How to be successful in 2012 and beyond (II)

Pervasive belief in individualistic self-improvement, goal achievement, profligate consumption and bullshit opulence was the target of my previous post: the tongue-in-cheek rant “How to be successful in 2012 and beyond” . 

The satire was too subtle (or maybe too long) for some. For instance a friend commented on Facebook, "Hey Steve, it's not that I don't believe in what you say... but I've had one hell of a 2011, and none of it was planned. Happy New Year and very best for 2012, planned or not."

I replied, “ My (satirical) point precisely. I'd say you have had a very successful year "dancing in the moment".

The thing is that he and we all seem to have become so accustomed, so programmed to the mantra of individualistic self-improvement and goal achievement that we tend not to see or value other forms of success.

This was highlighted for me in 2011 when as business development coach I “went back on the tools” a couple or three days per week to provide some flexible trades capacity in a client’s property maintenance business while we set it up for growth.

Not surprisingly the growth strategy includes niche-focusing, differentiating, and enhancing the value of his services, so to increase the price. 

Turns out that the first task was to rebuild his concept of the value of what he does.  His belief was that his service is manual work and therefore low status, low value, competing on price.

I can understand his belief. You don’t have to look far to see that success is widely regarded as not-doing manual work. It’s indicated by graduating from manual to administrative work. The further you are removed from the manual work into administrating it the higher the financial rewards and status. High paid people don’t get their hands dirty. This is I think grotesquely apparent in the differential between shop-floor and CEO remuneration.

I set out to convince him that despite the virtualisation of many aspects of contemporary life and the reification  of financial services, administration  and “knowledge work”, people still dwell in bricks and mortar. They depend on built-in utility equipment and services that suffer wear and tear. At the same time, the skills and knowledge needed to maintain and renovate these things, or even to install them properly in the first place, are increasingly alien to most.

The value of that skill and knowledge becomes acutely apparent with hard times, natural disaster, and environmental degradation when maintenance and renovation become a favourable alternative to profligate consumption.

Another thing I discovered with working on the tools was that I quickly got fit. There’s something about sustained physical activity that can’t be achieved in a thrice weekly, intense, hour-long gym workout, no matter how hard you go.

It wasn’t only the physical health but also the mental health of directly creative activity and tangible product – such a contrast to sedentary intellectual work in a typically manipulative bureaucratic setting.

I mentioned my re-evaluation of manual work to a surgeon friend who replied that surgery is labour. This was confirmed when a paediatrician friend confirmed that surgeons have lower status in medical circles than other medical specialists because they are the plumbers, fitters, carpenters and decorators.  

To return to the opening topic: in contemporary life it seems that success has become such a narrow and distorted belief that it rules out pretty much all people and activity except being on target to become or being a Glossy-model-looking CEO in “knowledge work” living at peak-consumption. 

That has got to be sick. My successful business clients, in terms of profitability, health and contribution to society, have overcome that programming to find a much more fruitful concept of success. It’s about finding hope, joy, and peace in doing good things together: in collaborative enterprise. 

That’s practically the antithesis of individualistic self-improvement and goal achievement.

What is & what produces organisational health?

The GFC highlighted that what we measure, for organisational health, determines what we get. As Colin Price, Director, McKinsey & Company, puts it in his Dec 14 2010 blog on MIX: “Focusing exclusively on performance  simply does not produce long-term shareholder value,  sustainable competitive advantage, or an ability to achieve the mandates of the organization in the public sector.”

Price proposes instead that organisational health is: “the ability to get aligned, to execute at a world-class level, and to renew.”  I’ll go for that. Those are the abilities I want, but I’m still left with the problem of what to do to produce that kind of health. 

Achieving that health requires us to see our organisations in a revolutionary new way: not as bureaucratic hierarchical machines but as communities of collaborating people. Seen in that light, the fundamental purpose of all the policies, procedures, systems, processes is to enable, to free people to collaborate better.

Thus organisational health has its roots in the health of the interrelationships between the people that comprise the organisation.  So what are healthy interrelationships and how do you get them?

Some useful perspectives can be drawn from the field of population health: the qualities of interrelationships that produce community wellness and productivity, and conversely illness and dysfunction are fairly well known and are evident, for instance, in the recovery approach to mental illness.

To achieve the kind of organisational health that Price proposes we have to revolutionise the way we see and manage our organisations: the purpose, nature and content of our organisational communication and interrelationships. That requires concerted, deliberate action to change the detail of the way we communicate with each other  at work. 

For more on this see How to Fix a Mental Organisation (December 2009) and my more recent blogs (December 2010).

WANTED: Communication educators for management revolution

Being able to collaborate better than the competition is gold in today’s globally competitive market: the most valuable differentiator; the greatest competitive advantage a firm can have; hard to copy or replicate. But such collaboration is pretty well impossible for conventional firms to achieve because the essential behaviours and attitudes are culturally alien; beyond the experience of people in most modern workplaces; contrary to the assumptions and practices of management. To achieve collaboration requires the end of Management and the key to that is in transforming the way that people communicate at work.

As Garry Hamel says:
“Management was originally invented to solve two problems: the first—getting semiskilled employees to perform repetitive activities competently, diligently, and efficiently; the second—coordinating those efforts in ways that enabled complex goods and services to be produced in large quantities.

In a nutshell, the problems were efficiency and scale, and the solution was bureaucracy, with its hierarchical structure, cascading goals, precise role definitions, and elaborate rules and procedures. Equipping organizations to tackle the future would require a management revolution no less momentous than the one that spawned modern industry.”

If we accept that Garry Hamel is right, and I most certainly do, then the problem is how do we achieve that revolution; that transformation? The firm conclusion I’ve come to over a couple of decades of leading learning in Business Schools and coaching business owners for change and growth, is that a large part of the solution lies in transforming the way we manage and do education; transforming it from what it has determinedly become over the last couple of decades. That’s the opportunity for Communication educators: their mission, should they accept it.

As change leader for university business students and SME owners and managers I realised that deep learning and change was continually derailed by deep seated tacit assumptions about knowledge and how to behave in organisations; how to behave at work; how to organise work.

I realised that I and my students, colleagues and clients are deeply imbued with a picture or organisation that is imprinted, learned and reinforced through industrial-age, synchronised education where experts have authority over “children”, requiring compliance in prescribed, synchronised, trivial ‘work’.

What we learn most powerfully from that education: what remains after we’ve forgotten everything we were taught, is how to organise and behave at work.

That unconscious imprinting, which begins at around year 7 at school when children leave the ‘learning nest’ environment of pre-school and primer years, is reinforced and ingrained right through University. It’s a major reason why we unthinkingly perpetuate the mechanistic bureaucratic, hierarchical systems in which people are cooperating, synchronised machine parts; organisations are structures; and processes are engineered sequences. This is absurd when we increasingly need people to be highly engaged collaborative agents for change and innovation, dynamically linked through rich, diverse interrelationships in pursuit of shared aspirations and goals.

To be a successful entrepreneur it apparently pays to leave the industrial education process early. Many successful entrepreneurs did: before the imprinting process was complete; likely because they didn’t fit that process.

In the academic world, Business Schools have long been criticised for perpetuating outmoded, ineffective organisational behaviours, assumptions and practices. It’s only recently however, most noticeably post 2008 crash, that the more popular literature, The Wall Street Journal for example, has pronounced the “End of Management” and begun to seriously criticise and question the underpinning assumptions and the revered Harvard MBA model of business education has come in for public scrutiny and even some scorn.

Steve Denning, an author whom I stumbled across a couple of years ago and have since  become a big fan of, even participating in the editorial process of his latest book The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (Oct 2010), puts it well in his draft article on The Death and Reinvention of Management. Here I summarise some of the main points with excerpts from that draft:

What are we to make of a rash of recent books suggesting that management as we know it today is seriously problematic? According to Matthew Stewart, management is “a myth”. Professor Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School tells us that management has “failed”. According to Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, we are looking at “the end of management”, while CEO Jo Owen has written about “the death of management”.

“[In the USA] ROA is 25% of what it was in 1965; life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 is down to 15 years, only one in five workers are passionate about their work. Moreover established firms are not creating new jobs: Friedman, T. “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts” New York Times, April 3, 2010”

“This is why business leaders and writers are increasingly exploring a fundamental rethinking of the basic tenets of management. Among the most important changes proposed are five basic shifts, in terms of the firm’s goal (a shift from inside-out to outside-in), the role of managers (a shift from control to enablement), the mode of coordination (from bureaucracy to dynamic linking),  the values being practiced (a shift from value to values) and communications (a shift from command to conversation).”

“Individually, none of these shifts is new. Each shift has been pursued individually in some organizations for some years. However what we have learned is that when one of these shifts is pursued on its own, without the others, it tends to be unsustainable because it runs into conflicts with the attitudes and practices of traditional management.”

“When the five shifts are undertaken simultaneously, the result is sustainable change that is radically more productive for the organization, more congenial to innovation, and more satisfying both for those doing the work and those for whom the work is done.”

“The challenge for managers today is that in trying to elicit the energies, imagination, and creativity of their workers, they need to communicate predominantly through the language of social norms, against a history in organizations of relationships dominated by hierarchy and to a lesser extent by market pricing.”

“. . . . . management in the 21st Century requires a shift in the mode of communication from command to conversation, with adult-to-adult interactions, human being to human being, using stories, metaphors and open-ended questions. Authentic leadership storytelling has an important role to play, particularly in dealing with social media.”

So, on the one hand we have a dawning realisation that high collaboration is crucial to competitive advantage, but on the other a generally weak experience and scarce knowledge of what it is, could be, and how to get it; and organisational settings that militate against that learning. Ironically, education institutions are among the organisations where this problem is most chronic.

But here’s the thing: Communication educators, researchers and practitioners as a profession are potentially among the best equipped to lead this transformation because they presumably know of what collaboration is, can be, and how to get it. That’s because, by my understanding at least, Communication is about what happens between individuals: the shared meaning that they create.

That’s the key to the transformation. Communication educators, this is your opportunity. Your mission, should you accept it, is to focus on enabling people to experience collaboration through changing the detail of their communication behaviour; changing the way they communicate with each other; the way that they generate shared meaning; the way they produce and implement organisational knowledge.

So that’s the opportunity. That’s the challenge. Now let’s consider the organisational and pedagogical detail of how you might go about that: how you can be and produce organisational Recovery Support Workers in the recovery of organisations, currently so dysfunctional that they are effectively insane, to competitive advantage (see previous blog: "How to Fix a Mental Organisation" ).

I’m not talking about a Communication course or even a Communication programme. I’m talking about the pedagogical foundations of all courses and programmes including Communication programmes. I’m talking course process, not content. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to Communication professionals.

The aim is to radically change the learning context, which is the organisational experience, from individualistic to collaborative. Remember that student’s individualistic and content-based assumptions about achievement and learning will be deeply engrained and largely unconscious. They will find the transformation process deeply disturbing, at least initially. Expect them to project their anxiety, confusion, anger, and blame on to you. This anxiety and confusion is a necessary precursor to the transformation you aim to achieve.

Expect to feel and behave similarly yourself as you learn to collaborate deeply with your colleagues. You aren’t just going to do this to your students. You’re doing it to yourself too. Denning’s five shifts have to occur simultaneously at both levels.

So if you’re highly averse to conflict and have a history of conflict avoidance, maybe don’t try this approach. Whatever, you need a well informed process plan and supporting supervision; you need to collaborate. That will be a learning experience for you too.

Because students (and employees) typically adopt a highly instrumental approach to their work (that’s the way they’ve been trained) you must radically redesign the tasks and measures to specifically reward collaborative behaviour (as mutually assessed by team members). The effect of this is to motivate teams to move beyond the usual fake-team division of tasks.



Because students (and employees) will tend to revert to accustomed child, instead of adult behaviour, wanting to be spoon fed processed information, remove yourself from the direct teaching (management) process and ban trivialised information.



I predict that you will find, as I did, that students (and employees, and you) will be amazed at the quality they (and you) can achieve together and that they become natural collaborators without realising how different they are from conventional graduates. Issues such as racial bigotry, dependence of trivialised information (PowerPoint), passive/aggressive behaviour, withdrawal, boredom, laziness and shallow instrumentality, melt away and behaviour actually changes (real, deep learning). Students achieve real insight.

You will find that when your graduates enter employment their employers credit them with exceptional “intuition”, marvel at how rapidly they become project leaders and how engaged their project teams are. They seem to adapt to and flourish in their workplaces three times faster that A grade honours graduates in their fields: in 6-8 months they are achieving what conventionally taught graduates take two years to achieve. When they enter a new situation they don’t look to the boss for a clear set of instructions. They assume that they’re to figure that out through collaboration.

It’s those radically different fundamental assumptions about communication that make these people so valuable. Yes they need subject specific knowledge, but it’s organisationally useless unless it can be productively, collaboratively shared.

As Noshir Contractor posited in The New Handbook of Organisational Communication (2001), knowledge doesn’t exist in the nodes; it exists in the web. In other words, organisational knowledge exists only between individuals as shared understanding. The most crucial skills are in generating a rich and productive shared understanding in the messy dynamics of interpersonal communication relationships.

That’s your opportunity and your challenge. You can do it.

How to be understood

Rule # 1: expect to be misunderstood. Mostly, we assume that understanding is normal. Wrong. Ask any spouse, sibling, parent, or lover. 

Successful service-sales and service-delivery people for instance, have woken up to this through competitive pressure, grinding experience, and objective analysis. Then by deliberate, focused action they have changed their assumptions and their behaviour.

They know the cost and risk of misunderstanding is high. They manage that risk by specialising and standardising their processes; by building durable interpersonal customer-relationships for learning and forgiveness; and continually seeking to delight the customer.  It becomes second nature – tacit.

But put those same sales and service people in a changed environment, even slightly different, and they can easily come unstuck. That now-tacit knowledge that has served them so proudly may well not work in the new environment.

This has been highlighted for me in my health service business development work. The New Zealand health services sector is in turmoil: yet another major government policy driven re-organisation; around the sixth in eight years.

This time it’s to vertically and horizontally merge and integrate health services. This when competition has been king and professional collaboration suspected as feather bedding; fear and loathing have become strong undercurrents in relationships between health professionals and their managers, between managers and between the managers of different organisations.

Competitors have become entrenched in their niches, adapted and fine tuned to the bureaucratic motivations and behaviour of their health sector customers, while the health professionals immersed themselves in their consumer relationships. 

Suddenly these competitors have to merge and join up.  Can they communicate to achieve that productively and innovatively? Fat chance! Misunderstanding reaches new heights: evidence, real and imagined, of defamation, misinformation and skulduggery is everywhere in an environment of fear and loathing. Even longstanding trusting relationships are suspect.

Mergers and join-ups that do occur are suspected as, and at least some are, driven by self interest and political gain, and as a result are slow to be productive in the essentially collaborative, professional, vocational world of health service.

So what can be done? Answer: expect to be misunderstood and take the time and trouble to find shared understanding in shared metaphor (stories) and experience; shared purpose; joint projects. Trust is found in action not argument.

Share your perspectives and reflections on that joint action by sharing stories. Be more than two dimensional “role holders.” Share stories about yourselves.
Remember you are dating with marriage in mind. The time to invest in the durability, mutual productivity, and enjoyment of that potential relationship is at the outset. Sacrifice “task” progress to build shared understanding.

The guy/woman you find so frustrating may not be a linear analytical, task oriented, conventional high achiever like you. He/she may think in pictures, think laterally to solve puzzles and make sense of seeming confusion; thinking that’s likely not crucial in the production environment that you have excelled in, but is crucial in a fast changing environment.

Learning to change; changing to learn

Habit-changing learning happens in the heat of real events, crises even; when the answer can only be achieved by inspired collaboration – the one thing that is not-taught and not-learned by the conventional teaching and learning model that dominates our high schools, colleges, universities board meetings, training sessions, coaching meetings, and management meetings.

In an interview with Jim Collins in Inc Jim argues that we are in the age of entrepreneurship and it can be learned. He points to the proliferation of courses and programmes in Entrepreneurship. Peter Bregman in HBR gives some good basic advice on “How to Counter Resistance to Change”: how to communicate effectively to achieve change.

To me these two articles revolve around the same problem: how to learn to communicate effectively to achieve change.

The problem is that no amount of observational, analytical research and generalisation of entrepreneurship and communication coupled with conventional teaching and learning will produce effective entrepreneurs and communicators. That’s because people in typical education settings learn not-effective communication and not-entrepreneurial behaviours. That’s because the main message is the medium – the way they are taught. Everything about the medium: experts out front armed with whiteboard, PowerPoint and grades in classrooms and, worse still, lecture theatres, is about abstraction, authority, hierarchy, personal expertise and self.

No wonder, despite the inappropriateness of conventional hierarchical bureaucracy to SMEs and MLEs, these models of organisation continue to predominate. It’s because everyone goes to school and everyone is imprinted with this industrial organisational model from the moment they become organisationally conscious until they graduate: with that knowledge refined to absurdity by the university.

This isn’t a crazy rant. I’ve taught in those places. I’ve employed those graduates. I work with SME and LME owners and managers. Listen to Ricardo Semler. He has too.

Every time we stand up front, expert with a whiteboard and PowerPoint, with our clients sitting attentively facing the front, we invoke the ‘magic’ of the classroom: the right-answer oriented, hierarchical, parent/child relationships and concepts of learning and knowledge that produce qualifications at best.

No wonder we typically fail to achieve change.

The secret of successful execution

The secret is effective interpersonal communication.

It bugs me that hardly any firms deliberately develop specific interpersonal communication skills and climate. It’s as if the notion of Communication is missing from collective management consciousness (except perhaps as ‘clear communication’).

What ‘got me going again’ was a client who having ‘done’ the soft ‘HR’ stuff: resolving toxic relationships in admin; management agreeing to design jobs and ‘organisational structure’ around their best people rather than expecting the reverse; and management agreeing a recruitment and succession plan and budget, decided that the next step is to focus on; get hard-nosed about; kick butt on KPIs (performance).

There seems to me to be a yawning gap in that sequence: a gap, which pervades management thinking, between the intention and actually achieving high performance. The gap is effective communication; communication that achieves purpose.

Plenty of attention seems to be paid to communicating numbers: accounts, sales, production. Enlightened managers even pay attention to identifying shared values, determining responsibilities and accountabilities (KPIs) and reviewing performance (Verne Harnish). Enlightened salespeople pay attention to building interpersonal communication relationships with current and prospective customers (Neil Rackham).

But typically the actual, specific interpersonal communication behaviours, patterns, attitudes and beliefs inherent in those activities receive little if any deliberate, specific attention. It’s as if there’s a widespread unconscious assumption that effective communication somehow magically happens if you get the right people with the right values, clear about the right responsibilities and accountabilities and they meet with the right frequency and the right task focus.

Well, clearly it typically doesn’t magically happen except perhaps for some people who fortunately are ‘naturally’ effective communicators just like some are naturally effective entrepreneurs. Just as entrepreneurship can be understood and learned (Jim Collins) so too can effective communication (What do they hear?) but where and how can we learn it?

Though Jim assumes that Entrepreneurship is learned in the many university business school courses and programmes, I disagree. At university business schools people typically learn to analyse and describe business, not to do it. The one thing that Business Schools typically don’t have and can’t teach is business sense and that’s at the core of entrepreneurship. It’s similar for communication.

Communication is learned by guided (coached) reflection on actual shared communication experience – on the job, in the role. Not in a ‘learning’ institution. Modern universities disable and discourage effective communication simply by the way they are organised (administrative bureaucracy). It takes a special organisational climate to enable reflective practice: one that’s rare in our X type Management dominated world (Telco allergy).

Get an experienced communication coach to work with you to enable you to learn together to communicate more effectively.

Telco allergy

I just wish that I could deal with my telco allergy the same way as I dealt with my bee sting allergy.

I used to keep bees for a hobby but I developed a bee sting allergy. So I gave up bee keeping. I wasn't dependent on bees . . . . .

I’ve been tracking my symptoms and I think that maybe my allergy’s not to telcos per se, but to large scale bureaucracies (LSBs).

It seems that I only get an allergic reaction when I rub up against these organisations and that happens when I initiate change that doesn’t neatly fit their established patterns and habits. I can avoid intimate contact by complying with their bureaucratic systems; accepting whatever they deliver.

When I don’t, the seeming self-sealing, impervious, impersonality of the LSB response “gets under my skin”. I can feel my allergic reaction building, aggravated, rather than soothed by each interaction.

My allergy flared up recently when I decided to switch telcos on a now-or-never offer of faster internet, lower phone charges and a once only rebate. I was a bit twitchy about the now-or-never pressure but it seemed like a good deal and the agreement allowed a week to cancel.

I won’t give you a blow by blow account; enough to say that within five days my ‘new’ telco – a young-minded progressive firm, if their advertisements are to be believed – screwed up twice, victims of their own departmentalisation. Then expected me to be impressed by how fast they reversed the screw-ups!

Defensively they cast me as unreasonable and urged me to forgive, forget and enjoy their wonderful world of fashionable, functional technology. I figured I’d witnessed their LSB spots and cancelled.

Is there something about the telecoms industry that breeds LSBs? Is it possible to be a telco and not behave like an LSB? I suppose the bureaucratic heritage runs deep in the industry. But there are signs that smaller firms emerging in the deregulated ‘unbundled’ NZ telco environment under inspired new leaders are different. . . . .

I’m re-reading Robert Townsend’s “Up the Organisation”: radical experience-forged advice on how to break the bureaucratic spell. Unfortunately, so little has changed in the nearly 40 years since he wrote it that it’s still radical today.

It’s nearer 50 years since Townsend’s inspiration, Douglas McGregor (1960. "The Human Side of Enterprise"), optimistically predicted the end of conventional Management by 1980. But ‘X’ type Management is still the default mode, even in small organisations. Maybe the current economic upheaval is the first real opportunity for transformation since McGregor?