Ship of Fools

No one is entitled to be ignorant.

— Harlan Ellison

Investigators this week found that a $2 billion warship burned because no one aboard turned on the fire-suppression system, according to US Naval Institute News.

The USS Bonhomme Richard burned last summer because its crew didn't know how to fight a fire, investigators concluded.

The fire-suppression system could have been activated, and the warship saved, by the push of a single button.

"It is surprising that nobody on the scene knew how to activate the system," a defense expert said.

A number of other missteps, including delays in reporting the fire, a disorganized command response, and a failure to seal off the area where the fire began, only worsened the situation.

The Navy blamed 36 individuals, including five admirals, for the ship's loss.

The incident is the second of its kind in eight years.

The USS Miami, a $ 1.6 billion submarine, burned in 2012.

The fatalist in me says catastrophes like the one aboard the Bonhomme Richard are overdetermined—brought about not by one, but by a "cascade of failures."

You could chalk the disaster up to hubris; but I'm more apt to blame sheer ignorance.

Americans have a romance with ignorance. It's at the bottom of most the errors and bad decisions we make, from investing in subprime mortgages to electing Donald Trump.

Our unfathomable ignorance is inexcusable, given how easy it is to become moderately informed about almost any topic. (Google it.)

Our widespread ignorance is willful, woeful, and thoroughly unconscionable.

We get what we deserve.

POSTSCRIPT: I felt a bit crabby when I penned this post. But less than 24 hours later, Maria Shriver wrote "most people don't want the truth," citing Trump's launch of his new social media platform TRUTH. She's right, by gum.   

Bystanders

Business leaders cannot be bystanders.

— Howard Schultz

Bought anything lately?

Corporate waste and failure seem the norm.

Appointments aren't kept. Emails go ignored. Phone calls aren't returned. Quotes are inaccurate. Packages never arrive. Products don't work. Bills are wrong. Customers are scolded. Customers are spammed.

Everything is broken.

They wouldn't be, if business leaders stopped confining themselves to the corner office, indifferent to the constant missteps their employees make.

They wouldn't be if business leaders started leading alongside their employees, and stopped being bystanders.

Far too many business leaders are bystanders today, content just to manage risk, instead of serving customers.

An incident recounted in Nightmare Scenario, the new book about the Trump Administration's mismanagement of the Covid-19 outbreak, brought the problem home to me.

You will recall how, last February, the same month Trump tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," the Atlanta-based CDC issued hundreds of test kits—kits that turned out to malfunction by producing false positives.

In hindsight, the failure came just when accurate testing was most needed.

And what did the leaders of HHS do? They convened in Washington for three weeks to debate not what, but who was to blame, and how to cover up the failure.

Only when the head of the FDA at last sent an immunologist to Atlanta to see how the kits were being assembled did those leaders learn who was to blame—and, most importantly, why.

CDC's own lab techs turned out to be the culprits. Unsupervised, they were assembling the test kits on the same tables where they were examining samples of Covid-19, contaminating the kits with the live virus. That stupid mistake guaranteed the kits would produce false positives.

How many cases of Covid-19 might have been prevented if the leaders of HHS, instead of bystanding for nearly a month, had visited the CDC lab right away?

For the sake of contrast, consider Churchill, a boots-on-the-ground leader.

Schooled as a cavalryman and war correspondent, Churchill was obsessed with fact-finding, an obsession that served him well during World War II.

In his Memoirs, Churchill's chief advisor "Pug" Ismay recounts how, at the slightest hint of a snafu, the peripatetic prime minister would rush to the scene of the action, often to his bodyguards' chagrin.

During the war, Churchill inspected air fields, air raid shelters, rifle ranges, gun encasements, tank factories, dock yards, shipyards, submarine pens, encampments, fortresses, battlefields, smashed villages, fallen bridges, and countless bombed-out buildings.

During one Nazi air raid over London, he visited fighter command’s ops room to observe the progress of the battle on a huge plotting board, whispering to Ismay, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few."

Churchill would say that his fact-finding trips were "reconnoiters" rife with the "refreshment of adventure."

Before Churchill, Lincoln—the only sitting US president to come under enemy fire during a war—behaved in a similar way. 

Lincoln was literally a boots-on-the-ground leader.

CEOs, please take a page from Churchill and Lincoln.

Don't just be bean-counting bystanders. There's more to business than risk management. There are—duh—customers.

Get out of the corner office once in a while.

At the first sign of trouble, get your damn boots on the ground. 

Lead alongside your employees—and fix what's broken.

One Job

Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than ambition?

― Doris Kearns Goodwin

When my last manager drove me to quit a great company, little did I know I was in the majority.

Only six months later, Gallup asked a million employees why they'd quit their jobs and found the Number 1 reason to be the manager.

Seventy-five percent of employees who quit did so from sheer contempt for bossypants.

My manager was pretentious, narcissistic and bewitched by her own—and her betters'—power. She was a vestige from an acquisition and completely unlike her home-grown, more admirable, peers. I was unlucky enough to work for her—until I quit. It was a hard choice, but unavoidable.

A manager has one job. One. That's to, as Jean-Luc Picard always said, Engage!

The managers who shouldn't be managers don't get that. They can't. They only get blind ambition.

But ambition has nothing to do with being a manager.

Manager, meaning "one charged with conducting a house of business," came into English from the Italian maneggiare in the 14th century. Maneggiare means "to handle," especially with regard to teams of horses (maneggiare came the Latin manus, meaning "hand").

A manager acts as the "hand" that guides the business. 

She's there to direct work, neither "hands on" nor "hands off."

Her handiwork should be to engage, not to command, demand, or reprimand; and certainly not to manipulate, mandate, or manacle. More like to emancipate—in Latin, "to take someone by the hand."

"People leave managers, not companies," Gallup concluded from its million-person study.

When will companies come to grips with that?

Comparing

Look for the similarities, not the differences.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

AA members believe "comparing" is the sure path back to the bottle. 

Comparing leads the drunk to minimize his problem-drinking ("I was never as bad as he was") and exaggerate his ability to control his drinking ("He drank every day; I'll only drink on weekends").

Instead, the drunk is supposed to "identify" with fellow members—accept that he's also an alcoholic and admit he can't control his drinking (it controls him).

My experience working with hundreds of different businesses has taught me that comparing—in AA's sense—is one of executives' worst habits—and an equally certain path to self-defeat.

I'd be rich if I had a dollar for every time an executive told me "we're different" (a statement often followed by "we're the industry leader").

Business strategists would call that attitude "optimism."

I call it drunk-think. 

Executives who believe "we're different" are drunk, drunk on a special flavor of Kool-Aid known as "Cheery Red." 

Drinking too much of it causes comparing.

For a decisionmaker, that's a terrible self-handicap.

Drinking too much Cherry Red, like drinking too much alcohol, blurs vision, slows cognition, and impairs judgement. 

And, like drinking too much alcohol, drinking too much Cherry Red can bring on denial—even deliria.

You hear examples of drunk-think in businesses every day. 

"That's unnecessary."

"That's untested."

"That can't be done." 

"We tried that, it doesn't work."

"That's too expensive." 

"That's too risky." 

"That's fine for other companies."

"That's for start-ups."

"That's for losers."

"That's irrelevant."

"I've never heard of that."  

"That's not how we do things here."

Drunk-think distorts reality because it's always way-too overconfident. 

Like the abusive drinker who believes he's different—that he can control his drinking—the executive afflicted by drunk-think believes that, compared to others, he is awesome—he can pull it off. He's peerless, after all, exempt from the ordinary constraints all his competitors suffer; exempt from the laws of economics, too. He has no need to rock the boat; challenge the company status quo; look outside for new ideas; or adopt others' proven strategies. He only needs to stay calm and carry on.

Eventually, drunk-think will take its toll on the executive. 

He may not destroy the company car, but he's sure to destroy the company's value.

Every Service Failure Levels the Playing Field

A mammoth corporation like this―it embodies too much experience. 

It possesses in fact a sort of group mind.

― Philip K. Dick

Organizational theorists believe every big business is a collective mind, and that performance "depends on coordinating the distributed knowledge and activities of the collective’s members."

When a big business screws up a simple transaction―more and more the norm―it obliterates the value of that vast, collective mind―opening the way for a small business to steal the disaffected customer.

Execs should think about that when tempted to cut more corners on talent, technology and time-frames.

All the money, bravado and best-practice babble in the world won't make you stronger than your weakest link.

The Buck Stops Here

The President, whoever he is, has to decide.
He can't pass the buck to anybody.

— Harry Truman

Harry Truman kept a foot-long sign on his desk in the White House that said, "The Buck Stops Here."

The saying derives from poker.

In frontier days, a knife with a buckhorn handle was used to indicate which player had the turn at dealing. If that player didn't want the responsibility, he would "pass the buck."

Most people mistake the "buck" in the expression to mean "dollar."

That meaning also derives from frontier days, not from poker, but from trading.

Deer hunting was common at the time, and buckskins could be used as legal tender. Traders valued a "buck" at one dollar.

They valued a doe at half a dollar.

Females have always been undervalued.

HAT TIP: Word-nerd Ann Ramsey inspired this post.

Doing the Wrong Thing

Nothing is funnier than confidently 

doing the wrong thing. 

— Adam McKay

Why do so many business leaders get it so very wrong, so very often?

For four reasons, says Dartmouth professor Sydney Finklestein:

• Experience (when the experience doesn't matched the situation)

• Self-interest (often unconscious)

• Pre-judgments (hasty decisions that stick)

• Attachments (undue influences)

Among my clients, I witness operator-induced train wrecks all the time. 

The five red flags are:

• Obsession with sacred-cow marketing tactics

• Fixation on "bright and shiny objects"

• Readiness to heed the advice of charismatic nincompoops 

• Hyper-focus on waste, instead of growth

• Bias for copying competitors and using low-price as strategy

It's easy for an outsider (like me) to spot when experience, self-interest, pre-judgements or attachments are driving decisions; far less so less for an insider.

As people in recovery like to say, "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt."

Denial enables business decisions to feel right, even when they're wrong.

That's because, as Professor Finklestein says, "Decision making is not a rational, step-by-step process. It’s much more emotionally driven."

HAT TIP to Steve Dennis for inspiring this post.

Resistance

When you're through changing, you're through.

— Bruce Barton

Resistance to change.

A psychologist would say fear of loss is behind it.

A Neoplatonist would say the devil is.

An inner voice advises you: Beware. Go slow. Back off. Give in. You're swamped. Next week. Next month. Next quarter. Next year.

What—or who—do you blame?

Boots

Here's to the bootstrappers, those entrepreneurs who make do on a shoestring. They sustain the American Dream.

Here's to the bootleggers, the copycats who ride the backs of first-movers and make them look good.

And here's to the bootlickers, without whose undying service there'd be no room for bootstrapping or bootlegging.

It doesn't much matter which pair you wear, but only that others will ask, "Who'll fill her boots when she's gone?"

Grace under Pressure

This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.

— Oscar Wilde, last words on his deathbed

Child therapists call the ability to avoid meltdowns when under pressure the executive function.

Ironically, some executives don't function under pressure—not well, at least.

You'll recall the Korean Air Lines executive who forced her plane back to the gate and kicked off the head steward after she was served macadamias in a bag, rather than on a plate.

Business isn’t always about growth, victories and celebrations over champagne.

Stuff happens.

Leaders unable to show grace under pressure exhibit the traits of the executive-type Tron Jordheim calls the "Spoiled Brat."

The Spoiled Brat thrives on barking orders and berating workers, caring only about productivity as she defines it. She mistakes herself for another executive-type, the "General," who thrives on defining missions, outwitting competitors, and "taking the next hill." But apply a little pressure and all hell breaks loose.

"The General will remain composed and keep the battle plan in mind even under pressure," Jorhheim says. "When under pressure, the Spoiled Brat overreacts and lashes out until someone offers a pacifier. The advantage the Spoiled Brat has is that people do react quickly and try to make this type of executive happy to avoid those tantrums."

Spoiled Brats are so narcissistic they forget they have an audience—workers and peers who expect them to display grace under pressure—calm, grit, insight, honesty, resilience, self-control and dignity. (Oscar Wilde's example of grace under pressure may be the ultimate one.)

If your management team includes executives who think eating nuts from a bag is roughing it—and who crack under the pressure—it's time to reorganize.

But You Must Act

Fantasy football will cost employers $16.8 billion in lost wages this season, according to Challenger.

Workers waste a ton of time not only during football season, but year round.

According to a study by GetVoIP, 80% of workers waste some time every day; and 20% waste one-third or more of each day.

Self-employment makes any sort of time-wasting unpalatable to me (I don't want to wind up living under a bridge).

But far worse-tasting is unconscious procrastination.

Procrastination comes in two varieties: conscious (you play fantasy football, instead of phoning customers) and unconscious (you answer yesterday's emails, instead of writing a strategic plan).

The former is foolish; the latter, fatal.

If you're addicted to unconscious procrastination, ask yourself: Am I too self assured?

That was Civil War General George McClellan's problem.

As you'll recall from your history lessons, Abe Lincoln put McClellan in charge of the Union army in July 1861 after the disaster at Bull Run. McClellan then took nine months to build up his army, swelling it to an immense size—121,500 men (at the time, the largest army ever assembled by a nation).

The power went to McClellan's head. He mistook the office he'd been handed for an elected one, and began to behave as if he had a public mandate. He started seeing himself as God's instrument, chosen by Divine Providence to save his country, and even flirted with idea of dictatorship—an idea that flourished, because he surrounded himself with "Yes Men." And he held Lincoln in open contempt, calling him a "baboon" and "the original Gorilla."

But McClellan failed to use his immense army to win a victory of any size over the Confederates and end the war.

Instead, he focused on parades, supplies, campgrounds and paperwork.

He procrastinated.

An impatient Lincoln soon would fire him; but before he did, Lincoln sent McClellan a now-famous telegram that read:

Once more, let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act. 

Are you too self-assured?

Mission Improbable

A noble purpose inspires sacrifice, stimulates innovation and encourages perseverance.
                                            Gary Hamel

Only 4 in 10 workers strongly agree their company's mission makes them feel their job is important, and fewer than half feel strongly connected to their company's mission, according to a new study by Gallup.

You may not care. But Gallup research shows a compelling mission boosts profits and reduces employee turnover and on-the-job accidents.

Gallup analysts Nate Dvorak and Bailey Nelson say company leaders should:

Build a brand. Employees and customers should hear the same brand promise from leaders. The promise separates the company from rivals and makes it worthy of consideration.

Recruit purpose-driven people. High performers long to make a difference in customers' lives. Leaders should use purpose-centric recruiting ads to attract them.

Foster employee engagement. Profitability soars when the mission's more than posters in the lunchrooms. Leaders themselves should continually communicate the company's purpose, and help workers relate it to their jobs.

But why is it so hard for leaders to step up?

La condition humaine.

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre spelled out the reasons people rarely rally in his multi-volume doorstopper, Critique of Dialectical Reason:

• Even when part of a group, Sartre says, people normally live lives in lonely crowds. He calls life in the primordial group the life of the series. While they work toward one goal (boarding a bus, for example), people in a series don't share common bonds or act in concert. It's every faceless, interchangeable man for himself.
  
  
• While the series is the primordial group, it's not the only one. When people in a series are threatened, they form an organic and spontaneous group Sartre calls the fused group. Everyone in a fused group rows in concert of his own free will; everyone trusts and inspires his fellows; and everyone's a leader. (Think of the French Resistance, for example.)
  
  
• When the outside threat diminishes, Sartre says, fused groups either disband or ossify. If the latter, they become organizations. People in an organization take the "pledge" to watch out for each other. But the pledge doesn't mean the group members won't seek to fulfill their own self-interests first. In fact, they usually do. (Think of any labor union.)
  
  
• To discourage members of an organization from "taking care of Number 1," leaders eventually emerge who put constraints in place. Sartre calls this "degraded" spinoff of the organization the institution. Institutions work to make sure to every member knows he's a cog that can be easily replaced. (Think of any of today's corporations.)

Delivering Bad News

Leaders can learn a lot from FDR.

A champ in many ways, he was at his most masterful where bad news was concerned—and there was a storm of it while he was president.

In April 1942, he told a radio audience that, due to war, "everyone will have the privilege of making whatever self-denial is necessary."

FDR provided no sugarcoating.

“The blunt fact is that every single person in the United States is going to be affected."

But he went on to say, "'Sacrifice" is not exactly the proper word with which to describe this program of self-denial. When, at the end of this great struggle we shall have saved our free way of life, we shall have made no 'sacrifice.'"


Americans responded patriotically.

Leaders are like that. From fails to fiascos, downturns to downsizings, they have the steady job of delivering bad news.

Georgetown University management professor Robert Bies recommends these 10 rules for mastering your delivery of bad news:

• Never surprise anyone. You’re shirking your duty by keeping bad news to yourself.


• Never stall. “Bad news delayed is bad news compounded,” Bies says.


• Never cover up. Withholding information will only lead others to draw false conclusions.


• Always put it in writing. A paper trail will one day be important.


• Always justify. Provide “specific and concrete reasons for the bad news.”


• Always give hope. Emphasizing the positive and temporary aspects of bad news can boost morale, as FDR knew.


• Always offer solutions. Solutions put the focus on future improvement. “Bad news without solutions is truly bad news.”


• Always consider every audience. “Remember when delivering bad news that the news never reaches just one; it reaches many.”


• Always follow through. “Bad news involves cleaning up a mess. After cleaning, let everyone know. Now the news is no longer bad; it is good.”


• Always show respect. You’re not just communicating bad news; you’re communicating it to human beings.

The last rule is the cardinal one, Bies says; and the one most often broken, as I can attest.

I was laid off, fortunately, only once in my career.

While, as an executive at the company, I was privy to the financial setbacks that preceded the event, when the bad news arrived, via telephone on the Monday before Thanksgiving, the very first thing I was told was that “the decision was easy.”

I grasped at the moment the words that were said (“Marketing is a luxury”).

I’ll never grasp why they they were said.

Only the Lonely

A new study published in the Academy of Management Journal says creative workers ignore their spouses.

Two management professors interviewed 108 workers and their spouses every day for 10 days. The workers held jobs in a variety of industries that included finance, healthcare, government, education, transportation and construction.

Workers were asked about the tasks they performed during the day; spouses, about the time spent with their husbands.

The findings: the more the worker was busy with idea-generation on the job, the less time he spent at home.

To remedy "the relational aftereffects of creative behaviors at work on relationships at home," the professors say, bosses should critique creative workers' results at the end of each day.

By providing an immediate critique, bosses, in effect, reboot creative workers' brains before they head home.

"Validating ideas at work may liberate an employee’s cognitive resources in a way that allows them to provide more effective support to their spouse after work," the professors say.

Of course, downloads of domestic devices also work.

My Chakra is Ferkakta

Fans of Mindfulness-Based-Stress Reduction (MBSR), which finds rays of Western science in Eastern meditation, have become saintly inside many Fortune 100s.

They've set up MBSR programs for employees of Aetna, Intel, Target and, naturellement, Google.

With all our Internet-induced stress, it's little wonder.

"We need this stuff right now," says New York Times reporter David Gelles, author of Mindful Work, "Mindfulness is an effective way to get off the hamster wheel of our minds."

But if your māyā detector just buzzed, I'm with you.

I've tried mindfulness meditation, sitting with a great teacher.

I learned enough to know it's hard work.

People peddling MBSR as an easy remedy to stress are selling snake oil.

There ain't no cure for work-life imbalance in one-minute meditations and cutesy memes.

After all, it took Siddhârtha seven weeks to work it out.

And he had a fig tree.

If You Have to Ask, You Can't Afford It

A new study from Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research shows restaurants will soon start charging diners for reservations.

"This is a logical extension of the revenue management principle of pricing a service to match demand," says Sheryl Kimes, co-author of the study.

Some app providers already charge a premium for hard-to-get reservations at trendy spots; and some auction off those reservations.

Demand, surge and dynamic pricing in fact surrounds us (think of your electricity company, local toll roads and summer rental properties), even though—as Uber recently learned—it's considered inhospitable.

Only restaurateurs and economists—who insist it boosts supply—would say demand pricing isn't just plain, old-fashioned price gouging.

What would you say?

Innovation's in Our Bones

Whenever I despair of our species, I remember that innovation is in our bones and such a marvelous thing, as two case studies illustrate.

Case Study No. 1

For the past 15 years, UPS drivers have been forbidden to turn left.

That's because company engineers discovered in 2001 that left-hand turns were inefficient, as a UPS spokesman told Fortune.

Left-hand turns wasted time and money.

So the engineers used GPS software to re-route drivers, eliminating left-hand turns.

The move—annually—shaved 20 million miles off drivers' routes; increased deliveries by 350,000 packages; saved 10 million gallons of gas; and cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20,000 metric tons.

Case Study No. 2

In 1940, film comedian W.C. Fields built an exercise room in his Hollywood home. 

He equipped the room with a stationary bike, a rowing machine and a steam cabinet, and hired a personal trainer to help him get buff.

Fields followed the trainer's instructions faithfully, but added touches of his own.

As directed, Fields dressed in sweats and mounted the stationary bike for long rides; but also drank several martinis en route.

He would work out in the rowing machine, but drink gin and sing sea chanteys while at it.

And he'd sit in the steam cabinet for an hour, sipping highballs the whole time.

"This is wonderful—these workouts are going to increase my liquor consumption two or three hundred percent!" Fields told the trainer.

The Return of the Meatware

Investor greed and digital technology are inspiring managers to become New Taylorists, says The Economist.

A long-discredited management theory, Taylorism appeals to executives eager to serve the dark side.

Profits can be boosted, the theory holds, if companies follow three simple rules: 

• Break complex jobs down into one-dimensional tasks;
• Measure everything workers do; and 
• Reward achievers, sack slackers.

The theory's opponents point to studies that show culture matters more than tasks and quotas, carrots and sticks.

But the New Taylorists don't buy it. Encouraged by short-term spurts, they'd rather treat workers as meatware.

There are signs, however, the meatware's time is coming.

"The proliferation of websites such as Glassdoor, which let employees review their workplaces, may mean that firms which treat their workers as mere 'meatware' lose the war for the sort of talent that cannot be mechanized," The Economist says.

Flight to Safety

A stock sell-off/bond buy-up by jittery investors is known on Wall Street as a "flight to safety."

A different kind of flight to safety takes place every hour on every street, at every workplace, in every town in America.

A colleague told me yesterday he was leaving a good company because his marketing ideas—which produced considerable results—don't "fit the culture."

A Cornell study reveals that company leaders often reject new ideas not because the ideas don’t have potential, but because the leaders themselves lack the guts to face risk and uncertainty.

It gets worse. 

When cautious leaders quash new ideas, the study says, they do so unconsciously. 

Their fear actually blinds them to the ideas.

No wonder 7 of 10 workers aren't engaged.

As adman Leo Burnett said, "To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas."

Listening Hard

Forgotten genius Ring Lardner was a popular satirist of the 1920s, famous for the practice of "listening hard."

He delighted fans by cloning the speech of ball players, barbers, cops and musicians in his newspaper columns, short stories, songs and plays.

Lardner influenced other, better known writers who followed, including Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and John O'Hara.

"Listening hard" is the secret sauce not only of good writers, but good salespeople, customer service reps, therapists, judges, spouses and parents.

Sadly, most of the time we default to "easy listening," where others' speech functions merely as elevator music during our ride to the top.

We're eager only to listen with the intent to reply, rather than understand, as Stephen Covey noted.

“When people talk, listen completely," Hemingway said. "Most people never listen.”