Memorable quotes
“How many of you have received an honest, straight-between-the-eyes feedback session in the last year, where you came out knowing exactly what you have to do to improve and where you stand in the organization?” On a good day, I get 20 percent of the hands up. Most of the time, it is closer to 10 percent.
That is true in every culture and in every country and in every social class. It doesn’t make any difference if you are in Iceland or Portugal, you don’t insult your mother’s cooking or call your best friend fat or tell an elderly aunt that you hated her wedding gift. You just don’t.
But in fact, Nancy says, classic philosophers like Immanuel Kant give powerful arguments for the view that not being candid is actually about self-interest—making your own life easier.
“He believed that when people avoid candor in order to curry favor with other people, they actually destroy trust, and in that way, they ultimately erode society.”
A middle-aged appliance worker who was at one Work-Out spoke for thousands of people when he told me, “For twenty-five years, you paid for my hands when you could have had my brain as well—for nothing.”
Performing balancing acts every day is leadership. Take rule 3 and rule 6. One says you should show positive energy and optimism, showering your people with a can-do attitude. The other says you should constantly question your people and take nothing they say for granted.
You have to evaluate—making sure the right people are in the right jobs, supporting and advancing those who are, and moving out those who are not. You have to coach—guiding, critiquing, and helping people to improve their performance in every way. And finally, you have to build self-confidence—pouring out encouragement, caring, and recognition. Self-confidence energizes, and it gives your people the courage to stretch, take risks, and achieve beyond their dreams. It is the fuel of winning teams.
There were times I talked about the company’s direction so many times in one day that I was completely sick of hearing it myself. But I realized the message was always new to someone. And so, you keep on repeating it. And you talk to everyone.
You’ve been made a leader because you’ve seen more and been right more times. Listen to your gut. It’s telling you something.
We’ve all been guilty at one point or another in our careers of boasting of perfect hindsight. It’s a terrible sin. If you don’t make sure your questions and concerns are acted upon, it doesn’t count.
Despite the enormity of my mistake, my boss’s boss, a former MIT professor named Charlie Reed, didn’t beat me up. Instead, his sympathetic, scientific probing of the reasons for the incident taught me not only how to improve our manufacturing process, but more importantly, how to deal with people when they were down.
hatever the reason, there is just not enough celebrating going on at work—anywhere. What a lost opportunity. Celebrating makes people feel like winners and creates an atmosphere of recognition and positive energy. Imagine a team winning the World Series without champagne spraying everywhere. You just can’t! And yet companies win all the time and let it go without so much as a high five.
Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They’re real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.
A good leader has the courage to put together a team of people who sometimes make him look like the dumbest person in the room! I know that sounds counterintuitive. You want your leader to be the smartest person in the room—but if he acts as if he is, he won’t get half the pushback he must get to make the best decisions.
The global business world today is going to knock any leader off her horse more than once. She must know how to get back in the saddle again.
Any candidate you hire in a managerial role must have the first two Es, positive energy and the ability to energize. Those are personality traits, and I don’t think they can be trained into someone.
Edge and execution, on the other hand, can be developed with experience and management training. Time after time, I’ve seen people learn how to make tough calls and deliver results.
Many are the inventors and entrepreneurs of the world, and usually they run their own shows. But within an organization, I just haven’t seen too many who have sustained success, especially as leaders, without the four Es and passion.
It’s so easy to just hire people you like. After all, you’ll be spending the majority of your waking hours with them. It’s also easy to hire people with relevant experience. They’ll get the job done. But friendship and experience are never enough. Every person you hire has to have integrity, intelligence, and maturity. Once you’ve got those, look hard for people with the four Es and passion. Beyond that, at the senior level, look for authenticity, foresight, the willingness to draw on others for advice, and resilience. Put it all together, and those are the people who win.
If you managed a baseball team, would you listen more closely to the team accountant or the director of player personnel? The input of the team accountant matters—he sure knows how much they can pay a player. But his input certainly doesn’t count more than input from the director of player personnel, who knows just how good each player is. That’s why the best HR people are a kind of hybrid: one part pastor, who hears all sins and complaints without recrimination, and one part parent, who loves and nurtures, but gives it to you fast and straight when you’re off track.
The inexorable pull toward layers is why I suggest you make your company 50 percent flatter than you’d normally feel comfortable with. Managers should have ten direct reports at the minimum and 30 to 50 percent more if they are experienced.
“Are you really the only person who sees a need for change?” I ask. “If you are, and you don’t have some authority, make your case, and if you don’t get anywhere, learn to live with the situation or get out.”
Almost immediately, I got back the two refrains common to every cost-reduction program ever launched: “We’ve already cut the fat. You’re asking us to cut the bone.” And: “The competitors are crazy. They’re giving away product. Just watch—they can’t keep it up.”
In big companies, calls for change are often greeted with a nice head fake. People nod at your presentations and pleasantly agree that given all the data, it sure looks like change is necessary. Then they go back to doing everything they always did. If the company has been through enough change programs, employees consider you like gas pains. You’ll go away if they just wait long enough. This pervasive skepticism is all the more reason that anyone leading a change process must stay far away from empty slogans and instead stick to a solid, persuasive business case. Over time, logic will win out.
Bob was running the company for about a month when he started boldly talking about these problems, using tons of data. But few people at any level were buying his story of Home Depot as a fixer-upper. Many employees from the good old days openly pined for the times when the founders ran the company and everyone was getting richer by the hour. Who could blame them for the nostalgia?
With all the noise out there about change, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and confused. But there are really just four practices that matter: Communicate a sound rationale for every change. Have the right people at your side. Get rid of the resisters. And seize every single opportunity, even those from someone else’s misfortune. That’s it. Don’t get all caught up in your knickers over change. You just don’t need to.
Admittedly, imitating is hard enough. I remember a software company executive at one Q & A session lamenting, “My people don’t copy very well. They just don’t want to—they like the way they do it.” This reluctance to imitate is a common phenomenon. Maybe it’s just human nature. But to make your strategy succeed, you need to fix that mindset—and go a lot further. In fact, the third step of strategy is all about finding best practices, adapting them, and continually improving them. When you do that right, it’s nothing short of innovation. New product and service ideas, new processes, and opportunities for growth start to pop out everywhere and actually become the norm. Along with getting the right people in place, best practices are all part of implementing the hell out of your big aha, and to my mind, it’s the most fun. It’s fun because companies that make best practices a priority are thriving, thirsting, learning organizations. They believe that everyone should always be searching for a better way. These kinds of companies are filled with energy and curiosity and a spirit of can-do. Don’t tell me that’s not a competitive advantage!
How can we beat last year’s performance? What is our competition doing, and how can we beat them? If you focus on these two questions, the budgeting process becomes a wide-ranging, anything-goes dialogue between the field and headquarters about opportunities and obstacles in the real world. Through these discussions, both sides of the table jointly come up with a growth scenario that is not negotiated or imposed and cannot really be called a budget at all. It is an operating plan for the next year, filled with aspiration, primarily directional, and containing numbers that are mutually understood to be
Six Sigma is meant for and has its most meaningful impact on repetitive internal processes and complex new product designs.
Once you understand the simple maxim “variation is evil,” you’re 60 percent of the way to becoming a Six Sigma expert yourself. The other 40 percent is getting the evil out.
…a stretch job increases the possibility of you screwing up. That’s why you should also make sure you join a company where learning is truly a value, growth for every employee is a real objective, mistakes aren’t always fatal, and there are lots of people around whom you can reach out to for coaching and mentoring.
…finding the right job gets easier and easier the better you are. Maybe that sounds harsh, but it’s just reality. At the end of the day, talented people have their pick of opportunities. The right jobs find them. So if you really want to find a great job, choose something you love to do, make sure you’re with people you like, and then give it your all. If you do that, you’re sure to have a great job—and you’ll never really work another day in your life.
Basically, getting promoted takes one do and one don’t. Do deliver sensational performance, far beyond expectations, and at every opportunity expand your job beyond its official boundaries. Don’t make your boss use political capital in order to champion you.
But an even more effective way to get promoted is to expand your job’s horizons to include bold and unexpected activities. Come up with a new concept or process that doesn’t improve just your results, but your unit’s results and the company’s overall performance. Change your job in a way that makes the people around you work better and your boss look smarter. Don’t just do the predictable.
People, it seems, are always looking for that one right mentor to help them get ahead. But in my experience, there is no one right mentor. There are many right mentors.
I had dozens of informal mentors over the course of my career, and each one taught me something important. My mentors ranged from the classic older and wiser executive to coworkers who were often younger than I was.
To get ahead, you have to want to get ahead. Some promotions come because of luck, but very few. The facts are, when it comes to careers, you mainly make your own luck. You will likely change companies, maybe even professions, more than a few times over the course of your working life. But there are some things you can do to keep moving ahead. Exceed expectations, broaden your job’s horizons, and never give your boss a reason to have to spend capital for you. Manage your subordinates carefully, sign up for radar-screen assignments, collect mentors, and spread your positive attitude. When setbacks come, and they will, ride them out with your head up.
People with great performance accumulate chits, which can be traded in for flexibility. The more chits you have, the greater your opportunity to work when and where and how you want.
Outside of work, clarify what you want from life. At work, clarify what your boss wants, and understand that, if you want to get ahead, what he or she wants comes first. You can eventually get what you both want, but the arrangement will be negotiated in that context. Make sure you work in a supportive culture where performance matters and you can earn flexibility chits with great results.
These numbers are impressive, but they’ll only get better as the EU feels the impact of its newest members, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and the other nations of “New Europe.” In the past decade, from Budapest to Bratislava, from Prague to Warsaw, I’ve seen the excitement, optimism—and the remarkable achievements—in these countries.
The paralyzing weight of socialism will gradually give way, and the EU will move steadily forward, fueled by an ever-increasing acceptance of capitalism.
It goes without saying that no businessperson wants disasters to occur, but they will.