#201: Bin It
| Dear friends Running organisations is a tricky affair. There are no end of strategy books to help you identify the key levers you should pull, the templates that need to be filled, and the metrics to be monitored. Then there are all the books about leadership and building psychological safety, and the ones about communication and on and on. It is complicated because we’re complicated. And yet, in the final analysis, it’s us and other people. Organisations come alive (and die or stumble) in everyday interactions and how they’re done. Today’s letter shares two anecdotes I find helpful. /strategy As our businesses and lives evolve, we add to them. We rarely pause to consider what we must get rid of. Indeed in an article published in Nature, engineer Leidy Klotz and social psychologist, Gabrielle Adams tell us that ‘people systematically overlook subtractive changes’, tending to add complexity rather than create simplicity. I loved Dublin-based The City Bin Company’s ‘Bin It’ campaign. They asked employees to identify practices or tasks that they thought wasted time, money, energy or space without generating a valuable resource. Those who submitted items that were approved to be ‘binned’, were rewarded. It also started when their CEO was speaking to team member, and she asked him whether he’d like to see ‘the spreadsheet’. He didn’t know what she was speaking about. It was a request he’d made three years, for a piece of information he needed at that moment. She’d maintained it ever since. The document grew and grew. No-one ever looked at it. It is pretty much guaranteed that if your business is older than 5 years, you have got things that can get binned. (This example comes from Verne Harnish Scaling Up an excellent ‘how-to’ guide to strengthening your business). //self Last week, I introduced you to innovation expert, Clayton Christensen. He describes a time when Intel Chairman, Andy Grove, asked him to present his research to Intel. Excited he flew to Silicon Valley, only for Grove to tell him that they haven’t got time to listen his research, instead he asked that Christensen just tell them the implications for Intel. Christensen refused. Instead, he insisted on the time and on presenting his research. Ten minutes in, Grove interrupted and again asked ‘tell us what it means for Intel’. Christensen refused, insisting on continuing to present his research. He remembers that as he ended his presentation, “Grove said ‘OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is…,’ and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor”. And reflects, “I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own”. It is a powerful methodology to bring to any management moment. Yes, there are instances where the solution is a standard process or urgency demands that we ‘tell’. However, the most powerful thing you can do is help others to think. When they come to you with a challenge, don’t present a solution. Instead, share examples of how you’ve seen things like it tackled before. Remember, like Grove, they probably know more about their situation than you do. The best thing that you can do, for yourself and them, is to share a framework or a case study that they can use to think about the challenge (of course, this means that you need to be dedicated to reflecting and learning so that you have examples to share). And, don’t be rushed. Christensen knew it would take time to explain. He insisted on it. And be sure of your value, Christensen had spent years doing his research. He had enough confidence in it and himself, to tell one of the world’s most powerful business leaders to be patient, not once but twice. ///soul We often think of art, literature and music as sources of joy. Indeed, they are and, as Michel Adanson the protagonist in David Diop’s latest novel Beyond the Door of No Return, reminds us, they can also be a powerful way to confront the part of ourselves and being human that diminish us, “I realized then that painting and music have the power to reveal to ourselves our secret humanity. Through art, we can sometimes push open a hidden door leading to the darkest part of our being, as black as the depths of a prison cell. And, once that door is wide open, the corners of our soul are so brightly illuminated that our lies to ourselves no longer have an inch of shade in which they can take refuge, as if exposed to the African sun at its zenith”. We are complicated, holding both joy and sorrow, light and dark, great art can help us see what we’d rather not but still need to (You can read my thoughts on Diop’s book here). All the best Karl PS: If you’re looking for some great female South African crime writers, I loved these three. |