“Our Values: customer focus, responsibility, innovation, performance, teamwork.”

What do you think when you read something like that?

“That’s an important list of drivers that gives me an insight into how they run their business” or, “Yadda, yadda”?

Lists like these might (just) look good from a distance — “oh, they say something about values” — but get close and you realise there’s nothing there.

Painting by Numbers?

It’s the painting-by-numbers of leadership. (And would you put one of those on your wall?)

Values are the guiding principles of how you make trade-offs, and they shout loud the kind of business you are. Tell me you have an unconvincing list of empty concepts at the heart of your business, and I’m likely to believe you.

But what about this from a firm of retail consultants?

“Obsessive. We are obsessed with fashion and shopping. We live it, love it, and just ‘get it’. An obsessive passion which means we’re like a ‘dog with a bone’ to get the best job done.”

‘Obsessive’ means something to this company and any recruit or customer who reads that little story would have at least some idea of what they’re dealing with. Convinced by the story or not, this is a different kind of company to our friends with ‘customer focus’.

The Truth

Every business has values, whether they’re written down and posted to an About Us page or not. If you decide to disclose yours, don’t be tempted by blandery, don’t settle for a wish list of concepts that you’d like to be true, and don’t waste your time with the dictionary.

Values are the truth about who you are as a company and if you want your staff to live them and your customers to trust them, if you want them to make any difference at all, show what they mean by giving some context.

Search for stories that describe who you are on your best days. What is absolutely true about your company, and absolutely you? Write it down. And publish that.

Neatly filed under Purpose
Tags: beliefs, honesty, Purpose, values

In the last five years I’ve run well over 6000 miles in marathon training. Over that period I’ve been completely sidelined with injuries for over 30 weeks and have run with niggling problems for maybe a third of the time.

There are two things I should point out about that last paragraph: motivation is not a problem, I run every day it’s remotely possible; and, these kind of stats are not unusual for a marathon runner.

Over those five years I’ve used 16 pairs of running shoes and a set of specially made orthotic insoles. Without going in to the glorious marketing-speak of individual running shoe models it’s a fair assumption that my equipment choices have made running easier and less stressful on my body. Right? Or, without all those shoes I’d be injured even more. Right?

Maybe not.

Over the summer I read Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run, which promotes the idea that humans have evolved to run, and running shoes aren’t good for us. Apparently:

“there’s no evidence that running shoes are any help at all in injury prevention. In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that there are no evidence-based studies — not one — that demonstrate that running shoes make you less prone to injury.”

My assumption: I need running shoes. The reality: I don’t need running shoes.

Everything I thought I knew is wrong.

What assumptions do you have, impacting your organisational life every day, that stand on no evidence?

The Science of Motivation

Here’s a possible example. In his recent TED Talk on the Surprising Science of Motivation Dan Pink highlighted the ineffectiveness of extrinsic motivators, such as bonuses, most of the time. Despite much of this research being 50 years old, many (most?) managers still rely on the wrong headed ideas of how to get things done.

The key lesson:

“There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does […] If we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks we can strengthen our businesses […] and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world.”

What to do when everything you know is wrong

So much for running shoes and extrinsic motivators. What do you do when something comes along that challenges your assumptions? Instinct may be to turn away and go back to the devil you know. Try this instead:

Stop – just think about it for a moment, is it even remotely possible that what has always seemed true, is maybe not the whole truth? Does this new thing nudge up against problem that just seems a part of the woodwork? Be open to possibility.

Look – dig into the the data. Strip away all the personality of the issue, what does the cold steel of a few facts show you?

Listen – who else is talking about this? Can you trust them? Ignore the doomsayers, trolls, the collapsoconomists and anyone with a vested interest in the status quo. Somebody, somewhere is looking at the edges of this thing. Find them.

Listen again – this time to your gut.

If you do all this and the world looks different … act.

My running world looks different. I’ve ditched the shoes for now. I’m not running marathons barefoot yet (although some people do) and I’ve had to make friends with a my blisters, but I am running again. And funnily enough … I feel stronger.

Neatly filed under Managing,Skippiness
Tags: beliefs, Dan Pink, doing, herzberg, Marathon, motivation

Innovation, independence, curiosity, collaboration, character, integrity, tradition, style all its own, authentic, risk takers, hardworking. All words used to describe craft brewing and craft brewers in this wonderful video by Greg Koch of the Stone Brewing Company.

The line I find most telling is,

We don’t put corn in our beer.

When I got over the obvious irony, I got to thinking – the difference between good and great, between ordinary and skippy, may well be the willingness to settle, to compromise, to cut corners, to take out the joy. Crafting the business you want, is a craft business. As they say in the video,

We are all craft brewers.

I love this kind of hokeyness, chapeau to David Meerman Scott for pointing out the video and giving me a little-morning-lift.

Neatly filed under Focus,Skippiness
Tags: beliefs, build

Thomas J Watson Jr succeeded his father as chief executive of IBM in 1952. His leadership was something of a success. IBM experienced around 30% compound growth, year on year, for the entire 20 years that he was in the job. Amongst his projects he oversaw the System/360 project, an initiative Fortune magazine called a “$5 billion Gamble.”

This isn’t intended as a second instalment in a series on the history of computing, any more than Don’t Waiver was yesterday, but as an introduction to running a business based on beliefs. How did Watson pull off $5 billion gambles? Page 5 of his 1963 book, from which this post takes its title, gives a clue:

I firmly believe that any organization, in order to survive and achieve success, must have a sound set of beliefs on which it premises all its policies and actions.

Next, I believe that the most important single factor in corporate success is faithful adherence to those beliefs.

And finally, I believe that if any organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except those beliefs as it moves through corporate life.

In other words, the basic philosophy, spirit, and drive of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation, and timing. All these things weigh heavily in success. But they are, I think, transcended by how strongly the people in the organization believe in its basic precepts and how faithfully they carry them out.

Watson’s sound set of beliefs formed the deepest of IBMs layers, providing the foundation for everything that happened at IBM under his watch.

I just searched Amazon for “business books” and found 156,947 results. One of them is Watsons, (which you can find here) – recommended reading for anyone in the pursuit of skippiness.
Photo credit – US Department of State, via Wikipaedia.

Neatly filed under Foundations,Purpose
Tags: beliefs, IBM, planning, Purpose, values