“Featherbedding is a pejorative term for the practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job, or to adopt work procedures which appear pointless, complex and time-consuming merely to employ additional workers. The term “make-work” is sometimes used as a synonym for featherbedding.

The term “featherbedding” is usually used by management to describe behaviors and rules sought by workers. But featherbedding has also been occasionally used to describe rent-seeking behavior by corporations in response to economic regulation. The term may equally apply to mid- and upper-level management, particularly in regard to top-heavy and “bloated” levels of middle- and upper-level management.”

Featherbedding – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bob Sutton notes a rave review of EDEO CEO Tim Brown’s new book “Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation“. Bob writes:

The review, called “Redefining a Profession,” concludes that Tim has successfully avoided one of the biggest risks in a book like this one – coming across as too much of a commercial for the firm he leads.  Tim accomplishes this by simply being himself, and indeed, when I read the galleys, that was my comment…”This is 100% Tim Brow.,”  In any conversation you have with Tim, he will do things that many CEOs do not, he will give others lots of credit, he will tell wonderful stories, talk honestly about what works and what doesn’t, and about the limits of the methods used by his company, not just the strengths.  Indeed, for me, as much as I am a big believer in the power of design thinking, after hanging around the Stanford d school for five years or so, although I believe we teach our students well, I am often disturbed because “design thinking” is treated as the answer to every problem and also as more like a religion than a set of practices for sparking creativity.  Tim and his many colleagues at IDEO have had the courage to apply design thinking to almost any problem – from designing better websites, to changing how programmers work together, designing a couple thousand products, revamping operations, and changing customers experiences.   In doing so they have simultaneously pushed the limits of design thinking beyond what others thought possible (hence the title “Redefining a  Profession”) while always acknowledging the limits of the approach.

via Rave Review for Change By Design in New York Times.

The New York Times article is “Redefining a Profession“

Master consultant and all round business genius Gerald Wienberg has sorted the best of Jerry Weinberg’s (no relation) “50 things to improve business”:

2. back up everything

4. Rule: do nothing, revised with 3 caveats: a) don’t do it if there’s someone that can do it better; b) don’t do it if there’s someone that can do it adequately; c) if it makes me really happy, do it anyway; d) if someone can do it 85% as well as I do, let them do it; e) anything not worth doing is not worth doing right; f) if in doubt charge for sales trips

6. make them pay something, with their time, their money — if they don’t pay for it they don’t value it

8. if it’s not on paper, don’t do it

9. listen to what other people are telling you

10. don’t communicate to somebody, but communicate with somebody

11. always have an exit strategy

12. make them feel like your client has a part in the final outcome; make sure they have their fingerprints on it

13. listen for what they’re not saying

14. listen to the “music”, body language, intonation

15. always be ready to sell your product

16. if you find yourself reluctant to sell your product, there’s something wrong with it

17. any successful services company has some fixed priced product to sell

18. given them entry points that they can buy

19. recurring revenue model, e.g. via contract maintenance plans, or follow-through

20. have a follow-through clause in contract so you can know how you’re doing

21. charge more money if they don’t want you to come back after some time, e.g. 3 months

22. if you just build it they probably won’t come

23. manage expectations, book: Managing Expectations, by Naomi Karten

24. Time spent in reconnaissance is time well spent

25. You can observe a whole lot just by watching (Yogi Berra)

26. Go hard or go home; fully commit all resources needed, or kill it mercilessly

27. Commit enough to learn what you have to learn to find out whether it’s worth pursuing or killing

28. People who work in an Agile/iterative way often fail to do the discovery

29. Ideas by themselves aren’t as valuable as you think they are; don’t guard them too closely

30. Nothing is as dangerous as an idea, esp. if it’s the only idea you have

31. Never rest on your past successes; there is always something more you could be doing; if you’re not learning, you’re dead

32. Sharing competitive advantages brings 10-fold rewards; give it away, it comes back

33. Being able to say ‘no’

34. Research clients as if you were hiring them

35. Recognize that every client is unique.

36. You don’t have to remember everything to succeed.

37. It’s ok to let a client go if it’s not the right fit; you should organize your business such that it’s ok to let a client go, i.e. don’t be over-dependent on any single client

38. The best way to build a business is to stay in business; stay around, build a reputation and credibility

39. Actively solicit feedback from clients; actively extract the feedback, e.g. watch the audience

40. Don’t be alone in your work; have someone to talk to

41. Honor the people who are your sounding board and bring feedback, e.g. life partners, friends, …

42. Anything that’s annoying or repetitive should be automated or stopped

43. Track your budget & cost every month

44. Don’t make mistakes over your budget or your cost.

45. Don’t spend your money on office decoration, esp. if your clients don’t come to your office

46. Always try someone out before you hire them

47. Don’t fall for the big lies: “we’re just about to get funding” “our data is clean” “your check is in the mail” “we’re going to sign it next month, just keep working” “don’t worry about the contract” …

48. Preventing any one of these mistakes will pay for this conference

49. Double your reading speed

50. Choose not to read a lot; don’t read stuff that’s not worth reading

51. Stay off Facebook & Twitter

52. Sometimes you can save money by spending money; and sometimes the reverse. Learn to tell the difference

via 50 more ways to improve your business.

Also see the original 50 ways to improve your business .

There is a good article in Projects@Work about what to do when a risk you chose not to mitigate materialises, and how to handle it.

From Projects@Work – A Guy Named Murphy:

Widely accepted risk management theory says that doing nothing is an appropriate response to some risks. But what happens on a project when you’ve done no risk mitigation and then the risk materializes?

“When you are running a large project and have already passed the project planning phase, the project manager’s core role is managing the performance of people, meeting plan expectations, and assessing the threats to project success,” say Tim Pare and John Kirkwood, managing consultants at PA Consulting Group. “From a practical point of view, there are always a ton of these threats and there is seldom time available to spend on things that have a low likelihood. It is probably more often the case that risk mitigation activities are curtailed, or not enacted at all, rather than pursued for too long.”

Lisa Anderson, president of LMA Consulting Group, also believes that there’s a natural stop to risk management activity. “I’ve led project teams, it is common to have unexpected events and challenges arise. [But] once you have established an effective project team and defined a critical path, stop risk mitigation activity, as it will be a waste of time and resources,” she says.

In fact, these unexpected events are par for the course in project management. “If you have been a PM for any length of time you have run into problems on your projects — especially if they are IT or technology related,” says Bruce McGraw, CEO of Cognitive Technologies, a professional services firm delivering project and program management services, products and PMO tool implementation to commercial and government clients. “In fact, we blame these problems on a guy named ‘Murphy’ which has led to the whole field of risk management, where we try to think of all the things that can go wrong before a project starts. The first step in addressing the worst case is to determine that you have a problem. That is not always as simple as it seems.”

Johanna Rothman, author of Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management, agrees. As a consultant, she was brought in to help resolve a crisis on a development project where nothing was working and everything had been tried. “[The] project was slipping a week every week,” Rothman says. “The PM had no idea what to do. The project team had no idea. They were trying to integrate a piece of hardware and software, and it wasn’t working.”

Rothman established that the problem they thought they had — no more options — wasn’t actually the real problem. “The developers had been saying ‘We’ve tried everything’ but they hadn’t. The testers were saying ‘We’ve tested everything’ but they hadn’t. I had them build a matrix of everything they’d tried and the results they’d gotten. Once they realized there were holes in the matrix where things hadn’t been tried, they knew how long those tasks would take and we would have another chance to reassess after those tasks were done.”

These are some selections and notes from a brilliant essay by Dr Chester W Richards about OODA loops and the general application of military know how to business. From “What you really do with OODA loops” :

The key to the military notion of time lies in how practitioners of the art of war view strategy. Great commanders down through the years have used time-based strategy to cloud their opponents’ understanding and destroy their morale so that the battle, if it must be fought at all, is relatively quick and painless. In the language of conflict, we say that they move their opponents where they want them to be. Leaders in business and industry can do the same thing and with similar results. This paper explores this notion, first by looking at what today’s most avant-garde business theorists claim for the concept of time, and then comparing that to what the most successful generals and strategists aim to achieve. Finally, we will the translate the military goals and objectives back into the commercial world and look for examples where it actually worked.

…Building one new business after another, faster than the competition, is the only way to stay ahead.

…a real strategist doesn’t like words like “respond” and is dubious about “anticipate.” These are passive sorts of things…

Now it is true that fast reactions have their place – if your opponent catches you by surprise, for example. Competence in this tactic, such things as staying cool, using the other side’s momentum against them, and so on, form an essential part of any competitor’s tool kit. Problems arise when, as in the above paradigm, reaction becomes the goal of strategy. First, under such an arrangement, if we don’t see anything, we don’t do anything. So much for initiative.

If your mindset is to observe carefully and then respond, you will always incur a lag, and the focus of your efforts will be on finding ways to shrink it. But suppose there was a way to compete that didn’t generate a lag in the first place.

…Sun Tzu also took aim at Maginot Line strategies: “Preparedness everywhere means lack everywhere.”

…”It is generally advisable to be the one to initiate the attack and thereby put the opponent in the defensive position.” (63) Also: “In the path to victory in Heiho (his school) taking the initiative at all costs is the most important thing.”

…What if opponents act first? Let’s not be arrogant – your opponents are thinking human beings and can also employ the basic strategic tools of surprise, deception, and ambiguity. Then, advised Musashi, you have to stifle their plans immediately. The focus, however, is never on defending, but on regaining and using the initiative so that you can lead your opponents where you want them to be.

…Sun Tzu had proclaimed that the ability to think and act rapidly is the essence of war…Sun Tzu and his commentators also talked about sowing confusion by not giving opponents time to plan…In particular, one could manipulate time and rhythm to unhinge an opponent’s mental and moral composure: You use “an advantageous rhythm to arrest the powerful determination of the adversary’s motivation.”

This was, he insisted, an essential step before engaging in physical combat. It is a stunningly powerful observation, for demotivated opponents are defeated opponents, no matter what weapons remain in their hands. Warriors using Musashi’s techniques could create gaps, which the Japanese call “suki,” in their opponent’s attention, during which one could attack a fully armed samurai with a fencepost (as Musashi once did) and win. (Nihon 31)

In modern times, a corollary notion has been synthesized by the American strategist, the late Air Force Col. John R. Boyd. Like Musashi, Boyd got his initial ideas from one-on-one combat, in his case, jets over Korea. After pondering this experience, and studying the results of engagements from Sun Tzu to the present, Boyd derived the OODA loop, for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. It has been described for business by Bower and Hout, Stalk and Hout, and Peters. Note 6 The ability to execute rapid OODA loops is called “agility,” and it now generally recognized that the more agile organization will build-up increasingly decisive advantages over its opponents.

It is worth repeating that this is not a theoretical construct, but a proven strategy for winning in armed conflict. It provides a framework much more powerful than merely reacting to opponents, but one might reasonably ask whether it applies to anybody but a soldier? More to the point, businesses don’t directly combat each other. Instead, they compete for the attention, and money, of customers. Can businesses employ OODA loops and the other tools of time-based competition to achieve anything like the effects of Sun Tzu, Musashi, and Boyd, and if so, how is this going to help them survive and grow?

Warfighters, as we have seen, use mind-and-morale destroying techniques to create and exploit opportunities for collapsing the enemy. In business, things are fundamentally different. War has opponents; business does have its analog of opponents – competitors – but they are of secondary importance next to a new god-like entity, the customer.

…What about the mind-destroying effects described by Sun Tzu, Musashi and Boyd? There is little in the business press on this question, probably because writers have been focusing on the remarkable, if passive, attributes noted in Section II. But anecdotes and circumstantial evidence abound to support what military strategists and practitioners have found. Anybody who has ever been on a losing team, or worked for a failing organization, knows Boyd is right. Here is a classic description from one of the founders of the modern quality movement, Joseph Juran:

Lacking victories over their competitors, and unable to defend themselves from their bosses, they lash out at each other, making unity of purpose even harder to achieve. (74)

Or this, from the former chairman of General Electric, Jack Welch:

This internal focus has wasted our time, wasted our energy, frustrated us, made us so mad some nights over some bureaucratic jackass boss that we’d punch a hole in the wall. (Sherman 46)

An organization falling victim to the Boyd Treatment will enter a tightening spiral of internal conflict. As it falls further behind in the marketplace, and its successful moves (as determined, of course, by the customer) become rarer and rarer, all the wonderful chaos and bickering beloved of military strategists follows. Interviews with members of such organizations will reveal witch hunts, strict adherence to directives and procedures (with a total lack of risk-taking), and so on. Inevitably, people split into camps and start apportioning blame, and the company turns ever more deeply inward (Welch’s “internal focus”, Boyd calls it “folding your adversary in on himself”). Usually, Stalk and Hout observe, traditional managers never understand what hit them. When attacked by a time-based competitor, cost-based managers rarely figure out why, despite what their spreadsheets are telling them, they are suddenly losing market share and why more robust cost-cutting isn’t restoring profitability.(264)

The key point is that for business, these effects are icing on the cake. They do not, in and of themselves, produce products that customers will buy. The primary active effect of time-based strategy in business is the symbiotic shaping of the marketplace that agile companies participate in.

“The company that can identify what technologies are needed, introduce them quickly, and commercialize them will succeed.” – Hiroshi Okuda, President, Toyota Motor Corporation (Business Week, June 15, 1998)

…Ask any CEO, “Is your business philosophy reactive?” It’s like asking if his marketing plan is to wait by the phone. Even the French of 1940, that wonderful source of what-to-avoid examples, liked to brag about how their élan would sweep away the Teutonic invaders. Of course, as they were soon to learn, talking a good fight was not the same thing as actually doing it. And so it is with the world of business. Policies are one thing, but companies that have the power to shape the market are structurally, as well as philosophically, different.

…Structure is so intimately bound up with strategy that it is difficult to imagine how one could make any lasting change in an organization’s behavior without first making equally profound changes in its systems.

…

meeting the needs of the customer should provide focus and direction to all activities of the company. Note 8 It is in this key area where we find perhaps the most visible differences between companies that claim to be proactive, and those that actually are. Reactive companies want to detect market opportunities. They engage in traditional market research, things like questionnaires, focus groups, and the like. Basic to their attitude is the idea that the customer is “out there” and we are “in here.” To bridge this gap, they will put a lot of effort into going out to Customer Land and “finding out what they want.”

One problem with this approach, of course, is that the customer often doesn’t know…the big question now is “What next?”  I don’t know – offer me something.

…whereas we all claim to put the customer first, the very structure of most companies limits how intimately involved with the customer they can become. One obvious example is a Marketing Department that jealously controls customer contact. Or a policy of basing sales and project people in a home office rather than with their customers. Or an accounting system that sees customer service as a cost, that is, an attractive candidate for cutbacks when times get tough.

…Most of today’s management systems and practices preclude the intensity of customer involvement that companies will need in order to survive.

…companies with rapid decision cycles are often good innovators. Partly this is because most innovations are actually incremental improvements on an original idea, what Hamel and Prahalad call “expeditionary marketing.” (”Imagination” 86-92) The more rapidly that a company can sense how the customer reacted to its last offering and make changes accordingly, the better job of innovation it will do.

…Companies take the initiative in the marketplace by offering a stream of new products and services. Where do new products and services come from? The only answer possible, discounting elves and gamma rays, is through the initiative of the people who work for and with the organization. A market creator uses the almost symbiotic relationship all of its people have with its customers to generate ideas for new features or capabilities or whatever. Stalk and Hout were dead on, when in the middle of describing how agile companies become entwined with their customers, they observed that “Sometimes it’s difficult to know who’s leading whom.”…Incidentally, this is the same principle underlying maneuver warfare, where an army puts out tens or hundreds of small “feelers,” then uses its fast OODA loop speed to identify and reinforce those that begin to penetrate.

…”lean production,” which is based on these same principles (and can therefore be considered as an implementation of the principles of maneuver warfare), has displaced mass production, which relies on synchronization and control, in every marketplace where the two compete.

Toyota, whose system is generally considered the foundation of lean production, expects initiative at all levels and in all processes…”The paperwork is minimal,” reads the official Toyota description of the system, “the efficiency is maximal.  And the employees themselves are completely in charge.”

…Far too many companies demonstrate the fatal flaw noted by Sybase co-founder Robert Epstein: An established company’s true major goal is to defend what it did last year….These are business versions of the Maginot Line.

The Maginot Line mentality is deadly and yet it is so appealing that it may not be recognized until it has sapped the company’s competitive strengths.

But while it is certainly true that at any given point in time a company has to do the best with what it has, this is the definition of “tactics,” not strategy.  Basing a company’s future on any particular resource is a business version of a stance, and so a false and fatal strategy.

Perhaps the most obvious objection to a core competencies strategy is that the market might not happen to be buying what you’re good at.

…It is worth keeping in mind that Wal-Mart is a market shaper and creator, not merely a market responder, and thus agility – rather than the specific products of it – is its “core competence.”

a belief that you have any type of unique capability is the siren song of complacency. In fact, a belief that you have some kind of difficult-to-emulate ability to know the customer is simply arrogance, which is even a faster-acting poison than mere complacency, and this tends to be true of all high-level business (as opposed to technical or physical) functions. You must assume that your competitors are just as good at the business basics as you are, and you would be better served to assume they are already ahead.

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove was right: Only the paranoid do survive. It is so tempting to believe that “we have these facilities” or “we have these great capabilities”, and therefore we are safe.  You are never safe, and the first hint of a belief that you are safe marks the start of your decline. Only a management that can constantly challenge comforting beliefs, even if they are unstated, will lead its company to survive and grow year after year.  Remember when Enron used to proclaim itself “The World’s Best Company”?

…

According to the ancient warriors of the Sun Tzu school, the real situation is even worse than complacency-invites-decline.  That, at least, is well within our own tradition.  Musashi proclaimed that any manifestation of the stance mentality, even if assumed with vigilance and paranoia, will always generate a defensive spirit and so will open vulnerabilities. One might do better to emulate the Zen warriors who knew that the only resource that will ensure victory is resourcefulness itself. (Cleary, Japanese Art of War, 77)

So the bottom line is yes, you can prosper by restructuring your operations to become a fast reactor to market trends. You may have to prune things some, which it’s probably time for anyway, but you won’t need to do great violence to your underlying systems and culture. And everything will probably work out OK, unless, of course, you meet up with a competitor who is determined to shape the market and who is structurally able to do so. Then 2,500 years of experience say that you are going to have a problem. And word is getting out. “Boldness,” writes Fortune’s Rahul Jacob, “may very well be the preeminent competitive advantage in this slow growth decade.” (74) After all, whom would you bet on, a fast sheep or a fast tiger?

From the Economist’s Guru section article on Elliott Jaques:

Jaques (1917-2003) decided that jobs could be defined in terms of their time horizon. For example, a director of marketing might be worried about marketing campaigns for next year, while a salesman on the road is worried about reaching his targets for the week. Jaques also believed that people had a “boss” and a “real boss”. The boss was the person to whom they were nominally responsible, while the real boss was the person to whom they turned to get decisions crucial to the continuation of their work.

The sales manager in charge of a salesforce would not have a longer time horizon than the people in his salesforce. So when a salesman wanted a decision on something affecting his ability to deliver to his clients, he would go over the head of the sales manager for that decision. Jaques called this “level skipping”, and identified it as a dangerous pathology in any hierarchy.

He then looked at the time horizons of people, their bosses and their real bosses, and he found that people with a time horizon of less than three months treated those with a horizon of 3–12 months as their real bosses, and so on up the scale. He identified seven different time horizons, from three months to 20 years, and argued that organisations, no matter how complex, should have seven levels of hierarchy, each corresponding to a different managerial time horizon. Jaques’s theory has come to be known as RO (requisite organisation).

This reminds me of the Tolstoy quotation from C.S. Lewis’s “The Inner Ring”:

“When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent, which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly understood-what he had already guessed-that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and a more real system-the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris, Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system.”

Here are a few books that compliment each other wonderfully:

“Getting Things Done” and “Getting It Done”

“McMafia” and “Illicit”

“Nudge” and “Influencer” and “Yes”

These are my links for May 28th 2009 through June 11th 2009:

• The dark side of Dubai – The Independent – Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging.
• The Atlantic Online | June 2006 | The Management Myth | Matthew Stewart – Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead
• BBC NEWS | Business | Irish Republic: Boom to bust – BBC radio look at the complete collapse of the Irish economy and how the Irish emigrant is back.
• Why Things Become Unpopular – "Why is everybody suddenly wearing those new sandals and listening to that new band? It's so trendy!" A recent study has investigated this sentiment in order to understand why some cultural products and styles die out faster than others. According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out.
• A List Apart: Articles: Burnout – "Web professionals are often expected to be “always on”—always working, absorbing information, and honing new skills. Unless our work and personal lives are carefully balanced, however, the physical and mental effects of an "always on" life can be debilitating."
• In the industrial economy success was self-limiting; – …it obeyed the law of decreasing returns. In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns.

[Originally published at Limbicnutrition.com]

Alex Moskalyuk has distilled the entirely of the book “Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive” by Cialdini et al into a single blog post.

It really does get in the best of them, including tips I recognise from recent the persuasion best-seller “Nudge” by  Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

Read on for this superb list:  Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive « alex.moskalyuk

Steve Roesler of All Things Workplace, one of the most dependable book recommenders I know of, gives “Rules of Thumb” a rave review in a recent post on his blog.

The subtitle lives up to its words: “52 Truths For Winning At Business Without Losing Your Self”.

You
don’t see many book reviews here even though we receive many
promotional copies. I do look hard at each one but, given my own
business and personal priorities, I only write a review when it’s a
raving recommendation, like: Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self

Get it over at: Amazon.com