Posts Tagged ‘communication’

People who admit mistakes bring honor to themselves; so do those who forgive

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

I’m still a bit in awe of the sequence of events that took place in Major League Baseball two weeks ago. Armando Galarraga, a journeyman pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, retired the first 26 batters in a row, coming within one out of the twenty-first perfect game in the 125+ year history of Major League Baseball. The next batter hit a slow ground ball to the first baseman, who threw to Galarraga covering first, the ball appearing to arrive before the batter’s foot reached the base.

Except the umpire, Jim Joyce, emphatically called the runner safe. No perfect game. Innumerable replays that night and the next day confirmed that the runner, in fact, should have been called out. Galarraga was robbed, and he had every right to be incensed. His shot at immortality had been taken away by a bad call. What a crazy turn of events.

Something even more amazing happened the next day. Joyce (named in a poll of baseball players as the best umpire in the game) admitted his mistake and apologized for it. Galarraga, for his part, graciously accepted Joyce’s apology with the delightful observation that “nobody’s perfect.”

How much easier would it have been for Joyce to insist that he saw what he saw? How understandable would it be that Galarraga hold a grudge rather than forgive the person whose mistake cost him his name in the record books? Yet it is to these two men’s everlasting credit that they took the difficult path, the thoughtful path, and as such they taught us much more than perfection could have.

[For a selection of other Mistake Bank-related posts, click here.]

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My reading journal: Morten Hansen’s “Collaboration”

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

I’ve finished a few books recently but am a bit behind on reviewing them. My kids have started documenting their books in reading journals that help them with reading comprehension. To add a bit of variety (and to make sure I’m not getting lazy), I’m going to use the reading journal format for this week’s reviews.

collaboration“Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results,” by Morten Hansen. 2009: Harvard Business Press, 231pp.

When did you read it? September-October 2009.

Subject: A study of collaboration in business; when it is and when it is not appropriate, and best practices for successful collaboration.

Did you like it? How many stars would you give it (1-5)? 4 (thankfully I don’t have assigned reading… I won’t be writing about any 1-star books here!)

Summary: Hansen has spent his academic career studying how corporate groups collaborate, effectively and ineffectively. This book sums up a number of studies he has worked on with various companies over the past 15 years. First, Hansen discusses obstacles to collaboration – including the warning that not all collaboration is good collaboration. In other words, when the costs of collaboration (communication, coordination, negotiation, etc.) outweigh the benefits. This frequently happens when businesses lacking key synergies are combined via merger.

The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing what Hansen calls “disciplined collaboration.” He discusses four collaboration barriers – not invented here, hoarding, search (inability to find the insight you need), and transfer (inability to put others’ knowledge to use), and three “levers” to promote collaboration: “unify people, practice T-shaped management, and build nimble networks.”

These are practical suggestions and, on their own, not revolutionary. But to me seeing these three levers together as requirements for successful collaboration was distinctive and valuable.

Favorite quote: “Paradoxically, the emphasis on performance management over the past decade has created what Harvard Professor Leslie Perlow calls a ‘time famine’ at work. As people are pressured to perform, they feel that they don’t have the time to help others; reasonable requests for help are seen as burdens that put them behind in their own work. So people are faced with a trade-off – to do their own work (but not help others), or to help others (but get less work done).” p.55

Was it similar to anything you have read before? There are echoes of the recent book “Senior Leadership Teams” which takes up the question of how to get groups of senior executives, who naturally work to drive results from their own groups, to collaborate – another application of the “T-shaped management” approach.

Will this book end up on your bookshelf or in the library donation pile? The bookshelf. Collaboration is an important subject and I don’t have any books that deal with that as a main topic. Plus it’s good.

Related posts:
On “Senior Leadership Teams”

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Be aware of using weird business metaphors

Friday, July 24th, 2009

The word “tsunami” was used a lot in the past to describe a trend or momentum in a market.

Then a real tsunami hit in December 2004. Hundreds of thousands died and more than 1 million people lost their homes. Suddenly we didn’t throw that term around as much anymore (well, except for some people: “[Jim] Cramer…called the latest baseball tech breakthrough a ‘tsunami’ and the ’single best example of the Mobile Internet.’”)

When we speak or write, we use metaphors constantly, without realizing it. They are powerful and insidious. And many have crept into everyday use that upon scrutiny are perhaps not what we really want to say. Such as:

- serial entrepreneur. My favorite weird business metaphor. In what other context does “serial” as a modifier have a positive connotation? Serial killer. Serial rapist. Ugh. Suggestion: how about “entrepreneur” or “successful entrepreneur”?

- viral marketing. Sometimes the metaphors we develop reflect our deep unease with the subject. “Viral marketing” suggests something silent, hard to trace, and… bad for us.

- death march. I used this term a lot when I managed software projects, like, “Let’s keep on our deliverable schedule so this project doesn’t turn into a death march.” With the recent release of the book, “Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath,” it brought home again the stark difference between a casual reference to the Bataan Death March and the real thing.

- nuclear option. Do we really want to compare a political tactic with our worst nightmares of the Cold War?

[Are there other weird metaphors out there? Post them in the comments. Thanks!]

There are countless other metaphors comparing business with warfare. Now that we are more than five years into the Iraq war, people are more aware of the costs and sacrifices of actual fighting, and so these metaphors seem to be in decline. But the war will end someday, and soon thereafter, they’ll start coming back.

It’s a dead certainty.

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