This is the team that I am part of. We have great visions to make the world better. We certainly add value to our customers. Sometimes we even make money! But we always have FUN!!!

Came across this article written by Dilbert-creator Scott Adams. (thanks to Rich Huffman). Should make most policy makers, teachers and parents think.

Here is the full text:

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That’s like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

I speak from experience because I majored in entrepreneurship at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Technically, my major was economics. But the unsung advantage of attending a small college is that you can mold your experience any way you want.

There was a small business on our campus called The Coffee House. It served beer and snacks, and featured live entertainment. It was managed by students, and it was a money-losing mess, subsidized by the college. I thought I could make a difference, so I applied for an opening as the so-called Minister of Finance. I landed the job, thanks to my impressive interviewing skills, my can-do attitude and the fact that everyone else in the solar system had more interesting plans.

The drinking age in those days was 18, and the entire compensation package for the managers of The Coffee House was free beer. That goes a long way toward explaining why the accounting system consisted of seven students trying to remember where all the money went. I thought we could do better. So I proposed to my accounting professor that for three course credits I would build and operate a proper accounting system for the business. And so I did. It was a great experience. Meanwhile, some of my peers were taking courses in art history so they’d be prepared to remember what art looked like just in case anyone asked.

One day the managers of The Coffee House had a meeting to discuss two topics. First, our Minister of Employment was recommending that we fire a bartender, who happened to be one of my best friends. Second, we needed to choose a leader for our group. On the first question, there was a general consensus that my friend lacked both the will and the potential to master the bartending arts. I reluctantly voted with the majority to fire him.

But when it came to discussing who should be our new leader, I pointed out that my friend—the soon-to-be-fired bartender—was tall, good-looking and so gifted at b.s. that he’d be the perfect leader. By the end of the meeting I had persuaded the group to fire the worst bartender that any of us had ever seen…and ask him if he would consider being our leader. My friend nailed the interview and became our Commissioner. He went on to do a terrific job. That was the year I learned everything I know about management.

At about the same time, this same friend, along with my roommate and me, hatched a plan to become the student managers of our dormitory and to get paid to do it. The idea involved replacing all of the professional staff, including the resident assistant, security guard and even the cleaning crew, with students who would be paid to do the work. We imagined forming a dorm government to manage elections for various jobs, set out penalties for misbehavior and generally take care of business. And we imagined that the three of us, being the visionaries for this scheme, would run the show.

We pitched our entrepreneurial idea to the dean and his staff. To our surprise, the dean said that if we could get a majority of next year’s dorm residents to agree to our scheme, the college would back it.

It was a high hurdle, but a loophole made it easier to clear. We only needed a majority of students who said they planned to live in the dorm next year. And we had plenty of friends who were happy to plan just about anything so long as they could later change their minds. That’s the year I learned that if there’s a loophole, someone’s going to drive a truck through it, and the people in the truck will get paid better than the people under it.

The dean required that our first order of business in the fall would be creating a dorm constitution and getting it ratified. That sounded like a nightmare to organize. To save time, I wrote the constitution over the summer and didn’t mention it when classes resumed. We held a constitutional convention to collect everyone’s input, and I listened to two hours of diverse opinions. At the end of the meeting I volunteered to take on the daunting task of crafting a document that reflected all of the varied and sometimes conflicting opinions that had been aired. I waited a week, made copies of the document that I had written over the summer, presented it to the dorm as their own ideas and watched it get approved in a landslide vote. That was the year I learned everything I know about getting buy-in.

“Why do we make B students sit through the same classes as their brainy peers? That’s like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn’t it make sense to teach them something useful instead?”

For the next two years my friends and I each had a private room at no cost, a base salary and the experience of managing the dorm. On some nights I also got paid to do overnight security, while also getting paid to clean the laundry room. At the end of my security shift I would go to The Coffee House and balance the books.

My college days were full of entrepreneurial stories of this sort. When my friends and I couldn’t get the gym to give us space for our informal games of indoor soccer, we considered our options. The gym’s rule was that only organized groups could reserve time. A few days later we took another run at it, but this time we were an organized soccer club, and I was the president. My executive duties included filling out a form to register the club and remembering to bring the ball.

By the time I graduated, I had mastered the strange art of transforming nothing into something. Every good thing that has happened to me as an adult can be traced back to that training. Several years later, I finished my MBA at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. That was the fine-tuning I needed to see the world through an entrepreneur’s eyes.

If you’re having a hard time imagining what an education in entrepreneurship should include, allow me to prime the pump with some lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It’s unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it’s easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.

Fail Forward. If you’re taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you’re doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you’d be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn’t work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.

Conquer Fear. I took classes in public speaking in college and a few more during my corporate days. That training was marginally useful for learning how to mask nervousness in public. Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I’ve given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn’t a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

That’s my starter list for the sort of classes that would serve B students well. The list is not meant to be complete. Obviously an entrepreneur would benefit from classes in finance, management and more.

Remember, children are our future, and the majority of them are B students. If that doesn’t scare you, it probably should.

I have been always blessed with some of the strongest Advisory Boards for my business. The trick has been getting executives who are not potential customers but with great experience that my management team could be well served with. In one of those recent Advisory Board meetings a very interesting discussion came up. Which I thought is a great point of learning for me.

My management team started a discussion around how to create a very effective rewards and recognition system when you have very different kind of jobs (product development, services, sales etc).

Some of the advice we got was pretty insightful. First, most agreed that while we need to have programmatic methods, they tend to be fundamentally too broad to be effective.

Instead, the push was to understand that if employees are clamoring for more rewards and recognition from management/leadership, there is a larger message here. The organization is saying that the feedback mechanism is not often enough or strong enough.

In other words, if employees were to very often get feedback on (*) how what they are doing aligns to the larger plan for the organization (*) what they are doing well and (*) what course correction is required, their sense of alignment, contribution and participation would solve the root cause of the problem why they feel they are not being recognized.

It was also felt that this forum should give the employee an opportunity to give quick feedback to the manager on what the manager needs to provide/do to help the employee achieve his/her goals.

One board member talked about a 10-10 practice. Every two weeks he makes himself and all managers in his group sit with all direct reports for a 10 minute discussion on giving feedback – 20 minutes either way as described in the two preceding paragraphs.

Another member talked about a variation of the same being practiced in the whole company (large strategy consulting company).

That was a pretty interesting learning for me. Understanding the root cause of why employees feel they are not being rewarded or recognized enough.

Worthwhile idea to copy.

Do you have any experience on this? What has worked? What has not?

Rajib

Some of the leaders that I have admired most have had the ability to not only stay calm under stress, but continually be outright positive. And these leaders have been across all levels of an organization. Because they have been across all levels, I think this is more of a personality trait than something one necessarily acquires as they go up. However, I have no reason to believe that one cannot strive to be so, even if it does not come naturally.

Stress gets created when the observable results are at variance with what is desired. As organizational behavior will teach you, if that accountability comes without commensurate authority, that exacerbates the personal stress.

In today’s corporate environment (most of it at least), the demand for short term accountability is extremely high. The tolerance for failure – regardless of all high words of risk taking capability – is getting narrower and narrower. A lot of this is derived not necessarily from within the organization but the tough competitive environment and the fact that business is moving at lightning speed.

One unfortunate outcome is that when a perceived failure happens, the organization demands quick answers. Quick answers, no doubt, lead to simplistic conclusions. Add the tendency to arrive at simplistic conclusions and the above discussed tolerance for failure – and that leads to another dangerous behavior – finger pointing. This is derived from a deep rooted human tendency – “I am better than others; what I control performs better than something that I do not control.”

Finally, average human being finds it more convenient to name a person as the reason for failure than understand the true nuances of processes and constraints. First, it is easier, it is more convenient and it is something most people can relate to. Person A is an idiot – Ah! I get that. The complexity of understanding constraints – some written and some not written – some internal some external – that starts becoming too complex for us  This leads to a missed opportunity to drive true learnings for the organization.

Leaders have to be doubly vigilant not to fall into this pattern of behavior. Any organization learns quickly from the top. As human beings, we all want to be leaders. In reality, we all want to be led. We copy behavior from the top very fast – perhaps believing that compliance will lead to success. In the process, we amplify the behavior at the top.

Any sign of panic on the top and the dissonance in the org below – like a bunch of dispersed ants – is immediately visible. Any signs of finger pointing from the top and immediately the organization takes a cue.

A true leader needs to address issues from the position of poise and even handedness. A calming sense needs to pervade in the organization that is under stress. Giving the entire troop a sense of purpose that they are all in it together is of paramount importance. Regardless of the level of stress, they will need to stick together and emerge successful.

But above all be aware that this is just one more hurdle of many more to come in one’s career. Crossing hurdles require cool-headed thinking and an aura of positivity around oneself.

So how many such cool-headed leaders have you seen? I have been fortunate enough to see a few in my life.

I am not going to bore you by telling you why time management is important and all that. I suspect enough books have been written on this topic. (I always have wondered though how people focused on effective time management are supposed to read up all those books on effective time management J ). Instead, let me tell you a couple of observations on some of the executives that I have learnt from.

First – and this might surprise you – what to spend time on differs vastly from executive to executive (and I have filtered the ones that I consider are very successful). Some spend lot more time on understanding the details – some prefer to drive the strategy. Some spend more time with their directs, some spend less. Some consider spending time with employees after work improper time of their work and some make it a point to do so. Regardless of the usual story of “balance” and “do both” and all that, my observation is that the successful executives – knowingly or unknowingly choose what they want to spend time on. And usually this differs from one executive to another.

Second – and this will not surprise you – they are very disciplined about managing their time with the choices that they have made above. It is very easy to fill up one’s calendar – especially as you go up the hierarchy. There is always some crisis, there is always an important customer, there is always an important presentation and so on and so forth. The ones that I admire most have struck me with their ability to say “No” and question why they are getting involved in things that they should not.  That is undoubtedly a common thread between successful executives.

Third – and this is more empirical evidence than I have taken the time to observe in detail – it seems that some amount of ability to compartmentalize your time and thoughts is important to be able to succeed. Some of the best ones had an uncanny knack of being able to switch gears yet grasp the “linking points” when they existed.

Finally – there is no correlation as I have seen between success and how much time some of the best executives spend on work. There are the ones who are absolutely obsessed with spending as much time as they can on work related items and there are the ones who draw boundaries and stick to them. While it is very difficult to compare two executives since they tend to differ so much from one another, I can definitely make the following observation thinking thru all the great executives I got close to – customers, partners and employers: In the longer term, the differences they made to their companies was very little to do with how much time was spent but a lot more to do with what they did with their time.

I am sure you will have something to share with me on this…

The other day, I had a pretty engrossing breakfast meeting with a top executive of a large public company. It was engrossing because we started debating  – what turned out to be a really interesting –  topic. I would love to hear your views on this.

The central question was – What should be the perspective that a top executive in a company should have? That he/she is going to be in the company for a long time? Or that he/she is going to be around for some stipulated period of time (say 5-6 years)?

As we debated, we found a lot of pros and cons on both sides. Presumably, the executive has shown somewhere in the resume that he/she has held at least one job for a pretty long time (8-12 years, say). So, that, at least proves that he/she is not a job hopper or that he/she bailed out everytime the wind blew unfavorably.

After that what?

If the executive joins the company thinking “I will be here for 5-6 years. I need to bring in the maximum effect I possibly can in that time”, the advantage is that

(*) the executive will have a certain level of impatience that is required to continuously push the organization

(*) will have little sense of job protection and is therefore probably not going to be too shy of picking battles

(*) just like a doctor’s advise “you will die in 2 years” quickly sets priorities in one’s life, a sense of “end date” will push the executive to focus on the right priorities

On the other hand,

(*) the executive might come across as being “not loyal” to the company or the cause

Let’s take another executive who joins the company with the assumption he/she will be there for the long haul (or even retire from the company). Chances are that the executive

(*) will be more patient about bringing some larger changes which inherently take a long time (especially if they require culture change in the company)

(*) will be valued as loyal to the cause of the company and

(*) inherently will be interested in learning different aspects of the company (with the assumption that he/she will see a career path thru various different positions in the company)

On the flip side,

(*) a sense of job preservation may drive the executive to acquiesce/avoid uncomfortable decisions/situations

The truth is most executives overestimate their ability to drive what their “end date” will be (more often than not , I have seen companies drive this calendar for them). Still, it would be interesting to understand from the company and the individual’s point of view what would be the right strategy under what circumstances.

Most importantly, the question is what perspective should they have? In reality, they may land up staying longer or shorter depending upon many other variables.

In an interesting twist to the debate, we also wondered, if we were the CEO of the company, which kind of executives would we hire? For what kind of positions?

Thoughts?

I realize the apparent implication of the subject line – that you have to choose between customer or innovation makes little sense – in fact, they are inextricably intertwined. All innovation needs to be driven for the customers and preferably with the customers. In fact, I have often held the belief that most innovation happens at the edges of the system. (where your system and the customer system intersect).

That said, imagine that you have just taken over a team or division or company and you realize that there is a grounds up rebuilding of culture you need to do. Across most industries, most companies and most teams, it is safe to say customer focus and growth thru innovation are going to be two of a few underpinnings on which you are likely to rebuild your organization.

If you have tried culture changes in any large situations, you also know the danger of pushing too many levers at the same time. Culture change is less about words, powerpoints and dashboards – and more about sustained example setting, public reward and penalty system and above all driving clarity on why change. Such efforts require both focus and perseverance.

Where would you put your relatively larger focus on – make the organization customer focused and enable innovation to happen thru that or put larger focus on accentuating growth thru innovation and use the customer as the litmus test thru the process?

I first faced this problem thirteen years back when I had to rebuild up a whole technology organization which had to fight the inertia of the existing players (who had been successful for some period of time). While it is dangerous to draw generalizations, I have tilted towards focusing on building the customer oriented culture first. And innovation was an inevitable result (needed work and processes to channelize it though). I will probably do the same again.

Thoughts?

Over the years, if there is one thing I have changed a lot on, it probably is this – how close I choose to become with my direct reports on the personal front. If you know me, you probably know that I am one of those gregarious persons who loves to talk and have been accused of fairly capable of listening to the interests of the other party. My personal Rolodex of about 10,000 people that I carry with me (about 2,000 of them get birthday wishes from me – handwritten emails – none of the automated ecards etc) is a reasonably good testimony to how quickly I can make friends.

For most of the early part of my career, I built great personal relationships with my direct reports. Our families would be close and we would share a lot of social events together. I have seen that model work for a lot of people too. In fact, I have observed how one of the CEOs that I admire a lot takes time over the weekend often to golf or hunt or what have you with his direct reports and sometimes with people deeper in the organization. I have no doubt in my mind that this has resulted in not only a great rapport but also a deep commitment from the people. In fact, most people that I know who still report to the CEO have the greatest loyalty.

However, for me, I had a change of heart probably sometime 7 or 8 years back. While it was great to know that we were a committed team, I started getting severe doubts on inherent human weakness of letting liking or not liking shrouding professional judgment of a person. I take great pride in my ability to differentiate these two. But I started reminding myself that I would be fooling myself if I thought I was above being human.  I also started thinking hard about whether this style of leadership might give rise to too much of  “conformance”. As a side story, I had an almost instinctive reaction to this from that time – anybody who has worked with me for the last 7-8 years will agree on one thing – I impulsively take the opposing view – regardless of what the arguer’s view is. (It has stood me in good stead – but that is a story of another day).

I remember having read a book around that time – cannot recollect the name – about true leaders looking for “performance, not conformance”.

And that is when I started the process of slowly weaning myself away from getting too close to my new direct reports on a personal front. It is very difficult for me to tell you – without running a control experiment whether I am better off or not. But I can tell you that I feel very comfortable that I have stonewalled some amount of the human fallacies. Of course, on the personal front, I missed getting to know some really great human beings closely. And as the 10,000 Rolodex entries shows you, personal relationships far outlive professional relationships.

Have you ever faced this conundrum? If so, what did you do? And why?

Rajib

This evening I got this email from an old colleague of mine who lost his job. The reason he wrote the email was to tell his old friends that he was able to get a great job – even in these tough times – and he is having a great time – professionally and personally.

That was a great story. Something most of us can relate to. We don’t like to get outside our zone of comfort. And yet, when we get kicked out of it, we often find that we can do even better in the new circumstances.

We build our zones of comfort and like staying there because that is where we can drive most value – or so we perceive. We believe we are an expert and have experience in that area. But above all, we hate change. There is nothing like getting “settled down” that makes us feel that we “know what we are doing”. (BTW, as an aside, we all believe that we personally love change – it is just that everybody else in the world hates changes).

I am sure you can think of a few cases in your life when you got pushed out of that zone – suddenly and definitely not following your calendar. And most of the time you look back and say – Wow, that was the best thing ever happened to me. I learnt lot more. I now understand lot more. No doubt, when the change happened we felt very uncomfortable, to say the least.

Of course, we do not want the environment to create the changes for us always. The trick is how do we incrementally but surely, keep pushing ourselves outside our zone of comfort? So as not to let us settle down. So as to make sure we are learning continuously and adapting to the environment. So as to keep our reflexes and judgment as sharp as ever.

I suspect it is tougher than it sounds. But I guess the best leaders make a practice of pushing themselves beyond their current “boxes” – so to speak.

Rajib

This evening I got this email from an old colleague of mine who lost his job. The reason he wrote the email was to tell his old friends that he was able to get a great job – even in these tough times – and he is having a great time – professionally and personally.

That was a great story. Something most of us can relate to. We don’t like to get outside our zone of comfort. And yet, when we get kicked out of it, we often find that we can do even better in the new circumstances.

We build our zones of comfort and like staying there because that is where we can drive most value – or so we perceive. We believe we are an expert and have experience in that area. But above all, we hate change. There is nothing like getting “settled down” that makes us feel that we “know what we are doing”. (BTW, as an aside, we all believe that we personally love change – it is just that everybody else in the world hates changes).

I am sure you can think of a few cases in your life when you got pushed out of that zone – suddenly and definitely not following your calendar. And most of the time you look back and say – Wow, that was the best thing ever happened to me. I learnt lot more. I now understand lot more. No doubt, when the change happened we felt very uncomfortable, to say the least.

Of course, we do not want the environment to create the changes for us always. The trick is how do we incrementally but surely, keep pushing ourselves outside our zone of comfort? So as not to let us settle down. So as to make sure we are learning continuously and adapting to the environment. So as to keep our reflexes and judgment as sharp as ever.

I suspect it is tougher than it sounds. But I guess the best leaders make a practice of pushing themselves beyond their current “boxes” – so to speak.

Rajib