
When the company righted itself each employee could choose to return to the original work schedule and pay or remain at 30 hours a week. They all chose to keep the short work week. Read the whole amazing story here.
A recent Danish study found that 90% of managers who worked 30-37 hours a week were satisfied with their work-life balance. Among managers working more than 48 hours a week, that percentage dropped to 46. The consequence: More stress, less job satisfaction and an increased risk that they will leave the company.
We’ve long known that reasonable working hours are one of the most important factors determining whether people are happy at work (and in life). Long working hours are not a sign if commitment and may not even contribute to business productivity.
Therefore businesses should stop encouraging (implicitly and explicitly) long work hours and start rewarding the people who go home on time. They’re good for business.
Fred Gratzon is
an entrepreneur who hates hard work. In fact, I refuse to do it. Yet two of my businesses grew like Jack’s beanstalk. Each made Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest growing companies in America. One of those businesses appeared three times and was even ranked #2.
His blog is excellent. Check out his run-in with jackal investment bankers or this story of financial growing pains solved by the question “Does it feeeeeeeel like you’re making money?”.
I could write a long piece on the value of laziness, but I can’t be bothered right now, so I’ll just point to this excellent quote by Mark Twain who says it much better anyway.
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne has much in it to like, but in the end it fails to deliver usable business tools because of one huge flaw: It completely misrepresents the nature of corporate innovation.
The book is subtitled “How to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant” and is based on a blue ocean vs. red ocean metaphor. Businesses can stay in their place in the market and fight all others in that red-ocean space (think red with blood) or they can sail of into the blue ocean where no one else has gone yet.
The book cites ventures by companies such as Cirque Du Soleil, Southwest Airlines, [yellowtail] wine, Apple and Curves gyms as examples of Blue Ocean Strategies.
Blue Ocean makes 4 major points that every business can learn from:
Pay attention
All change begins with an appreciation of your current situation. First get to know your business and your market. Listen to your customers and to those who are not your customers.
Go simple
Look at what you can do, but also examine what you can stop doing. What are you doing that isn’t really of value to the customer? How can a simpler product be of even greater value?
Play a non-zero-sum game
Don’t fight over the pie – grow the pie. Cirque Du Soleil didn’t steal customers from Ringling Bros., they brought a whole new crowd of people to the circus.
Visualize your strategy
The book demonstrates a strategy canvas – a 1-page chart that visualizes what areas to focus more or less on compared to the business today and to competitors. This helps sell the strategy inside the organization.
That’s good advice. However, the approach described will not help companies create major change.
The problem is the role the book gives to innovation. When the Blue Ocean strategic process is outlined, only one point out of 10 mentions new ideas, saying “See which factors you should eliminate, create or change”. In other words, one word (“create”) in one sentence focuses on the actual process of creating new ideas – everything else is strategy. That’s not the way it works.
It is typical, though, of the way many businesses misunderstand creativity. There’s a widespread illusion that innovation happens like this:
In real life, however, innovation usually happens like this:
If you don’t believe me, read this story of how post-its were invented at 3M. If ever there was a Blue Ocean product this is it, but the process was most definitely NOT as described in the Blue Ocean book.
It is my firm belief that few companies will be able to apply the tools in the Blue Ocean book to actually create ground-breaking innovation. Even the case stories cited in the book support this – only two stories are told in which companies apply the book’s metods and they result only in incremental innovation.
Which is not surprising. A measured strategic approach like the one described here is fine for creating measured, incremental change, but if you really want to take your business into uncharted water, you will need a completely different approach to innovation.
In the previous post CEO Jim Goodnight explained why he won’t take SAS Institute public. He believes that:
There is no trust anymore in public companies. I think it’s an excellent time to be private.
And this article in the CEO Refresher by Steve Kayser backs him up. IPO’s are a bad idea for many reasons including that:
- Being a private company, you are not under pressure to grow by merging or acquiring companies to meet shareholder expectations.
- Section 404 of the 2002 Sarbanes Oxley Legislation (which governs how public companies report their finances) is 180 words. Yet estimates of costs for publicly traded companies to comply are between $10 billion to $20 billion ? yes, $10 billion to $20 billion, or approximately $55 million to $111 million per word.
- Senior management now, instead of concentrating on planning a future, building a business, filling customer needs, creating jobs and becoming a valuable cog in the economic engine of prosperity, is tasked with design, implementation, assessment, controls and auditing results.
- Public ownership can make any unique culture difficult to sustain if one bad quarter forces you to lay off 20% of your workforce, or the market drives pressure for meeting certain results regardless of their long-term implications
I can definitely see the lure of the IPO. The massive amounts of money. The chance to grow the organization quickly. The ability to cash in on your initial investment and hard work. The validation of seeing your company highly valued on the stock exchange. So it’s good of Goodnight and Kayser to remind us of the downside.
One company did manage to go public and keep their identity: Google. When they announced their IPO, founders Brinn and Page made it very clear that they would continue to run the company their way. They promised to go on treating their employees extremely well and making long-term decisions rather than living from quarter to quarter. If investors didn’t care for that, they were kindly requested to take their money elsewhere. Google being Google, investors flocked to buy the stock anyway – less famous companies might not get away with this model.
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