CommLog

Strategy Bites Back

Jeff Grimshaw recently finished reading Strategy Bites Back, and was kind enough to compile for the rest of our firm a summary of the passages from the book he found most compelling. It includes this paragraph, which I think is spot on:

Part of the reason people fail when they try to walk the talk is that their intention was doomed from the start. Failure was inevitable because they have things backward. Walking is the means to find things worth talking about. People discover what they think by looking at what they say, how they feel, and where they walk. The talk makes sense of walking, which means those best able to walk the talk are the ones who actually talk the walking they find themselves doing most often, with most intensity, and with most satisfaction.

Symbolic Messages

As we've said in the past, the two "loudest" channels for sending messages in organizations are leadership decisions and actions and rewards and recognition. The latest issue of Knowledge @ Wharton (free registration required) highlights an example of each.

First, an article on the trade-off between "talent and disruptive behavior" examines the Philadelphia Eagles' heretofore under-reported decision to boot T.O. from the team.

Employees like Owens are found in almost any organization, but they can be more difficult to manage in cultures that demand top-flight results and, at the same time, place a premium on cooperation and harmony. [Wharton management professor Peter] Cappelli says the Eagles' decision to cut Owens sends a signal through the organization about culture. "By letting T.O. go, the Eagles are saying, 'We're willing to pay a pretty high price to maintain teamwork. We will not tolerate people who are not contributing to the overall good of the organization. This is an exercise in refocusing the organization and getting people's priorities clear."

The challenge with symbolic messages, of course, is translating intentions into outcomes. To date, there's no evidence the "exercise" has refocused the organization. But in the midst of distraction, the team seems to have heard the message about the organization's intolerance for...eh...distraction (last paragraph).

Continuing the theme of symbolic messages, a second article examines whether process management programs such as Six Sigma and TQM unintentionally discourage innovation. Wharton professor Mary Benner says they do.

Changing the culture at GE or any established company to embrace long-term innovation will be challenging, Benner acknowledges. "Most managers know they must do this. But there are few short-term rewards for focusing on long-term. When you give people a choice of something that's new and distant in time, they will choose the short-term, measurable goal... You can get stuck being very, very good at something you were good at yesterday. That's what some managers choose because it is measurable."

Measuring innovation is not easy because there is no yardstick. Rewarding innovation makes compensation a tricky exercise. Managing those who innovate is also challenging. "Creative people will push back in an environment where people are required to follow standard processes and are being measured," says Benner. "People who are comfortable in such an environment are not exactly the most innovative."

This is part of a larger issue we've seen time and again: Organizations implementing Six Sigma, TQM, or some other program in such a way that employees interpret adoption of the methodology in its most orthodox form as not a means to an end but the desired end in and of itself. When this happens, reduced emphasis on innovation is just one of the negative unintended consequences to result.

Still In The SlowLane?

I asked several days ago if GM would use its FastLane blog to address its restatement of earnings. Checking in today, there's nothing but positive PR spin: A post about GM's Red Tag event, a podcast of the Escalade preview, and a post by the VP of Environment and Energy about GM's "plans for bioethanol-based fuel systems and hybrids."

True, FastLane's "About" page states:

The FastLane blog is all about the cars and trucks. GM leaders discuss all aspects of our vehicles.

So, technically, I suppose a comment on earnings isn't in scope. But they've used the blog to talk strategic issues before, and you'd think the company would see that the medium they've chosen to use nearly requires some acknowledgment of such a significant corporate issue. Otherwise the silence itself becomes a message, one that also recasts the blog as flog, rather than an authentic way of conversing with the market.

Tivo Alert: Executive Suite

This Saturday at midnight (and on a couple of other occasions in the coming weeks), Turner Classic Movies is showing Executive Suite--an Academy Award-nominated film from 1954 that is, unfortunately, not yet available on DVD. Directed by John Houseman and starring luminaries such William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, June Allyson, Walter Pidgeon, and Shelley Winters, the film represents one of Hollywood's first studies of corporate culture.

I happened on the film when my Tivo recommended it several months ago. What I found unsettling, but not surprising, was the film's all-white cast and relegation of all of the women in the film to "stand-behind-your-man" roles. In this respect, it provides a benchmark against which to compare what has changed in 50 years.

But what surprised me were elements I did not expect to see in a film portraying corporate culture half a century ago. Poor succession planning launches the plot. A secondary plot revolves around insider trading. And a major character--notably, the antagonist--is a practitioner of crisis communication planning and Lean Six Sigma. No one in the film actually utters any of the terms I've italicized in the three previous sentences. But their presence suggested to me that while the players and lexicon in corporate culture may have changed significantly in 50 years, the underlying archetypes may not have changed as much as I used to think. 

New Host, New Look

Regular visitors can see that we've changed the look, location, and host of CommLog. We've moved the site to our TypePad space, using it rather than MoveableType. We still use MT for our internal blogs, but TypePad is a bit more flexible and easy to use for the things we like to do with CommLog (like "What We're Reading").

We've set up an automatic redirect for the old URL, but you might want to update your bookmarks to the new page:

http://craweblogs.typepad.com/commlog.

Thanks.

So here we are. Moving all the content over was seamless, but there are some minor consequences. One is some small formatting issues in the posts (bullets didn't transfer over well, for example); another is that all the imported posts now list me as the author. As much as I'd like to lay claim to being so prolific, that's not the case. We're trying to find a way to amend the correct author names, but in the meantime, apologies to all whom this site has by-lined.

SlowLane Blog?

This morning in the Wall Street Journal[1]  I read that GM is going to restate results for 2001, and possibly, subsequent years. I then clicked over to the FastLane blog to read GM's take on the issue and found ... nothing. Nothing yet, at least, and I'll be interested to see if Lutz or others offer an account on the site.

What's more, I notice there's not much at all happening at FastLane these days. There are only three posts on the front page, and only five over the past six weeks or so. (compared to eight in May and 11 in June).

When FastLane debuted most new media observers credited the site with being the "right" way for a big company to publish an external blog: posts by senior leaders, not highly spun by the PR group, and a mix of marketing flogs and candid takes on the company.

Now, though, I wonder if the site's losing its steam. We lose steam at CommLog from time to time, but we also don't widely promote CommLog as a portal into our firm. If anything it's a mix of hobby for us and service for clients, with any branding benefits a plus.

Is FastLane becoming SlowLane? We'll see, but the announcement of earnings restatement is exactly what a company using blogs in the "right" way would use a blog for: to offer an authentic, not-press-release take on the issue to supplement their other communication efforts.

We'll see if they do.

1. Subscription only; here's a link to Reuters' story.

Actionable Email

This post at 43 Folders, in which Merlin Mann asks "how many actionable emails do you get each day?" (he also has a poll up), prompted me to post this comment:

I get plenty; they're nearly all actionable. That said, I (and the folks in our firm) receive significantly less that our peers in other organizations, and certainly less than our clients.

Why?

1) We put "pull" information where it belongs: On the web. The core of our intranet is a blog, which we use to post any information that would otherwise find its way into an email distribution. If someone's hosting lunch at Chili's for Suzie from AR's birthday or there are Dunkin' minis in the break room, you need to check the blog to know. And if you miss something important because you don't read the blog, you're accountable for the miss.

2) We do a good job of matching message to media based on the principles of "media richness." (Read more about media richness here). The result is that we spend more time in face-to-face or telephone conversation, which is more efficient than email for a whole range of topics.

Works for us, and thanks to the liberal use of David Allen's Getting Things Done Outlook add-in across our firm, we nearly all go to bed each night with our inbox an empty box.

One of the reasons our IC practice has pushed blogs so hard with clients isn't because we have a high level of latent geekiness (well, not all of us). It's because one of their benefits is a significant reduction in email traffic. Over the three years that blogs have been the foundation of the CRA Intranet, employees have become wonderfully conditioned to (1) post anything there that's of interest to the group, rather than emailing it, and (2) check there on a regular basis.

As a result, nearly any internal email we get is either one-to-one or one-to-few.

As to media richness, certainly go read the CommLog post I linked to in the comment above and download its primer (it's a PDF file). When I speak about communication, especially to leaders, I hammer the point of media richness: the more uncertain, strategic, persuasive, or relationally important a topic is, the more it requires media closer to face-to-face conversation.[1]

"Uncertain" involves a lot of daily business discourse, but it typically doesn't mean "earth-shaking uncertainty." Indeed, most of these conversations are routine. Trying to set a meeting time among three people is a routine task. It also involves a large amount of uncertainty, which is why it's so difficult to do via email--the feedback channel for the medium has significantly greater lag than that of a telephone conversation.

We overuse email because it's in front of us and it's cost-efficient. But getting off your keyboard and on the phone, or face-to-face, often produces faster and better results.

1. More on these issues here.

Positive Conflict

Conflict is a necessary evil. When used correctly and depending on the attitudes and perspectives of those involved, conflict can:

• Diffuse a more serious conflict.
• Spark an urge to search for more facts or solutions.
• Increase group performance and cohesion.
• Find where you stand on a particular topic.

So how do you get to a spot where conflict can influence and help facilitate these positive outcomes?