Category Archives: leading

Intrinsic Motivation

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Seth Godin has an interesting post today concerning six, lobsters and videotape:

Today, in anticipation of a dinner party, I stopped at a lobster seller in Chelsea Market in NYC. I asked for a six pound lobster. The pricing at the store is $9.95 a pound for small lobsters and $8.95 a pound for lobsters six pounds and up.

The lobster weighed (I’m not making this up), 5.97 pounds. For reference, that’s just less than a pound by the weight of a penny. Feed the lobster a plankton and it would be six pounds.

He started to ring me up at $9.95 a pound. I pointed out the price breakdown and the guy shrugged and said, “It doesn’t weight six pounds.”

Two co-workers came over and with precisely the same uncomprehending grin, repeated his point. I added a penny to the scale but they weren’t swayed.

So, the two questions are, “Do you think the owner wanted them to act this way?” and “Would they have acted differently if they were on camera?”

I believe that the best motivation is self-motivation. That teaching people the right thing to do is far more effective than intimidating them into acting out of fear.

Seth brings up the critical difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: if you can create a culture that encourages people to act on the basis of self-motivation, you’re likely to have good relations between workers, good customer service, and best of all, a place that churns out innovation. Why? Because intrinsic motivation leads to enjoyment, flow and meaning. Ask Honda or Cox.

Bringing cool stuff to life: 2004 TED Prize

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I’m obsessed with the process of bringing cool things to life. I admire the TED Prize, because it isn’t about being a genius or a superhero — it’s about doing great stuff. The 2004 winners are Bono, photo-artist Edward Burtynsky, and medical device pioneer Robert Fischell.

Some say that rockers are but court jesters, but some use their fame as a bully pulpit. Bono has done this; the TED site leaves us with one of his remarkable thoughts: "What are the blind spots of our age? It might be something as simple as our deep down refusal to believe that every human life has equal worth."



To my mind, the environmental issues facing us today are beyond comprehension. What do a billion people look like? What does it feel like to lose an organism forever? Photos by Burtynsky can help deliver the message in a way that breaks through the fuzz.

Many people create products which claim to change people’s lives, but which really only affect lifestyle. For example, an iPod is way cool, but it differs from my 80’s Walkman only by degree. Robert Fischell creates things that fundamentally change lives.  His work is the standard by which that statement must be judged.

metacool Thought of the Day

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“Research should be defined as doing something where half of the people think it’s impossible – impossible!  And half of them think hmmmmm, maybe that will work, right?  When there’s ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was, ‘Well, that’s nonsense.’  So what that means is that a true, creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.”

– Burt Rutan

Steve Jobs on Innovation

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"You need a very product-oriented culture. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. How are monopolies lost? Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly. [But] what’s the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself? So a different group of people starts to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. Then one day the monopoly expires, for whatever reason…but by then, the best product people have left or they are no longer listened to."
– Steve Jobs

Things which I believe drive this dynamic in organizations:

1) As Clay Christensen has noted, succcessful organizations drive for ever-increasing margins over time.  This dynamic forces changes in the organization’s internal mission and raises the profile and validity of sales and financial people.

2) People who do the creative work of product development are different from the people who do the routine (but very important) work of managing call centers, tracking accounts receivable, talking to shareholders, and keeping the lights on.  Thing is, routine people are more likely to get satisfaction from being managers, rather than from focusing on content, which is what creative people like to do.  So the routine people rise in the organization, mismanage the creative people, and nothing gets good gets created — witness Apple without Jobs.

3)  Tibor Kalman once said "success = boredom".  If a product line is becoming mature, and if the company is unwilling or unable to roll out new lines of products, the good product people will leave in search of more interesting challenges.  Who wants to be the guy trying to take another $0.01 of cost out of an already optimized mechanism? 

4) Product success drives financial success, which leads to going public, which leads to short-term financial pressures and the generation of a gigantic bureaucratic hairball.  That hairball tangles the creative product people and binds them, limits them.  As the rather creative fellow Richard Branson says, "If it’s a private company, you can get away with more. If it’s my money, then if I lose my money, no one else has been hurt by it."

Cranium Wisdom from Richard Tait

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Attended Stanford’s EDAY over the weekend, and had my hat knocked in the creek by the event’s final speaker, the Grand Poo-Bah of Cranium, Richard Tait.  The theme of EDAY was “the power of play,” so who better than a gaming company Grand Poo-Bah to tie a bow around things? 

Tait’s spiel focused on his own version of the 4 P’s: Passion, Productivity, Profitability, and Play.  Some particularly chewy nuggets:

Passion:

  • Lighten & Enlighten: that’s Cranium’s passion, and as a mission it infuses all their daily activities.
  • Invest time and energy in your culture: Cranium holds periodic “rodeos” where the group gets together to discuss cultural issues.  What’s going wrong and how can we improve things?
  • Encourage each member of your org to come to work each day with a point of view about what they bring to the party: Tait’s daily POV centers on passion, speed & urgency, and discovery.

Productivity:

  • Focus on innovation and marketing (metacool editorial: if you do them right, they’re one and the same): Everything else can and should be outsourced.  Drucker agrees, by the way.
  • When hiring for jobs that create value in the marketplace, hire for how people think and not for what they know:  Hiring for smarts, and renting experience when needed, is a great way to find (and retain) those knowledge workers capable of creating remarkable products.  To his credit, Tait acknowledged that for routine work (a concept I borrow from Bob Sutton, another EDAY speaker) like day-to day accounting, finance, and operations, you should go for experience.  Just make sure those folks are a cultural fit.  Actively shun the fun sponges who take delight in the creation of bureaucratic hairballs.

Profitability:

  • Operational rigor can empower, rather than distract, a creative organization:  Encouraging your entire workforce to actually understand EBITDA (as Cranium does) is impressive.  Setting that EBITDA reporting to a Bee Gees soundtrack takes things to setting eleven.  Creative people are adults, too, and they’re usually pretty smart.  They can understand EBITDA.
  • Never forget that customers are your best (and FREE) sales force:  Cranium made its limited marketing dollars work as hard as they could.  In fact, it sold its first million units without a dime of outbound marketing spend.  And people at Cranium do seemingly crazy things to win and retain passionate customers.  For example, Tait once delivered Cranium games on Christmas Day to customers on a shipping waitlist. 

Play:

  • Use the spirit of play to guide your product development process:  Cranium went from concept to reality in just six months using a philosophy of rapid prototyping (print out game boards drawn in PowerPoint) and fluid iteration (hold four user playtests a night, and modify the prototype between each one).
  • See the world with the mind of a child:  What is interesting?  What works particularly well?  What tastes and feels good?  Case in point, the Cranium color palette – which now informs the entire Cranium brand – was lifted from a roll of Lifesavers.  Classic.  Tasty.  Effective.
  • Enjoy yourself in the workplace, and enjoy what you do:  Tait clearly does, and his enthusiasm is infectious.  And he digs old 911’s, which is worth 50 bonus points.

Speaking of bonus items, here’s a charming PDF by Tait which nicely summarizes his thoughts on culture, meaning and innovation.  I’m still looking for my hat…

Download CraniumSecretSauce.pdf

Soichiro Honda on Enjoyment and Innovation

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"Each individual should work for himself. People will not sacrifice themselves for the company. They come to work at the company to enjoy themselves."  – Soichiro Honda


That Honda the company is a champion innovator is due in no small part to the culture created by Honda the founder.   

What I find so interesting about this quote from Mr. Honda is his focus on the concept of enjoyment.  When was the last time you heard any industry magnate, let alone a Japanese one, say it’s all about individual enjoyment, not about the greater good of the company?

Many business thinkers write about managing innovation, as if innovation were a thing.  But innovation is ultimately the expression of a set of behaviors originating in the individual.  So rather than focusing our energy on understanding the output of those individuals (innovation), we should think instead about how to lead those individuals so that they can be as innovative as possible.  Could creating a culture of innovation be as simple as cultivating a culture of enjoyment?  Mr. Honda says "yes": If you’re at Honda, then, the central task of leadership is about creating work that leads to enjoyment, and innovation will follow.  It’s not unlike the leadership philosophy of Bobby Cox.

But what does enjoyment mean?  Is the implication that work needs to be "fun", as in dot com fun?  Is it about air hockey tables and free M&M’s?  Should employees be walking around with inane smiles on their faces?  I don’t think so.  My guess is that Mr. Honda believed in the kind of enjoyment which leads to a state of flow.  Csikszentmihalyi (the originator of the concept of flow) wrote this illuminating discussion of enjoyment in his book Good Business:

The experience of happiness in action is enjoyment — the exhilarating sensation of being fully alive… Enjoyment, on the other hand, is not always pleasant, and it can be very stressful at times.  A mountain climber, for example, may be close to freezing, utterly exhausted, and in danger of falling into a bottomless crevasse, yet he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else…  At the moment it is experienced, enjoyment can be both physcially painful and mentally taxing; but because it involves a triumph over the forces of entropy and decay, it nourishes the spirit.

Nourishing the spirit.  Experiencing the thrill of triumphing over adversity.  Happiness in action. When was the last time you heard those words associated with managing innovation?  Next time someone in your workplace couches innovation in terms of by-the-numbers processes, jargon, and esoteric management theories, just ask them this simple question: how do you plan to enable people to enjoy their work? 

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Bobby Cox on Leadership

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Worthwhile has a nice post on the leadership style of Bobby Cox, manager of the Atlanta Braves:

1) Check your ego
2) Make your team shine in the field
3) Remember that things are supposed to be fun

If you’re in the business of making good stuff happen, I think these are great guidelines for getting the most out of your team, especially if that team is made up of knowledge workers.
Don’t go soft on deadlines, though.

Wynton Marsalis on What’s Important

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“You can reach a situation where things of intelligence and refinement and culture can be considered elite, and things that are crass and ignorant can be considered to be real and of the people; when you begin to have the mass of the populace believing that they should strive for something that’s not worth striving for, then tremendous amounts of energy goes into the worthless and the maintenance of that which is worthless.

That’s a battle we all fight, even within ourselves. You have to actively pursue knowledge. It’s out here for you. But you gotta go out and get it. You gotta want it. And you’ve gotta keep wanting it.”

— Wynton Marsalis

What if the CEO knew his products?

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I have a good friend who is an officer in the US Army.  He’s the Real Deal: immensely educated (engineering undergrad, Harvard MBA, plus multiple other graduate degrees), an elite athlete (each morning he outruns all the junior soldiers he works out with), and, as you can well imagine, highly motivated and disciplined.  But before you begin to think he’d be the last person you’d want to go to a ballgame with, realize that he’s also one of the most creative and original thinkers I’ve ever met, not to mention a very capable consumer of cool Corona beverages.  For example, I’ll never forget his story of manning a highway checkpoint as part of a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo: the afternoon was dragging on, the line of stopped cars growing ever longer, tempers flaring.  What would you do to diffuse the situation?  My friend had a portable field kitchen brought in ASAP and proceeded to serve up thousands of hot doughnuts, calming nerves and making friends via an awesomely creative use of soft power.

He’s also a tanker, meaning that he leads an organization of over a thousand individuals whose mission is to go to battle, if necessary, in tanks.  I remember comparing notes on what a typical workday looked like.  As you can imagine, ours were quite different.  His started with an intense physical workout, and then transitioned to a full 12 hours of harsh decision making and do-it-now leadership, after which he would be free to go home.  Except he wouldn’t.  No, as a hardcore tanker, he would stroll over to the maintenance garage for a few more hours of wrenching on tanks along with rank and file soldiers.  Why?  Partly because, as an engineer, he loves mechanical stuff.  And maybe there’s some stress relief in there.  But mostly because he recognizes that he is a much stronger leader of men when his way of knowing – understanding what it takes to keep of group of tanks and tankers running day after day – comes by doing.  For him, when to do is to know, there’s never a knowing-doing gap, and his leadership rings true and effective.

Think of my tanker buddy and ask yourself this: how would your own organization look, feel, and behave if its leadership really – really – understood what things were about?  What if they could demo any product as well as a frontline salesperson?  What if they could man the tech support helplines?  Screw that, let’s lower the bar limbo limbo to the floor and just ask: what if the CEO knew how to start up the product we make?

I’m an engineer by training, so I’m biased, but I’ve long believed that product companies are best run by engineers/people who grok stuff at a deep level.  Like Apple.  Toyota.  Porsche.  Amazon.  Or Honda… Honda makes arguably the best damn motors on the planet (eat your heart out Ferrari and BMW!) and they have a conspicuous habit of picking CEO’s from an elite pool of engineers who spent their formative 20’s wrenching on Formula 1 cars.  You better believe these guys know cars inside and out, and it shows in the very real value difference between even the most pedestrian Accord (wow!) and an average rental-crapwagon Ford Taurus. 

Consider this: last week Takeo Fukui, the CEO of Honda, shoehorned his derriere into a BAR-Honda Formula 1 car and proceeded to carve a few hot laps of Tochigi, the corporate R&D track, hitting 181 miles per hour. Few auto makers boast a CEO who can shift a manual gearbox, let alone demonstrate his company’s racing vehicles at speed.  For dessert Fukui straddled a RC211V Honda racing motorcycle and burned off a few more laps.  Any wonder why Honda makes such great stuff?

I have a feeling Takeo and my tanker friend would see eye-to-eye on all the important aspects of leading by knowing by doing.