We are honored to be profiled
in Inc.'s May 2013 issue for our "audacious" take on
culture, along with fellow culture innovators Trek Bicycle, New Belgium
Brewing, Menlo Innovations and Dreamhost.
Paul Green, Jr. describes Morning Star's process for resolving
conflict/decision-making in the absence of designated managers--referred to
as the "Gaining Agreement" process in Morning Star's Colleague
Principles.
A few years ago I was convinced that I wanted to be a business
school professor. I spent a lot of time researching various PhD
programs; met a lot of professors (most of them are pretty incredible,
creative people); read a mountain of academic literature (I still like
reading research articles); and even went so far as to take the GMAT (the
required admission exam).
I've since decided that academia might not be the course for me
(at least at the moment), and although I've maintained most of my academic
relationships, I've become a little disillusioned with business academia and
I'm more than a little convinced that very little innovation in the way we
build our organizations will come out of academia.
I should probably give you a bit of
background.
I've spent the better part of the past six years working on
building better organizations. I think my academic aspirations came, in
part, from my belief that academic training would better equip me to make
progress on that front. In theory, I guess it's possible that a PhD
program might enable me to make greater progress toward my Mission, but in
reality, it's very unlikely. First, there's the process of getting a
PhD in Business:
A business PhD takes, on average, 5 years to complete. Your
first two years in the program will be a lot of coursework; some portion of
the coursework will be related to the discipline you're planning to study (in
my case it was management and organizational behavior, so it would have been
some psychology courses and some general management courses). The other
portion of the coursework is methodological: basically, teaching you how to
do research. It's a lot of statistics and
econometrics.
This whole time, you have an ongoing commitment of 15-25 hours per
week as a teaching assistant (TA) or research assistant (RA) for some
professor(s). From the stories I've heard, what this means varies
widely depending on the university you're attending, and the professor you're
assigned to. It can range from the equivalent of high school study
hall, to what might best be described as indentured servanthood.
Add to all this the expectation to generate some meaningful
research (probably in conjunction with a professor or two), and your weekly
workload is between 65-80 hours per week. On the upside, tuition is
free, and you receive a stipend (generally $20,000-30,000 per year), so
unless you're married and have children, you don't have to worry about
generating any additional income.
At the end of the two years you take your exams. Everyone
I've ever interviewed about these exams tell me stories that cause me to
think that they were devised by the demon responsible for coming up with
creative punishments in Dante's third or fourth level of hell. There
are hours of intense interviews by a variety of professors. They grill
you on the nuances of hundreds of different research papers that you should
have been exposed to by this point (that is, if you're doing the work), and
you have to come up with deeply thoughtful responses that convince them that
you belong in the brotherhood of those who write incessantly inscrutable
literature. There's also a written portion that usually goes something like
this: Friday evening you get a one page question in your email (again,
relating to the nuances of one or more of the research areas that you've
studied over the last two years). On Monday morning you're expected to
deliver a written response to that question that is of sufficient length to
make Leo Tolstoy wince, and with a sufficient number of citations to convince
the reader that you actually spent 12 months preparing this
paper.
Moving forward to years three through five: these are generally a
little less intense in that, at this point, you're done with coursework and
you've passed your qualifying exams. During these three years, you: a)
continue your valuable work as a TA/RA; b) teach a few classes (something
that you won't have to do as much of once you're a fully certified professor
[this always struck me as really screwed up]); and c) continuing your
research. The end goal here is to generate a doctoral dissertation that
you'll present at the very end of your education. Additionally, you're
working on a number of research projects (again, probably as an RA for a
number of professors) that will, hopefully, someday (probably 3-5 years down
the road) be published.
When you graduate, you (hopefully) get a job as an Assistant
Professor at a business school somewhere. By this time, if you're a
really good researcher, and you've developed relationships with a few really
prolific professors who are doing research that is considered
"cool" at the moment, you might have an article published. If
you do, you're in very good shape. One way or the other, the minute you start
your job as a professor, the "academic clock" starts ticking. This
clock is similar to the proverbial biological clock in that if you can't get
the job done before the clock winds down, the gig is up. There might be
some other alternative ways to realize your dream, but they aren't going to
be nearly as fulfilling as the more "natural" way, and they'll
probably be quite a bit more painful.
The academic clock: it's basically this idea that, in order to
keep your job, long-term, you have to gain tenure (which basically is a label
that your university gives you that guarantees that you can't be fired).
Obviously, the university wants to be very careful about who they
guarantee can't be fired, so they set a very high bar: you must publish,
publish, publish in order to gain tenure. And you only have a certain
number of years to convince the powers that be at your university that you
are worthy of never being fired (generally about 7 years).
So you have this clock winding down, and within that time, you
have to publish some signficant number of articles, a great proportion of
those being in "A" rated journals (there are only a handful of
"A" rated journals, each of which is published 4-6 times per year,
each issue of which contains maybe 8 articles; all told--there are probably
only 150 or so articles published in "A" rated journals
annually).
So what does it take to get publications in "A" rated
journals? Well, first, it's important to note that if you submit an
article to a journal today, you probably won't receive a response from the
editor for 4-6 months. That response is statistically likely to be
either an outright rejection or a "revise and resubmit" (literally
NO article is accepted outright--that's not an exaggeration). These
revise and resubmits go out to maybe 10-15% of the submitters, and they
basically amount to the reviews of three other professors who serve as
editorial reviewers for the journal. The remaining 85-90% of
submissions are simply rejected.
I've received one of these "revise and resubmits".
They make you cry; professors (in their reviews) are very effective at
communicating how little value you bring as a researcher. But more
importantly, they tell you "I would like this article better if it were
to focus on these ideas/research questions". So you then spend the
next 4-6 months revising the article--maybe a little longer if you need to do
a little more research--with the goal of making it more interesting to the
reviewers. And then you resubmit, fingers crossed that you get an
acceptance a few months later. Now you're 12-16 months in; the journal
will actually be printed perhaps 6-12 months down the road. So from the
time you submit your article to the time it reaches production is 2-3 years.
That doesn't include the time you actually spent doing the research and
writing the initial paper (which, can range from a few months to a year or
two, depending on how prolific you are).
Long way of saying, it's a lot of work, and quite a lot of time,
to get the requisite number of "A" publications while your clock is
still ticking. The best strategy to take: try to figure out what topics
are currently of interest to the editors of the "A" journals, and
do research that'll probably interest them. Here's the thing: academic
business journal publishing is strangely incestuous; there are topics that
are currently "en vogue", and topics that aren't. Whether or
not a topic is "en vogue" has absolutely nothing to do with whether
or not the topic has any practical import; it has everything to do with who
runs the journal. So most submitters try to write articles that are of
interest to the editors, and a publication inevitably ends up having a few
common themes for an editor's tenure. And then other editors look to
those highly rated journals, see those themes, and assume that this is the
stuff "A" journals are made of, and so they begin to only accept
articles that look just like those in the "A" journals.
Before long, you have the academic equivalent to the entire pop-music
industry recording albums full of slightly differing covers of Justin
Bieber's song "Baby". All in all, a really boring
world.
So what does this all mean with respect to management innovation?
My view from here in the cheap seats is that the deck is stacked
against you if you enter the academic system. There are a great number
of incredible professors who entered business academia because they wanted to
do something that would fundamentally improve management and organizations,
but in order to survive in that world, you MUST conform to the system.
And conforming to the system is an all-consuming prospect; you don't
have a lot of time available to change the world--it's everything you can do
to just stay alive.
I might be wrong, but I don't think so. I just performed a
Google Scholar search for the terms "management" and
"innovation". Google sent me a list of over 2.1 million
unique articles--the vast majority of them academic articles of some sort.
But you tell me: how many truly groundbreaking things that are going to
revolutionize the way you run your business have you seen come out of
academia in the last year? Or two years? Or ten? They're
great people writing lots of very interesting things--but with very little
likelihood of fulfilling what I believe their Mission should be: to
fundamentally change the way business operates for the better.
I think it's important to point out that this has very little to
do with the people; business academics, as a whole, are incredibly brilliant,
creative and hardworking people who are, interestingly, very focused on
trying to fundamentally improve organizations. It's a problem with the
system that they're a part of. It's a broken system, and I sometimes
worry that there's no real way to fix it. The system might be so
pervasive that the change will be of the disruptive sort--an alternative
system that ultimately displaces the one we've got.
Which, when you think about it, would make a great business school
case study.
I read a recent Wall Street Journal article that made me
cringe. The title of the article says it all: "The
Unsung Beauty of Bureaucracy".
The headline, as you might imagine, caught my attention; I
couldn't resist reading it. Quite honestly, I fully expected that the
title was of the snarky, sarcastic sort--and that the article would be some
sort of scathing expose of the absurdity of bureaucracy.
Imagine my surprise (and the sharp uptick in my blood pressure)
when I realized that the authors were serious! The article, in a
nutshell, said that we need bureaucracy. That too much freedom is a bad
thing. That bureaucracy keeps us safe. Sure, it is a bit
restrictive and stifling, and it hampers innovation--but it also keeps bad
stuff from happening. The article said that, if there had just been
more bureaucracy, the BP oii spill of 2005 wouldn't have happened. It
said that, if there had been more centralized, bureaucratic control, the
Airbus A380 fiasco would never have happened.
The authors went on to make a statement so patently absurd that I
have to quote it in all it's glory here:
"By the same token, many government functions may
be laden with bureaucracy, but the private sector might not do any better
with the same tasks. Like the makers of baby products, governments deal with
uniquely sensitive problems, from ensuring that terrorists never get past
airport security to keeping deadly germs out of the food
supply."
As I write this, I'm having to break and walk away from the
computer every few minutes just to keep from yelling at my computer
screen.
Here are my issues with this:
I could rant on for pages here (can my colleagues say
"amen"?), but let me summarize for you: it's a logical fallacy to
say that some of the worst examples of business failure in the last decade
would have been averted if there were just more bureaucracy--at least if
you're going to use the arguments that these authors used.
But the larger point for me is this: bureaucracy is nothing more
than a human technology--a tool that someone invented as a hedge against
ignorance and dishonesty. And I won't argue that bureacracy is not
somewhat effective at minimizing the risk associated with ignorant or
dishonest people. But it's effective in the sense that an atomic bomb
is an effective way to eradicate a bed-bug problem. It'll work--but the
collateral costs are atrocious. Our job as thinking, innovative human
beings is to imagine, and devise, a BETTER technology for limiting the impact
of ignorance and dishonesty--a technology that doesn't have side effects that
are as painful as the disease it purports to heal.
primary: philosophy/principles secondary: directing/controlling
With The
Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager, Daniel Mezick
has given organizations a set of not-so-secret success formulas. His
writing is crisp, cogent and to the point. Best example: his riposte to
people that check e-mail in meetings is “Give me a break”.
Best
of all, the advice is fully actionable. Right away. Anyone
can pick up a copy of Culture Game and, within a couple of hours,
brainstorm multiple ways to apply Agile thinking and Tribal Learning
Practices to their organization. This book is designed to give leaders
(and those aspiring to be leaders) the kinds of powerful business execution
techniques that elude most organizations. If you don’t recognize the
terms Agile or Tribal Leadership, check the links below for a quick
introduction.
I found the concepts of Culture Game to
be largely compatible with Morning Star’s philosophy of
Self-Management. Mezick’s first sentence in Chapter 22: Eliminate the distinction
between work and play—one of Morning Star’s central themes (one of
the first books in the Morning Star library was The Game of Work
by Charles Coonradt). Morning Star’s performance management system is
called Steppingstones—a set of visual scorecards for each business process
and each colleague playing the game of business. And, despite the
massive amounts of literature dedicated to achieving work/life balance, there
is really only life (unless people at work are actually zombies!). Why
not use games to make life at work as enjoyable as possible?
The author has a cohort of like-minded
thought leaders and fellow experimenters (including Robert Richman, former
head of Zappos Insights, and Michael Margolis, master storyteller), and he
draws them out skillfully in interviews. Throughout, he builds out
Agile principles in a logical sequence upon a solid foundation of history and
context, and does so in an authentic and entertaining way. He gives
full credit where credit is due, not only to Agile and Tribal Leadership, but
to every resource that defines and/or reinforces his principles (including
complexity theory, brain science, psychology, Toyota, systems theory, and
many others). As a reader, I appreciated the references and learned
where to go for more in-depth
information.
Daniel Mezick has comprehensively
defined the game of organizational culture. It’s safe to say that he,
like his book, is a real winner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_logan_on_tribal_leadership.html
We heard from a number of incredible thinkers at our recent 2012
Self-Management Symposium (the best so far, by the way). One of our
speakers, John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T (check
out the video here—you need to register to view it, but
registration’s free and there are a lot of cool benefits) gave a deeply
profound talk that really forced me to think deeply about our shared values
here at Morning Star and the Self-Management
Institute.
He spoke on BB&T’s 10 core
values, and how those core values have enabled continued success at
BB&T.
One that struck me as a
“non-mainstream” value (like integrity—everybody SAYS that integrity is a
value) was Self-Esteem. Allison made the point that Self-Esteem is
a good thing—that you (as an individual) must believe that you are capable of
being good, and that you have the moral right to be happy.
But then he went on to discuss the
source of self-esteem.
Self-esteem can’t be “granted” or “bestowed” by someone else;
"you look good in that dress" isn't really a source of true
self-esteem. In fact, many of the things that we look to as a source of
self-esteem (like conspicuous consumption or cosmetic surgery) amount to no
more than a very, very poor substitute for true self-esteem. Real
self-esteem comes from doing productive work. It comes from
creating value for others. It’s the accumulation of personal Pride
(another of BB&T’s core values), which we derive by doing work that
has a purpose, using reason, and exercising independent thinking (another
value), in integrity with our principles (yet another value).
Think about that for a second: in
order to have self-esteem, you have to have a sense of personal pride in what
you do.
In order to have pride in what you do, you have to feel that the
work you do is productive—that it has a purpose, that you are doing
good.
Further, in order to have personal pride, and by extension,
self-esteem, you have to be working in an environment that allows you to
think independently, to exercise reason and to use your individual mind to
make optimal and rational decisions.
So maybe you don’t think self-esteem
matters all that much; I’d disagree. Answer this question: do you think, in
general, people prefer to feel good or bad about themselves? Of course, I
think we all agree that people prefer the former. What’s the cost
to our organizations, though, when people don’t feel good about
themselves?
Think about the last time you felt like you were doing
completely valueless work—work that was completely irrelevant or
unproductive.
Was it an invigorating experience? Did it inspire
you to lofty, new heights of innovation, productivity and
performance?
Of course not; that feeling is incredibly demotivating. And, in fact, I
suspect millions of people, in countless organizations, are desperate to
leave their current job—a job that they hate; why? I believe it’s
because their current role is lacking at least one of the key ingredients
necessary for individuals to build self-esteem.
Which brings us to what is, I believe,
the irony here:
if this idea—that self-esteem is the result of doing productive
work that has a purpose, and that allows you to exercise reason and
independent thinking—has any merit, it means that we humans come pre-loaded
with an internal motivational system. We are all internally motivated to do
things that will give us a sense of personal pride, and build our
self-esteem.
And if we do, in fact, have that internal drive for self-esteem,
it means that good, productive work is a part of our nature.
So why, then, do so many organizations
spend so much time talking about “motivating their employees”? I’ve thought a
lot about this, because the idea that employees need motivating seems to be
at odds with the idea that employees have a internal drive for self-esteem
that can only be fulfilled by doing productive work well. The only
conclusion I can come to is that far too many organizations have put in place
systems that actually REMOVE
those ingredients that are so vital to people cultivating healthy
self-esteem.
They’ve eliminated a sense of purpose from jobs in the
enterprise; people don’t have a sense that what they are doing has any large
purpose whatsoever.
Or people in the organization see their jobs as unproductive—as
not doing good things for people (think: mind-numbing, civil
servant/bureaucrat).
Or perhaps it’s that people in the organization aren’t allowed
to exercise reason—to think always, and to question authority. Or perhaps it’s
that people aren’t allowed to think independently—they aren’t allowed to
exercise their individual judgment to make rational and optimal decisions
that they are more than capable of making.
I don’t think I’m too far off the mark when I surmise that
many jobs in many modern corporations don’t have most of those
ingredients. So it’s no surprise, then, that people in those organizations
aren’t motivated—self-esteem (that internal motivator) isn’t a real
possibility given the absence of those key ingredients, so people simply
disengage and “put in their time”. And so management in those
organizations turn to experts seeking answers to, “how do we motivate our
employees and achieve higher engagement levels?” when their organizational
systems were the culprit that killed the naturally present motivation in the
first place!
Irony.
So, here’s my question to you:
Does your organization systematically ensure that people who are a part
of that organization can find personal pride in their work, and accumulate
healthy self-esteem, through:
Thought provoking, I hope. I’d enjoy hearing
your thoughts!
John Allison presents “Principled Leadership”--the principles by
which he lead while at BB&T. Mr. Allison is Retired Chairman and CEO
of BB&T Corporation, the 10th largest financial services holding
company headquartered in the U.S. Mr. Allison began his service with
BB&T in 1971. He became president of BB&T in 1987 and was
elected Chairman and CEO in July 1989. During Mr. Allison’s tenure as CEO
from 1989 to 2008, BB&T grew from $4.5 billion to $152 billion in
assets. In March 2009, he joined the faculty of Wake Forest University School
of Business as Distinguished Professor of Practice.
The integration of game elements, or gamification, in design,
internal or external marketing strategy or, as an employee management tool is
a blossoming trend--in fact 2012 may be the Year of Gamification. The term
gamificaition is used to describe organizations using game mechanics to drive
engagement in traditionally non-gaming scenarios. Brands are leveraging game
mechanics to encourage external audiences to engage in desired behaviors and
some companies use gamification techniques for internal employee motivation.
We will explore often used and confused terminology of Game Mechanics, Game
Design and Gamification; discuss examples of how brands are leveraging
gamification to influence audiences; and discuss top best practices for
success.
BSO started out as a one-man organization (Eckart Wintzen) and
grew to be a multinational of 6000 people, and yet it never felt like a large
bureaucratic organization. The reason for this was the fact that the whole
organization was based on units of a maximum of 50 people (called cells). The
organization grew by dividing a cell in two and letting each half grow to 50
people again.
In BSO, most authority was delegated to these cells with very
little management from above but with a strict framework of accountability
and personal responsibilities. Adherence to this framework was monitored on a
peer-to-peer basis. A former director at BSO, Martijn Kriens, describes the
way BSO created a structure to work as a big organization while still
allowing great personal freedom. He concludes his presentation with a
discussion of the vulnerabilities of such an organization.
Ken Everett’s experience developing “Think on Your Feet Around the
World” (from 3 to 300 colleagues in 30 countries) has convinced him that
there is an opportunity for business advantage in the way we organize.
Inspired by Dee Hock’s vision of the chaordic organization, the dubbawalas of
India, and his own international network, Ken will discuss ways to produce
organizations that are exceptionally innovative, resilient and
leader-full.