metacool

Contrails

When I awoke this morning, I sensed a step function increase in the power of The Force.

This could only mean one thing:  Jim Matheson is blogging.

My good friend, professional peer, and all-around partner in crime, Jim is one of those rare individuals who does just about everything to the hilt, boosts the energy of any room he enters, and is just plain fun and good to hang out with.  He cares intensely about innovating with a heart, and is a wise man (and sometimes a wise guy).

It's still very much a startup, but I have no doubt that Jim's blog Contrails will provide stimulating reading over the weeks and months to come.

Lessons in avoiding assholes, part 2

My previous post on the importance of avoiding assholes as a way to be more innovative is the single most popular post in this blog, so in the name of creativity, progress, and better workplaces everywhere, here's another serving of asshole-bashing.

Dan Pink's blog has an interesting link to a study done by economist Armin Frank, who studied the effect of close managerial supervision on employee motivation.  His conclusion is not startling to those of us who have labored under an asshole, to wit:

"Anyone who is suspicious of the willingness to work of their employees is in fact punished by poor work levels; whoever is optimistic and gives them free rein is rewarded."

I really believe in this.  I spent my formative career years doing skunkworks R&D inside of the old, original incarnation of HP.  I had an enlightened manager who always got the best out of his engineering teams.  We didn't have any weekly supervisory meetings -- you just worked to do your best, and when you had a question or needed some guidance, you'd stop by his cube.

One cold, rainy February day he  happened to walk by my cube (hadn't seen each other in weeks) only to catch a whiff of raw Bondo, the automotive body filler (of course, I was wearing a gas mask).  Toxic fumes!  I was using it to create a quick prototype of some mechanism I had sketched up, nothing that I wasn't used to doing in my college dorm room 12 months earlier.  What did he do?  Well, he didn't pull the asshole maneuver and tighten the "circle of trust" noose upon my neck by forcing me to start clearing every little work decision with him.  No, instead, he just said (calmly),  "There are very few things that will get you fired here.  Working with hazardous materials inside of an office space is one of them.  Cool stuff you're working on, by the way."  And then he strolled away.

For this guy, for this kind of leader able to make this kind of optimistic, trusting gesture, I redoubled my efforts to get the prototype to work. 

Outside in the rain.

Creating Cool Stuff with Storytelling, part 4

I can’t tell you how much I learn from good blogs.  One I particularly like is Presentation Coach.  Scott Rayburn writes pure gems about making good presentations, telling better stories.  His latest post,  “About fear…” is wonderful, because it acknowledges the fact that we’re all human, and nothing in life ever reaches a state of 100% perfection:

Will you make mistakes? Of course.

Will there be flashes of panic? Yes.

Will you forget details? Most likely.

Give yourself permission to make mistakes, to be anxious. Then carry on. Just don’t make yourself a liability for your message. It’s too important for that.

I love Scott's approach to public speaking.  When was the last time you did anything worthwhile without  making a mistake or two?  Giving yourself permission to make mistakes is about much more than effective public speaking, it's about being innovative across your entire life.  Just go do it!

Nike Considered: Simply Remarkable

Nike has just launched its new Considered family of shoes, designed from a Cradle-to-Cradle-ish Point of View.  To create the Considered line, Nike's designers went back to first prinicples, questioning basic design traditions in order to get to a new and better product outcome which addresses the environmental footprint required to source, manufacture, and recycle shoes.  Here are some highlights:

• Leather (a renewable resource) pieces are stiched in an overlapping fashion so as to produce smooth internal seams, obviating the need for comfort liners and reducing the shoes's material mass.
• All of those leather pieces are tanned using a vegetable-based process
• Again, to save material mass, metal eyelets aren't used
• The two-piece outsole is designed to snap together, eliminating harmful adhesives and simplifying recyclability
• No use of PVC
• Where possible, materials are sourced locally to reduce transportation energy use

The result?  Considered shoes generate 63% less waste in manufacturing than a typical Nike design.  The use of solvents has been cut by 80%.  And a stunning 37% less energy is required to create a pair of shoes. 

Is Considered a perfect example of green design?  No, but when was the last time anyone did anything to perfection?  I'm just happy to see a big, public company like Nike -- with everything to lose, and not so much to gain -- take a leadership role in trying to forge a new market space for environmentally friendly, socially relevant products.  This is a wonderful first step.

The result is a new sub-brand of shoes whose differentiation is rooted not in the multi-million dollar marketing endorsement of a basketball player, but in the physical makeup and design of the offering itself.  That's real, and I hope it's for keeps.

Bono's Important TED Talk

Bono gave an inspiring, audacious speech at TED about changing the world, and it's worth watching.

Stanford's new Institute of Design (aka the "d.school")

A secret informant slipped me this manifesto from Stanford's new Institute of Design (aka the "d.school"). 

Pass it along to your friends!  Join the design thinking movement!

metacool Thought of the Day

"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" - Thomas Keller

Creating an Organization around Customers

A while ago I wondered what would happen to an organization whose CEO really understood its line of market offerings.  Then I asked what the ramifications would be if a CEO was able -- and willing -- to blog.  Now I think the biggest and best question is: what if your CEO were willing to create an org chart with the customer somewhere on the page?

What sparked this question was this interesting thought from Vincent Grimaldi I found while reading Interbrand's 2004 User's Choice Awards (top brand of the year?  Apple):

...conventional organization charts contribute to reinforcing the wrong behaviors, as they show the CEO at the top and the receptionist at the bottom. Notice that the customer is not part of this picture... When the customer calls on the phone, it is the receptionist who picks up, not the CEO. Who is the most important person in that scenario?

So, what would happen if you mapped out your own organization from a customer's point of view?  You could start by asking these four simple questions:

• What is the user experience of our organization like today?
• What should the user experience actually be like?
• Who in our org actually delivers that experience?
• How can we better allocate resources to help those key brand representatives? 

Everything should be fair game in this exercise: from how customer support calls are handled, how incoming resumes are sorted and evaluated, how content gets created for the company blog (you do have one, don't you?), how the FedEx guy gets treated each day, to how the corporate website is structured.  The results of this exercise should help your organization really "get" how to create wonderful end-to-end customer experiences by becoming more aware of the human aspects of the brand impression your company makes in the world.

In essence, it's about making your org chart a catalyst for fractal brand thinking.  At every point from the janitorial staff on down to The Office of the CEO.

Good brands are fractal

Definition of fractal, from Hyperdictionary: 

A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a smaller copy of the whole. Fractals are generally self-similar (bits look like the whole) and independent of scale (they look similar, no matter how close you zoom in)

Good brands are fractal.  Every interaction you have reflects the interaction you'll have with every other piece of the whole, as well as the whole itself.  Since "brand" is shorthand for the total experience you get from buying, using, servicing, and disposing of a product, creating a great brand requires taking a fractal point of view to the process of designing total experiences where everything -- large and small -- is consistent and mutually self-reinforcing.

What's the implication for creating cool stuff?  I haven't fully thought this one out, but I think it all boils down to leadership.  Behind every great product is someone who had a vision of the end thing in mind and was able to say "yes" and "no" to help the development team understand that vision.  In a way, great products require a kind of fractal leadership able to recognize the right texture for a button, the right message for the box, the right approach to customer support and service.

What do you think?

Cool Books of 2004

Another list.  Here are my favorite reads of 2004. No claims to comprehensiveness or consistency, and not all were published in the past year; just a list of books that made me think different in 2004:

On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins:  an elegant book on the nature of intelligence and how the brain works.  The good news for metacool readers is that "real intelligence" is the way that designers think.

The System of the World, by Neil Stephenson: third in the baroque triology, capable of stimulating latent nerdism, and a helluva of a long book, it continues Stephenson's fascinating journey through the origins of modern finance and computing.  I loved every page of it.  Not for everyone, which is refreshing.

The Innovator's Solution, by Clayton Christensen: forget the hype, the content is outstanding.  Clay tested the ideas in this book on my class at Harvard Business School, and yet I still find something fresh and interesting each time I go back to its pages.  The chapters on need-based market segmentation strategies are excellent.

Porsche: Excellence was Expected, by Karl Ludvigsen:  perhaps the best business book of 2004, unfortunately Excellence is marketed as a car book, which will keep it out of the mainstream.  In a world where marketing-led "brand building" is an oxymoron, Ludvigsen shows how Porsche built a brand with deep integrity piece by piece, slowly evolving it over time.  His discussion of the genesis of the Porsche Cayenne SUV also shows how quickly a brand can be diluted and maimed by managers out to make a quick buck.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball, by Gordon MacKenzie:  any book recommended by both Richard Tait and Bob Sutton (both proponents of humane business practices, and really good guys themselves) has to be good, and Hairball delivers.  Look, any organization will have its problems, and those problems can seem particularly nasty when seen from the inside.  The real question is: do you care enough about those problems do something about them?  Hairball is a guide to engaging with an organization to help solve its problems without losing your soul.  It also contains some great advice about dealing with nasty behaviors in the workplace, including teasing, which has run rampant in every org I've ever worked in.

Emotional Design, by Donald Norman:  if you haven't noticed, I'm quite taken by this wonderful piece of thinking.  His Visceral-Behavioral-Reflective model of human cognition is a powerful way to understand slippery concepts like brand and meaning, making this one of the most important books on marketing (where marketing is the process of understanding human needs and creating offerings to meet those needs) to come out in years.  His message about beautiful things working better is important, too.  Read this one.

Collins on Drucker

"His generosity of spirit explains much of Drucker’s immense influence. I reflected back on his work, The Effective Executive, and his admonition to replace the quest for success with the quest for contribution. The critical question is not, “How can I achieve?” but “What can I contribute?”

Drucker’s primary contribution is not a single idea, but rather an entire body of work that has one gigantic advantage: nearly all of it is essentially right."

- Jim Collins

Alex Zanardi on Courage and Passion

“In life… when you find something that you love so much, as much as I did love motor racing, and as I still love motor racing, you will find in yourself the determination to go out and really bring the best out of yourself.”
– Alessandro Zanardi

[In 2001 champion race driver Alex Zanardi’s legs were cut off above the knee in a horrific racing accident.  Zanardi battled back from the brink of death to once again carry his baby son on his shoulders… and in 2004 to race a BMW in the Italian touring car series (that's him in the car above).  Intrinsically motivated to race and win... stubborn, courageous, and passionate to the core of his being, Zanardi is proof positive that racers make great role models. Forza Zanardi!

A lesson in avoiding assholes, from Sir Richard Branson

I just caught the premier episode of The Rebel Billionaire, Sir Richard Branson’s answer to Donald Trump.  I had three takeaways from the show, two trivial, one deep.

First, the trivial:

• If you want to get on a reality TV show, you must dye your hair blonde, or for bonus points, burn it extra crispy white.
• And/or: do something strange with that hair.  Shave it.  Grow a jazz dot.  Stick it up with glue. If all else fails, dump a dorky hat over it. 

Perhaps this is Branson’s way of poking fun at Trump – “Look mate, I can gather a load of people with hair at least as silly as yours.”  However, as with the extreme sports activities which make up the bulk of the show, hair has very little to do with business acumen or success.  As I said, these are trivial points.

Assholes, on the other hand, are not (for those of you not paying attention, this is the “deep” takeaway).  Organizational behavior expert Robert Sutton has written extensively on the effect that assholes have on coworkers.  We’ve all been there: you’re sitting in a staff meeting, trying to act like an adult, and then someone in the room has a hissy fit.  Or think about the low-level teasing that inevitably accompanies someone wearing what they want to wear to work.  And then there are the folks who, plainly put, treat people below them (such as janitors and exec assistants) like shit.  All the work of assholes, and all bad news; as Sutton points out, “…there is substantial evidence that anger and hostility are contagious, so if I am nasty to someone, they will be nasty to me, and a destructive cycle will commence.”  Sound familiar?

What if you could have an asshole-free workplace?  I worked in one such place, and it was the best four years of my professional career.  Sure, we had a few total jerk-offs here and there, but in general our hiring process was all about establishing a shock-proof, bullet-resistant asshole detector, and it worked.  Here’s how:

1. We generally only accepted interviews from candidates referred via word of mouth.  In Seth Godin speak, we looked for Purple Cows.  Resumes were a bad thing… piles of references were golden!
2. We phone screened for technical competence before you walked in the door.  It’s one thing to be an asshole, it’s quite another to be an incompetent asshole, or even worse, an incompetent nice person.
3. Once in the door, you spoke to at least 12 people.  You had lunch with them.  You walked around.  You talked.  You answered questions.
4. Any hire candidate got interviewed by people in the org who would be above, below, or to the side of them, status-wise.  And by people in totally unrelated disciplines.  That way, if you did get hired, you felt that the entire company wanted you, not just one specific high-status manager, who by the way, might or might not be a total asshole herself.  This method also keeps assholes in a hiring position from replicating.  Assholes tend to stick together, and once stuck are not easily separated.
5. We took you to lunch.  Decisions you made at the restaurant mattered.  A lot.

I know this isn’t the norm out in industry.  Not many HR professionals are ready to cede so much power over the hiring process to the rest of the organization.  This is too bad.  As Sutton writes:

For starters, I am surprised by how few senior managers act to avoid hiring jerks in the first place, or to stop abusive employees in their tracks once they reveal their true colors. The key is to make explicit to everyone involved in hiring decisions that candidates who have strong skills but who show signs they will belittle and disrespect others, cannot be hired under any circumstances.

Sir Branson took an innovative approach to the asshole problem by donning Scooby-Doo-ish makeup and mask before picking up would-be contestants from the airport in a London taxi cab.  Disguised as an arthritic old cabbie, Branson was able to observe these would-be Trumps interacting with a “little” person, a situation which is to an asshole what buried truffles are to a pig – an invitation to root around and generally make a boor of one’s self.  Not surprisingly, three contestants showed their true colors in short order, and Branson kicked two of them off.  A strong cultural statement, eh?

On Branson’s show, the jerks – wait, by willingly going on a reality TV show they’re all grade-A assholes, right? – okay, the really, really big jerks get kicked off first.  But that doesn’t happen in real life workplaces, at least not quickly enough to matter in most situations.  What to do?  Sutton advises that there “… are times when the answer is indifference, when the wisest course is to go through the motions, learn not to care, and just get through the day until something changes on your job, or something better comes along… I am starting to believe that, as a management professor, part of my job is to teach people when indifference is more useful than passion.”  I tend to agree with him. 

Intrinsic Motivation

Seth Godin has an interesting post today concerning six, lobsters and videotape:

Today, in anticipation of a dinner party, I stopped at a lobster seller in Chelsea Market in NYC. I asked for a six pound lobster. The pricing at the store is $9.95 a pound for small lobsters and $8.95 a pound for lobsters six pounds and up.

The lobster weighed (I'm not making this up), 5.97 pounds. For reference, that's just less than a pound by the weight of a penny. Feed the lobster a plankton and it would be six pounds.

He started to ring me up at $9.95 a pound. I pointed out the price breakdown and the guy shrugged and said, "It doesn't weight six pounds."

Two co-workers came over and with precisely the same uncomprehending grin, repeated his point. I added a penny to the scale but they weren't swayed.

So, the two questions are, "Do you think the owner wanted them to act this way?" and "Would they have acted differently if they were on camera?"

I believe that the best motivation is self-motivation. That teaching people the right thing to do is far more effective than intimidating them into acting out of fear.

Seth brings up the critical difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: if you can create a culture that encourages people to act on the basis of self-motivation, you're likely to have good relations between workers, good customer service, and best of all, a place that churns out innovation. Why? Because intrinsic motivation leads to enjoyment, flow and meaning. Ask Honda or Cox.

Bringing cool stuff to life: 2004 TED Prize

I'm obsessed with the process of bringing cool things to life. I admire the TED Prize, because it isn't about being a genius or a superhero -- it's about doing great stuff. The 2004 winners are Bono, photo-artist Edward Burtynsky, and medical device pioneer Robert Fischell.

Some say that rockers are but court jesters, but some use their fame as a bully pulpit. Bono has done this; the TED site leaves us with one of his remarkable thoughts: "What are the blind spots of our age? It might be something as simple as our deep down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth."

To my mind, the environmental issues facing us today are beyond comprehension. What do a billion people look like? What does it feel like to lose an organism forever? Photos by Burtynsky can help deliver the message in a way that breaks through the fuzz.

Many people create products which claim to change people's lives, but which really only affect lifestyle. For example, an iPod is way cool, but it differs from my 80's Walkman only by degree. Robert Fischell creates things that fundamentally change lives.  His work is the standard by which that statement must be judged.

metacool Thought of the Day

“Research should be defined as doing something where half of the people think it’s impossible – impossible!  And half of them think hmmmmm, maybe that will work, right?  When there’s ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was, ‘Well, that’s nonsense.’  So what that means is that a true, creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.”

– Burt Rutan

Steve Jobs on Innovation

"You need a very product-oriented culture. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. How are monopolies lost? Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly. [But] what's the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself? So a different group of people starts to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. Then one day the monopoly expires, for whatever reason...but by then, the best product people have left or they are no longer listened to." - Steve Jobs

Things which I believe drive this dynamic in organizations:

1) As Clay Christensen has noted, succcessful organizations drive for ever-increasing margins over time.  This dynamic forces changes in the organization's internal mission and raises the profile and validity of sales and financial people.

2) People who do the creative work of product development are different from the people who do the routine (but very important) work of managing call centers, tracking accounts receivable, talking to shareholders, and keeping the lights on.  Thing is, routine people are more likely to get satisfaction from being managers, rather than from focusing on content, which is what creative people like to do.  So the routine people rise in the organization, mismanage the creative people, and nothing gets good gets created -- witness Apple without Jobs.

3)  Tibor Kalman once said "success = boredom".  If a product line is becoming mature, and if the company is unwilling or unable to roll out new lines of products, the good product people will leave in search of more interesting challenges.  Who wants to be the guy trying to take another $0.01 of cost out of an already optimized mechanism? 

4) Product success drives financial success, which leads to going public, which leads to short-term financial pressures and the generation of a gigantic bureaucratic hairball.  That hairball tangles the creative product people and binds them, limits them.  As the rather creative fellow Richard Branson says, "If it's a private company, you can get away with more. If it's my money, then if I lose my money, no one else has been hurt by it."

Cranium Wisdom from Richard Tait

Attended Stanford’s EDAY over the weekend, and had my hat knocked in the creek by the event’s final speaker, the Grand Poo-Bah of Cranium, Richard Tait.  The theme of EDAY was “the power of play,” so who better than a gaming company Grand Poo-Bah to tie a bow around things? 

Tait’s spiel focused on his own version of the 4 P’s: Passion, Productivity, Profitability, and Play.  Some particularly chewy nuggets:

Passion:

• Lighten & Enlighten: that’s Cranium’s passion, and as a mission it infuses all their daily activities.
• Invest time and energy in your culture: Cranium holds periodic “rodeos” where the group gets together to discuss cultural issues.  What’s going wrong and how can we improve things?
• Encourage each member of your org to come to work each day with a point of view about what they bring to the party: Tait’s daily POV centers on passion, speed & urgency, and discovery.

Productivity:

• Focus on innovation and marketing (metacool editorial: if you do them right, they’re one and the same): Everything else can and should be outsourced.  Drucker agrees, by the way.
• When hiring for jobs that create value in the marketplace, hire for how people think and not for what they know:  Hiring for smarts, and renting experience when needed, is a great way to find (and retain) those knowledge workers capable of creating remarkable products.  To his credit, Tait acknowledged that for routine work (a concept I borrow from Bob Sutton, another EDAY speaker) like day-to day accounting, finance, and operations, you should go for experience.  Just make sure those folks are a cultural fit.  Actively shun the fun sponges who take delight in the creation of bureaucratic hairballs.

Profitability:

• Operational rigor can empower, rather than distract, a creative organization:  Encouraging your entire workforce to actually understand EBITDA (as Cranium does) is impressive.  Setting that EBITDA reporting to a Bee Gees soundtrack takes things to setting eleven.  Creative people are adults, too, and they’re usually pretty smart.  They can understand EBITDA.
• Never forget that customers are your best (and FREE) sales force:  Cranium made its limited marketing dollars work as hard as they could.  In fact, it sold its first million units without a dime of outbound marketing spend.  And people at Cranium do seemingly crazy things to win and retain passionate customers.  For example, Tait once delivered Cranium games on Christmas Day to customers on a shipping waitlist. 

Play:

• Use the spirit of play to guide your product development process:  Cranium went from concept to reality in just six months using a philosophy of rapid prototyping (print out game boards drawn in PowerPoint) and fluid iteration (hold four user playtests a night, and modify the prototype between each one).
• See the world with the mind of a child:  What is interesting?  What works particularly well?  What tastes and feels good?  Case in point, the Cranium color palette – which now informs the entire Cranium brand – was lifted from a roll of Lifesavers.  Classic.  Tasty.  Effective.
• Enjoy yourself in the workplace, and enjoy what you do:  Tait clearly does, and his enthusiasm is infectious.  And he digs old 911’s, which is worth 50 bonus points.

Speaking of bonus items, here’s a charming PDF by Tait which nicely summarizes his thoughts on culture, meaning and innovation.  I’m still looking for my hat…

Download CraniumSecretSauce.pdf

Soichiro Honda on Enjoyment and Innovation

"Each individual should work for himself. People will not sacrifice themselves for the company. They come to work at the company to enjoy themselves."  - Soichiro Honda

That Honda the company is a champion innovator is due in no small part to the culture created by Honda the founder.   

What I find so interesting about this quote from Mr. Honda is his focus on the concept of enjoyment.  When was the last time you heard any industry magnate, let alone a Japanese one, say it's all about individual enjoyment, not about the greater good of the company?

Many business thinkers write about managing innovation, as if innovation were a thing.  But innovation is ultimately the expression of a set of behaviors originating in the individual.  So rather than focusing our energy on understanding the output of those individuals (innovation), we should think instead about how to lead those individuals so that they can be as innovative as possible.  Could creating a culture of innovation be as simple as cultivating a culture of enjoyment?  Mr. Honda says "yes": If you're at Honda, then, the central task of leadership is about creating work that leads to enjoyment, and innovation will follow.  It's not unlike the leadership philosophy of Bobby Cox.

But what does enjoyment mean?  Is the implication that work needs to be "fun", as in dot com fun?  Is it about air hockey tables and free M&M's?  Should employees be walking around with inane smiles on their faces?  I don't think so.  My guess is that Mr. Honda believed in the kind of enjoyment which leads to a state of flow.  Csikszentmihalyi (the originator of the concept of flow) wrote this illuminating discussion of enjoyment in his book Good Business:

The experience of happiness in action is enjoyment -- the exhilarating sensation of being fully alive... Enjoyment, on the other hand, is not always pleasant, and it can be very stressful at times.  A mountain climber, for example, may be close to freezing, utterly exhausted, and in danger of falling into a bottomless crevasse, yet he wouldn't want to be anywhere else...  At the moment it is experienced, enjoyment can be both physcially painful and mentally taxing; but because it involves a triumph over the forces of entropy and decay, it nourishes the spirit.

Nourishing the spirit.  Experiencing the thrill of triumphing over adversity.  Happiness in action. When was the last time you heard those words associated with managing innovation?  Next time someone in your workplace couches innovation in terms of by-the-numbers processes, jargon, and esoteric management theories, just ask them this simple question: how do you plan to enable people to enjoy their work? 

Bobby Cox on Leadership

Worthwhile has a nice post on the leadership style of Bobby Cox, manager of the Atlanta Braves:

1) Check your ego
2) Make your team shine in the field
3) Remember that things are supposed to be fun

If you're in the business of making good stuff happen, I think these are great guidelines for getting the most out of your team, especially if that team is made up of knowledge workers.
Don't go soft on deadlines, though.

Wynton Marsalis on What's Important

“You can reach a situation where things of intelligence and refinement and culture can be considered elite, and things that are crass and ignorant can be considered to be real and of the people; when you begin to have the mass of the populace believing that they should strive for something that’s not worth striving for, then tremendous amounts of energy goes into the worthless and the maintenance of that which is worthless.

That’s a battle we all fight, even within ourselves. You have to actively pursue knowledge. It’s out here for you. But you gotta go out and get it. You gotta want it. And you’ve gotta keep wanting it.”

-- Wynton Marsalis

What if the CEO knew his products?

I have a good friend who is an officer in the US Army.  He’s the Real Deal: immensely educated (engineering undergrad, Harvard MBA, plus multiple other graduate degrees), an elite athlete (each morning he outruns all the junior soldiers he works out with), and, as you can well imagine, highly motivated and disciplined.  But before you begin to think he’d be the last person you’d want to go to a ballgame with, realize that he’s also one of the most creative and original thinkers I’ve ever met, not to mention a very capable consumer of cool Corona beverages.  For example, I’ll never forget his story of manning a highway checkpoint as part of a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo: the afternoon was dragging on, the line of stopped cars growing ever longer, tempers flaring.  What would you do to diffuse the situation?  My friend had a portable field kitchen brought in ASAP and proceeded to serve up thousands of hot doughnuts, calming nerves and making friends via an awesomely creative use of soft power.

He’s also a tanker, meaning that he leads an organization of over a thousand individuals whose mission is to go to battle, if necessary, in tanks.  I remember comparing notes on what a typical workday looked like.  As you can imagine, ours were quite different.  His started with an intense physical workout, and then transitioned to a full 12 hours of harsh decision making and do-it-now leadership, after which he would be free to go home.  Except he wouldn’t.  No, as a hardcore tanker, he would stroll over to the maintenance garage for a few more hours of wrenching on tanks along with rank and file soldiers.  Why?  Partly because, as an engineer, he loves mechanical stuff.  And maybe there’s some stress relief in there.  But mostly because he recognizes that he is a much stronger leader of men when his way of knowing – understanding what it takes to keep of group of tanks and tankers running day after day – comes by doing.  For him, when to do is to know, there’s never a knowing-doing gap, and his leadership rings true and effective.

Think of my tanker buddy and ask yourself this: how would your own organization look, feel, and behave if its leadership really – really – understood what things were about?  What if they could demo any product as well as a frontline salesperson?  What if they could man the tech support helplines?  Screw that, let’s lower the bar limbo limbo to the floor and just ask: what if the CEO knew how to start up the product we make?

I’m an engineer by training, so I’m biased, but I’ve long believed that product companies are best run by engineers/people who grok stuff at a deep level.  Like Apple.  Toyota.  Porsche.  Amazon.  Or Honda… Honda makes arguably the best damn motors on the planet (eat your heart out Ferrari and BMW!) and they have a conspicuous habit of picking CEO’s from an elite pool of engineers who spent their formative 20’s wrenching on Formula 1 cars.  You better believe these guys know cars inside and out, and it shows in the very real value difference between even the most pedestrian Accord (wow!) and an average rental-crapwagon Ford Taurus. 

Consider this: last week Takeo Fukui, the CEO of Honda, shoehorned his derriere into a BAR-Honda Formula 1 car and proceeded to carve a few hot laps of Tochigi, the corporate R&D track, hitting 181 miles per hour. Few auto makers boast a CEO who can shift a manual gearbox, let alone demonstrate his company's racing vehicles at speed.  For dessert Fukui straddled a RC211V Honda racing motorcycle and burned off a few more laps.  Any wonder why Honda makes such great stuff?

I have a feeling Takeo and my tanker friend would see eye-to-eye on all the important aspects of leading by knowing by doing.

metacool Thought of the Day

"If you want a successful product, test and revise. If you want a great product, one that can change the world, let it be driven by someone with a clear vision. The latter represents more financial risk, but it is the only path to greatness."

-- Donald Norman, Emotional Design

Vartan Gregorian on Liberty

I’m an unabashed fan of Vartan Gregorian, and was quite taken with his thoughts in Ken Burn’s film The Statue of Liberty:

"If you could say one single force that is threatening liberty, in my opinion, it’s ignorance.

Second, is to treat ourselves as only economic units, rather than as spiritual beings.

America is not an actuality, but is a potentiality.  We have to remember that the Universe is not going to be seeing somebody like you again in its entire history of creation.  So it’s up to you to become a dot, a paragraph, a page, blank page, chapter in the history of creation."

The modern corporation is one of the finest inventions of past 500 years; it has helped create an elevated state of innovation unknown to all previous generations of mankind.  However, it often suffers from a lack of respect for the individual humans who sustain its economic well-being.  Though they are its lifeblood, these people all too often are regarded by the corporation’s management as mere “resources” or cost centers to be dealt with as primarily economic units, rather than as unique individuals.  I don’t think corporations are going to become more humane and respectful of the individual anytime soon. 

But individuals can make a difference.  If you work for a corporation that mistreats its employees or the society in which it operates in the name of maximizing shareholder value, try to make it more humane from the inside, or vote with your feet.  Just do something -- start making changes yourself within the company, or take your once-in-the-Universe potentiality somewhere else.  It’s hard to do, I know.  But if we all did it, our society would benefit from a powerful opportunity to balance the liberty-threatening power of the modern corporation.

Leadership in Steel

BMW's design leader Chris Bangle, as quoted in Automobile:

"The responsibility that comes with attempting to look forward is that you also have to research, to bring your research into the world and show people and generate discussion.  That's something a lot of companies don't want to do... we have an obligation in the future to provide cars that owners will be proud to retore and proud to bring back, so that at Pebble Beach in fifty years, they'll be showing a 50-year-old car instead of a 150-year-old car."

I admire Bangle's guts and determination to change the face of BMW design, and on an intellectual level I understand what he is trying to do with this new design language.  However, my heart says that the new designs don't sing. 

I really want him to succeed, but I have yet to see a design from the house of Bangle that knocks my socks off.

Vartan Gregorian on Organizational Leadership

I was recently in a meeting where a very senior person directed a question about the presentation to another very senior person who had nothing to do with the presentation. She could have just asked the presenter, a fabulous, engaging person who knew everything about the subject at hand. Why the conscious snub? Because the presenter was of a lower "salary grade," and you wouldn't want to mix with those types, you know?

Contrast that world view with this tidbit from Vartan Gregorian, former President of Brown, describing how he approaches relationships with those "under him":

I also did something both in the library and at Brown and at Penn. I got to know the staff. By staff, I don’t mean secretaries alone. The building and ground workers, too. I used to go occasionally to the basement of the New York Public Library and have bourbon with the custodians. I learned more from them about the structural problems of the building than from anyone else. At Brown, I tried to set an example of having a lifestyle governed by modesty. For example, I took a Bonanza bus from Providence to the Boston airport for $11.25 to save money, but more important, to set a tone for the rest of the campus. I instituted a policy that nobody could travel first class. Everybody had to travel economy. No limousines, only buses and taxicabs, and no fancy meals. These were important symbolic measures so that if I cut the budget, nobody would say, “Well, the fat cats are still living high on the hog.” There were even funny moments related to these policies.

Once it was raining and I had no umbrella. I was walking along and the university garbage truck stopped. “Hey, Prez,” one of the workers called out. “You need a lift?” He thought that I would not take it. I embarrassed him by climbing on and coming home with a garbage truck, and that story made the rounds.

It would be really interesting to spend a day in the shoes of an organizational snob. What a painful, limiting existence it must be.