BarrieBergman

Thanks Mark

Thank you Mark Z and the Winklevoss’s. You guys made my life better with Facebook, but I didn’t realize it for a long time.  I finally got it a year ago, when I was promoting my book and my speaking by using social media.

I looked at Facebook as a marketing tool, but what I realized was that it was a terrific way to reconnect with old friends.  I’ve lived a long time and in a number of places, so I’ve met a bunch of people in my life. By using Facebook, I’ve gotten in touch with many friends who I long ago lost touch with.

I’ve heard from numerous people I worked with at our old company, Record Bar.  Some of them I never even met because our stores were so spread out geographically.  The comments have been wonderfully complimentary.  To have people say such nice things about a company we sold twenty years ago brings me a warm glow.

It reminded me of a reunion party we had for the company a few years ago.  A lot of ex-employees of the company were there.  When Arlene and I got to the party, we naturally fell into our old rolls as hosts.  We split up and didn’t see each other until the end of the evening.  People were so warm and complimentary about the company.  We were both very gratified.  As I said to Arlene at the time, “Hell they didn’t have to suck up anymore, we aren’t the bosses now."

It’s really great that the good feelings about the company have lasted so long.  We tried to make it a special place to work, and it looks like many folks thought we succeeded.

Who Deserves to Get the Credit?

If I had to pick one area where I feel American business has lost its way, it would be in the sanctioning of political in-fighting and cutthroat tactics among co-workers. It has become all about who gets the credit. The idea that it’s a good thing to claw your way to the top, leaving bodies strewn in your path, just astounds me. What a miserable way to do business, and what a losing strategy.

An inordinate amount of time and energy in organizations is taken up by people jockeying for credit. When people feel the only way to further their career is at the expense of fellow employees, the environment becomes toxic. The rush to take credit creates resentment, anger and dysfunction, completely stripping away the possibility of effective teamwork. If an organization is going to function properly, you can’t condone people taking credit at someone else’s expense.

Recognition of the contribution of an individual or a team is a strong motivator.  To create an organization that rewards the individual, you have to incentivize people for teamwork, and pay them well for their contribution.  But it can't just be about the money.  Recognition by the company and/or their peer group is also vitally important.  It is paramount that they get enough ego strokes to feel good about what they are doing.

There is never a star without a supporting cast. Organizations don’t score big wins without a lot of people pulling together. Any time you get a corporate star, it’s best to remember that a lot of people are making contributions behind the scenes. Ideas rarely come from just one person; they tend to germinate among a bunch of people. Inevitably if one person gets credit, one person is happy and three are pissed. I’d rather have four people happy. It’s the team as a whole and each contributor within that deserves to get credit.

 

Organizational Inertia Stifles Innovation

Organizational inertia occurs when a culture of fear permeates a business and people are afraid to make decisions. At its very worst people are afraid to do anything at all. Individuals begin to adopt a survival attitude, believing that the way to keep their job is to never take a chance, to never do anything outside the norm.

 

When an organization creates an environment of fear, you can take very capable, creative people and turn them into ineffective paper pushers. They come to believe the worst thing they can do is to make a decision. They don’t want to risk being responsible for a project that could fail.

 

People want to achieve. They want to act on creative ideas and make things happen, but you have to let them make mistakes. Intelligent people will learn from the experience and not make the same mistake again. If you’re going to cut somebody’s head off the first time they make an error, they aren’t going to take risks. They’ll stop trying, they’ll never learn and they’ll never innovate.

 

If you graph it, most organizations make progress by fits and starts. Over time, the graph will show a steady upward trend. The fits and starts represent a learning curve. In a culture of fear that graph will flat-line in a hurry. I believe most competent people will make the right decision 90% of the time. When you empower people to act, most of the time, they’ll get it right. Unfortunately in this country, the larger the company, the greater the bureaucracy. People become set in their ways, and innovation stops happening because bureaucratic organizations reward the status quo.

 

Look at the car manufacturers in Detroit. Twenty years ago, all the Big Three cars started to look alike. It bored the American public and consumers started to buy foreign cars that were cheaper and got better gas mileage. As foreign car designs became more innovative, there were fewer Americans willing to buy from Detroit.

 

Organizational inertia in some arenas is met with swift repercussions; you don’t have the luxury of a decade or two to figure things out. The high tech industry is all about innovation, change and risk-taking. In this business if you snooze you lose. When Steve Jobs left Apple, we watched the company vegetate. When he came back, the company came alive. There is a spirit of innovation at Apple. It starts with Steve and permeates the organization. When Steve is around, people are energized. He turned the faucet back on.

 

You don’t get that kind of dramatic innovation without somebody at the top saying it’s okay to fail. If the person at the top is only worried about next quarter’s earnings per share, innovation isn’t going to happen. CEOs become afraid of their boards and afraid of their own shareholders if, God forbid, their profits go down for a quarter. You’ve got to be willing to take chances and risk making some big mistakes, if you are going to win big.