Archive for the ‘HBS Working Knowledge’ Category

Everyday stories hold great insight

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

If you’ve visited this space at all before, you’ll know that I believe the stories we tell of our lives hold vast riches of information–and that information can be used to inform decisions on strategy, management & leadership, among other areas.

Today, the invaluable Harvard Business School Working Knowledge website features an article by Julia Hanna discussing creativity in the workplace and its place in innovation. The whole article is wonderful and worth reading in full. But I was fascinated by this passage regarding the research of Harvard professor Theresa Amabile:

As a way to delve deeper into the link between motivation and creativity, Amabile and her husband, psychologist Steven J. Kramer, conducted a three-year study of 238 professionals from seven companies in the high-tech, consumer products, and chemicals industries. Without revealing the focus of their study, they asked the subjects (all of whom were working on projects requiring creative effort) to fill out a daily electronic diary form that required numerical answers to questions about their work that day, as well as their emotions, motivation, and work environment. They were also asked to describe what they’d done that day and to include a brief description of one event at work that stood out in their minds [emphasis mine]. (Participants were asked to refrain from discussing the diary content with colleagues.) By the end of the study, Amabile and Kramer had collected nearly 12,000 entries, what she describes as a “wonderful treasure trove of data.”

“We have a window into how concrete events affected knowledge workers’ thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and motivations,” Amabile says. “We call this ‘inner work life,’ and we found that it directly influences creativity and other aspects of performance.”

The mundane, quotidian stories (the events the subjects documented) were an integral part of the study data. By leveraging these, Amabile and Kramer were able to evaluate a trait–creativity–far more deeply than could have been done by numerical analysis alone. I’m convinced that capturing and sorting through stories can add incalculable wisdom to the business world. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the possibilities.

On a side note, I’ve been thinking about how Twitter and like tools will be involved in this arena. What are all those tweets telling us about ourselves?

But that’s a topic for another post.

(Photo: “Old Diary” by Race_Eend via stock.xchng)

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Posted in HBS Working Knowledge, assessment, creativity, evaluation, narrative, sensemaking, storytelling | Comments

Innovative companies must excel at partnering

Monday, November 26th, 2007

There’s a fascinating interview at Harvard Business School Working Knowledge with HBS professor Alan MacCormack, covering innovation and how it’s moving away from Corporate R&D and into a collaborative web of partnering & alliances. (You can find a working paper on the subject here.)

According to MacCormack, there are several reasons why this is so:

  1. Products are becoming more complex, and therefore it’s impossible to retain all the competencies in house to create them.
  2. Open standards and architectures help allow work to be more readily distributed to partners.
  3. The growth of developing economies means that competitive, at times distinctive work is available at lower prices.

The implications of collaborative innovation fascinate me. It means that R&D professionals will need more negotiation and management skills than technical skills, and that the ability to manage internal politics will be less important than the need to bridge corporate & geographic cultures.

I’m not aware of anything in business-school curricula to prepare the next generation of managers for this challenge. (HBS students should seek out courses by Bazerman and Malhotra, as well as MacCormack.) There certainly was nothing of this sort that I learned for my MBA–any learning was entirely OJT.

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Posted in HBS Working Knowledge, alliances, innovation, negotiation, open innovation | Comments

Fearful of negotiating? Better get over it

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

Time was, we used to be product developers and manufacturers. We created designs for products, manufacturing groups figured out how to produce them, and we built them in our own factories.

Those days might as well be a million years ago. Now we are systems integrators. We create designs (or concepts we send to ODMs to flesh out), then hire companies to build components, assemble, ship and even service them.

The upshot is that we need a new skillset in this new world. Instead of design skills, we need partnership skills. Instead of building, we are buying. And instead of demanding or ordering, we are negotiating.

It’s a much more uncertain world as a result. Outside parties don’t necessarily see things our way, and we have limited tools to force them to see our point of view (read this recent Wall Street Journal article to learn more). Instead, we need to understand, to cajole, to threaten when necessary, but most of all to create scenarios where when our partners do what’s in their interest, it helps us too.

As a result, I’m very interested in reading “Negotiation Genius” from Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School. I’ve discussed some of their work in a previous post. (And here’s a recent reference in HBS Working Knowledge.) The book just came across my desk. I’ll provide a full report after I’m finished with it.

(Photo from just4you via stock.xchng)

Posted in HBS Working Knowledge, alliances, negotiation, purchasing | Comments

Great innovation requires great teams, candor, and acceptance of mistakes

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007

While preparing yesterday’s post on the business value of dissent, I stumbled upon some research by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson on team learning. The research centered on explaining a paradox–why in her studies did excellent teams make more errors than poor teams?

The answer, as you might expect, was greater candor and its corollary, greater confidence and openness to learning. Better teams simply communicated better, and, in a learning environment, that meant surfacing and talking about mistakes.

In a discussion about the topic with HBS Working Knowledge, professor Edmondson summarized her findings thusly:

In well-led teams, a climate of openness could make it easier to report and discuss errors—compared to teams with poor relationships or with punitive leaders. The good teams, according to this interpretation, don’t make more mistakes, they report more. When I suggested this to physicians involved in the study, they were skeptical. Their response was understandable: With a research grant for the purpose of identifying the error rate, this idea was decidedly unwelcome. My interpretation of the data suggested that we might not be finding the definitive error rate—and further errors might be systematically underreported in certain units but not others. Their skepticism forced me to work hard to develop ways to support my proposition, which ultimately they came to see as reasonable, if not obvious in retrospect.

Once again, we see that learning in adults means supressing instincts for self-protection, defying organizational incentives to conform and be “team players,” and ignoring ingrained concepts like division of labor and roles/responsibilities.

This is from a working paper on the subject, “When Learning and Performance Are At Odds” from Professor Edmondson and her collaborator, Sara Singer:

…Effectively conducting an analysis of a failure requires a spirit of inquiry and openness, patience, and a tolerance for ambiguity. Such an inquiry orientation is characterized by the perception among group members that multiple alternatives exist, frequent dissent, deepening understanding of issues and development of new possibilities, filling gaps in knowledge through combining information sources, and awareness of each others’ reasoning and its implications(Argyris et al., 1978). Such an orientation can counteract common group process failures. Learning about the perspectives, ideas, experiences, and concerns of others when facing uncertainty and high stakes decisions, is critical to making appropriate choices.

Looking at this through the prism of innovation, you can see how using the whole disorderly team, how arguing and soliciting dissenting views is essential. Innovation means confronting the unknown, the complex, the ill-defined. Mistakes are to be expected, not avoided. Confronting, embracing failure, then gathering the entire teams’s viewpoints on what didn’t work and how to fix it, then stepping back and trying a different tack, is essential. Locating dead ends and understanding failure quickly and changing course leads to faster innovation development, lower cost and higher probability of eventual success.

Posted in HBS Working Knowledge, innovation, learning, mistakes, teamwork | Comments

The dissent-free organization: a worst practice

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

There’s an excellent item by Garry Emmons in Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge site this week on candor–or more accurately, a lack of it, and what damage it can do to organizations. Here’s a quote:

Consider the costs to organizations, large and small, when dissent does not or cannot surface: Abjuring rigorous debate about its merits, a youthful president John F. Kennedy essentially rubber-stamped a 1961 plan to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, resulting in one of the biggest U.S. foreign policy fiascoes in decades. During a 1996 commercial expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest, several climbers, including two of the world’s most experienced professionals, died in part because junior team members didn’t speak up when their expert leaders ignored their own core operating principles surrounding safety. In 2003, NASA engineers were reluctant to challenge long-held beliefs that foam strikes incurred during the launch of the space shuttle Columbia posed no risk to its fuselage.

I can’t count how many times in my career I have swallowed what I should have said–and I was always considered a loudmouth. How many mistakes could have been avoided? Lack of dissent is terribly frequent within senior management teams, where respect for (or fear of) the CEO, or an unwillingness to step into colleagues’ sandboxes, results in meetings full of good feelings and no debates. (We know that X-Teams don’t do this.)

Why do people shut down when they should pipe up? It’s entirely rational. Writes Emmons:

[HBS Professor Amy] Edmondson says this reluctance to speak up stems variously from fears that superiors will not like the idea or that it may appear to criticize the status quo, which most people find reassuringly familiar or dangerous to challenge. Edmondson sums up the mental calculation this way: “The potential costs to me for speaking out seem reasonably certain and somewhat immediate; the potential benefit to me for speaking out seems rather uncertain and definitely long-range.”

I’ve also been responsible for quashing dissent. Whether due to wishing to move faster, or to protect my turf, I didn’t create a very good environment for those who disagreed with my ideas. It’s appalling, in retrospect. It should be somewhat comforting that I’ve got a lot of company in this. But it’s not.

So, to improve your business, get your team debating, disagreeing, even arguing. Here’s former Medtronic CEO Bill George quoted in the Working Knowledge article:

During the decision-making process, George explains, this means asking probing questions and insisting that managers present each situation in objective terms, rather than with a positive spin.

“You must acknowledge and thank those who disagree by telling them that they made the discussion, and hence the ultimate decision, much better,” George says. “You need to reward and promote the mavericks or else the organization will lose its creative edge. You try to create tension inside because the outside challenge is so great.”

Posted in HBS Working Knowledge, candor, disagreement, leadership, management, organizational behavior | Comments