Who's The Barber Here?

Below is a link to one of my favorite SNL skits of all time: Theodoric, Barber of York. It's from one of the first seasons, with Steve Martin in his prime playing the starring role as the village barber/doctor. Have you seen it? It's brilliant!

For the longest time, I thought it was merely a good-natured rant against the arrogance of doctors - "Now, who's the barber here?" Theodoric admonishes one of his hapless patients before yet another bloodletting.

Ah, but it's so much more. This skit is an admonition to all experts, thought leaders, and gurus to tread carefully. What we knowledge specialists take as gospel today may be just as flawed as what we used to think was certain a few years ago.

The next time someone insists they have a monopoly on the truth, be afraid: be very afraid.

We humans do our best. Our best is often very good. Indeed, all of the progress we've made from Theodoric's time until the present day - even just from 1975 - is because we took what we knew and acted upon it.

But it's also because we questioned what we were told was irrefutable. We tested what the experts told us. Those who questioned orthodoxy most thoroughly became our new experts (at least for a while).

The next time someone insists there's a small toad in your belly causing your company's profits to dip, and laughs at past experts who told you the cause was demonic possession, think of Theodoric - and avoid that guru's prescription for another round of bloodletting!

Me? I'll take "reasonably sure" versus Insistently Right every time!

Watch Theodoric here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/3529/saturday-night-live-theodoric-of-york

From Old School to 21st Century CEO

In 1995, when he became Chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, John Chamber was a 20th-Century leader at the top of his game. In the spirit of the era, his style was command-and-control all the way, as he himself admitted in a recent interview with Newsweek.

But today? Today, Chambers is a changed man - and his company is far more competitive than ever! As he tells Newsweek,

"I realized there was something that many of us do not understand when we take a leadership role: culture. Great companies have very strong and great cultures. A huge part of a leadership role is to drive the culture of the company and to reinforce it. The other thing that has changed dramatically is [a shift] from command and control to collaboration and teamwork. It sounds easy to do, but it’s hard, because you are trained that way in M.B.A. school, in law school. Around 80 to 90 percent of the job is how we work together toward common goals, which requires a different skill set."

Continues Chambers,

"There’s a fundamental change that may be really important to the future of business in this country and the world. At Cisco, we are moving to collaboration teams, groups coming together that represent sales, engineering, finance, legal, etc. And we’re training leaders to think across silos. We now do that with 70 different teams in the company. So we’ll have a sales leader go run engineering. A lawyer go run business development. A business development leader go run our consumer operations. We’re going to train a generalist group of leaders who know how to learn and operate in collaboration teamwork. I think that’s the future of leadership."

Ask John Chambers if 21st-Century Leadership is a fad, or if he sees it as essential to keeping his enterprise at the forefront of innovation and profits long into the future.

Click here for the entire interview. You'll especially enjoy the longer video-version found on page 2 of this story:

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/04/know-what-you-don-t-know.html

*****

This is part 2 of a 2-part entry. Part 1 precedes it on this blog.

Is 21st-Century Leadership Inevitable, or Just a Fad?

I'm often asked, "If we're trending toward a new style of leadership in this exciting new century, why are so many companies still run like the 1950s never ended?"

This implies the question, "If it's working for these old-fashioned companies, why do leaders need to progress or die out, as you suggest?"

Are you ready for some heresy against my own heresy? Many leaders will continue in their old ways, and some of their companies will continue to prosper. While I'd like it to be otherwise, here's why eddies of the old ways will remain, in some pockets probably forever.

Capitalism isn't all that old yet. When Adam Smith first laid it out for us in 1776, most of the world was still mired in feudalism. Those few economies that were entering what we'd consider the modern era were focused on exploitation of natural resources for trade internally and overseas.

In this first permutation of Capitalism, commodities reigned. Most work required low-skill labor. In such a scenario, the command-and-control, top-down management of the feudal system carried over very well to enterprise. And just as trade was a zero-sum game, where you made money at the expense of your customer, so too pay was zero-sum: the Capitalist prospered more by paying his workers less. Thus, workers and customers were exploited just as was nature.

That is 19th-Century management in a nutshell. A commodities economy, with workers just another commodity.

The 20th Century brought sophistication to the workplace, though. Large-scale manufacturing created an ever-growing demand for high-skill labor. Command-and-control still ruled in the new century, but leadership grew up just a bit, as it became clear that competition over the best workers required better working conditions and pay.

Please don't think I'm claiming that 20th-Century leaders benignly granted better conditions to their workers. Social backlash against the oppressive conditions of 19th-Century management, manifested in new labor laws and unionization, also drove the improvement of management practices. But the turn of the last century did see leaders imposing more enlightened styles upon themselves as a way to attract and retain top talent, as Henry Ford showed when he doubled the going rate for labor in order to combat attrition brought about by the monotony of his new assembly lines. Ford would almost certainly have failed had he not progressed to a 20th-Century leadership style.

Did all of the 19th-Century ways fade away over the course of the 20th Century? Not at all. You can still find examples of completely exploitative management practices even today. Why? Because there remain some industries, such as agriculture, where the old rules still apply.

So what about today? We've trended from a commodities-based economy to a manufacturing one to a knowledge-based economy.

Are commodities and manufacturing gone entirely? Well, if you're reading this post on a computer or smart phone, if you're doing it in clothes while sipping a latte, you know they haven't - and they never will.

But in mature economies across the globe, high-skill, high-education knowledge-based industries are in the ascendancy. And guess what? That calls for an entirely new style of leadership. One that treats workers like adults. One that is both easier, because it's collaborative, and more difficult, because giving orders and expecting workers obey may be simpler, but it is simply no longer feasible.

...But it is genuinely infeasible only where the market forces employers to wise up or go under. Or, as is also often the case, where employers choose to embrace a more enlightened leadership style because it's the right thing to do and they want to do it. (An idea you can poo-poo if you like, but I know quite a number who have adopted a 21st-Century leadership style because they do honestly prefer it.)

Will 21st-Century Leadership ever be the only leadership there is? I promise you, it won't.

But I will promise you this: within competitive high-skill industries, the most successful, prosperous companies will be those that adopt modern management practices soonest and most meaningfully.

Next time, I'll share one CEO's transformation from 20th to 21st-Century leadership and the remarkable transformation it has wrought on his company. I'll bet you're using one of his products right now, maybe without even realizing it.

What's Really Dragging Your Business Down

Think your competition is the biggest threat to your company's prosperity?

Not even close.

The Japanese have a saying: "The nail that sticks up gets hammered."

What this means is that if someone goes against the grain, stands out and perhaps starts to make a name for himself, it is the responsibility of his peers to slam him down and put him back in his place.

Japanese culture values conformity about as much as American culture cherishes individuality, so for years I took this saying as reflective of an ethic that set our nations apart.

I'm a bit older and, in this case at least, a whole lot wiser now.

It doesn't matter the culture, humans are jealous creatures. Even when there is plenty for everyone, we're quite often more concerned with the other guy - notably, with making sure the other guy isn't doing better than we are.

I see this in my two little girls all the time, as I saw it with my sisters and myself when we were little. Even though in a healthy family there's plenty of parental love to go around, children are incensed by the idea that a sibling may get one more Popsicle, or an extra ten minutes of alone time, or... fill in the blank. It never ends.

And I've seen it in workplaces for years. I've observed it so often that I'm convinced this is a universal human trait.

...But so is rage, and we don't tolerate that in the workplace. Jealousy has no place at work, and it stifles most business' progress. When staff and managers are more concerned with keeping the other guy from the boss' favor than they are happy for a peer's success, that only hurts.

And not one in one hundred companies is truly free of this drag on its productivity.

Several years ago, I had a client with a number of retail locations. I spent quite a bit of time at a number of these spots, and got to know the store managers well. One of these managers, whom I'll call Bob, was highly innovative, and one of his creations was a program that taught math to area school kids in a real-world way that was fun for them, fun for Bob and his staff, and a great PR boon as well. His store thrived as he involved his community in this program. Within a couple of years with him at the helm, they really were the neighborhood store.

Bob was recognized by a trade organization in a national award ceremony. Great for Bob, right?

Well, of course it should have been great for Bob. But before he returned from his trip, the other store managers were poisoning the grapevine with jealous chit-chat about Bob. They teased him relentlessly for being the company's golden boy.

It got so bad that this is what Bob told me a few years after returning from his trip: "I wish I'd never won that stupid award." He was practically shaking as he related this. Not one ounce of him was proud or grateful for the recognition; he was just resentful of his peers and regretful of the entire experience.

There are a hundred different ways that jealousy can manifest itself within an organization. The result is always the same. Jealousy acts like a weight on a company's potential. A culture that tolerates it, even in much more subtle ways than Bob's firm, is paying a huge price in lost morale and de-motivated talent.

How jealous is your culture? And what is even a little jealousy costing you?