Tag Archives: Myths

We Must Unlearn These Three Management Myths

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Mark Twain is reported to have said, “It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” Ignorance of facts is easily remedied. We can read books, watch documentaries or simply do a quick Google search. Yet our misapprehensions and biases endure, even in the face of contradicting facts.

The truth is that much of what we believe has less to do with how we weigh evidence than how we see ourselves. In fact, fMRI studies have suggested have shown that evidence which contradicts our firmly held beliefs violates our sense of identity. Instead of adapting our views, we double down and lash out at those who criticize them.

This can be problematic in our personal lives, but in business it can be fatal. There is a reason that even prominent CEOs can pursue failed strategies and sophisticated investors will back hucksters to the hilt. Yet as Adam Grant points out in Think Again, we can make the effort to reexamine and alter our beliefs. Here are three myths that we need to watch out for.

Myth #1: The “Global Village” Will Be A Nice Place

Marshal McLuhan, in Understanding Media, one of the most influential books of the 20th century, described media as “extensions of man” and predicted that electronic media would eventually lead to a global village. Communities would no longer be tied to a single, isolated physical space but connect and interact with others on a world stage.

To many, the rise of the Internet confirmed McLuhan’s prophecy and, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, digital entrepreneurs saw their work elevated to a sacred mission. In Facebook’s IPO filing, Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

Yet, importantly, McLuhan did not see the global village as a peaceful place. In fact, he predicted it would lead to a new form of tribalism and result in a “release of human power and aggressive violence” greater than ever in human history, as long separated—and emotionally charged—cultural norms would now constantly intermingle, clash and explode.

For many, if not most, people on earth, the world is often a dark and dangerous place. When your world is not secure, “open” is less of an opportunity to connect than it is a vulnerability to exploit. Things can look fundamentally different from the vantage point of, say, a tech company in Menlo Park, California then it does from, say, a dacha outside Moscow.

Context matters. Our most lethal failures are less often those of planning, logic or execution than they are that of imagination. Chances are, most of the world does not see things the way we do. We need to avoid strategic solipsism and constantly question our own assumptions.

Myth #2: Winning The “War For Talent” Will Make You More Competitive

In 1997, three McKinsey consultants published a popular book titled The War for Talent, which argued that due to demographic shifts, recruiting the “best and the brightest” was even more important than “capital, strategy, or R&D.” The idea made a lot of sense. What could be more important for a company than its people?

Yet as Malcolm Gladwell explained in an article about Enron, strict adherence to the talent rule contributed to the firm’s downfall. Executives that were perceived to be talented moved up fast. So fast, in fact, that it became impossible to evaluate their performance. People began to worry more about impressing their boss and appearing to be clever than doing their jobs.

The culture became increasingly toxic and management continued to bet on the same failed platitude until the only way to move up in the organization was to undermine others. As we now know, it didn’t end well. Enron went bankrupt in 2001, just four years after The War for Talent highlighted it as a model for others to follow.

The simple truth is that talent isn’t what you win in a battle. It’s what you build by actualizing the potential of those in your organization and throughout your ecosystem, including partners, customers and the communities in which you operate. In the final analysis, Enron didn’t fail because it lost the war for talent, it failed because it was at war with itself.

Myth #3: We Can “Engineer” Management

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, based on his experience as a manager in a steel factory. It took aim at traditional management methods and suggested a more disciplined approach. Rather than have workers pursue tasks in their own manner, he sought to find “the one best way” and train accordingly.

Before long, Taylor’s ideas became gospel, spawning offshoots such as scientific marketing, financial engineering and the six sigma movement. It was no longer enough to simply work hard, you had to measure, analyze and optimize everything. Over the years these ideas became so central to business thinking that they were rarely questioned.

Yet they should have been. The truth is that this engineering mindset is a zombie idea, a remnant of the logical positivism that was discredited way back in the 1930s and more recent versions haven’t fared any better. To take just one example, a study found that of 58 large companies that announced Six Sigma programs, 91 percent trailed the S&P 500 in stock performance. Yet that didn’t stop the endless parade of false promises.

At the root of the problem is a simple fact: We don’t manage machines, we manage ecosystems and we need to think more about networks and less about nodes. Our success or failure depend less on individual entities, than the connections between them. We need to think less like engineers and more like gardeners.

Don’t Believe Everything You Think

At any given time, there are any number of clever people saying clever things. When you invoke a legendary icon like Marshall McLuhan and say “Global Village,” the concept acquires the glow of some historical, unalterable destiny. But that’s an illusion, just like the “War for Talent” and the idea of “engineering” your way out of managing a business and making wise choices.

Yet notice the trap. None of these things were put forward as mere opinions or perspectives. The McKinsey consultants who declared the “War for Talent” weren’t just expressing an opinion, but revealing the results of a “yearlong study…involving 77 companies and almost 6,000 managers and executives.” (And presumably, they sold the study right back to every one of those 77 companies).

The truth is that an idea can never be validated backward, only forward. No amount of analysis can shape reality. We need to continually test our ideas, reconsider them and adapt them to ever-changing conditions. The problem with concepts like six sigma isn’t necessarily in their design, but that they become elevated something approaching the sublime.

That’s why we shouldn’t believe everything we think. There are simply too many ways to get things wrong, while getting them right is always a relatively narrow path. Or, as Richard Feynman put it, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”

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

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Avoid These Four Myths While Networking Your Organization

Myth #1: You Need To Restructure Your Organization

In the early 20th century, the great sociologist Max Weber noted that the sweeping industrialization taking place would lead to a change in how organizations operated. As cottage industries were replaced by large enterprises, leadership would have to become less traditional and focused on charismatic leaders and more organized and rational.

He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into small, specific tasks and be governed by a system of hierarchy, authority and responsibility. This would require a more formal mode of organization—a bureaucracy—in which roles and responsibilities were clearly defined. Later, executives such as Alfred Sloan at General Motors perfected the model.

Most enterprises are still set up this way because it remains the most efficient way to organize tasks. It aligns authority with accountability and optimizes information flow. Everybody knows where they stand and what they are responsible for. Organizational restructures are painful and time consuming because they disrupt and undermine the normal workflow.

In fact, reorganizations can backfire if they cut informal ties that don’t show up on the organization chart. So a better path is to facilitate informal ties so that people can coordinate work that falls in between organizational boundaries. In his book One Mission, McChrystal Group President Chris Fussell calls this a “hybrid organization.”

Myth #2 You Have To Break Down Silos

In 2005, researchers at Northwestern University took on the age old question: “What makes a hit on Broadway.” They looked at all the normal stuff you would imagine to influence success, such as the production budget, the marketing budget and the track record of the director. What they found, however, was surprising.

As it turns out, the most important factor was how the informal networks of the cast and crew were structured. If nobody had ever worked together before, results were poor, but if too many people had previously worked together, results also suffered. It was in the middle range, where there was both familiarity and disruption, that produced the best results.

Notice how the study doesn’t mention anything about the formal organization of the cast and crew. Broadway productions tend to have very basic structures, with a director leading the creative team, a producer managing the business side and others heading up things like music, choreography and so on. That makes it easy for a cast and crew to set up, because everyone knows their place.

The truth is that silos exist because they are centers of capability. Actors work with actors. Set designers work with set designers and so on. So instead of trying to break down silos, you need to start thinking about how to connect them. In the case of the Broadways plays, that was done through previous working relationships, but there are other ways to achieve the same goal.

Myth #3: You Need To Identify Influentials, Hubs And Bridges

In Malcolm Gladwell’s breakaway bestseller The Tipping Point, he wrote “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts,” which he called “The Law of the Few.” Before long, it seemed like everybody from marketers to organizational theorists were looking to identify a mysterious group of people called “influentials.”

Yet as I explain in Cascades, decades of empirical evidence shows that influentials are a myth. While it is true that some people are more influential than others, their influence is highly contextual and not significant enough to go to the trouble of identifying them. Also, a study that analyzed the emails of 60,000 people found that information does not need rely on hubs or bridges.

With that said, there are a number of ways to network your organization by optimizing organizational platforms for connection. For example, Facebook’s Engineering Bootcamp found that “bootcampers tend to form bonds with their classmates who joined near the same time and those bonds persist even after each has joined different teams.”

One of my favorite examples of how even small tweaks can improve connectivity is a project done at a bank’s call center. When it was found that a third of variation in productivity could be attributed to informal communication outside of meetings, the bank arranged for groups to go on coffee break together, increasing productivity by as much as 20% while improving employee satisfaction at the same time.

Myth #4: Networks Don’t Need Leadership

Perhaps the most damaging myth about networks is that they don’t need strong leadership. Many observers have postulated that because technology allows people to connect with greater efficiency, leaders are no longer critical to organizing work. The reality is that nothing can be further from the truth.

The fact is that it is small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose that drive change. While individuals can form loosely connected small groups, they can rarely form a shared purpose by themselves. So the function of leadership these days is less to plan and direct action than it is to empower and inspire belief.

So perhaps the biggest shift is not one of tactics, but of mindset. In traditional hierarchies, information flows up through the organization and orders flow down. That helps leaders maintain control, but it also makes the organization slow to adapt and vulnerable to disruption.

Leaders need to learn how to facilitate information flow through horizontal connections so people lower down in the organization can act on it without waiting for approval. That’s where shared purpose comes in. Without a common purpose and shared values, pushing decision making down will only result in chaos. It’s much easier to get people to do what you want if they already want what you want.

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