Category Archives: Leadership

Learn More About the Problem Before Trying to Solve It

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Ideas are cheap, but converting them into a saleable product and building the engine to make it all happen is expensive. Before spending the big money, spend more time than you think reasonable to answer these three questions.

1. Is the problem big enough?

There’s no sense spending the time and money to solve a problem unless you have a good idea the payback is worth the cost. Before spending the money to create the solution, spend the time to assess the benefits that will come from solving the problem.

Before you can decide if the problem is big enough, you have to define the problem and know who has it. One of the best ways to do this is to define how things are done today. Draw a block diagram that defines the steps potential customers follow or draw a picture of how they do things today. Define the products/services they use today and ask them what it would mean if you solved their problem. What’s particularly difficult at this point is they may not know they have a problem.

But before moving on, formalize who has the problem. Define the attributes of the potential customers and figure out how many have the same attributes and, possibly, the same problem. Define the segments narrowly to make sure each segment does, in fact, have the same problem. There will be a tendency to paint with broad strokes to increase the addressable market, but stay narrow and maintain focus on a tight group of potential customers.

Estimate the value of the solution based on how it compares to the existing alternative. And the only ones who can give you this information are the potential customers. And the only way they can give you the information is if you interview them and watch them work. And with this detailed knowledge, figure out the number of potential customers who have the problem. Do all this BEFORE any solving.

2. Will they pay for it?

The only way to know if potential customers will pay for your solution is to show them an offering – a description of your value proposition and how it differs from the existing alternatives, a demo (a mockup of a solution and not a functional prototype) and pricing. (See LEANFOUNDRY for more on an offering.) There will be a tendency to wait until the solution is ready, but don’t wait. And there will be a reluctance attach a price to the solution, but that’s the only way you’ll know how much they value your solution. And there will be difficulty defining a tight value proposition because that requires you to narrowly define what the solution does for the potential customer. And that’s scary because the value proposition will be clear and understandable and the potential customer will understand it well enough to decide they if they like it or not.

If you don’t assign a price and ask them to buy it, you’ll never know if they’ll buy it in real life.

3. Can you deliver it?

List all the elements that must come together. Can you make it? Can you sell it? Can you ship it? Can you service it? Are your partners capable and committed? Do you have the money do put everything in place?

Like with a chain, it takes one bad link to make the whole thing fall apart. Figure out if any of your links are broken or missing. And don’t commit resources until they’re all in place and ready to go.

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Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard

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Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard

GUEST POST from David Burkus

How do you make your team care about the work they are doing?

If you’re a manager, you’ve probably asked that question a few times in your career. And you’ve probably made some attempts at motivating your team already. Did you whip out the company mission statement? How did that go over?

Even if you think your team is doing the most boring work, like turning numbers into different numbers on a computer screen, you can still inspire your team to feel something in their work. This is such a crucial part of great leadership, and it’s not something you can fake or beg people to do.

Employees don’t want mission statements or half-hearted enthusiasm to lift their spirits at work. They want to feel meaning in their work and understand their impact beyond the bottom line or increasing shareholder value.

They want to know “What good is our work doing?”

We want to know our work has a rationale behind it—a purpose, no matter how small. And lack of any rationale or contribution creates a lack of motivation.

The key to motivating your team is to show them the meaning in their work and to help them know their impact. These terms may sound similar, but there are subtle differences that make each important. Meaning is knowing that your contribution counts, that your task isn’t just busy work, and that what you literally do contributes to the larger picture of the business. Impact is knowing who is counting on you.

Most of us think of meaning with a capital M. It’s why we think of doctors, nurses, or firefighters as doing Meaningful work. They’re saving lives. But the research on human motivation and team collaboration suggests something different. It’s okay to offer lowercase m meaning as well. In fact, it’s more than ok. Small m meaning dramatically increases the big M: Motivation.

For impact, well, think about the last time you felt engaged and motivated at work, or the last time you worked on a team that was inspiring and energizing to be a part of. You’re probably not thinking about the last time your boss recited the company mission statement verbatim.

Instead, you’re probably thinking about the last time you got a “thank you” from a client or coworker, or when you found out how your work mattered to someone else.

Taken together – meaning and impact, create what is called a “Pro-social purpose.” And research suggests motivating you team with prosocial purpose leaves them not only more motivated to pursue objectives, but also more likely to work together as a team.

Take KPMG’s approach for instance. Struggling with low morale, they didn’t just throw perks or pay raises at the problem. Instead, they turned to storytelling, launching the “We Shape History” campaign in 2014. The goal of the campaign was to showcase pivotal moments in history that KPMG as a firm was involved in. KPMG managed the logistics of the Lend-Lease Act during World War II, which helped the United States aid the allies. KPMG audited the 1994 South African Presidential Election, which saw Nelson Mandela make history as the first black president. The campaign worked to raise awareness of the impact KPMG’s past work had on history, but what happened next worked even better to raise morale.

After being inspired, employees were then tasked with finding the impact their roles had—at their level. Not a companywide impact, but how their work made an impact from an individual level. They set up an app on the company’s internal website that let any of the 30,000 plus employee submit their own stories. They called it the “10,000 Stories Challenge,” but didn’t take long for them to blow past that target.

Within 6 months, KPMG had collected 42,000 stories, with powerful examples of personal impact like:

“I help farmers grow – because I support the farm credit system that keeps family farms in business.”

“I restore neighborhoods – because I audit community development programs that revitalize low-income communities.”

“I combat terrorism – because I help banks prevent money laundering that can go toward terrorism.”

Leadership at the company got the results they wanted. Employees felt their work made more of a difference. Retention was better. The company became a top place to work.

Purpose became a regular conversation on the individual team level.

Research on Prosocial Purpose

In 2014, researcher Adam Grant and his colleagues were working with their university’s donation call center. These call centers are manned by student workers who are given a list of alumni and a phone and tasked with calling each person and reading from a script that always ends in a request for a donation. The job is boring. It’s draining to be hung up on, yelled at, or worse. It’s relatively thankless. In fact, when Grant and his colleagues showed up, the first thing they noticed when touring the call center was a sign in one student’s cubicle. It read “Doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit, you get a warm feeling but no one else notices.”

The researchers wanted them to feel noticed—but obviously not for wetting themselves. They wondered if getting the call center employees to notice the difference they were making would have a motivating effect on them. So, they took the break time student workers received and used it to run an experiment. During a five-minute break, some of the workers were visited by a fellow student who had received scholarship funds raised by the call center and they heard how receiving the funds had positively impacted him.

And when the researchers followed up a month later, they noticed that just that small meeting with a scholarship recipient had a big impact on the callers. The workers who got to meet the people directly served by their work worked twice as hard. They made double the number of calls per hour and spent double the number of minutes on the phone. Their weekly revenue went from an average of around $400 to more than $2,000 in donations.

It’s impossible to overstate how big this effect is.

The workers didn’t get any additional perks or benefits. They didn’t get any training. And they certainly didn’t get asked to memorize and internalize the university’s mission statement. Instead, they got a five-minute chat with someone whose life was made better by the work they were doing.

Putting Prosocial Purpose Into Practice

So, when it comes to motivating your team, the key is to demonstrate to your colleagues the work they’re doing is meaningful and has an impact is a big part of their job. Maybe the most important. Prosocial purpose won’t happen overnight, but here are a few things to bring Meaning to the forefront and have Impact lead the way.

1. Tactic: Make metrics meaningful.

Organizations love metrics. They’re what allow the company to assess the performance of the business and their employees. They can be insightful. They can be cruel. But metrics aren’t meaning. Performance metrics get senior leaders excited when they show business is booming. And managers feel crummy when performance metrics for their team are lagging.

Often the blur of trackable metrics makes it difficult to remember why metrics matter. That’s why you as a leader need to readily remind your team. Use metrics that inspire meaning.

2. Tactic: Share a win every day.

Most organizations celebrate wins, but they’re often limited to the successful end of a project or hitting an important milestone. But on the team level, high-performing teams share wins much more frequently. It may sound like that’s taking too much time for something of too little importance, you’re wrong. People get bogged down on the small tasks that make up the day-to-day experience. You might have established meaning, but it’s like a muscle. It’ll go away if you don’t exercise it. Remind your team. Find wins and express them to the team. And where appropriate, go more public past your team. This sounds simple but imagine yourself in their position. A win is a win, no matter who you are. Wins feel good. Wins create meaning.

3. Tactic: Collect Impact Stories

KPMG was certainly the best example of this. You as a leader need to be on the lookout. Collect threads wherever they come from. Part of being a good leader is keeping tabs on those stories and using them to create that prosocial purpose. And take a note from KPMG to– bring your team into the storytelling process. Have them find impact in their role. But as their manager, keep most of the storytelling work on your plate. Collect them, showcase them, and keep them coming.

4. Tactic: Pause for Purpose

You know – when people talk about jobs with real meaning and impact, we’re quick to say teacher, firefighter, doctors, or nurses. And we’re correct, those are jobs that have and provide a TON of meaning. Do doctors and nurses need reminding of their purpose? Well, consider this: at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the entire team of surgeons, nurses, and support staff pause before every surgery to take a moment to remember the patient they are about to operate on. They break up what would be a routine procedure with a powerful reminder of the humanity behind what they’re doing.

If prominent surgeons are pausing for purpose, you and your team can do this too.

5. Tactic: Outsource Inspiration

Teams, especially at the entry-level, can be put far from the people who they serve. A customer testimonial video or comment only goes so far. Think of this as an extension of the impact story tactic. Bring the story to them. Bring in clients or customers to meet with your team, even just briefly. It only took 5 min for the call center to be inspired. Or if you need to, send them to the story. Take your team out of the office, out of the zoom meeting, and into the world where their impact is. Field trips aren’t just for elementary schools.

Conclusion

On first reading, a lot of this article might sound difficult. It reads like fancy business school jargon on motivating your team. But it’s actually relatively simple. In fact, the entire article can be summarized in just a single sentence.

“People want to do work that matters, and they want to work for leaders who tell them they matter.”

No matter where you get started as long as it’s in the service of one of those things—letting them know their work matters and letting them know they matter to you—you’ll be moving the needle on how much your team feels inspired and how much they feel energized to do work and you didn’t even have to recite the company’s mission statement which is actually a lot harder to remember than anything in this article.

Image credit: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on March 17, 2024.

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Putting Human Agency at the Center of Decision-Making

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Putting Human Agency at the Center of Decision-Making

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

We live in an automated age. From the news we read and the items we shop for, to who we date and what companies we choose to work for, algorithms help drive every facet of modern life. Such rapid technological advancement has led some to predict that we’re headed for a jobless future, where there is no more need for humans.

Yet in their recent book Radically Human, Accenture’s Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson argue exactly the opposite. In their work guiding technology strategy for many of the world’s top corporations, they have found that, in many cases, the robots need us more than we need them. Automation is no panacea.

For over a century, pundits have been trying to apply an engineering mindset to human affairs with the hope of taking a more “scientific approach.” So far, those efforts have failed. In reality, these ideas have less to do with science than denying the value of human agency and limiting the impact of human judgment. We need to stop making the same mistake.

The Myth Of Shareholder Value

In 1970, the economist Milton Friedman proposed a radical idea. He argued that corporate CEOs should not take into account the interests of the communities they serve, but that their only social responsibility was to increase shareholder value. While ridiculed by many at the time, by the 1980s Friedman’s idea became accepted doctrine.

In particular, what irked Friedman was that managers would exercise judgment with respect to the objectives of the organization. “the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation … and his primary responsibility is to them,” he wrote.

The problem is that boiling down the success of an enterprise to the single variable of shareholder value avoids important questions. What do we mean by “value?” Is short term value more important than long-term value? Do owners value only share price or do they also value other things, like technological progress and a healthy environment?

Avoiding tough questions leaves significant problems unsolved, which may be one reason that, since Friedman’s essay, our well-being has declined significantly. Our economy has become markedly less productive, less competitive and less dynamic. Purchasing power for most people has stagnated. By just about every metric, we’re worse off.

How The Consumer Welfare Standard Undermines Consumer Welfare

In 1978, the legal scholar Robert Bork published the Antitrust Paradox in which he argued against the rule of reason standard for antitrust cases that required judges to use their discretion when deciding what constitutes a practice that “unreasonably” restricts trade. In its place, he suggested a consumer welfare standard, which would only take into account whether the consumer was harmed by higher prices.

Much like Friedman, Bork didn’t like the idea of depending on subjective human judgment. How could we trust judges to decide what is “reasonable” without a clear and objective standard? If the government is going to block business activity, he argued, it should have to prove, through stringent economic analysis, that harm is being done.

Yet as Lina Kahn pointed out in a now-famous paper titled Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, consumers can be harmed even as prices are lowered. If Amazon is allowed to control the online retail infrastructure, including logistics, hosting, marketing, etc., then trade is restricted, free markets are undermined and the consumer will be harmed.

To understand why, you only need to look at the recent baby formula shortage, in which only three firms dominate the market and, the leader, Abbott, is the exclusive supplier in many markets. Not only is it highly likely that the lack of competition contributed to lax quality standards at Abbott’s plant in Sturgis, Michigan, but once it went offline because of contamination, there weren’t enough suppliers to fill the gap.

These aren’t isolated examples, but indicative of a much larger and growing crisis. An article in Harvard Business Review details how the vast majority of industries are concentrated in just a few dominant players. A more extensive analysis by the Federal Reserve bank shows how the lack of competition leads to lower business dynamism and less productivity.

“Great Power” Politics

In early March, the prominent political scientist John Mearsheimer gave an interview to The New Yorker in which he argued that the United States had erred greatly in its support of Ukraine. According to his theory, we should recognize Russia’s role as a great power and its right to dictate certain things to its smaller and weaker neighbor.

Today, the idea that America should have left Ukraine at the mercy of Russia seems not only morally questionable, but patently absurd. Not only has the brutality of the Russian forces horrified the world, their incompetence has laid bare the fecklessness of the the Putin regime. How could such a respected expert of foreign affairs get things so wrong?

Once again, the failure to recognize human agency is a key culprit. In Mearsheimer’s view, which he calls, “realism,” only “great powers” have a say in world affairs and they will work to further their interests. He believes that by not recognizing Russia’s desire to subjugate other nations in its orbit, America and its allies are being silly and impractical.

Hopefully, we can learn some lessons from the war in Ukraine. Strategy is not a game of chess, in which we move inert pieces around a board. People have the power to make choices. Ukraine chose to undertake tough reforms and arm itself. Russia chose an autocracy which rewarded loyalty over competence. That, more than anything else, has driven events.
The Real World Isn’t An Algorithm

A joke began circulating in the late 1970s, often attributed to management consultant Warren Bennis, that the factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. Today, even with offshoring, about 10% of Americans work in factories.

When you scratch below the surface, the joke has less to do with technological advancement than it does with derision and control. Bennis wasn’t just any business consultant, but a renowned expert on leadership, who wrote books, published articles in top journals and even advised presidents. That he would promote the view, even as a joke, that leaders should deny agency to employees is as troubling as it is telling.

If you believe that human judgment is a liability rather than an asset, you manage accordingly. You treat employees as cogs in a machine rather than partners in a shared enterprise. You invest in offshoring rather than up-skilling, schedule shifts without regard to people’s lives, deny benefits such as parental leave. We’ve seen where that’s gotten us—lower productivity, worsening mental health and a society that is more unequal and less just.

We need to get back to the business of being human. Our economy should serve our people, not the other way around. The success of a society needs to be measured by the well-being of those who live in it. If we increase GDP, but our air and water are more polluted, our children less educated, we live unhappy lives and die deaths of despair, what have we really gained?

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Company Power Strategy is a Team Sport

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Company Power Strategy is a Team Sport

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Company power is primarily a function of the amount of ecosystem support for your offerings, which in turn is due largely to the market-making opportunities you create for partners to resell or flesh out your whole product. Market share leaders enjoy the most extensive ecosystem support because their installed base creates the majority of partner opportunities.

Let me note, however, that in the context of our Hierarchy of Powers framework, market share is a misnomer. The correct phrase would be category share. That’s because in our taxonomy markets are defined by groups of customers whereas categories are defined by groups of competitors. When financial analysts talk about market share, they are referring to category share, and it is your share of the category that sets the upper bounds of the opportunities you can create for ecosystem partners, the percentage of the total category you can make available to the ecosystem.

After category share, the next most important determinants of company power are barriers to entry and barriers to exit, or what we often just call “stickiness.” Because sticky offerings create ongoing opportunities for up-sell and cross-sell, as well as resist being displaced by lower-cost competitors, they enable vendors to sustain above-commodity pricing margins for the life of the category.

Gorilla Royalty Game

The strongest form of stickiness comes from proprietary technology that is category-enabling, the kind that Oracle has had in databases, Qualcomm in smartphones, Microsoft in operating systems, and Intel in microprocessors. When a category consolidates around such companies, it creates a hierarchy of company power we call a Gorilla Game, entailing three roles — gorilla, chimp, and monkey. In the absence of proprietary technology, categories form an analogous hierarchy with much lower switching costs, something we call a royalty game, organized around a parallel set of roles — king, prince, and serf. Cellular telephony, Wintel PCs, WiFi networking, and DRAM memory chips all exemplify categories with this latter type of structure.

The difference in stickiness between these two hierarchies creates dramatic differences in market capitalization. In the gorilla game, the gorilla dominates the category for the entirety of its life cycle, and thus its market cap gets a very high premium indeed. Chimps also have proprietary technology, hence stickiness, but are not the market standard, hence more limited scope. Their best play is to develop an independent ecosystem organized around high-value use cases specific to particular vertical markets, the way the Unix workstation vendors competed successfully against PCs with CAD-like applications for cinema, semiconductor, oil exploration, fluid dynamics, and high-frequency trading. And finally, there is a very large market open to being served by monkeys who are able to clone the gorilla technology and deliver a plug-compatible alternative at a much lower price.

When it comes to royalty games, the absence of proprietary technology with high switching costs leads to a much more fluid hierarchy of power. The category leader is still the king, but it can be deposed by some up-and-coming prince, the way that Compaq displaced the IBM PC, the way that Micron can challenge Samsung in DRAMs, the way that Aruba can challenge Cisco in Wi-Fi. Here the low-cost providers, whom we termed the serfs, have an easier time gaining entry into a large and growing market, but a harder time sustaining even the most modest of margins, as there is always some hungrier low-cost competitor looking over their shoulder.

Overall, the key takeaway is that, while the gorillas and gorilla games get the bulk of the attention, especially from the investment community, all six of these strategies are perfectly viable provided you play within the parameters of your role. The key is not to hallucinate about what role that is.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

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Your Response is What Matters

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Your Response is What Matters

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When was the last time you taught someone a new method or technique? What was their reaction? How did it make you feel? Will you do it again?

When was the last time you learned something new from a colleague? What was your reaction? What did you do so it would happen again?

When was the last time you woke up early because you were excited to go to work? How did you feel about that? What can change so it happens once a week?

When was the last time you had a crazy idea and your colleagues helped you make it real? How did you feel about that? How can you do it for them? What can you do to make it happen more frequently?

When was the last time you had a crazy idea and it was squelched because it violated a successful recipe? How did you feel about that? What can you do so it happens differently next time?

When was the last time you used your good judgement without asking for permission? How did you feel about that? What can you do to give others the confidence to use their best judgement?

When was the last time someone gave you credit for doing good work? And when was the last time you did the same for someone else? What can you do so the behavior blossoms into common practice?

When was the last time you openly contradicted a majority opinion with a dissenting minority opinion? Though it was received poorly, you must do it again. The majority needs to hear your dissenting opinion so they can sharpen their thinking.

When was the last time you gave good advice to a younger colleague? How can you systematize that type of behavior?

When was the last time you did work so undeniably good that others twisted it a bit and adopted it as their own? Don’t feel badly. When doing innovative work this is what success looks like. All that really matters is your customers realize the value from the work and not who gets credit. What can you do so this type of thing happens as a matter of course?

Good things happen and bad things happen. That’s how life goes. But the important part is you pay attention to what worked and what didn’t. And the second important part is actively making the good stuff happen more frequently and the bad stuff happen less frequently.

Image credit: Pexels

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Yes the Comfort Zone Can Be Your Best Friend

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Yes the Comfort Zone Can Be Your Best Friend

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

We’ve all heard it: “You need to jump out of your comfort zone to grow.” But what if I told you that real, lasting growth doesn’t come from leaping into discomfort, but from steadily expanding your comfort zone?

Expand Your Comfort Zone!

I like to challenge the popular belief that growth necessitates a sudden leap into the unknown. Instead, I suggest a concept that introduces a progressive model where growth is about gradually broadening the comfort zone. By expanding it, we incorporate new skills, experiences, and thought patterns into our safe space, reducing anxiety and fostering sustainable development.

Navigate the Mindset Zones

The model divides our mental landscape into four interconnected zones: Comfort, Fear, Learning, and Growth. These zones form a fluid continuum rather than rigid boundaries. Our development journey is not about jumping from one zone to the next but involves continuous navigation and expansion of these zones.

Comfort Zone: As defined by psychologist Judith Bardwick, the comfort zone is a “behavioral state where a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviors to deliver steady performance without a sense of risk.” It’s where we feel safe, in control, and efficient.

Fear Zone: Just outside the comfort zone lies the Fear Zone, characterized by anxiety, self-doubt, and external pressures. This is where our fears, from failure to judgment by others, reside.

Learning Zone: When we face our fears, we enter the Learning Zone, a space for growth. Here, we develop new skills, gain knowledge, and build resilience. Mistakes are part of the learning process.

Growth Zone: The outermost zone is where we actively realize our potential. In this space, newly acquired skills become second nature, confidence surges, and we begin achieving long-term goals and dreams.

The Comfort Zone: Not Just a Place of Stagnation

While often vilified, the comfort zone has significant advantages. It’s not a space of laziness – it’s a foundation for stability, efficiency, and well-being. This is often where we do our best, most consistent work. Consider these pros:

— Predictability: You know what to expect and can respond effectively.

— Confidence: Drawing from experience, you can act with assurance.

— Efficiency: Routine tasks are completed quickly and effectively.

— Dependability: You’re reliable and consistent, both for yourself and others.

— Stability: Your actions don’t threaten the status or ambitions of others.

— Low Stress: You limit the pressure that comes with constant change.

— Risk Management: You minimize exposure to potential failures.

— Recharging: The comfort zone provides mental and emotional rest.

— Safety: It’s your sanctuary, and being there is enjoyable.

While these advantages are crucial for maintaining stability and recharging, the real power of the comfort zone lies in its ability to grow. When we begin to push its boundaries, the zone expands, turning once unfamiliar challenges into sources of confidence and opportunity.

However, all though this is positive, an over-reliance on the comfort zone comes with its own set of challenges:

— Status Quo: You may become stuck in familiar patterns.

— Missed Opportunities: Staying in your comfort zone can cause you to miss out on new experiences.

— Limited Growth: Over time, your personal and professional value can decline.

— Lack of Self-Discovery: Without taking risks, it’s hard to discover your true potential.

— Stalled Learning: Growth slows when challenges are avoided.

— Complacency: Routines can lead to laziness.

— Stagnant Ambition: New goals and dreams are left unexplored.

The Importance of Expanding your Comfort Zone

By expanding the comfort zone, we reduce the size of the Fear Zone.

Taking small, manageable steps is crucial. Whether it’s learning a new skill, facing a difficult conversation, or taking on a new responsibility at work, each step is an opportunity to widen your comfort zone incrementally. As these steps accumulate, they turn once intimidating tasks into routine actions within your expanded comfort zone.

This approach re-frames how we view stress, failure, and discomfort. Rather than seeing these as barriers, they become necessary and productive elements of growth.

Strategies for Expanding Your Comfort Zone

For Individuals:

1. Self-Awareness: Start by recognizing the edges of your comfort zone and acknowledging its benefits and limits.

2. Re-frame Stress: Understand that stress isn’t always a negative force. While chronic stress can be harmful, short bursts of positive stress – known as eustress – can act as a motivator, pushing you forward toward growth and new achievements.

3. Stay Curious: Continually seek new learning experiences and knowledge.

4. Embrace Failure: Redefine failure as part of the growth process, not as a roadblock.

5. Build a Growth Network: Surround yourself with like-minded individuals who encourage growth and share valuable insights.

For Teams:

1. Open Culture: Create an environment where failure is seen as a learning opportunity. Encourage team members to take calculated risks and openly share their experiences.

2. Collaboration: Foster a team dynamic where members can learn from each other and support one another in their growth journeys.

3. Leadership Involvement: Leaders should model growth behaviors and actively promote the idea of expanding the comfort zone within their teams.

4. Provide Support: Ensure team members have the resources and support to learn and grow. Offer constructive feedback and provide opportunities for development.

A Dynamic Process, Not a Linear Journey

Growth isn’t a one-time leap; it’s a continuous, dynamic process. There will be times when we retreat to our comfort zones for safety and recharging, and other times when we boldly step into the unknown. The goal isn’t to abandon the comfort zone, but to expand it to include new skills, experiences, and mindsets.

By steadily stretching the boundaries of our comfort zone, we can make continuous learning, resilience, and adaptability part of our daily lives. Growth isn’t about how often you leave your comfort zone – it’s about how far you can expand it.

The Comfort Zone

Pros of the Comfort Zone

Cons of the Comfort Zone

Image Credits: Stefan Lindegaard

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Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth

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Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“What will you do on vacation?” a colleague asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.

The uncomfortable silence that followed spoke volumes. In boardrooms and during quarterly reviews, we celebrate constant motion and back-to-back calendars. Yet, study after study shows that the most successful leaders embrace a counterintuitive edge: strategic idleness.

While your competitors exhaust themselves in perpetual busyness, research shows that deliberate mental downtime activates the brain networks responsible for strategic foresight, innovative solutions, and clear decision-making.

The Status Trap of Busy-ness

At one company I worked with, there was only one acceptable answer to “How are you doing?” “Busy.” The answer wasn’t a way to avoid an awkward hallway conversation. It was social currency. If you’re busy, you’re valuable. If you’re fine, you’re expendable.

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research confirmed what Columbia, Georgetown, and Harvard researchers discovered: being busy is now a status symbol, signaling “competence, ambition, and scarcity in the market.”

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: your packed schedule is undermining the very outcomes you’re accountable for delivering.

Your Brain’s Innovation Engine

Neuroscience has confirmed what innovators have long practiced: Strategic Idleness. While you consciously “do nothing,” your default mode network (DMN) engages, making unexpected connections across stored information and experiences.

Recent research published in the journal Brain demonstrates that the DMN is activated during creative thinking, with a specific pattern of neural activity occurring during the search for novel ideas. This network is essential for both spontaneous thought and divergent thinking, core elements of innovation.

So if you’ve always wondered why you get your best ideas in the shower, it’s because your DMN is powered all the way up.

Three Ways to Power-Up Your Engine

Here are three executive-grade approaches to strategic idleness without more showers or productivity sacrifices:

Pause for 10 Minutes Before Making a Decision
Before making high-stakes decisions, implement a mandatory 10-minute idleness period. No email, no conversation—just sitting. Research on cognitive recovery suggests that this brief reset activates your DMN, allowing for a more comprehensive consideration of variables and strategic implications.
Take a Walking Meeting with Yourself
Block 20 minutes in your calendar each week for a solo walking meeting (and then take the walk!). No other attendees, no agenda, just walking. Researchers at Stanford University found that walking increases creative output by an average of 60% compared to sitting. The combination of physical movement and mental space creates ideal conditions for your brain to generate solutions to problems you didn’t know you had.
Schedule 3-5 minutes of Strategic Silence before key discussions
Research on group dynamics shows that silent reflection before discussion can reduce groupthink and increase the quality of ideas by helping team members process information more deeply. Before you dive into a critical topic at your next leadership meeting, schedule 3-5 minutes of silence. Explain that this silence is for individual reflection and planning for the upcoming discussion, not for checking email or taking bathroom breaks. Acknowledge that it will feel awkward, but that it’s critical for the upcoming discussion and decision.

Remember, You’re Not Doing Nothing If You’re being Strategically Idle

The most valuable asset in your organization isn’t technology, capital, or even the products you sell. It’s the quality of thinking that goes into critical decisions. Strategic idleness isn’t inaction; it’s the deliberate cultivation of conditions that foster innovation, clear judgment, and strategic foresight.

While your competitors remain trapped in perpetual busyness, by using executive advantage of strategic idleness, your next breakthrough will present itself.

This is an updated version of the June 9, 2019, post, “Do More Nothing.”

Image credit: Unsplash, Laura Weiss

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Learn How Your Team Works Best

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Learn How Your Team Works Best

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Assembling a team of talented individuals is only the first step toward success. The real challenge lies in ensuring that this team can work together effectively to meet deadlines and achieve goals. Despite having a roster of skilled professionals, you may find your team underperforming, a situation that can be both perplexing and frustrating. In this article, we’ll examine why some teams don’t work.

The Need For Common Understanding

It’s a common misconception that if each member is clear on their individual tasks, the team will naturally succeed. However, this overlooks the crucial aspect of how team members interact and collaborate with one another.

The reluctance to micromanage may lead managers to adopt a hands-off approach, expecting teams to navigate their dynamics independently. However, this can result in a disjointed effort, with members unsure of how to integrate their work with that of their colleagues. Providing clear guidance on roles and responsibilities is essential, but fostering a culture of empathy and understanding is equally important. This dual focus on clarity and empathy cultivates a common understanding, enabling teams to excel not just in their tasks but in their collaboration as well.

Empathy in management goes beyond simply putting yourself in another’s shoes. It involves actively fostering a team culture where members are attuned to each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and working styles. This was exemplified by Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut, who led a diverse team on the International Space Station. Hadfield prioritized team cohesion. He realized that the mission’s difficulties would not stem from a lack of technical knowledge but rather from the potential clashes arising from differences in personality and work preferences, which tend to intensify over extended periods in close quarters. To foster understanding and unity, Hadfield lived and worked in both the United States and Russia, immersing himself in their respective cultures. He encouraged the team to share their preferences, connect with each other’s families, and engage in role-playing exercises to anticipate reactions to challenging scenarios.

This dual understanding—clarity regarding tasks and insight into each other’s perspectives—proved instrumental in the mission’s remarkable success. Despite spending five months together in the confined quarters of the ISS, the team never experienced heated arguments. They faced unexpected challenges, including the loss of a loved one while in space and a sudden ammonia tank leak, which demanded an urgent spacewalk. However, their thorough preparation and understanding allowed them to navigate these challenges effectively and ensure the mission’s triumphant completion.

Why Empathy Works

Research by Dr. Anita Williams Woolley at Carnegie Mellon University highlights that the success of a team isn’t solely dependent on the intelligence or diversity of its members. Dr. Woolley and her research team tested 152 teams and gave them assignments that required collaboration, creative thinking, decision making challenges and involved planning ahead. Initially, the researchers assumed that factors like intelligence or level of skills specific to the task would best predict which teams performed well. But surprisingly, it was a team’s level of social perceptiveness and ability to work together harmoniously that predicted performance—including high-performance on tasks in which the team had merely average intelligence or no discernable skills for the task. Teams that develop a shared behavioral norm and understand each other’s contributions could tackle any task efficiently. In other words, the more common understanding, the more likely the team was to perform.

How To Build Common Understanding

Building empathy within a team doesn’t require grand gestures but can start with simple, everyday interactions. Here’s a few ways to get started:

Find Free Time:

One of the most productive times for team collaboration is when the team does nothing at all. That sounds counterintuitive, but humans are social creatures and socialization is how we learn about each other best. In times when people aren’t talking about work, they’re usually talking about themselves. They’re describing past experiences, introducing their family, and sharing hobbies and interests that extend beyond their job description and training.

These moments of self-disclosure allow the whole team to understand the person better, and they allow individual teammates to find uncommon commonalities—things that those two have in common, that are uncommon to the rest of the team. These uncommon commonalities are how individuals build bonds and how coworkers turn into friends. A myriad of research suggests having friends at work and on a team makes people more productive, engaged, and resilient.

Some unstructured times happen naturally, like the moments before a meeting when some of the team is in the conference room or on the video call early. But other times may need to be created deliberately, like setting certain days to eat together or creating a calendar of paired “coffee chat” appointments between coworkers. These deliberate times might seem fundatory (mandatory fun that’s not actually that fun), but that’s likely because the team doesn’t know that much about each other yet. As these times continue and as the team grows closer and develops more empathy, they’ll quickly turn into some of the most energizing times on a team’s calendar.

Write Manuals of Me:

Think of this as a user’s manual, like the one you’re handed when you get a new car. Have each person on the team draft a short document telling their teammates more about them and how they prefer to work. These manuals help the team understand why one person always seems overly optimistic and another skeptical, and why one person writes long, contemplative emails and another writes back “Sounds good.” This saves time and confusion and also helps reduce conflict, perhaps better than any over-priced personality test could.

One easy template to start contains four simple statements: I am at my best when __________. I am at my worst when __________. You can count on me to __________. What I need from you is __________.

Send these questions out and ask the team to ponder them for a while before meeting to share answers. If you’re the leader, establish trust by going first (more on that in Part Two). Allow time after each statement for questions and clarification, as people are trying to apply what has been shared to past experiences with that person. Just like team charters, the real value is not in the document, but in drafting and sharing it.

Share Gratitude:

One of the simplest and most powerful ways to build empathy and connection with someone else is to show appreciation. So, it’s not surprising that research suggests high-performing teams express significantly more gratitude to each other than other groups. In addition, increasing expressions of gratitude on a team also increase the openness to helping each other on future projects. The benefits of gratitude aren’t just reserved for the receiver, they’re also gotten by the giver (Please forgive the grammar there in favor of some awesome alliteration).

Taking the time to say “thank you” increases well-being and brain function and reduces impatience and other stressors that get in the way of empathizing with colleagues. Grateful people are more relaxed, more resilient, and earn about seven percent more than their ungrateful colleagues.

Consider starting a few public displays of appreciation on your team. This could be a weekly ritual at the end of a meeting where each person says thanks to someone else on the team (and pay attention, you want to make sure everyone receives at least one kudos). It could also be by creating a “Weekly Praise” email or communication channel where members share what they appreciated about each other this past week. If you need an even smaller start, you could target just one person and pass around a symbol or token when they receive appreciation (the token also nominates them to share next week).

Conclusion

Creating a high-performing team is akin to playing chess, where understanding the unique strengths and roles of each piece is crucial to victory. By fostering a culture of clarity, empathy, and mutual understanding, you enable your team to navigate the complexities of collaboration effectively. This approach not only enhances performance but also builds a resilient and adaptable team capable of achieving its objectives. Remember, the path to a high-performing team is a journey of building understanding and empathy, a strategy that, while it may require time and patience, yields substantial rewards for those willing to invest in it.

Image credit: Pexels

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You Already Have Too Many Ideas

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You Already Have Too Many Ideas

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Innovation isn’t achieved by creating more ideas. Innovation is realized when ideas are transformed into commercialized products and services. Innovation is realized when ideas are transformed into new business models that deliver novel usefulness to customers and deliver increased revenues to the company.

In a way, creating ideas that languish in their own shadow is worse than not creating any ideas at all. If you don’t have any ideas, at least you didn’t spend the resources to create them and you don’t create the illusion that you’re actually making progress. In that way, it’s better to avoid creating new ideas if you’re not going to do anything with them. At least your leadership team will not be able to rationalize that everything will be okay because you have an active idea generation engine.

Before you schedule your next innovation session, don’t. Reason 1 – it’s not an innovation session, it’s an ideation session. Reason 2 – you don’t have resources to do anything with the best ideas so you’ll spend the resources and nothing will come of it. To improve the return on investment, don’t make the investment because there will be no return.

Truth is, you already have amazing ideas to grow your company. Problem is, no one is listening to the people with the ideas. And the bigger problem – because no one listened over the last ten years, the people with the ideas have left the company or stopped trying to convince you they have good ideas. Either way, you’re in trouble and creating more ideas won’t help you. Your culture is such that new ideas fall on deaf ears and funding to advance new concepts loses to continuous improvement.

If you do want to hold an ideation event to create new ideas that will reinvent your company, there are ways to do it effectively. First, define the customer of the ideation event. This is the person who is on the hook to commercialize things that will grow the business. This is the person who will have a career problem if ideas aren’t implemented. This is the person who can allocate the resources to turn the ideas into commercialized products, services. If this person isn’t an active advocate for the ideation event, don’t hold it. If this person will not show up to the report out of the ideation event, don’t hold it. If this person does not commit to advancing the best ideas, don’t hold the event.

Though innovation and ideas start with “i”, they’re not the same. Ideas are inexpensive to create but deliver no value. Innovation is expensive and delivers extreme value to customers and the company. If you’re not willing to convert the ideas into something that delivers values to customers, save the money and do continuous improvement. Your best people will leave, but at least you won’t waste money on creating ideas that will die on the vine.

If the resources aren’t lined up to run with the ideas, don’t generate the them. If you haven’t allocated the funding for the follow-on work, don’t create new ideas. If the person who is charged with growing the business isn’t asking for new ideas, don’t hold the ideation event.

You already have too many ideas. But what you lack is too few active projects to convert the best ideas into products and services that generate value for your customers and growth for your company.

Stop creating new ideas and start delivering novel usefulness to your customers.

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Portfolio Management and Category Power

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Portfolio Management and Category Power

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Portfolio management is the most consequential and the most challenging element in strategic planning. There is typically a ton of data, but none of it can really speak to the host of underlying risks that underpin long-range investments in net new lines of business, ones that pay off primarily in the out years. The best one can do is leverage experience, frameworks, and pattern recognition to navigate what are inevitably uncharted waters. With that in mind, here are some things to keep in view.

Category Maturity Life Cycle: Tornadoes versus Main Street. Who doesn’t want a growth portfolio? To get one, however, means your enterprise must have meaningful plays in categories that are undergoing secular growth. Secular growth happens when net new budget is being created for a new purchase category across a broad spectrum of customers, a phase in technology adoption we have termed the tornado. Once the tornado has passed, the category will have an established place in these customers’ budgets going forward, a stage in the life cycle we call Main Street, one that is characterized by cyclical growth. Cyclical growth rewards inertial momentum, the goal being to leverage incumbency to grow wallet share more than market share. Secular growth rewards disruption, the goal being to displace an established profit pool by leveraging an emerging one. These dynamics transcend the efforts of most companies to influence (gorilla leaders being the exception), so assessing category power is first and foremost getting clarity on the hand you have been dealt. That will shape your ambitions for next year’s performance and set a baseline for future investment.

Valuation: Growth investors versus value investors. Both forms of growth, secular and cyclical, are valued by investors for their respective risk-adjusted returns, but in different ways for different reasons. Growth investors are looking for a big pop and are willing for you to take considerable risk to get it. Value investors by contrast seek predictably consistent performance—an earnings-oriented approach that outperforms bonds with a minimum of additional risk. Both groups discount the value of the other group’s approach which exposes the market cap of established enterprises to a “conglomerate discount,” a painful penalty given that their stock is the major currency that will fund any M&A. Managing for shareholder value, in other words, gets hung up on the question, which shareholders? The reality is that most publicly held companies have a mix across the board, so the salient issue to address is how much of our operating budget should we commit to the current year versus the out years? Having a principled discussion on this topic leading to a definitive commitment is essential to creating a coherent strategy.

Capital market status: PE-backed versus publicly held. Strategic planning in privately held enterprises is typically more straightforward because the board of directors representing the investing firms share a common approach to risk-adjusted returns. This is why when publicly held companies like Dell reach a crossroads that requires a patch of difficult sledding, they choose to take themselves private in order to accelerate their course corrections. The price to pay for this option is committing to operating principles, performance milestones, and a management discipline that meets the PE investors’ approval.

Leveraging M&A: Incubate before you commit. Pundits like to claim that most M&A transactions fail to deliver on their promise (although recent research puts the odds at closer to fifty-fifty). Some of the failures, however, are self-inflicted wounds that can be avoided by taking a multi-step approach. If your enterprise has a venture investment capability, taking positions in disruptive start-ups with observer rights is a good way to test the waters. In parallel, the goal is to incubate comparable initiatives internally and get them into the market as trial balloons. The difference between this and the early-stage venture model is that you cannot wait for these organic efforts to scale—it will simply take too long. So, you are not trying to win the game with your new offers, just learn it. Sooner or later, you will turn to M&A to acquire something of meaningful mass, the difference being, because you have spent the intervening time in the market competing, you will be a much more knowledgeable acquirer than you otherwise would be.

Synergy management: Year One is the one that matters most. Value-oriented M&A is intended to consolidate mature categories with cyclical growth. It is based on an inside-out approach to cost reduction focusing on eliminating duplicated functions, typically in the back office and the supply chain. Growth-oriented M&A, by contrast, takes an outside-in approach focusing on accelerating bookings and revenues through a series of go-to-market and customer success initiatives. When a smaller high-growth enterprise gets acquired by a larger, slower-growing one, the opportunity is to galvanize the latter’s existing customer base and ecosystem relationships, as well as its global sales and service footprint, to capture market share under highly favorable selling conditions. The trick is to do this quickly, while the iron is still hot, and that requires special incentives and strong management support to build trust between the old and new guards and to overcome the initial inertial resistance that accompanies any acquisition. In sum, what looks good on paper could very well be good in actual fact, but only after you execute Captain Picard’s famous dictum: Make it so!

M&A integration: Year Two is the one that matters most. If the first year is all about getting the go-to-market right as fast as possible, the second is about creating lasting relationships that will enable the two enterprises to operate as one. There are four areas of interest here—the product team, the sales team, the management team, and the culture overall—and each one calls for a slightly different approach. The single most important outcome is to keep the product talent in place—they have the keys to the new kingdom. The sales team can and normally should continue to function as an overlay during the second year, but in parallel a transition to an integrated organization must begin so that in Year Three the overlay is eliminated. The management team is a wild card. Despite all the best intentions on both sides of the table, including vesting incentives of various kinds, entrepreneurial CEOs rarely stay, nor should they. The skillset for disrupting does not translate well into the skillset for scaling and optimizing. This suggests that from the outset a leadership transition should be on the table, typically enlisting an up-and-coming executive from the acquiring enterprise to personally throw themselves into the gap and pull the two organizations together leveraging every talent and tool they have. Finally, large enterprises necessarily entail an enormous amount of process management, something that goes against the grain of entrepreneurial culture, so one needs to tread carefully here, with the understanding that long term there can only be one enterprise, and by virtue of its scale, it will be process-driven for much of its day-to-day work. To promise the acquired company anything else will only create disillusion and disintegration down the line.

Decision Time: To play or not to play. There is no formula for making transformational decisions, but there are some guidelines to keep in mind. The first is few, and far between. Transformations are disruptive to the core business that is funding your overall operation, and it takes time for everything to stabilize around a new portfolio. A second principle is existential threat. If the emerging category obsoletes a pillar of your core business, the way digital photography obsoleted film, the way that streaming is obsoleting conventional TV, then you must take action. Absent such a forcing function, a third principle to consider is value to the existing customer base, with the corollary of opportunity for our existing ecosystem. In other words, does the world want you to do this? Transformation takes a village, and it matters a great deal how much your constituencies will lean in to help you through it. Finally, when your competitors hear about this, will they smile and laugh, or will they say Oh sh*t! If the latter, it just puts icing on the cake.

Plan B: Leverage the updraft. The stars have to align to make any transformational portfolio play work, and sometimes they simply won’t. Plan B is to incorporate a portion of the tornado category into your existing portfolio as a supplement. Take Gen AI, for example. You don’t have to be in the category like Open AI or Anthropic to participate in the new spending. Virtually any enterprise application can benefit from a Gen AI bolt-on to improve the user experience or simplify the administrative one. Prior experiences with adding mobile applications and digital commerce to legacy systems have delivered similarly positive returns. You don’t have to be in the lead, but customers do want to see you are still in the game, and assuming you show up with a working product, they are more than happy to consume it.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

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