BarrieBergman

From Mars to St. Barths

I’ve got to stop reading the newspaper.  There’s too much stupidity in the world, and I may have to move to Mars.  I’m sure Martians are more intelligent than the inhabitants of Earth.  I’ll bet no one there is the equivalent of Sarah Palin.

Last week I wrote about Tenure, but I neglected to mention Seniority.   In Los Angeles recently, a teacher was decorated and praised for excellent performance.  He was so good at teaching kids to read, that he started speaking to groups of teachers to help them better instruct their students.

He was laid off last week, while the teacher in the next classroom was retained.  The neighboring teacher was cited for poor performance on a standardized test, but was kept on because he had seniority.  Can we possibly be this dumb?  Is this kind of insanity the reason our educational system is behind other countries?  Am I on some sort of hallucinogen?

I believe in making seniority part of the evaluative process, but performance must come first.  Maybe these union inspired rules are the reason people are so pissed off at teachers’ unions (see: Wisconsin).  If we don’t do a better job of educating our kids, this country is going to hell in a hand basket, and my great-grandchildren will have to live in St. Barths.  On second thought . . .

Won’t Work for Tenure

Tenure.  What a strange word.  I guess it comes from somewhere.  Wherever it comes from, it’s a ridiculous concept.  Yeah, I know, it protects academicians and their freedom to teach whatever ideas they accept as their truth, but it also disincentivizes said educators.

In business, the concept of tenure doesn’t exist.  The closest we came to it was in the good old days with IBM, when they never fired anybody, just stuck them in a room with no windows and no phone.  This policy damn near ruined the company, because they had a bunch of pissed off employees sitting around doing nothing and getting paid.

I wish some company would hire me and give me tenure.  I would promise to be nice, only speak well of the organization, and never do anything negative or positive.  I’m serious, do nothing!  I wouldn’t even come to work.  They could just send my paycheck to my house, so I wouldn’t get in the way.

Tenure in our educational system is a cancer.  It guarantees poor performance and a bunch of people who don’t give a crap about outcome.  Disincentivized employees are not productive.  They don’t produce.  Do away with tenure, except for me.

CEO’s and Miss Congeniality

Recently I saw one of financial TV’s talking heads criticizing a CEO for his presentation during an annual stock holder’s meeting.  If I hadn’t had a context, I could easily have thought I was listening to a beauty contestant critique.  Granted most TV pundits have no idea what it takes to be a CEO, and maybe this particular guy was dumb as a rock, but it started me thinking about what makes a good CEO.

I used to be a CEO.  I had my good and bad moments, so I have an idea what works and what doesn’t.  To run a large organization you must look like a leader.  This style takes many different shapes depending on the organization and the culture.

A leader can be General George Patton or Deepak Chopra, whatever the group you’re leading needs to get to its objective.  The key is to understand what the group needs and to project that style, if possible (why “if possible”?)

This stylistic problem is the reason certain CEO’s and leaders are great in one situation and crummy in another.  One of the reasons that I voted for Barack Obama was that I thought we needed a calm leader at that point in time, not someone like John McCain, who I considered a bit of a hot head.

If you want to know if you are a leader, look over your shoulder.  If there is anybody back there, you are a leader.  If there’s no one there, you are not a leader.

On a sadder note . . . I’ll miss Elizabeth Taylor.  Beautiful people like her make the world a better place.

Greed is Not Good

I read a great article in the LA Times about the destruction of a good company.  The private equity firm, that bought retailer Harry and David, has made every mistake that can be made.  The first mistake they made was to violate the cardinal rule, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

They raped the cash, over leveraged the balance sheet, paid themselves, fired the CEO, brought in seedy management, laid off one third of the labor force, and then took some more money.   They pissed off everybody living in the town, where the company was located.

All of this stupidity and cupidity was explained with the kind of mealy-mouthed BS that is hard to read about without puking.  And then for fun they took some more money.

I am a victim of people who bought my company and ruined it.  We sold to a Belgian company named Super Club, but we always called them Stupid Club.  If brains were dynamite, these clowns couldn’t have blown their noses!

It only took a few years for these rocket scientists to tear apart 25 years of hard work.  I know, they gave us a lot of money, and it was their toy.  But damn, it hurt to watch them.  Twenty years later I’m still pissed off.

I have no recommendations for making an acquisition.  Companies always have reasons for buying another company, and generally it’s not to annihilate it.  Perhaps they could try to remember what those reasons were in the first place.

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.

 

Controlling Gossip in the Office

Gossip is deadly.  The gossip mill shreds a person's reputation.  Often there's no merit to the accusation.  It is the worst kind of organizational politics.  It's divisive communication and it's amazing how many organizations accept it.  If nothing is done, this kind of communication can create an organizational nightmare with no relation to any truth.

The only way to stop gossip is on a person-to-person level.  People have to understand that it's a terrible way to communicate and that it's unacceptable in the organization.  When there's an issue between two or more people, the most effective way to resolve it is for those involved to discuss it among themselves and come up with a resolution.  The way I chose to stop it in our organization was to start with what I could affect personally.  The people who worked for me knew that if they came into my office to criticize somebody's behavior or decision, they would have to face that person with me in my office.  They'd have to say it to their face, not behind their back.  If necessary, I'd facilitate, but we would talk it out, all three of us, and the issue would get resolved.

Most people didn’t like that. Generally, people will go to great lengths to avoid confrontation. Not surprisingly, once the person who was the subject of the gripe joined us in the office, the one with the issue would clam up. It would take some coaxing on my part, but once the dialog started, what appeared to be a huge issue at the outset became an opportunity for deeper understanding.  When an issue is out in the open, you can talk it out and reach a resolution. If the issue is left unaddressed, great damage can be done.

 If you want your people to adopt a certain behavior, you’ve got to model it at the top. In my executive management group we made an agreement—if you say something to anybody in the group, you’re saying it to everybody. I don’t believe in secrets anyway, because my experience is people don’t keep secrets. So there’s no point in having them. Immediately the alarm goes off when somebody says “I’m going to tell you, but don’t tell anyone else.” My philosophy has always been, “Say it to me, you’ve said it to everybody. Don’t say it to me if you don’t want everybody to know!” It cut out a lot of the crap!

 There are times that you may disagree with a decision that is made, but ranting, raving, or gossiping about it is never appropriate in the workplace.  It is disruptive and obnoxious.  A discussion with your immediate supervisor may provide a better understanding of why or how the decision was made.  But keep in mind, the workplace is not a democracy.  The guy at the top gets to make the final call.

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.

 

 

Focusing on Focus

I’ve been doing some consulting. Consulting is an interesting job. I come up with incredible ideas and my clients totally ignore me. It’s great for my ego.  

When I consult, I only do it with CEOs who are running companies that are on the way up. It’s fun for me and I enjoy helping them so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Occasionally, they do listen to me and save themselves some time and a lot of grief. It’s not because I’m smarter than they are, it’s because I’m older and more experienced. So many of the issues and problems they face are ones I’ve dealt with a time or two. 

One issue that comes up repeatedly with my clients is focus. I’m convinced that the younger people are, the harder it is to focus. We live in an A.D.D. world that inundates us with images, sounds and experiences quicker than we can take it all in. In a society that’s been brought up on MTV, we have less and less of an attention span, making it more and more difficult to focus. Coupled with impatience, this leads to a tendency for people to flit from one business model to another, never giving sufficient time or attention to one area long enough to reap the rewards.    

Talking about focus and staying the course seems very simple. But on a day-to-day basis, it’s hard to keep an organization focused. Entrepreneurial types tend to be creative, innovative thinkers. Once an idea is launched, it’s much more fun and intriguing to move on to the next great idea than to stick around to fully implement the original plan.  

Let me tell you a tale of two clients of mine. Client A is extremely creative and talented. He came to me with a good business model that played to his strengths. Unfortunately, being the creative, A.D.D. type, he is absolutely incapable of focusing on his core business and doing that well. He’s got an idea a minute. He just bounces all over the place. He comes up with these wonderful ideas, but they aren’t related to what he is doing at any point in time, so he veers off in a new direction. That’s a recipe for disaster. You’ve only got so much time, so much energy, so much money, and so many people. He chews them up and spits them out. The guy makes me crazy. Since I’ve been working with him, he has gone through one business model after another. Each one is the new thing that’s going to be the home run. His business is struggling, and has been for years now.  

Client B is also full of good ideas and has a good business model. He’s had numerous opportunities to move away from his core business, and I’ve advised him against it. He is very good at focusing and executing his core business. He’s a great leader and gets his people to focus their talent as well. It’s not the most exciting business in the world, but it’s damn profitable. His people like working for the company, they are excited about what they do and the company is growing at a fast pace, just booming.  

Client A and Client B are equally talented, intelligent people. Both are entrepreneurs who started with nothing but great ideas. One is fabulously successful. The other is floundering and failing. The difference is FOCUS and the commitment to hang around to see ideas through to fruition and profitability.