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Ricardo Semler is a Brazilian businessman, CEO of Semco, well known for his innovative business management policies. He implemented at Semco a radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering. I am fan of Ricardo Semler's work since 1988, in the beginning of my career, when I read his first book Virando a Própria Mesa (Turning Your Own Table, published in Portuguese), one of the first business book I read, and after attended his lecture on business management using innovative approaches. In 1995, he published an English version of his book, entitled Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace, and in 2003 published The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works.
MIT World is a free and open site that provides on demand video of significant public events at MIT. MIT World's video index contains more than 700 videos.
Before arriving, each of the attendees participated in an hour-long interview, and once together, they shared perspectives in large and small groups.
What drew the participants together was a set of broadly shared beliefs about the importance of management, and a sense of urgency about reinventing management for a new age. These animating beliefs briefly are:
First, that "management" - the tools and methods we use to mobilize resources to productive ends - is one of humankind's most important social technologies.
Second, that the "management model" that predominates in most large organizations is now seriously out-of-date. This model has its roots in the late 19th century, and was invented to solve one overriding problem: how to get semi-skilled human beings to do the same things over and over again, with perfect replicability and ever-increasing efficiency. This was, and is, an important problem, but it is not the most important challenge for today's organizations.
Third, that we must, therefore, reinvent management in ways that will make large organizations fundamentally more adaptable, more innovative and more inspiring places to work -- that will, in short, make them as human as the individuals who work within them.
In the end of the event, they described the challenges, they called "moonshots for management", summarized below (and described in full in the February 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review):
1. Ensure that management's work serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals.
2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There's a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups.
3. Reconstruct management's philosophical foundations. To build organizations that are more than merely efficient, we will need to draw lessons from such fields as biology and theology, and from such concepts as democracies and markets.
4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. There are advantages to natural hierarchies, where power flows up from the bottom and leaders emerge instead of being appointed.
5. Reduce fear and increase trust. Mistrust and fear are toxic to innovation and engagement and must be wrung out of tomorrow's management systems.
6. Reinvent the means of control. To transcend the discipline-versus-freedom trade-off, control systems will have to encourage control from within rather than constraints from without.
7. Redefine the work of leadership. The notion of the leader as a heroic decision maker is untenable. Leaders must be recast as social-systems architects who enable innovation and collaboration.
8. Expand and exploit diversity. We must create a management system that values diversity, disagreement, and divergence as much as conformance, consensus, and cohesion.
9. Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. In a turbulent world, strategy making must reflect the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.
10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization. To become more adaptable and innovative, large entities must be disaggregated into smaller, more malleable units.
11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Existing management systems often mindlessly reinforce the status quo. In the future, they must facilitate innovation and change.
12. Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process where share of voice is a function of insight, not power.
13. Develop holistic performance measures. Existing performance metrics must be recast, since they give inadequate attention to the critical human capabilities that drive success in the creative economy.
14. Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. Discover alternatives to compensation and reward systems that encourage managers to sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gains.
15. Create a democracy of information. Companies need holographic information systems that equip every employee to act in the interests of the entire enterprise.
16. Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Management systems must give more power to employees whose emotional equity is invested in the future rather than in the past.
17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.
18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. Markets are better than hierarchies at allocating resources, and companies' resource allocation processes need to reflect this fact.
19. Depoliticize decision-making. Decision processes must be free of positional biases and should exploit the collective wisdom of the entire organization.
20. Better optimize trade-offs. Management systems tend to force either-or choices. What's needed are hybrid systems that subtly optimize key trade-offs.
21. Further unleash human imagination. Much is known about what engenders human creativity. This knowledge must be better applied in the design of management systems.
22. Enable communities of passion. To maximize employee engagement, management systems must facilitate the formation of self-defining communities of passion.
23. Retool management for an open world. Value-creating networks often transcend the company's boundaries and render traditional power-based management tools ineffective. New management tools are needed for building complex ecosystems.
24. Humanize the language and practice of business. Tomorrow's management systems must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.
25. Retrain managerial minds. Managers' traditional deductive and analytical skills must be complemented by conceptual and systems-thinking skills.
During the event, they also recorded a video, where the Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks to Gary Hamel:
A tweet¹ by Ron Dimon caught my attention about an excellent video published in the Tony Mayo's blog. It is a Dan Pink's lecture on motivation and rewards, recorded in July at TED Global 2009. About this lecture, from TED: "Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward."
Watch and enjoy.
Thanks Ron Dimon and Tony Mayo for share the link.
1. Learn to thrive in unstable times—our lot (and our opportunity) for the foreseeable future.
2. Only putting people first wins in the long haul, good times and especially tough times. (No "cultural differences" on that one! Colombia = Germany = the USA.)
3. MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around. Stay in touch!
4. Call a customer today!
5. Train! Train! Train! (Growing people outperform stagnant people in terms of attitude and output—by a wide margin.)
6. "Putting people first" means making everyone successful at work (and at home).
7. Make "we care" a/the company motto—a moneymaker as well as a source of pride.
8. All around the world, women are an undervalued asset.
9. Diversity is a winning strategy, and not for reasons of social justice: The more different perspectives around the table, the better the thinking.
10. Take a person in another function to lunch; friendships, lots of, are the best antidote to bad cross-functional task accomplishments. (Lousy cross-functional communication stops companies and armies alike.)
11. Transparency in all we do.
12. Create an "Innovation Machine" (even in tough times). (Hint: Trying more stuff than the other guy is Tactic #1.)
13. We always underestimate the Innovation Advantage when 100% of people see themselves as "innovators." (Hint: They are if only you'd bother to ask "What can we do better?")
14. Get the darned Basics right—always Competitive Advantage #1. (Be relentless!)
15. Great Execution beats great strategy—99% of the time. (Make that 100% of the time.)
16. A "bias for action" is a "bias for success." (Great hockey player Wayne Gretzky: "You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.")
17. No mistakes, no progress! (A lot of fast mistakes, a lot of fast progress.) (Australian businessman Phil Daniels: "Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.")
18. Sometimes "little stuff" is more powerful than "big stuff" when it comes to change.
19. Keep it simple! (Making "it" "simple" is hard work! And pays off!)
20. Remember the "eternal truths" of leadership—constants over the centuries. (They say Nelson Mandela's greatest asset was a great smile—you couldn't say no to him, even his jailors couldn't.)
21. Walk the talk. ("You must be the change you wish to see in the world."—Gandhi)
22. When it comes to leadership, character and people skills beat technical skills. (Emotional Intelligence beats, or at least ties, school intelligence.)
23. It's always "the little things" when it comes to "people stuff." (Learn to say "thank you" with great regularity. Learn to apologize when you're wrong. Learn the Big Four words: "What do you think?" Learn to listen—it can be learned with lots and lots of practice.)
24. The "obvious" may be obvious, but "getting the obvious done" is harder said than done.
25. Time micro-management is the only real "control" variable we have. (You = Your calendar. Calendars never lie.)
26. All managers have a professional obligation to their communities and their country as well as to the company and profit and themselves. (Forgetting this got the Americans into deep trouble.)
About the Goldsmith’s book, she showed the list of twenty annoying habits that hold great people back from the top:
1. Winning too much: Goldsmith notes that the hypercompetitive need to best others "underlies nearly every other behavioral problem."
2. Adding too much value: This happens when you can't stop yourself from tinkering with your colleagues' or subordinates' already viable ideas. "It is extremely difficult," Goldsmith observes, "for successful people to listen to other people tell them something that they already know without communicating somehow that (a) 'we already knew that' and (b) 'we know a better way.'" The fallacy of this sort of behavior is that, while it may slightly improve an idea, it drastically reduces the other person's commitment to it.
3. Passing judgment: "It's not appropriate to pass judgment when we specifically ask people to voice their opinions ... even if you ask a question and agree with the answer." Goldsmith recommends "hiring" a friend to bill you $10 for each episode of needless judgment.
4. Making destructive comments: We are all tempted to be mean from time to time. But when we feel the urge to criticize, we should realize that gratuitous negative comments can harm our working relationships."The question is not, 'Is it true?' but rather, 'Is it worth it?'" This is another habit Goldsmith recommends breaking via monetary fines. Sound expensive?
5. Starting with "No," "But," or "However." Almost all of us do this, and most of us are totally unaware of it. But Goldsmith says if you watch out for it, "you'll see how people inflict these words on others to gain or consolidate power. You'll also see how intensely people resent it, consciously or not, and how it stifles rather than opens up discussion." This is another habit that may take fines to break.
6. Telling the world how smart we are: "This is another variation on our need to win."
7. Speaking when angry: See number four.
8. Negativity, or "Let me explain why that won't work": Goldsmith calls this "pure unadulterated negativity under the guise of being helpful."
9. Withholding information: This one is all about power. Goldsmith focuses on ways even the best-intentioned people do this all the time. "We do this when we are too busy to get back to someone with valuable information. We do this when we forget to include someone in our discussions or meetings. We do this when we delegate a task to our subordinates but don't take the time to show them exactly how we want the task done."
10. Failing to give recognition: "This is a sibling of withholding information."
11. Claiming credit we don't deserve: To catch ourselves doing this, Goldsmith recommends listing all the times we mentally congratulate ourselves in a given day, and then reviewing the list to see if we really deserved all the credit we gave ourselves.
12. Making excuses: We do this both bluntly (by blaming our failings on the traffic or something else outside ourselves) and subtly (with self-deprecating comments about our inherent tendency to be late or to lose our temper that send the message, "That's just the way I am").
13. Clinging to the past: "Understanding the past is perfectly admissible if your issue is accepting the past. But if your issue is changing the future, understanding will not take you there." Goldsmith notes that quite often we dwell on the past because it allows us to blame others for things that have gone wrong in our lives.
14. Playing favorites: This behavior creates suck-ups; rewarding suck-ups creates hollow leaders.
15. Refusing to express regret: "When you say, 'I'm sorry,' you turn people into your allies, even your partners."
16. Not listening: This behavior says, "I don't care about you," "I don't understand you," "You're wrong" and "You're wasting my time."
17. Failing to express gratitude: "Gratitude is not a limited resource, nor is it costly. It is abundant as air. We breathe it in but forget to exhale." Goldsmith advises breaking the habit of failing to say thank you by saying it -- to as many people as we can, over and over again.
18. Punishing the messenger: This habit is a nasty hybrid of 10, 11, 19, 4, 16, 17, with a strong dose of anger added in.
19. Passing the buck: "This is the behavioral flaw by which we judge our leaders -- as important a negative attribute as positive qualities such as brainpower and resourcefulness."
20. An excessive need to be "me": Making a "virtue of our flaws" because they express who we are amounts to misplaced loyalty -- and can be "one of the toughest obstacles to making positive long-term change in our behavior."
Consultant, Boulder BI Brain Trust (#BBBT) Member, Passionate about Big Data, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Data Science, Internet of Things, Business Strategy & Innovation.
