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.

  • Forget everything you know about change!

    Jim Collins, the author of Built to last and Good to great examines our peceptions of how change in orgnizations happens, and finds that most of our current thinking is dead wrong. This is one of the best and most insightful articles I’ve read in a loooong time. A teaser:

    I want to give you a lobotomy about change. I want you to forget everything you’ve ever learned about what it takes to create great results. I want you to realize that nearly all operating prescriptions for creating large-scale corporate change are nothing but myths.
    …
    Picture an egg. Day after day, it sits there. No one pays attention to it. No one notices it. Certainly no one takes a picture of it or puts it on the cover of a celebrity-focused business magazine. Then one day, the shell cracks and out jumps a chicken. All of a sudden, the major magazines and newspapers jump on the story: “Stunning Turnaround at Egg!” and “The Chick Who Led the Breakthrough at Egg!” From the outside, the story always reads like an overnight sensation — as if the egg had suddenly and radically altered itself into a chicken.

    The key to succesful change: Put “Who” before “What”. Read the article at (where else) Fast Company.

  • Blame and responsibility

    Another topic that came up at the conference was the issue of blame and responsibility. How do you react, when a situation is all your fault? Or when somebody accuses you of it? We talked about it, and a thought came to me: There are a few differences between blame and responsibility.

    Blame is looking back, responsibility is looking forward. If I blame you, it’s about something that’s already happened. If I give you responsibility for something, that means the outcome is still uncertain.

    Blame means you’re essentially powerless. It’s done, it’s in the past, all you can do now is argue about whether or not it’s your fault. Responsibility means you have the power to change things.

    But perhaps the most important difference to me, is that blame can be divided, whereas responsibility can’t. If something bad happens, it can be 50% my fault and 50% yours. If we have a shared responsibility for something, we both have 100% responsibility. Acting as if you can pass around shares of responsibility has some weird consequeces. In my thinking, 10 people working on the same project all have 100% responsibility.

    This reminds me of a story I heard once, of the CEO of a danish company who went around in the organization taking the blame. Whenever there was a conflict or a crisis, he’d step in and say “It’s my fault”, leaving his people free to work out solutions. He took the blame, they got the responsibility.

  • Strong democratic leaders, a paradox?

    One of the things that came up in the discussion at the democratic CEO round table was the apparent paradox, that a democratic organization needs a strong leader. You’d think that the whole idea of democratic organizations, would be to eliminate the need for strong leaders so that everyone could lead according to their interests and passion. In practice this is not the case, as evidenced by the experience of those present at the round table.

    I came up with the idea, that the strong leader is necessary not to make actual business, but rather to keep the democracy alive and healthy. The one thing, that is not up for the vote in a democratic organization, is whether or not to be democratic. And since the transition to democracy and the practice of democracy once you’re there is untried and can be confusing, frustrating and difficult (in addition, of course, to being fun, dynamic and energizing), someone needs to hold on strongly to the democratic principles and values.

    That got me thinking about a model I came up with a couple of years ago – heavily inspired by some work in NLP, namely that at any given time, you can operate on three levels:
    * Values
    * Process
    * Production

    The lowest level is production. This is where things actually get done, and if you never spend time there, all your efforts will come to nothing. The middle level, process, is when you work on how you produce, eg. having a meeting to decide how to organize your work. The top level is values, and here you identify and strengthen the values and principles which shape the way you work.

    A strong democratic leader then, is one who is active in the middle level of democracy, ie. the principles. He will not make decisions at the production level, those are made democratically. But he or she will operate at the process level, to ensure that democracy is practiced and kept alive, according to the values of the company.

  • Practice of peace – part 1

    You know, when I planned my trip to the US and planned to fly from DC to Seattle, I was kinda thinking “OK, domestic flight, how long can it be – 2-3 hours?” Well, flying across the US takes five and a half hours!

    I’m now at the Practice of Peace conference, and it’s quite a far cry from the CEO round table. The round table was at a fancy Marriott hotel – here I share a room with two other guys one of whom snores constantly, though fortunately not very loudly. The round table meetings were in your traditional windowless conference room, here it’s this grand hall with windows, wooden beams and skylights. But notice, that where the luxury hotel had wired internet access in the rooms at $9.95 a day, this place has free wi-fi. Woohoo!

    The conference is just taking off, but I think I may have overextended myself, and I’m afraid I’m all conferenced out. Let’s see what happens. Oh, I talked briefly to Harrison Owen – seems like a very nice person.

  • Simplicity – complexity – simplicity

    I posted an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote a while ago:

    I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

    Sandy Wilder of Communico used this quote in his presentation at the CEO round table, and that got me thinking. I’d say that the first simplicity comes from thinking you understand any given system. Yep, we’ve got it figured – we know how the system will react in most situations, and we can manage that.

    The complexity comes when you realize, that you don’t understand the system. An example: You give you salesforce bonuses to make them sell more. It works for a while, but suddenly sales drop. More bonuses help, but not as much as the first time. What’s going on? Apparently the system is more complex than we thought. The specific reasons, why additional bonuses don’t make much of an impact can vary. Maybe the first round of bonuses motivated the sales people to close a lot of easy sales, and now there are only the “hard” cases left. Maybt it has fostered strong internal competition, so they actually undercut each others work to get the bonus. The point is, that the system was apparently more complicated than we thought – and in truth, most systems are.

    The “simplicity on the other side of complexity” does not come, however, from understanding the system. Most systems in a business setting are so complex, that we won’t ever be able to predict them. Trying to understand the system is, in all probability, ultimately futile.

    However, trying to develop your values and principles, so that they align with your goals is certainly a worthwhile pursuit. And that is the simplicity on the other side of complexity. That simplicity comes from knowing yourself and your values, and living by them. It comes from the belief or faith that, as long as we work in the right way and stick to our principles, it will turn out right. And that’s a crucial distinction.

  • Democratic CEO round table, part 2

    The round table is now over, and it’s been an amazing ride. Some of the highlights were:
    * Hearing real-life stories of organizational democracy – the ups AND the downs
    * Meeting some wonderful, courageuos people
    * Exploring the link between political democracy and organizational democracy. Fredo Arias-King gave a fascinating presentation on the transition to democracy in eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet countries and why some succeeded and others didn’t. Key factor: People! The countries that completely got rid of the old guard (the Nomenklatura) succeeded.
    * Seeing Traci Fenton and her team in action. Relaxed, creative and on the ball
    * “Singing in the rain” with Victor Aspengren of Schafer Systems

    I’m jetting of to Seattle in a few hours, and I’m looking forward to just chilling on the flight. Then the Practice of Peace conference starts tonight.

  • Democratic CEO round table, part 1

    I’m now in Washington DC, and the first 24 hours of the World Dynamics round table for democratic CEO’s has been fantastic. There are some great people here, who can tell some amazing stories. There’s an incredible level of experience, openness and curiosity present – and it’s just plain fun.

    The conference started thursday evening Mart Laar, the first prime minister of Estonia. He talked about democracy and about values and principles he beliveves are necessary to practice democracy. And he should know: Under him, Estonia went from a hopeless ex-soviet backwater, to a modern, fast-developing economy. His speech was very inspiring and moving, and his down-to-earth authentic and slightly underplayed style was wonderful.

    Today several of the participants have had a chance to present, and I talked briefly about the principles behind Enterprise Systems (my old IT company). In the afternoon we did a short open space session, which seemed to go over really well with this crowd – as I’d hoped it would. If there’s one tool that can promote organizational democracy, I believe it’s Open Space meetings.

    The day ended with a wonderful dinner with everybody in really high spirits. My mind is still racing from all the input and all the incredible stories I’ve heard today, and I hope tomorrow will be just as interesting.

  • Incentives do not work

    If you want your employees to perform well, conventional wisdom says that you must give them lots of incentives. Stuff like free phone calls, company cars, gold stars, employee of the month awards are necessary, right? Wrong! Incentives, and the ensuing competition, actually make matters worse, and remove peoples attention from their work. This makes employees less motivated about their work.

    According to this article by Alfie Kohn, you should in stead:
    * Pay people well.
    * Pay people fairly.
    * Then do everything possible to take money off people’s minds.

    Notice that incentives, bonuses, pay-for-performance plans, and other reward systems violate the last principle by their very nature.

    I could not agree more. The whole notion that you can motivate anybody is wrong, and money is certainly not the way. People can motivate themselves, and businesses can create environments in which it is easy or hard for them to do so. Incentives make it harder!

  • Will your business fail if you take today off?

    Peter Carruthers ponders the entreprenurial drive and what it does to business leaders in this article. Teaser: Most of us are bogged down with a deep guilt about our businesses. We?re uncomfortable being away from the beast for too long. Maybe it?s the way we were taught ? that we have to work hard to prosper. Maybe it?s because we?re afraid it?s really going to stop breathing. [A little like the first months as a new parent when you check the baby every few hours.

  • Quote

    I’m a businessman, but I’m still going to do things on my own terms. I’m going to break a lot of rules, and we’re going to blur the distinction between work and play. So we have a policy here – it’s called “Let My People Go Surfing.” A policy which is, when the surf comes up, anybody can just go surfing. Any time of the day, you just take off and go surfing… That attitude changes your whole life. If your life is set up so that you can drop anything when the surf comes up, it changes the whole way you do your life. And it has changed this whole company here.

    – Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia

    Yvon explains the surf boards lined up in the entrance hallway of the companys headquarters in Ventura, California. Quoted in “Good Business” by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly.