There is an old joke/fable that many of you have probably heard… it goes something like this:
One day a manager was scouring the countryside for a solid candidate, but striking out everywhere. The lions were too lazy, the elephants ate too much, the monkeys wouldn’t sit still. Those damned eagles always wanted to be in charge. This manager, beaten and depressed, dropped down and sat in the middle of a field, head in his hands.
A few minutes into his pity party (c’mon, we’ve all been there), he heard a hissing, and looked next to his foot… it was a 6-foot rattlesnake! “Hey, there,” said the snake. “I hear you need help. Just hire me, and all your troubles will be over. I’m crafty, pretty fast, and not trying to climb any ladders.”
Desert Snake close-up portrait
“Wait a minute…” said the manager, “… you’re a snake! I’ll have to check your references first.” So, the manager contacted people whom the snake had been with before, and sure enough, “You don’t have a very good reputation,” said the manager. “They all say that hiring you will just come back to bite me.”
“C’mon,” said the snake. “Those people are just disgruntled, and maybe even a little jealous. Trust your gut — you need me.”
So, the manager finally acquiesced and hired the snake, who turned out to be a super employee. The manager began thinking he nearly misjudged, and that the references were misguided. Then one day, of course, the snake simply slithered up alongside and bit the manager on the leg.
“WHAT???” cried the manager… “You promised that if I would just give you a chance, this wouldn’t happen!”
“Yes, I did,” said the snake, “but you knew I was a snake when you hired me.”
Now, the real joke is much longer (stretched out for dramatic effect), but you get the idea. In this war for competitive, competent talent, it’s easy to ignore our instincts and available proof, and succumb to the belief that, “maybe they’ll work out after all.”
Just like with mutual funds, “Past performance does not guarantee future results.” But it’s all you’ve got. If something looks too good to be true, or you are convinced through judgment, history, or instinct that it’s wrong… run away from it.
Yeah, right. I’m calling bullshit. Enough already with this change-kumbaya stuff. Sometimes, change is essential for growth, for progress, hell even for organizational survival. Sometimes.
I get that.
But sometimes, we change for changes’ sake, and that’s just got to stop. Take automation, for example… At some point in our storied, sordid organizational evolution, we determined that anything we do can be made “better” if we simply automate it. Sort of like adding bacon makes all food better.
Except it’s true about the bacon…
Too frequently, though, we have processes in our organizations that just don’t work well. They aren’t all that effective, aren’t necessarily efficient, and truthfully, should be drastically modified or deep-sixed altogether.
In other words, many of our existing processes are crap. And if we take crap to begin with, then automate it, you know what we get?
Automatic crap.
And we want this? Really? Instead of using a bad manual process and taking several hours, or even days, to screw something up, we put the technology in place to now screw it up at the mere push of a couple of buttons.
Yahoo!’s Marissa Mayer is a machine. She’s doing damned good things with the company—hired in 2010, and publicly announced on that same day she was pregnant, due in September. At the time, Yahoo!’s stock was languishing around $15.
As a top Lieutenant at google (she was employee #20), Mayer was asked about her stupidly grueling schedule (about 250 all-nighters while there). She responded, “I don’t really believe in burnout.” Hell, I guess not.
Since joining Yahoo! just two short years ago, Mayer got rid of the BlackBerrys, replacing them with iPhones and Androids. She provides employees with free food, like all other Silicon Valley companies. She created a system for employees to complain about bureaucracy. She implemented Friday-afternoon meetings (called F.Y.I.’s) where employees can ask Mayer and other execs anything they want. She acquired tumblr, and made nearly $7B in an Alibaba stock sale.
In other words, she turned around a large, bureaucratic, flailing company. The Guardian,a UK based news magazine, says this about Mayer: “Newsflash: move over Gordon Gekko, women can be fat cat capitalist bastards too.”
And did I mention she’s more than doubled Yahoo!’s stock price?
And did I mention she’s again pregnant—this time with identical twins?
She’s a machine, and worthy of our Leadership Leader.
That’s right. The King CEO launched a website, issues a press release, and even had mock-ups done to contain the allegedly peace-building McWhopper… all before contacting Mickey D’s CEO Easterbrook to chat. Burger King (a division of Canadian Tim Horton’s), slipping to #3 burger joint recently, had nothing to lose and everything to gain. But manipulative crap like that doesn’t usually sit well, and this (surprisingly) did not.
Nice try, BK. Really. I’ve got this really cool, alternative idea. Given your lackluster performance as an enterprise, the likelihood your P.E. owner will expect a real return, and McDonald’s seven straight losing quarters… how about you guys both just concentrate on building mediocre burgers and call it a day?
Sometimes, mediocrity is a function of bad decision-making. Like this.
“Life is Short. Have an Affair.” This is the Ashley Madison website slogan. The website, recently hacked and had its subscriber base made public, makes its money selling the chance of an affair to men. I say “men,” since they are the only ones who pay to use the website.
So, this paragon of ethics is having a bit of a struggle; seems when married people subscribe to a website for cheaters, they want some degree of confidentiality. Whouldathunkit??
Never mind all the really easy name-calling and labels. The best part is that the CEO (actually parent company CEO), Noel Biderman, recently “stepped down” in “the best interest of the company.” Biderman, hailed as both “the most hated man on the internet” and “the King of Infidelity” apparently was taking advantage of the services himself, much to the surprise of many (presumably, even his wife). Having pick of the litter, he connected—and had affairs—with multiple “subscribers.”
There’s an executive perk you don’t see every day.
From a business perspective (though the scurrilous stuff is much more fun), this was a company on a meteoric path, doing less than $30M in 2009 and almost $115M last year. It had its sights on a European-based IPO soon, hoping to raise $200M on a $1B valuation.
Leadership is inherently fraught with risks; we can no more avoid them than we can the decisions that cause the concerns. Wringing our hands won’t fix it, neither will running around the figurative circle waving our arms about.
Trust me, it’s been tried. And it ain’t all that pretty…
Any way you cut it, there’s risk in leadership. (more…)
I was recently asked that question by a client. Now, in all fairness, I didn’t actually say it was a stupid question.
But it is. Of course they work.
The premise of the question is the problem. Of course Balanced Scorecards “work.” They display a particular set of organization-specific metrics to use within the context of coaching and performance management/improvement. They don’t do–nor are they supposed to do–any more than that.
Therein lies the problem, and the basis for my “stupid” comment. Too many think that scorecards, incentive plans, spiffs, et al, should actually DO something. Like somehow substitute for leadership. Like motivate so a leader doesn’t have to. Like provide the impetus for discretionary effort and productivity without any leadership heavy-lifting.
Balanced Scorecards work just fine. Incentives (if done properly) work just fine.
When you watch baseball, what do you expect the scorecard to do? Make hits? Score runs? Catch balls? It’s a scorecard–it tracks your score.
When you play golf, what do you expect the scorecard to do? Hit drives? Make putts? Whistle at the cart girl? It’s a scorecard–it tracks your score.
If related leadership would just remove their heads from their collective butts, maybe the added benefit of those scorecards could be realized. Brazen Leaders don’t have their heads up their butts. That’s practically a definition.
Therein lies the problem, and the basis for my “stupid” comment. Too many think that scorecards, incentive plans, spiffs, et al, should actually DO something. Like somehow substitute for leadership. Like motivate so a leader doesn’t have to. Like provide the impetus for discretionary effort and productivity without any leadership heavy-lifting.