All Thumbed Out

Reading the newspaper -- a real one, printed on real paper -- is still a ritual in our house. One of the first articles I read over my morning coffee today was this piece by Adam Bryant. (Free registration required.) It's a letter to his BlackBerry, which he seems to have stopped carrying.

It's been a few weeks since we parted company. I'm sure you've forgotten me by now and are still hard at work for my former employer.

That's good. No hard feelings. I've decided I'm actually better off without you.

Why? Because even though you made me feel more productive, I'm realizing that in fact you made me less so.

...

Sure, I'm to blame, too. I made some mistakes. I liked your alarm feature, so I kept you bedside. I'd check you late at night. I'd check you first thing in the morning. Sometimes I'd even check you on Sundays, and often regretted it.

But you gave me something to do in idle moments, while I was standing in line or waiting for a train. With you, there was no dead time. It seemed great for a while.

Living without you, though, there's more time to think.

Daydreaming is an underappreciated pastime, and I've been doing more of it since we broke up, often to good effect. The idea percolator works better with fewer distractions.

I realize that not everyone can let go like I did. People who are on the road a lot, in particular, are still smitten.

But here's a thought. What if they cooled it just for a week? Wouldn't that leave more time to puzzle through what-ifs and how-abouts, the kind of questions that help us keep a step ahead of the competition?

Spot on. Of course, continuous partial attention is the fault of the user, not the technology. (As a quick aside, when I saw Edward Tufte speak last year he noted only two industries call their customers "users": tech and illicit drugs.) These things have an off button, and the wise person uses them frequently, turning a way for the world to reach them into a way for them to reach the world.

It's sort of like the note I wrote on silence a few days ago. "White space," I call it. Long stretches of uninterrupted time to think, stretching before you like a large, blank sheet of thick butcher paper. White space. Open for anything.

In 30 minutes or so I'm going to head to the Perkiomen Trail for my weekly Sunday long run. Today it's 10 miles, which will take me between an hour and 25 and an hour and 30 minutes to complete. It's sunny today, and not too hot, and the Perky is a lovely trail that follows a wide river, runs under a nave of arching trees, along fields and through a small town or two -- it's beautiful. I'll have my iPod on and listen to some good music along the way, but best of all I'll be alone to think, without interruption or conversation, the more distracting parts of the mind focused on the small task of left-foot right-foot, for an hour and a half.

This is the best part of my week (at least, the best part I don't spend with Katherine). Somewhere today, along the trail, I will see a beautiful thing. Somewhere along the trail, the music in my ear and the light in my eye and the endorphins in my brain will combine to form a thrill of soaring emotion in my heart. And best of all, somewhere along the trail I will have a great idea. Certainly one. Perhaps two. It's the white space that brings that idea along; the lack of interruption and low level focus of the run.

It's a wonderful thing, something I'd encourage you to have, too. Find your white space. Unroll the page. Give your brain a chance to draw.

The First Stevenote

I POSTED EARLIER in the week about Steve Job's latest MacWorld keynote. Tonight while browsing* I came across a video of Job's first MacWorld keynote, which he gave at MacWorld 1997 in Boston.

It was an interesting time for Apple: the company was in disarray, losing market share, and increasingly called irrelevant. Jobs was CEO of Pixar at the time, and had been asked back to Apple in an unofficial capacity to poke around and offer some counsel. With this Stevenote he'd announce a significant turnover of the Board (including his taking a position as Director), a new partnership with Microsoft (the crowd reaction to Bill Gates joining the speech via downlink is priceless), and more. More important, he'd nearly instantly begin to reinvigorate Apple's employees and user community, launching The Apple Comeback (as you watch the video, pay attention to his use of optimism and descriptions of an appealing future ... part of the rhetorical sense that makes him such an effective leader).

iPods, Powerbooks, G5s, iTunes, an $80 per share post-split stock ... they all started with this speech Boston. I've posted the video for your viewing pleasure; just click the "play" button (courtesy Google Video ... bought that stock yet?). There's also a first-person account of the day on the web here; together, and given all the change that's occurred in the past nine years, they're a pair of very interesting new economy artifacts.

Technorati Tags: steve jobs, macworld, macworld1997, apple

* Found via the always interesting del.icio.us Popular Page.

Jobs On Stage

HIS STEVENESS delivered his MacWorld keynote yesterday -- likely the most watched and critiqued senior executive speech in the world each year. Watch it via streaming video here (free QuickTime required) and see a senior exec. doing the on-stage thing about as well as it can be done. He does so well, in fact, that he easily breaks one of my rules: Give no speech over 20-30 minutes in length. It's a great example of how an authentic performance and interesting content can suspend time (and of those two, interesting content is much more important).

Job's focus on prep for the keynote is legendary, and there's a nice inside account of it here. He follows my Paul Newman Principle: He doesn't practice because he's Steve Jobs; he's Steve Jobs because he practices.

It's also a lesson in presentation development: You'll surely note that Jobs slides and the ones you likely see and produce at the office don't have much in common. (Yours should look more like his.) For more on the "right way" of PowerPoint / slideware development, visit Presentation Zen.

Technorati Tags: Steve Jobs, MacWorld, Speeches, Leadership, Presentation Zen

* Scheduled post, written earlier.
 

Wired Transparency

Wired's Chris Anderson provides a nice example of a leader using (in this case) his blog to offer an authentic and candid response to a customer problem / potential corp. reputation issue. Read the whole post, but here's a snippet:

We're not going to eliminate the option of an automatically-renewing subscription, because many subscriber prefer those, especially with credit card billing (the only checks I write these days are to renew magazine subscriptions, which always seems like an anachronistic hassle), but what's important is that we ensure that the unsubscribing procedure be quick, simple and painless. No AO-Hell run-arounds.

Right now, it's not nearly clear enough how to do that (or even to find out if you have an automatically-renewing subscription or not). This week, I'll start working with the Conde Nast circulation department on improving that. Transparency is the key.

Yep.

The Hewitt List

Hewitt has released the results of their annual U.S. Top Companies For Leaders study. Details: Sample of HR execs. from 373 companies; median revenue of $2 bil.; median employee size of 7,300. If you're not into downloading the PDF of the results, FC Now has them here.

Frankly, and as a partner in a consulting firm, I always cringe when I see consulting firms conducting these types of studies and releasing their resulting lists. At the firm we've been exposed to their inner workings and methodologies on several occasions (although not this particular Hewitt study), and with a research practice of our own in-house, we've frankly never been very impressed with the rigor of the processes involved.

So, in general, like the Oscars, we say take them with a grain of salt. In this instance the methodology seems a bit more robust, with multiple steps for screening the "best" leadership companies, including comparisons of financial performance, with the final call coming down to a panel of judges (from the study booklet):

• John Byrne is the Editor-in-Chief of Fast Company magazine and the author of eight books on business, leadership, and management. He was previously a senior writer at BusinessWeek and the author of 57 cover stories at the magazine. He is a frequent commentator and public speaker on topics ranging from creativity and innovation to leadership and corporate governance.
• Price M. Cobbs is an internationally recognized psychiatrist and management consultant. Pacific Management Systems, the company he founded, consults with organizations on leadership, executive development, and diversity strategies. He is the author of several books, including Cracking the Corporate Code: From Survival to Mastery.
• Marshall Goldsmith is a leading executive coach, prominent speaker, and author of many books and articles on leadership. He is an authority on how to help leaders achieve positive, measurable changes in their own behavior and that of their people and teams. The author of 18 books, he has been named one of the five most respected executive coaches by BusinessWeek, and one of the 50 greatest thinkers in the field of management by American Management Association.
• Jay Jamrog is the Executive Director of the Human Resource Institute and identifies and analyzes the major issues and trends affecting the management of people in organizations. He is an associate editor of Human Resource Planning, and is frequently quoted in business publications on topics relating to the future of people management.
• Joseph McCann is Dean of the John H. Sykes College of Business, Dean of Graduate Studies, and Co-Chief Academic Officer at the University of Tampa. He is a consultant, researcher, and author on organizational design and strategic change, mergers and acquisitions, rapidly growing technology companies, and new business venturing. He is an associate editor of Human Resource Planning.

So take it for what it's worth. I must say that if the staff at CRA were to sit around a table and call out names of companies we think have great leadership development programs, many of Hewitt's top 20 would be in our top 20 (due to personal exposure, reputation, or both). But I also know there are lots of smaller firms, and many, many privately-held firms, that due to lack of exposure (or a preference for privacy) simply wouldn't be in the mix.

How To Lead (And Send A Message)

John Mack does the right (and smart) thing and gives up a guarantee of $25 million at Morgan Stanley:

"I don't want anyone to think I am entitled to something others are not ... I will amend my employment agreement. No guarantee. No industry benchmark. The board will set my pay after our results are in, based strictly on our performance."

More On Thin Slicing

Nobel laureate Reinhard Selten on decision making:

Experience is very important. Of course it is! However, the ways in which decision makers take experience into account — and therefore the outcome of any decision-making process — are different from the kinds of rational optimization assumed in economic theory. Traditional economics assumes that before you make a decision, you go through some rational calculations, which then yield a recommendation. The idea of optimization is a very attractive fiction. But it is a fiction. In actual fact, people are often not at all influenced by such calculations before the fact, but only after the fact. We call this “ex-post rationality.”

...

In many situations, decision makers adjust their behavior by thinking about how different actions in the past could have yielded a better outcome. These alternatives, reinforced in the decision makers’ minds, become default actions to apply in future situations. When making decisions in those future situations, no optimization or rational calculations are involved, and instead, the decision maker simply follows the rules he has developed in the past — just like many of the subjects in my experiments about the winner’s curse.

...

The most effective way to improve your decision making is to improve your intuition. It is very rare that you can derive a decision from data and calculations alone. In most situations, you have to have some intuition that is based on the knowledge of analogies. These analogies concern very simple situations in which you can clearly see the best course of action. Such simple situations, sometimes presented in game theory, can then be transferred to more complex situations with similar features. When people have in mind great stores of such simple business or game situations and their analyses, they have better intuition. They will not easily forget the important aspects of a decision problem.

This is about decisions via heuristics, or as Malcolm Gladwell terms the process, "thin slicing." If you've not read Blink yet, put it on your short list.

 

Leadership As Friendship

Gerri Perreault of the University of Northern Iowa offers a new metaphor for leadership -- leadership as friendship:

Since metaphors structure both perception and action, conceptualizing leadership as friendship provides a stance toward/with the world that can contribute to shaping new actions and ways of thinking.  That friendship stance is a relational view of leadership, grounded in perceptions of connection and inter-dependence from which emerge a sense of respect and responsibility for the welfare of self and others.   Such leaders seek to understand the views and needs of others, refuse to define others as enemies, and are open to the potential mutuality of the parties involved in any situation.  They are inclusive in their definition of "the other."  This conceptualization of leadership extends the responsibilities of leadership beyond one's own group.  The friendship metaphor asks leaders to assume and affirm the best in human beings, whether as followers, potential followers, and even those who are viewed as "enemies."

Read the rest at Advancing Women in Leadership.

Raspberry Jam

Richard Farson was wise enough to write that "technology creates the opposite of its intended purpose," and I've posted often over at CommLog about how email, Blackberrys, cell phones--left unchecked in their volume of information flow--actually make leaders less effective in managing their communication rather than more effective.

Microsoft's Linda Stone has even added a term to the lexicon to describe the matter: continuous partial attention.

Now Marc Eisenstadt at Corante brings RSS aggregators into the fold:

RSS aggregators, as a way of managing zillions of feeds, always struck me as something of a short-term fix for the problem of how to deal with, well, zillions of feeds.

And he offers this insight:

My conjecture is that tools like this (e.g. RSS aggregators) give users, especially early adopters of new technologies, a two-orders-of-magnitude (i.e. 100x) 'power boost' in dealing with the 'knowledge flow' (forget 'information' and 'content') whipping around us. Indeed, such tools are particularly valuable in helping foster and even accelerate knowledge flow among other early adopters (who tend to correlate highly with the 'thought leaders' involved in the knowledge that you want to be, well, flowing)! But whenever there's a three, four, five, or six orders-of-magnitude (i.e. 1000x, 10,000x, 100,000x, or 1,000,000x) increase in 'adopters of new technologies', not only are such technologies not new any more, but a two-orders-of-magnitude 'power boost' is insufficient, so we turn to new technology to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

Spot on (tip to Erick Schonfeld at business2blog).

Every new communication channel that technology brings us not only gives us greater access to information and communication, it also makes us more accessible. In doing so, however, it also makes us more interruptable, and more prone to being continually attentive to so many inputs, that we're acutely attentive to none.

Yesterday I gave a speech to 600 or so leaders for a health care client of ours. To them I put it this way: Don't make yourself accessible, make yourself available. There's a big difference between always leaving your pager, cell, and Blackberry on so people can get you, and always giving your people an avenue by which they can get you. Carve out time in your day to talk with your folks. Carve out similar blocks to respond to voice mails and download and respond to emails. Carve out similar "white space" time in which you're only interruptable if it's an emergency.

This isn't about ending open-door management ... it's about making sure there's only one door open at a time, so you don't have 30 people prone to walk in from different directions, any time, any place.

Because at the end of the day, your attention is like raspberry jam: you're welcome to spread it around as much as you like, but it's never going to get any thicker (a metaphor which I think I picked up from Keith Ferrazzi's book). (Besides: Attending to email appreas to be worse for you than smoking marijuana ...)