Won’t we Ever Learn?

Speaking of learning from the past, Leon Gettler’s Management Line comments today on the continuing ability of internet scammers to successfully pull of their stunts. It never ceases to amaze me how, as a race, we fail to learn from the past and continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. This isn’t restricted to individuals picking away at their keyboards, of course.

Politicians around the world are frequently caught out doing something that has been done before, getting a similar result and then wondering why their plans didn’t work out. A current war springs to mind.

And managers do it too, though often because they don’t have scope or time to learn from the past, rather than because it is inconvenient to do so. So a few pointers:

• Don’t do the same thing the same way and expect a different result;
• Never assume that ‘common sense’ will prevail (amongst your staff or your superiors – or even yourself);
• Never assume that a lesson learnt won’t need to be learnt again. (Or, for that matter, that just because the penny dropped for you, that it did for everyone else).

Words of Simple Wisdom from the Attic

I just stumbled across a 10 year old interview with the late Ken Iverson, long time CEO of U.S. steel manufacturer Nucor. His philosophy on management centres on keeping it simple. And it helped grow Nucor into a leader in its industry, and an outperformer of the market, from near bankruptcy in the 1960s. (Nucor is one of the primary examples used in Jim Collin’s must-read book, Good to Great).

Tom Brown, author of the article, isolated five of Iverson’s keys to managing simply (with my comments in italics):

• Destroy hierarchy: management exists to help workers do their jobs. In 2006, only 66 of Nucor’s nearly 12,000 employees were in head office.

• You need to trust to operate efficiently. Iverson believed in pushing decision making down to the lowest possible level. But you can only do that if you trust people to make the right decisions.

• Give workers a stake in the success of the business. Workers are rewarded financially for their productivity. But it’s not all about money. Job security, the chance to contribute and supportive management are also highly valued.

• Centralization vs decentralization is not the issue – decisiveness is. Which is probably why the centralization vs. decentralization debate has never ended!

• Don’t overlook the virtues of smallness. A similar formula for success has existed at Virgin.

Iverson’s thoughts, as expressed in the Harvard Management Update piece, might be 10 years old. But they are by no means out of date. Nor, sadly, are they any more commonly applied.

A Simple Truth about Work-Life Balance

Speaking of Balance, this month’s article for Business Simplification just happens to be on that topic…

It all started well for Russell. Like a growing number of busy 21st century managers, he wanted more balance. He counted himself lucky when he and his wife worked out they could afford him to cut back to four days a week. His own manager, although hesitant, opted to support him rather than risk losing years of knowledge and experience.

In the first few weeks, Russell relished the new arrangement. He was surprised at how the simple act of picking his kids up from school made him feel more a part of his own family. At how relaxed taking part in routine family conversation made him feel. He even found himself (secretly) enjoying playing umpire in sibling spats.

Meanwhile, Russell also felt that he was much more focused and productive when he was at the office. He put that down to the extra ‘headspace’ he seemed to have.

But change crept up on him. It was his wife who noticed first. Where he’d started checking his email from home once or twice a day, that grew to hourly. Twice in a row, calls to the office caused him to be late for the school pick-up. Increasingly, as before, he complained to his wife about the length of his ‘to do’ list.

Russell’s newfound work-life balance was teetering.

Then a news story prompted an epiphany. During a report about a recent bushfire, Russell heard an interview with a farmer bemoaning the loss of his fences. The farmer grumbled that without effective boundaries around and within his property, he had no control. Russell realized that the same applied to him.

He had not established any boundaries around his time. Russell’s full time colleagues worked, more or less, within the ‘natural’ boundary of the weekends. He had not – in his own mind – properly adjusted his own boundaries to fit his new circumstances. He needed to better separate his ‘work’ time from his ‘life’ time.

He had not established any boundaries around his expectations. In the past he had worked hard to manage the chronic frustration that his ‘to-do’ list always seemed to grow more quickly than he could prune it. Now, working less time, he would have to adjust his expectations further. There are only so many hours…

Finally, Russell realized that not only had he failed to properly establish his own boundaries, he hadn’t made them visible to others either. His boundaries, like a national border, would only hold when respected by those on each side of them. Making his boundaries visible would require discipline on his part, clear communication and support from others.

In short, Russell came to understand that you can’t have balance without boundaries.

It took time, but Russell built his boundaries and before long found himself, again, enjoying both more satisfying family time and a more productive approach to his work. Balance prevailed.

Are you Addicted to being Connected?

Thanks to Leon Gettler’s Management Line for the heads up on a fabulous video showing the managing editor of Forbes magazine struggling to do without his mobile phone and BlackBerry. The challenge was to last seven days – he lasted 40 hours.

This little experiment raises a couple of issues.

First, it is clear from the video that being connected – via email, mobile phone and/or BlackBerry – can be addictive. The experiment’s subject, Dennis Kneile, displays physical symptoms as a result of becoming an isolated island in his connected world. Gettler cites a recent study which has expanded on this.

But the experiment also demonstrates that the real challenge is finding the right balance. Kneile ‘cracks’ because he needs his cell phone to stay in touch with his young daughter – too young to understand an experiment like this. (At 6 years old, she would have no concept of a purely wired world!).

This serves to highlight that all this technology can be useful: who would want to go back to sending faxes and having to find change for public phones – and being out of touch with loved ones?

So – can we have the usefulness without the addiction? We can – but it does take great self discipline. For a start, as I’ve written before, you need to find the ‘off’ button.