Category Archives: Decision Making

The Great Repeatable Business Model

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As budgets contract while missions expand, one way to accomplish the mission might be to look at how businesses innovate their expertise to grow and become more successful.  Zook and Allen offer some insights below:

  1. Most very successful organizations do not reinvent themselves through periodic “binges and purges”.  Instead, they focus relentlessly on their fundamental strengths, and moving from strength to strength.
  2. Successful organizations learn to deliver their differentiation to the front line, creating an organization that lives and breathes its strategic advantages day in and day out, and sustaining it through constant adaptation from the market.

Four actions you can employ to sustain your competitive advantage:

  1. Ensure  you and your management team agree on differentiation NOW and in the future-ask your top team: what do our end users see as our advantages over others? How do we know?
  2. Ask the same question to those who are on the front lines interacting with end users, customers, and partners. Are the advantages similar?
  3. Write your strategy on an index card-does it include and center on key sources of differentiation?
  4. Translate strategy into a few non-negotiables. Can you describe the simple principles that drive key behaviors, beliefs, values?  Are they adhered to on a daily basis?

The article also has some key categories you can use with your team to describe and distill areas of strategic advantage and innovation.

 (Source: 2011, Zook and Allen, Harvard Business Review)

Avoiding the “One More Time” Syndrome

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“The Army doesn’t give medals for missing your kid’s first step, or Little League games.” GEN Shelton relates this nugget that he heard as a young officer from one of his commanding officers, Lieutenant Colonel Old.  As GEN Shelton relates, LT COL Old helped him remember that one of the most critical decisions you make is one as part of a family and as a parent and spouse.  LT COL Old continued, “But the thing  you have to watch out for is the one more time syndrome.  I know you love those kids. But the night the CG (Commanding General) is due to drop by and you tell yourself, ‘Just this one time I’ve got to stay late because it’s so important’- or when you’re about to walk out that door and you get word the Coast Guard got deployed and you’ve got no boats for the next morning’s exercise-those are the ones that’ll sneak up on you.” (page 117 of Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior)

As I think about GEN Shelton’s illustration,  I think that integrity in decision making is made up of the hundreds of different decisions, large and small that occur in our daily lives.  It’s not just the big decisions that demand integrity and alignment with our priorities, it’s the multiple small decisions, like bringing work home late or missing family events that can degrade integrity in one’s personal life.

Why Leaders Don’t Learn from Success

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You remember the cliche, success breeds success? Some recent research on decision making suggests that success can, in fact, breed failure by hindering learning at the individual and organizational level. Learning from success can present major challenges.  Gino and Pisano (April 2011) outline 3 interrelated traps: 

1) Fundamental attribution error: When we succeed, we think it was because of us. When we fail, we think random or external events conspired to derail us.

2) Overconfidence bias: Success breeds self-assurance and reinforces that we are on the right track. This overconfidence bias can lead to institutional arrogance and a “Not Invented Here” mentality.

3) Failure to ask why: This challenge involves the tendency to fail to systematically investigate causes of good performance: Leaders don’t ask the tough questions that can help them learn.

It’s always good when you read an article where there is a problem and a path forward toward a solution.  In this case, Gino and Pisano suggest five tactics  leaders can use to avoid these traps:

1) Celebrate but analyze your success: When a project is successful, leaders should lead investigation on reasons behind the success with the same rigor and scrutiny applied to failures.

2) Institute systematic reviews (After Action Reviews): Reviews should ask these questions: What did we set out to do? What actually happened? Why did it happen? What are we going to do next time? What are the top 5 things we would do again and the top 5 things we would not do again. The key is to ensure the same rigor for both failed and successful projects.

3) Use the right time horizons to gauge success or failure: By understanding the correct time horizons, you can prevent yourself from being fooled by randomness.

4) Replication is not learning: Six Sigma and TQM are great for determining root causes. Add to that by reviewing factors that are under your control as well as those that are affected by external events.

5) Experiment: Experimentation is a way to test assumptions and theories on what is needed to achieve high levels of performance. The right question for leaders is not “What is going well?” but “What experiments are we running?”

5 Key Thoughts and Principles of Leadership (Part 5 of 5)

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This is the last in the series of key thoughts and principles of leadership from an interview with a CEO.  You can find the previous key thoughts and principles below:

Part 1: Know Who You Are     Part 2: Be a Listener/Listen Broadly

Part 3: Courage and Attitude   Part 4: What is your Philosophy of Leadership

5-COMMUNICATION-What do you believe in and how can you communicate that most effectively?  You say more by saying less. Be authentic and genuine. We all can learn a lot and do a better job with this.  Style never displaces substance.  you have to avoid the situation where your team says…”Pass me the hemlock please”.  You have to work on your communication skills all the time-you always can improve.  You deploy the right style with the right audience , then tailor the message-length, style, substance.

Are leaders and great communicators born or made? I get this question a lot.  I believe that lots of leadership skills that can be learned. Even if you are not wired that way-you can get over that.

Two questions you need to ask yourself:

1-Before you say anything that is emotionally charged, ask yourself “Is what I am about to say necessary?” I have to ask you…If you sit in meetings, how much commentary would not pass that test?    Ask yourself, “Will what I am about to say advance the discussion, add a new dimension that matters and is relevant and important OR is what I have to say a regurgitation of what others have said?”   If what you want to say needs to be backed up, it is necessary. But if it is argumentative for sake of disagreeing, you don’t do it. This works in families as well.

2-Is what I am about to say, kind?  I mean this in an exploratory and inquiry based way, not sugar and spice.  How you say things is more important than what you are going to say.  Will you say it in the right way and will it be constructive or destructive?  How many times have we seen a relevant point delivered in the wrong way?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Five Key Thoughts and Principles of Leadership (Part 3 of 5)

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(Note-you can find the first post that outlines the background of this series here and here. This is the third in the series.

3-COURAGE AND ATTITUDE- Let me share something with you. Almost every leader likes people to be happy. I want everybody to be happy.  That is a positive and a detriment. But sometimes, you have to have the moral courage to make a decision that will disappoint and upset people.  If you are going to be a leader, you have to step up and put up.  You have to make the call.  There will be a percentage who will hate the decision and will try to mitigate, resist, or sabotage the decision.  It’s hard work and not easy to do.  I screw it up all the time because of blow back.