Month: October 2020 Page 3 of 4

So, most business book are boring re-assertions of the same advice and most non fiction books are magazine articles extended to book length, without adding any real content.

Nine lies isn’t. During my reading splurge at the big box bookstore I started taking notes. The book with the most notes was this book, and I’m not even all that interested in business management and leadership. This is a data driven book, and it turns out most of how we manage people in firms is just straight wrong.

Let’s go thru the nine lies.

#1: People care which company they work for

Turns out it’s all down to the team, the people they work most closely to, and the number of teams they are on. You can work for a shitty company, but if the team is good it’s a great job and you can work for a good company and it the team is bad, it’s a shitty job.

The authors found the following questions predict good teams.

1. I am enthusiastic about the mission.
2. I clearly understand what is expected of me.
3. In my team I am surrounded by people who share my values.
4. I have the chance to use my strengths every day.
5. My teammates have my back
6. I know I will be recognized for excellent work.
7. I have great confidence in my companies future.
8. In my work I am always challenged to grow.

Notice that only one of these questions (7) is about the company, though number three can be effected by it. I bolded #4, “I have the chance to use my strengths every day” because it’s important throughout the book, the authors find that playing to people’s strengths rather than trying to shore up their weaknesses and make them all-round good is important.

Trust of the team leader is extremely important: if people don’t trust the leader, they won’t like the job.

All of the questions are framed to give yes or no answers. People are happy when they’re positive, not when they’re ambivalent.

#2: The best plan wins

Nope. Fast feedback on what works and doesn’t from the front, and fast decision loops win. Leaders are always out of touch with actual conditions and can’t make good plans.

This means:

1. You should share as much info as possible
2. See what data people find useful
3. Trust people to make sense of the data, and;
   
4. Let the teams make the decisions, not the top leaders, since they’re who has to deliver

Leaders should check in once a week, and ask “what are your priorities?” and “how can I help?”

#3: The best companies cascade goals

Nope, they do the following.

1. Express values (write ’em on the walls!)
2. rituals
3. stories

In other words, they work on shared values almost entirely, they’re about creating a good culture, shared by the teams who do the actual work, and otherwise their job is almost entirely to support teams, not tell teams what to do.

#4: The best people are well-rounded

A strength is something you’re good at and enjoy. If you’re good and don’t enjoy it, it’s an ability. People look forward to using their strengths, enter flow when doing so and and feel fulfillment afterwards.

The best performers are defined by their strengths, not weaknesses and it is a leader’s job to make sure they use their strengths regularly and avoid their weaknesses. The best use of time isn’t making people all-rounded, if someone’s great at something and bad at something else, play to the strength and have another team member cover the weakness.

People learn from success, not from failure, and leaders should seek outcomes not control. Put your best person on it, tell them what you want, don’t tell them how to do it.

(This is how the best managers I ever had worked, as an aside. I remember one boss telling me that she had me doing audits and someone else running physically around the building because I’d be bored doing that job, and the girl doing that had so much energy she’d go stir crazy sitting down and auditing files.)

#5: People need feedback

Positive feedback is about 30X more effective than negative feedback, and negative feedback is 60 times more effective than no feedback.

Didn’t expect that last bit, but apparently people would rather be criticized than ignored. However concentrating on what people do right is vastly more effective. Again, when possible, focus your workers on what they do well and find someone who enjoys what they do badly (which they will dislike doing) to take that off their shoulders.

Further, because of how growth works, you should concentrate on improving strengths. If someone increases 10% every quarter say, 10% improvement in what they’re best at rather than 10% improvement on what they’re worst at means a lot more growth. A person does need to be competent enough at things they hate but must do that they don’t cause a disaster, but beyond that, hit the strengths.

To give positive feedback:

1. interrupt them when they’re doing great and tell them (use common sense about interruptions)
2. make up highlight reels of their best work and show them their own excellence (obviously, this can just be a list you talk to them about in a meeting, you don’t have to become a movie-maker)
3. when praising say what you saw, how it made you feel or what it made you think or realize
4. remember that praise increase performance more than performance increases praise.

Excellence is not the opposite of failure, fixing mistakes doesn’t create excellence.

Advice tends not to work because we tend to say what worked for us. To give advice ask them what has worked for them in the past on similiar issues.

#6: People can reliably rate other people

Nope, what you find in statistical studies is that their ratings only correlate to their own personality. We don’t see other people, we see ourselves. Groups don’t make this better; increasing the number of people who are bad at rating others doesn’t, in aggregate, turn the ratings good. Everyone is wrong. (There’s a bunch of other statistical stuff here, but what it comes down to is everyone is that there is NO way to measure the performance of knowledge workers.

Generally the best thing to do, counter-intuitive as it is, is have people rate themselves.  When asking others, the questions are:

1. Who do you plan to promote?
2. Who do you go to get X done well?
3. Who do you go to when you need extraordinary results.

This is still subjective information, but it is reliable.

#7: People have potential

Nope. Ratings create the future. If you tell someone they are good, they do good. If you tell them they are bad, they do badly. (Aside: this is true in school, as well, and gifted programs create gifted students more than predict them.)

#8: Work-life balance matters most

Nope. What matters is “love in work.” People who are doing what they love (that might be playing with your kids) have lives they love. It’s not about balance, it’s about doing what you love. If you want both happy and effective workers figure out what they love and get them to more of it.

#9: Leadership is a thing

A leader is someone with followers. Followers follow someone who

• Makes us feel part of something bigger
• Values us for who we are
• Connects us to a mission we believe in
• Make sclear what is expected
• Values us for our strengths
• Who show us teammates will be there for us
• Who over and over again celebrate our victories
• Who give us confidence in the future

In other words, a leader is someone who creates feelings in the followers, that’s the function.

Different leaders have different strengths. One long example in the book is Martin Luther King, whose strength was bringing festering problems to a crisis which forced change.

The best leaders are not well rounded, they are extremely idiosyncratic. (Think Steve Jobs.) People love or hate them, but the people who love them really love them. The more idiosyncratic (Gandhi) the more passionate their followers.

We trust leaders when they give us confidence in return.

Because we follow extreme ability, leaders tend to polarize. MLK was hated by more people than loved him. While Gandhi was loved, those who hated him hated him so much they killed him (MLK too.) Jobs was famous for generating extreme responses. You either really wanted to work with him, or you wanted nothing to do with him and considered him a giant jerk.

The book concludes with Truths.

1. People care what teams they work with
2. The best intelligence (not plan) wins
3. The best companies cascade meaning (not plans)
4. The best people are spiky (not well rounded)
5. People need attention (not feedback)
6. People can reliably rate their own experience (they can’t rate others)
7. People have momentum (not potential)
8. Love in work matters most (not work-life balance)
9. We follow spikes (people who are extreme)

Concluding remarks

As I noted at the beginning, most business books are boring and just say the same thing over and over. This one doesn’t, it says most of what we do in large corporations is moronic, which we all know and somehow don’t break out of. (I especially appreciate the hard takedown of 360 reviews by everyone around you, which always seemed like a complete waste of time.)

But the books message goes far beyond work. There’s a message here about how to live life and how to interact with others. I found the advice on, errr, giving advice particularly useful, since I’ve been giving advice mostly wrong (and I knew I was, but didn’t know how to do it better.)

Likewise the celebration of difference, of the people around you mattering more than the larger organization (or society), and of doing what you’re best at resonate hard.

A good read, and a manual to help you avoid the group-think of standard corporate practices.

You’re probably familiar with Ursula LeGuin’s short story on Omelas. If you aren’t go read it now, it’s short and profound and you should know it.

Though a great story, Omelas is largely inapplicable to us, which is odd, because surely LeGuin wrote it, at least in part, as commentary on our society.

Omelas is a paradise, of sorts.. Many of us are well off, in some ways the majority of those of us who live in the developed world live in a paradise, with more access to food and pleasures than any society before us.

But Omelas’s prosperity is based on suffering. In Omelas’s case, the suffering of just one person, a tiny minority.

In our case, the number is much more, and our civilization is global. Our prosperity is based on slavery and poverty and degradation in developing and undeveloped countries. Blood minerals, effective slavery in mines and factories, children picking thru garbage dumps for food. It was born in mass genocide in the Americas, and mass conquest everywhere else.

At some point, every self-aware person with a smidgen of intellectual integrity becomes aware of these facts: that the good life is based on the suffering of others.

But we don’t leave, because we can’t.

Where would you go? There is no place left, no place that isn’t Omelas, where any good life is bought by the suffering of others. Even if you do nothing yourself, to participate in our prosperity is to eat of the fruits of the suffering of others, there is no avoiding it, save, perhaps, to become a hermit who takes nothing from our society.

Omelas is a powerful parable, but it isn’t applicable to our society because we are all locked in; there is no decent society to go to, no place to escape to. We cannot leave.

And so, if we are to be ethical, since we cannot leave, we must work to free those whose suffering our prosperity is based on.

Because whether we will it or no, our pleasures are always, to some extent, born from their pain.