How to alienate a country

Have you seen the letter that Titan International CEO Morry Taylor - who so delights in his nickname "The Grizz" that he features it in his bio on the Titan corporate website - wrote to the French minister of industry on Feb. 8? It's quite an addition to annals of corporate communiques:

Dear Mr. Montebourg: 

I have just returned to the United States from Australia where I have been for the past few weeks on business; therefore, my apologies for not answering your letter dated 31 January 2013. 

I appreciate your thinking that your Ministry is protecting industrial activities and jobs in France.  I and Titan have a 40-year history of buying closed factories and companies, losing millions of dollars and turning them around to create a good business, paying good wages. Goodyear tried for over four years to save part of the Amiens jobs that are some of the highest paid, but the French unions and French government did nothing but talk. 

I have visited the factory a couple of times. The French workforce gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that’s the French way! 

You are a politician so you don’t want to rock the boat. The Chinese are shipping tires into France - really all over Europe - and yet you do nothing. The Chinese government subsidizes all the tire companies. In five years, Michelin won’t be able to produce tires in France. France will lose its industrial business because its government is more government. 

Sir, your letter states you want Titan to start a discussion. How stupid do you think we are? Titan is the one with money and talent to produce tires. What does the crazy union have? It has the French government. The French farmer wants cheap tires. He does not care if the tires are from China or India and these governments are subsidizing them. Your government doesn’t care either: “We’re French!” 

The US government is not much better than the French. Titan had to pay millions to Washington lawyers to sue the Chinese tire companies because of their subsidizing. Titan won. The government collects the duties. We don’t get the duties, the government does. 

Titan is going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one Euro per hour and ship all the tires France needs. You can keep the so-called workers. Titan has no interest in the Amien North factory. 

Best regards, 

Maurice M. Taylor, Jr.

Chairman and CEO

The downside of this missive for Titan is pretty obvious: It alienates the French government, which can make it difficult to do business in the country; it insults the French, who buy Titan products; and it suggests that the company has an arrogant leader who can't curb his tongue, with all the problems that implies for investors, business partners, etc.

I assume The Grizz saw some benefit to sending such an incoherent rant, but I can't imagine why he just didn't write: "Thanks so much for thinking of us for this opportunity, but it isn't something we can pursue at the moment."

s+b's Best Business Books 2012

The annual Best Business Books special section is now online at strategy+business. We've got a great team of expert essayists, who chose and reviewed a terrific stack of books...in my not-so-humble opinion. Here's my intro to the section and the best of the best lineup. Read the rest here...

New and improved! This promise gets slapped on business books as often as on household cleansers. Many books are new each year, but those with genuine insight and value are very rare indeed.

We take the time to find them. In strategy+business’s Best Business Books 2012, our team of distinguished experts — some veterans of this annual special section, namely James O’Toole, Sally Helgesen, Phil Rosenzweig, and “Z” Holly, and some newcomers, Alice Schroeder, J. Philip Lathrop, and Shaun Holliday — review 21 tomes published between the autumn of 2011 and the autumn of 2012 that fulfill their promise.

Be sure to take a close look at our Top Shelf selections — our reviewers’ picks as the best of this year’s best business books. They include a new appraisal of Dwight David Eisenhower that will prompt you to consider your own effectiveness as a leader, a realistic plan for improving healthcare that eschews political rhetoric for practical solutions, an exploration of cloud computing that gets beyond the surface technological story to look more deeply at how it will change business practices, and four more books that merit your time and attention.

Here's the Top Shelf selections (lifted off the s+b website). Congrats to the authors! 

	Biography Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith (Random House, 2012)
	Strategy The New Emerging Market Multinationals: Four Strategies forDisrupting Markets and Building Brands by Amitava Chattopadhyay and Rajeev Batra, with Aysegul Ozsomer (McGraw-Hill, 2012)
	Marketing Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies by Jim Stengel (Crown Business, 2011)
	Innovation Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think about Risk, Innovation, Scale, and Success by Thomas M. Koulopoulos (Bibliomotion, 2012)
	Healthcare Healthcare Beyond Reform: Doing It Right for Half the Cost by Joe Flower (Productivity Press, 2012)
	Organizational Culture Productive Workplaces: Dignity, Meaning, and Community in the 21st Century: 25th Anniversary Edition by Marvin R. Weisbord (Jossey-Bass, 2012)
	Capitalism The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt (Pantheon, 2012)

            

Killer quotes #2

 

 

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"

--attributed to Winston Churchill 

Journalistic objectivity?

I started browsing an advance copy of a new book - Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012 - that collects all of the coverage of Warren Buffett in Fortune magazine over the past six decades. It was put together by Carol Loomis, whose first paragraph in the book's preface struck me as odd. Here it is:

Because I have long been the chief writer about Warren Buffett at Fortune, which for decades has covered him more closely than any other business publication, I have often been asked whether I'm not going to branch out and write a Buffett biography. I have always said no, sure beyond a doubt that a writer who is a good friend of the subject does not make a good biographer. And I have indeed been a close friend of Warren's for more than forty years, a shareholder in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, for almost that long, and the pro bono editor of his annual letter to shareholders for thirty-five. All of those facts can be accommodated in my Fortune articles about Buffett, simply by my informing the reader that they exist. But they are not a firm base for a wide-ranging personal and professional biography, in which there should be considerable distance between writer and subject. Its absence in this case settled the question.

I don't quite follow the logic here. Being a close friend of Buffett precludes Loomis from writing a bio about him, but not writing about him in Fortune?

The other interesting thing is how adroitly Buffett and a few other businesspeople - Jack Welch and the late Steve Jobs come to mind - handle the press by picking out a favored few, who they then treat as friends and grant insider access. I wonder how much that has contributed to their reputations and whether there's a lesson in that for CEOs?

The Dalai Lama came to town

I was lucky to get a chance to see the 14th Dalai Lama just down the street at the College of William & Mary yesterday. He gave a terrific talk -- informal, humorous, and inspiring -- on the need to practice compassion and its power to change the world and our lives. You can hear it here.

I particularly liked what he said about the importance of making thoughtful and independent decisions of our own:

"We must study reality. The mind must be calm, then it can carry investigation or research more objectively. If there’s too much anger, suspicion, the mind is already one-sided and cannot see objectively."

"Investigate, experiment, do not easily accept."

Spring training tips

In 2006, the St. Louis Cardinals hired Jason Selk as its first Director of Mental Training. The team had pitching, batting, and fielding coaches, but the players also needed to learn how to set goals, focus on their priorities, stay positive, be disciplined, and win. They went on to win their first World Series in 20 years.

Since then Selk has written a couple of books detailing his approach to high personal performance: 10-Minute Toughness: The Mental Training Program for Winning Before the Game Begins
and Executive Toughness: The Mental-Training Program to Increase Your Leadership Performance. And publicist Cathy Lewis just sent along his five timely tips for execs who want to up their games:

Watch your swing, forget the home run. If you focus on your target, such as finishing the report, making the sale, or acquiring the new client, you may never get there. Pay attention to your process instead. Identify those daily goals that have the greatest influence on your performance and, therefore, your success. If your aim is to double your client load in one year, then figure out three specific tasks, or process goals, you need to complete each day that will help you reach that ultimate target. Then be relentless and consistent about completing your three process goals every day.

Don't take your eye off the ball. Many high-performing businesspeople believe they can multitask and still maintain focus. The American Psychological Association cites a study showing that multitasking leads to as much as a 40 percent drop in productivity. Recent research from Stanford University found that multitaskers are less productive than their single-minded counterparts, and also suffer from weaker self-control. Regain control of your performance. While completing the three essential tasks you identified above, turn off your cell phone and shut down your email.

Be your own ref. If you want to be more productive, you need to establish your own limits--your "not to-do" list. This might include counterproductive tasks such as responding to company emails during family time, talking to clients after 3:30 p.m., or not saying yes right away to a new project, but giving your answer the next day, after you've slept on it. Be sure that you are scheduling your calendar rather than allowing your calendar to schedule you.

Get R&R between workouts. Nearly 4 out of 10 workers are regularly fatigued, according to a recent study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Lack of sleep causes fatigue, and that's a productivity killer. In fact, the rate of lost productivity for workers with fatigue was 66 percent, compared with 26 percent for workers without fatigue. Fatigued workers lost an average of 5.6 hours per week of production time. Make rest, rejuvenation, and 7-9 hours of sleep a priority.

Listen to your body. When professional athletes try to push through the pain, they end up on the DL. In the workplace, this is known as "extreme working," and it results in lower performance. New research found that 69 percent of extreme workers--super high achievers who regularly work 60-80 hours a week--admit that their extreme working habits undermine their health. Most of these workers can't sustain this level of performance, and end up burning out, just like promising athletes who have to sit on the bench all season or retire early because of injuries.

Approaching thought leadership

One of the major benefits of working as a senior editor for Booz & Company's strategy+business is the opportunity to work with its editor-in-chief, Art Kleiner. Art is a leading business writer and editor - he's worked with business thinkers like Peter Senge, Arie de Geus,and Noel Tichy.

When I first started working with Art, he told me about his simple, but hardly simplistic, approach to analyzing thought leadership, which uses four questions, or orientations:

• What is your purpose?
• What research is the work based on, and how credible is it?
• Who is your audience?
• What is the story?

The other day, Art elaborated on this analytical framework in a webinar for Leading News, an online leadership community created by Patricia Wheeler and Marshall Goldsmith. If you're associated with creating thought leadership or aspire to become a thought leader, the audio replay is well worth your time (listen here: http://ow.ly/8U4cp). Art was also kind enough to provide a great deck on thought leadership, which accompanied the talk (see http://slidesha.re/zAuu3v).

Isaacson's Jobs

Everybody has reviewed Walter Isaacson's bio Steve Jobs and rightly so - it's a terrific book about a highly successful businessman and a highly flawed person. Unsurprisingly, one of the best reviews was Malcolm Gladwell's for The New Yorker. He pegged Jobs as tweaker rather than a inventor.

The book is full of great stories, but the one that I can't get out of my mind isn't about Jobs. It's about a guy named Ron Wayne, an engineer at Atari, to whom Jobs and Wozniak gave 10% of Apple when they formed it on April 1, 1976. Here goes...

Wayne then got cold feet. As Jobs started planning to borrow and spend more money, he recalled the failure of his own company. He didn't want to go through that again. Jobs and Wozniak had no personal assets, but Wayne (who worried about a global financial Armageddon) kept gold coins hidden in his mattress. Because they had structured Apple as a simple parnership rather than a corporation, the partners would be personally liable for the debts, and Wayne was afraid potential creditors would go after him. So he returned to the Santa Clara County office just eleven days later with a "statement of withdrawal" and an amendment to the partnership agreement. "By virtue of a re-assessment of understandings by and between all parties," it began, "Wayne shall hereinafter cease to function in the status of Partner." It noted that in payment for his 10% of the company, he received $800, and shortly afterward $1,500 more.

Had he stayed on and kept his 10% stake, at the end of 2010 it would have been worth approximately $2.6 billion.

s+b's Best Business Books 2011

The annual Best Business Books special section (read or download it here) was published by strategy+business this week. I edited the 7 essays and contributed this opening:

In 2001, when strategy+business published its first Best Business Books section, an irrationally exuberant investment bubble had recently popped and the business world was coping with a global recession. Now, as this feature enters its second decade, another irrationally exuberant investment bubble has popped and the global recession is back with greater ferocity. Apparently there is some truth to the loosely translated epigram of French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Although they cover a wide variety of topics and fields, just about all of the books featured in the seven essays ahead are rife with dissatisfaction. Many of their authors have tracked down root causes of the destruction of economic value and prescribed radical solutions for them. Judging by the fact that the expert essayists we recruited to cull this year’s stack of business books chose these particular titles, it’s fair to assume that they too would welcome change that alters the status quo.

Professor of business ethics James O’Toole, who has contributed an unbroken chain of insightful annual essays since 2001, leads off with books that illuminate the social role of business. Karr-like, he finds that for all the change we experience, the defining characteristics of “good” companies remain the same over time — as does the inability of leaders to sustain them.

Next, IMD professor Phil Rosenzweig brings his sharp eye for flaws in business logic to his survey of this year’s books on strategy. He chooses three books that eschew formulaic strategic approaches to focus on the fundamental questions executives must consider as they decide the direction of their company.

David K. Hurst, author and our regular Books in Brief reviewer, takes on the always-packed shelves of new books on management. His picks illuminate the struggle for the future of Western management practice and thought — and suggest the kinds of changes, and their magnitude, that may be needed to ensure that we move beyond business as usual.

Award-winning financial journalist David Warsh picks the year’s best books on economics. He discovers many worthy forward-looking books, and focuses on one in particular that describes the oncoming mash-up of national economies, providing what may prove to be a durable framework for making sense of a global economy that will soon be four times its current size.

Journalist Catharine P. Taylor brings two decades of perspective to her roundup of the year’s best books on marketing. She finds a trio of compelling books that reject conventional marketing “window dressing” for more socially responsible and engaging approaches, but adopting such approaches would clearly require some corporate reinvention.

We placed this year’s choices for best leadership books in the capable hands of Barbara Kellerman, a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In her first best business books essay, Kellerman bypasses leadership theory for leaders’ lives, picking two biographies of American presidents and a presidential memoir that illuminate four lessons for better understanding executive effectiveness.

Finally, strategy+business contributing editor Michael Schrage of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and London’s Imperial College returns to our pages with an essay on the best books on technology. His choices broaden our understanding of how people and technology interact and coevolve, creating innovation ecosystems in the process.

Here are the year’s best business books. I hope you find them as worthy as we do and take some of their ideas to heart. If you do, we might not be reliving this same cyclical chaos 10 years hence.

Be Our Guest - 10th Anniversary Edition

Here's a brief article from D23, the Disney Fan Club, announcing the publication of the revised and expanded edition of Be Our Guest earlier this month. The book has been amazingly successful (over 150,000 copies sold), which tells you something about Disney's expertise at delivering quality service and their ability to market their products.

Ten years ago, Ted Kinni’s book Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service pulled back the curtain to give readers a look at how Walt Disney Parks and Resorts does business.

Based on DI programs and extensive interviews with their clients, Be Our Guest showcases how Disney builds its entire organization around customers, or in Disney parlance, guests. Now, 150,000 copies later, the Disney Publishing Worldwide book is back on store shelves, freshly updated in time to help celebrate DI’s 25th anniversary.

“The interesting thing about this edition is that the Company itself has grown and entered a lot of different businesses since the first edition,” Ted says. “Because of this, there’s now a whole new range of examples and enhancements to the book.” He cites growth in retail stores, the Cruise Line, travel businesses, and a more global Parks presence. “This book represents a more refined quality service approach that DI has been able to develop these last 10 years,” he says. “When you think of customer service, Disney immediately pops into your mind. It’s really amazing how long Disney has excelled in customer service and how it’s built a successful organization around it.”

I'm working on a second book for Disney Institute now. It's really a dream gig working for a client that has so much great content and such a terrific track record. More on the new book when we get closer to the publication date later next year.

Bottling customer experience

For a couple of years now, I've been editing a monthly feature on the strategy+business website named Author's Choice, in which one author introduces an excerpt from another author's book, but just got around to introducing one myself. It's from a really good new book by the co-founders of Method Products that explains how they built a successful consumer packaged goods company in one of the most competitive product niches - household cleansers. Here's the intro:

The best customer experiences tend to come from companies with major service components, like Disney and Ritz-Carlton. Their business models place them face-to-face with customers, and their fortunes rise and fall on their ability to provide compelling experiences, as Starbucks discovered a couple of years ago. But most product companies, especially those that don’t sell directly to end-users, don’t think quite as rigorously about customer experience.
Enter Method Products. Method is one of those delightfully quirky entrepreneurial stories. In the late 1990s, two 24-year-old guys — an ad man and a climate researcher — take off on a ski weekend and decide that the home cleaning products industry is ripe for a shakeup. Never mind that it’s a mature, relatively stagnant market dominated by powerful brand names like Procter & Gamble and the Clorox Company. Never mind that everybody else is starting e-businesses. Never mind that they are two 24-year-old guys on a ski weekend talking about cleaning products. By 2010, their privately held company is generating annual revenues somewhere north of US$200 million; it counts major retailers, including Target, Whole Foods, and Auchan, among its accounts; and the big dogs are tracking it.
How did Method do it? One way, as detailed in the excerpt below from the new book by Method cofounders Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, was by zeroing in on the abysmal experience associated with so many home cleansers, such as the eye-tearing, nose-burning, skin-irritating sensations that can transform a minor decision about who is going to clean the bathroom into a domestic negotiation of epic proportions...read the excerpt here

MacArthur in The Washington Post

It was cool to see No Substitute for Victory pop up in The Washington Post's "On Leadership" blog . They published the following excerpt from getAbstract's summary of the book:

The stereotypical military general wields authority like a blunt instrument: Issue an order and it's followed. The reality of military leadership is more complex, as this intriguing study of General Douglas MacArthur shows. MacArthur took a deliberate, nuanced approach to inspiring his troops. His arsenal included motivation, knowledge, intimidation, praise and self-deprecation. Authors Theodore and Donna Kinni combine a short biography, compelling anecdotes and a keen understanding of MacArthur's career and personality to build this episodic analysis of his approach to strategy, motivation and management. They include relevant study questions after each chapter. getAbstract recommends this to managers who need to take their leadership skills to boot camp and to those who enjoy good military tales.

MacArthur’s strategic rules
Douglas MacArthur was born in 1880 into an Army family. He served in World War I, became the head of West Point and served in World War II. At 70, General MacArthur remained a force in world affairs as the leader of U.S. troops in Korea. He always employed strategic skills and concepts that still offer useful guidance to managers:

"Define and pursue victory" – In any endeavor, the definition of success can differ. If you don't have a clear definition of victory, you cannot win. In Korea, MacArthur knew that he had to outline victory clearly, although this ultimately cost him his job. President Harry Truman defined victory as a sullen stalemate. MacArthur defined it as absolute victory; his criticism caused Truman to relieve him from duty. Korea today remains divided; North Korea remains an international political problem.

"Understand the situation" – As a young officer, MacArthur gained a reputation as a leader who went into battle with his troops. He wanted to get to the front so he could evaluate events for himself. Later, when his rank made it hard for him to accompany the troops, he built an intelligence-gathering team that reported directly to him.

"Use every available means" – MacArthur knew he couldn't fight today's war with yesterday's strategies, so he got creative. When he had to move forces from Australia to the Philippines during WWII, he did not let WWI logistics hold him back. Hampered by shortages of supplies and men, he hatched a "triphibious" approach, combining ground troops with air and naval forces. Stretching scarce supplies was his trademark. Short of supplies in 1947, he created "Operation Roll-Up" to refurbish leftover WWII gear in Japanese factories. This reclamation project armed U.S. troops for the Korean War. MacArthur became known for doing "more with less."

“Manage the environment” – In Papua, New Guinea, MacArthur's men were decimated by an unexpected enemy: malaria. Most of his troops were ill. He formed a task force to tackle the epidemic and soon greatly reduced infection rates, while Japanese troops continued to suffer from rampant malaria. "Nature is neutral in war," MacArthur later wrote, although he noted elsewhere that the army that adapts to the terrain wins.

“Utilize surprise" – Unpredictability was a MacArthur hallmark. He attacked the least obvious places, only after seeming to prepare for an assault elsewhere. Trapped on Corregidor, he escaped not by submarine – the most obvious method – but by unheard-of PT boats. He sent troops into heavily Japanese-fortified Manila to free U.S. prisoners of war. He figured no one would expect him to broach an armed city…

Click here to read on and receive a free summary of this book courtesy of getAbstract, the world's largest online library of business book summaries . (Available through June 1, 2011.)

Orwell on writing

George Orwell - author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, you know the guy - took on the doublespeak that passes for political prose in a 1946 essay titled "Politics and the English Language." He offered six rules for writing clearly that all of us would do well to follow:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

SPC and healthcare

I think Atul Gawande, surgeon, New Yorker staff writer, MacArthur Award winner, etc., etc., is the best healthcare writer around for two reasons. First, his writing epitomizes the best New Yorker nonfiction, which I’ve been reading ever since cutting my teeth on John McPhee’s inquires into everything from Bill Bradley’s basketball chops to birch-bark canoes. Second, and more important, Gawande, unlike many writers who approach healthcare as proverbial blind men, sees the whole elephant. He looks at the woes of U.S. healthcare from a Deming-like systemic perspective that would behoove anyone concerned with healthcare reform anywhere in the world. Remember W. Edwards Deming?

Gawande’s most recent foray into the healthcare wilds, “The Hot Spotters" takes us to Camden, New Jersey, where a family physician named Jeffrey Brenner got the city’s three main hospitals to give him access to their medical billing records and analyzed the data on a desktop computer. He discovered that “just one percent of the hundred thousand people who made use of Camden’s medical facilities accounted for thirty per cent of [the city’s entire healthcare] costs.”

Brenner then set up a program to provide these “super-utilizers” of healthcare with greater attention and more education. The results: Over the long term, the hospital visits of the first 36 patients in the program were reduced by 40 percent per month and their average total monthly hospital bill dropped by 56 percent from $1.2 million to just over $500,000. Gawande points out that the net savings are lower (because of the extra attention these patients need from primary care physicians, among other things), “but they remain, almost certainly, revolutionary.” Clearly, if they could be extrapolated over Camden’s 1,000 one percenters, they could put a real dent in the city’s overall healthcare costs.

Gawande says Brenner’s program is “a strange new approach to health care: to look for the most expensive patients in the system and then direct resources and brainpower toward helping them.” This “new” approach is, of course, classic statistical process control – analyze your process outcomes, pick out the biggest variations from the mean, and address them. It’s SOP for manufacturers. If it was for healthcare systems, too, lots of low-hanging fruit would surely be revealed. But healthcare systems aren’t like manufacturing plants and their supply chains.

The major players in healthcare – doctors, hospitals, and insurers – are drowning in data, but they aren’t sharing it. The fact that Brenner got three hospitals to hand him their medical records is nothing short of amazing. And if providers and payors did start pooling and analyzing their patient data, who’s going to address the outliers that are revealed? Brenner had to scare up grants to run his program because, as Gawande writes, “that’s not how the health-insurance system is built.” That alone seems like a pretty good argument for rebuilding it.

Beauty and the beast

Tina Brown's Newsweek has an interesting new back page feature -- a guest column called My Favorite Mistake. It's probably going to turn out to be a back-handed way for famous people to stroke their own egos. But I got a kick out of the inaugural column which featured this story from movie mogul Harvey Weinstein:

One of my all-time classics happened when I took a plane to England and ran into Kate Moss and Linda Evangelista on the flight. They were both dating friends of mine and couldn’t have been happier to see me. They wanted to initiate me, as I was a two-pack-a-day smoker, into their habit of smoking in the bathroom on the plane. So, whenever one of them was there, I got away with it. But the one time I tried it myself, I got caught. I said to the attendant, “When I smoked with Kate Moss, you never busted me,” and he replied with the magic words: “You are no Kate Moss.” Could there be a truer statement? They nearly arrested me, and I had to go to court and pay a small fortune for my activities...read the rest here

Customer experience reading list

I wrote a "knowledge review" discussing my picks for the essential books on the topic of customer experience that appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of strategy+business, but I forgot to mention it here. So, belatedly, here's the article opening set in my adopted home town, a link to the rest, and the book list:

Greetings from Williamsburg, Va., an outpost on the new frontier called the experience economy. Well, maybe not so new. John D. Rockefeller Jr., the only son of Senior, who was, of course, the founder of Standard Oil and an iconic figure in the rise of the unfettered industrial economy, began buying up this sleepy Tidewater town in the 1920s. Junior’s vision: Create a living museum that would protect the heritage of the United States and transport everyone who paid the price of admission back to the revolutionary 1770s to experience colonial life, right down to the horse manure.

Colonial Williamsburg, the restored capital of England’s Virginia colony, has attracted tens of millions of visitors since then, including long-reigning Queen Elizabeth II, who visited her ancestral fiefdom first in 1957 and again, 50 years later, in 2007. It also spawned an entirely new local economy based on feeding, lodging, and entertaining all those visitors and providing housing and services for people who found jobs there, as well as for former tourists who decided, as I did, that it would be a nice place to live. The entire greater Williamsburg area is a testament to the transformative power of a compelling customer experience...read the rest here

Here are the books covered in the article:

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Harvard Business School Press, 1999)

Bernd H. Schmitt, Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands (Free Press, 1999)

Lewis P. Carbone, Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again (FT Press, 2004)

Leonard L. Berry and Kent D. Seltman, Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic: Inside One of the World’s Most Admired Service Organizations (McGraw-Hill, 2008)

Lior Arussy, Customer Experience Strategy: The Complete Guide from Innovation to Execution (4i, 2010)

Gosia Glinska, James H. Gilmore, and Marian Chapman Moore, “The Geek Squad Guide to World Domination: A Case for the Experience Economy,” (Darden Business Publishing, 2009), DVD

Jeanne Bliss, Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action
(Jossey-Bass, 2006)

Management ala Google?

Adam Bryant wrote a good article in today's business section of The New York Times. It appears that Google, which has been promoting people into management based on their technical skills, ended up with a bunch of managers who were lousy at managing people. Go figure!

This situation gave rise to Project Oxygen, which sounds like a pretty exhaustive analytical study of Google employees aimed at discovering how they want their bosses to behave. The findings, as reported in the Times, revealed the following 8 behaviors in priority order:

1. Be a good coach. Provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and positive. Have regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions to problems tailored to your employees' specific strengths.


2. Empower your team and don't micromanage. Balance giving freedom to your employees, while still being available for advice. Make stretch assignments to help the team tackle big problems.


3. Express interest in team members' success and personal well-being. Get to know your employees as people, with lives outside of work. Make new members of your team feel welcome and help ease their transition.


4. Don't be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented. Focus on what employees want the team to achieve and how they can help achieve it. Help the team prioritize work and use seniority to remove roadblocks.


5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team. Communication is two-way: you both listen and share information. Hold all-hands meetings and be straightforward about the messages and goals of the team. Help the team connect the dots. Encourage open dialogue and listen to the issues and concerns of your employees.


6. Help your employees with career development.


7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team. Even in the midst of turmoil, keep the team focused on goals and strategy. Involve the team in setting and evolving the team's vision and making progress towards it.


8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team. Roll up your sleeves and conduct work side by side with the team, when needed. Understand the specific challenges of the work.

This all seems very basic, although it is worth noting that technical expertise came in dead last. But I wouldn't want to have to parse some of this advice. "Don't be a sissy?" Really? Nevertheless, Google says it bumped up the performance of three-quarters of its managers using these rules. Read the entire article here...

Leadership ala Keith Richards?

I've been reading Keith Richards' memoir, Life (Little Brown, 2010), which is jaw-dropping and hilarious - sometimes by turns, sometimes simultaneously, when I came across a leadership lesson of all things. Keith is talking about how when National Service (mandatory service in the armed forces) was abolished in England in 1960, he suddenly found himself with a couple of years of free time, when out pops this passage:

My life had been plodding along nicely until I found out there was no National Service. There was no way I was going to get out of this goddamn morass, the council estate, the very small horizons. Of course if I'd done it, I'd probably be a general by now. There's no way to stop a primate. If I'm in, I'm in. When they got me in the scouts, I was patrol leader in three months. I clearly like to run guys about. Give me a platoon, I'll do a good job. Give me a company, I'll do even better. Give me a division, and I'll do wonders. I like to motivate guys, and that's what came in handy with the Stones. I'm really good at pulling a bunch of guys together. If I can pull a bunch of useless Rastas into a viable band and also the Winos, a decidedly unruly band of men, I've got something there. It's not a matter of cracking the whip, it's a matter of just sticking around, doing it, so they know you're in there, leading from the front and not from behind.
And to me, it's not a matter of who's number one, it's what works.

5 Steps to Jumpstart Your Productivity

Feel like you're drowning in work? Rosemary Tator of 2beffective LLC and Alesia Latson of the Latson Leadership Group might be able to help. They describe how in More Time for You: A Powerful System to Organize Your Work and Get Things Done (AMACOM). Here's a taste:

When our actions aren’t aligned with our intentions, then a breakdown in our productivity occurs. Here are five steps you can use when you find yourself misaligned and in conflict with yourself such that you are saying one thing and yet doing something altogether different.

Step 1: Notice What You Are Doing Without Judgment
The first sign of being in conflict with what you should be doing is when you feel the “warring.” The warring is a physical sensation in the body. It is an acknowledgment that you aren’t doing what you said you would do. It begins in the pit of your stomach; you feel nervousness and uneasiness. Then it travels to the palms of your hands, which become sweaty. At last, the struggle moves to your face as you furrow your brow.

Then, after the warring comes the thrashing. You tell yourself, “You’re doing it again! What’s wrong with you? How come you can’t do what you say you’re going to do? Look at you. You’ve squandered a half-hour. You could have been done already!”

Be aware of how long it takes you to notice your behavior. It may take forty-five minutes before you realize that the war is raging: “Oh, yeah, that’s right; I’m supposed to notice when I’m avoiding my task.” The next time, your reaction will be faster. The goal is to shorten the time it takes to notice your habit, thinking, or behavior. As soon as you recognize yours, you have a chance to make a choice.

Step 2: Name Your Feeling
Identify the feeling you are having right now. Pick two or three of the following words to describe what you are feeling: angry, sad, scared, glad, happy, overwhelmed, frustrated, put upon, controlled, resentful, unappreciated, unworthy, incompetent, irritated, impatient, lonely, isolated, defeated.

You can have your feelings, but you don’t have to be your feelings. You can have the feeling of being angry, but you don’t have to be angry. You can have the feeling of being unworthy, but you don’t have to be unworthy.

Next, reflect on your feeling in relation to the task you are doing. Does your feeling have anything to do with the task? Now that you know how you are feeling, decide whether you are still committed to completing the task you set out to accomplish. Once you’ve separated your feeling from a task at hand, you can choose again.

Step 3: Breathe
Use a breathing exercise to bring yourself back to balance. One of our favorite yoga exercises is called the Breath of Joy. It is a quick and refreshing breathing exercise that instantly lifts your spirits and clears your mind of negative thoughts and tension. It oxygenates your brain and rejuvenates your body.

The Breath of Joy is three inhalations taken with the arms swinging shoulder height forward and then fully outstretched to the side, over head and finishing with the arms swinging downward with the body in a slight forward crouching position. Inhale one-third of your capacity with each swing of the arms forward, to the side, and up. Then when you drop your arms down as you bend forward at the hips and knees, exhale with a “Ha!”

As you perform the Breath of Joy ensure that you are taking one continuous breath in three parts, rather than three separate breathes. Exhale loudly with a Ha!” (When your arms are swinging downward and you are bending at the hips and knees) allowing tension to escape from the body. Repeat the exercise several times. Remember it is one continuous breath in three parts. Each swing of the arms is to be done vigorously.

Step 4: Know That You Have a Choice
The great thing about having choices is that as long as you are breathing, you have an endless supply of them. They don’t expire or evaporate.

So you might say to yourself, “Oh, look, I noticed that I’m playing this little game with myself again, where I thrash myself for not working. I noticed it, and now I can make other choices.” You might make a choice to continue doing what you’re currently doing, take on the task you were avoiding, or choose something else altogether. By choosing, youare back in control, rather than your habit being in control. It’s not only about reaching your goals; it’s about living the life you create, including playing spider solitaire, if that strikes your fancy.

Step 5: Make a Two-Minute Choice
If you are still not ready to tackle your task, make a choice that you can live with for the next two minutes. Given the tender state that you are in at this moment, it is often best to make an initial choice that expires quickly. The goal of this short-term choice is to create movement that will get you unstuck.

For example, if you’re resisting getting up from watching television to check your e-mail, you may say to yourself, “For two minutes, I’m going to choose to get up, sit at my desk, and answer my e-mail and, after the two minutes, I can stop.” You can even set a timer. By the time the timer goes off or the two minutes have expired, you’ve taken the action to overcome the habit and are back in choice again.

s+b's Best Business Books 2010

As in the past, it was a real pleasure to edit the Best Business Books special section for strategy+business. We had a terrific team of eight expert reviewers, who chose a great list of books. Here's my introduction to the essays and a link to the entire section:

Two years after the financial collapse, the idea of hunkering down and waiting for a return to business as usual — as people did in previous recessions — seems a less and less viable strategy. But what should you do instead?

In this edition of our annual review of the year’s best business books, you will find a reading list that offers intriguing and compelling answers to this question. The list, assembled by a distinguished team of experts, starts with a select guide to the year’s tallest stack: titles that parse the recession of 2007–09 for lessons in preventing another collapse. The reviewer is David Warsh, who covered economics for the Boston Globe for more than two decades and won financial journalism’s Gerald Loeb Award twice.

Next up is Walter Kiechel III’s essay on the best business books on leadership — in a year when the spotlight revealed an unflattering view of too many of our leaders. Kiechel, whose career included stints as the managing editor of Fortune and the editorial director of Harvard Business Publishing, reviews a handful of books that confront “traditional notions of leadership with new circumstances,” including the rise of social networking. (We didn’t cover the topic of strategy this year, but Kiechel’s engaging book The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World [Harvard Business Press, 2010] is featured in “The Right to Win,” by Cesare Mainardi with Art Kleiner, s+b, Winter 2010.)

The ramifications of technologically enabled societies play a starring role this year in University of Southern California Stevens Institute executive director Krisztina “Z” Holly’s review of the best books on innovation, and a supporting role in journalist Sheridan Prasso’s choices for the best books about China, now the world’s second-largest economy. Both are especially timely as organic growth becomes a top priority at many companies.

In the doing-more-with-less theme, strategy+business contributing editor Sally Helgesen returns with a selection of titles that call into question the “star” system of talent (a factor in the recent recession) and argue for a far more inclusive definition of human capital. In a complement to Helgesen’s essay, neuroscience author Judith E. Glaser examines the year’s best books on the human mind, which offer executives the means to improve their decision making and galvanize their workforce.

David K. Hurst, our longtime Books in Brief reviewer, finds that the Great Recession has not only emphasized the shortcomings of the managerial status quo, but also yielded a number of books that offer alternatives in its art and practice. Finally, University of Denver Daniels College of Business professor James O’Toole returns with his ninth consecutive annual best business books essay, which plumbs biographies and histories on subjects as diverse as Henry Luce and Chinese tea for business lessons that are as relevant as today’s headlines.

In a time of halting recovery, frugal consumers, tight money, and increasing government activism, companies urgently need winning strategies. For executives charged with creating and executing those strategies, this year’s best business books are a valuable source of insight and inspiration...read the essays here>