Reading, Writing re: Management: April 2015

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

The new world of weed

My new book post on s+b is up:

Welcome to the Marijuana Economy

As a child of the 1960s, I can’t resist reviewing Big Weed: An Entrepreneur’s High-Stakes Adventures in the Budding Legal Marijuana Business. But I won’t stoop to snickering references to nickel bags and Cheech and Chong bits that are as passé (and culturally obsolete) as my youth. Instead, I’ll let Hageseth pick up the slack for me.

“I was baked off my ass,” recalls the self-styled “ganjaprenuer” of the time he worked his company’s booth at the 2012 High Times Medical Cannabis Cup in Denver. “Seriously, I’ve never been so high in my entire life. At one point I thought I was hallucinating.”

That’s not something that I ever imagined I’d hear a CEO say (let alone commit to print). But from Hageseth, the founder of Colorado-based Green Man Cannabis, it’s more like smart marketing than a stoner’s sketchy memories. Hageseth is on a brand-building mission that he compares to those of Ben & Jerry’s and Starbucks — two brands that got their start as alternative/counterculture businesses and have since become mainstream icons: “I wanted to win the minds, then the hearts, and finally the wallets of marijuana product and lifestyle consumers and become the most recognized brand of legal marijuana in the world.”

A couple of decades ago, such a business plan would have been written off as, um, a pipe dream. But according to Hageseth, business is booming at Green Man. The company grossed US$300,000 in 2009, the year he started it as a grower of medical marijuana. The business grew nicely, but really took off when the recreational use of marijuana became legal in Colorado in January 2014. Last year, the company grossed $4 million, mainly from two retail outlets in Denver — one of which is across the street from a Whole Foods Market. And after the Green Man Cannabis Ranch & Amphitheater, the first-ever “weedery” (think winery for weed), slated to open in the fall of 2015, has been up and running for a year, Hageseth says annual revenue will jump to $97 million.

Big Weed is an entertaining story of entrepreneurship with all the usual — and some markedly unusual — challenges. Hageseth’s company has the same talent woes as other startups: Green Man almost crashes on takeoff because he hires a master grower via Craigslist (where else?) who can’t quite comprehend the differences between growing marijuana illegally in a basement and growing it legally at scale in a 5,000-square-foot warehouse. Hageseth also has less-familiar problems: No bank wants to do business with a legal marijuana grower for fear of falling afoul of federal banking regulations. Technically, Green Man’s revenue is illegal drug money in the eyes of the feds. “Imagine having to pay huge bills in cash — amounts in the tens of thousands,” Hageseth writes...read the rest here

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Leaders don't always sport a title

How To Find the Hidden Leaders on Your Team

Posted April 21, 2015 by Safari Books Online & filed under Business, Content - Highlights and Reviews, leadership, leading teams, management, managing people.

By Theodore Kinni
Theodore Kinni has written, ghosted, or edited more than 20 business books. He was book review editor for strategy+business for 7 years.

Everybody recognizes the importance of leadership in the C-suite, but we don’t always give it the

attention it deserves in the trenches—where execution is the name of the game. Nevertheless, there are lots of so-called “hidden leaders” on the front lines, and supervisors and middle managers who know how to find and nurture them can enhance performance in their teams and provide a great boon to their companies.

Who are these hidden leaders? “They are the people who are putting your organization’s strategy into practice, carrying out your quarterly plans, and bringing the value of your organization to life for customers every day,” says Scott Edinger, the founder of Edinger Consulting Group. “They are the employees who make the engine run.”

In Hidden Leader: Discover and Develop Greatness within Your Company (AMACOM, 2015), Edinger, along with co-author Laurie Sain, explains that these often unrecognized and, thus, underutilized employees can set the standards for performance excellence and bring energy to their teams; they serve as trustworthy sounding boards for supervisors and peers alike and are the go-to guys and gals for critical assignments. Edinger generously agreed to answer a few questions to help you harness the power of the hidden leaders on your teams...read the rest here

Thursday, April 16, 2015

How to simplify complex decisions

My new article for Stanford Business:

Conquering Complexity With Simple Rules

A Stanford professor offers a better way to make decisions.

April 14, 2015|by Theodore Kinni

What do burglars, Stanford’s football team, and Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen have in common?

They all use simple rules to help them navigate complex challenges, according to a new book by Stanford professor Kathleen Eisenhardt.

Many burglars follow just one rule that significantly lowers their risk of getting caught — they pass on houses where there are cars in the driveway, says the book, which Eisenhardt co-authored with Donald Sull, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Business. Cardinal football players follow three simple dietary rules: Eat breakfast; stay hydrated; and eat as much as you want of anything that can be picked, plucked, or killed. And Yellen adopted a “mind the gap” rule which uses targets for unemployment and inflation to inform the Fed’s interest rate decisions.

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World is counterintuitive in a time when algorithms and terabytes of data are often cited as prerequisites of decision-making. “How can people manage the complexity of the modern world?” the authors write. “Our answer, grounded in research and real-world results, is that simple rules tame complexity better than complex solutions.” ...read the rest here

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Frontline career development

The Three Conversations that Will Help Your Employees Grow

Posted April 14, 2015 by Safari Books Online & filed under Business, careers, Content - Highlights and Reviews, management.

By Theodore Kinni

Theodore Kinni has written, ghosted, or edited more than 20 business books. He was book review editor for strategy+business for 7 years.

There are plenty of plausible excuses for managers who don’t want to be bothered helping employees

enhance their careers. There’s no time. People should “own” their own careers. If I give an inch, they’ll want a mile. Career development is only for so-called high potentials.

The only problem with these excuses, according to employee development experts Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni: “Study after study confirms that best-in-class managers—the ones who consistently develop the most capable, flexible, and engaged teams able to drive exceptional business results—all share one quality: they make career development a priority.” In other words, if you are being called upon to meet ever-expanding expectations or to continuously improve quality or to deliver the next big thing (and who isn’t), you better be thinking about how to help your people help you achieve those goals.

The best way to build career development into your managerial repertoire, write Kaye and Giulioni in their book Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want (Berrett-Koehler, 2012), is by becoming an expert at holding career conversations. These are conversations that “facilitate insights and awareness, explore possibilities and opportunities, and inspire responses that drive employee-owned action” ...read the rest here

Monday, April 13, 2015

Let them hear your body talk

My latest book post on Safari Online:

Why You Need to Work on Your Body-Language Skills

Posted April 7, 2015 by Safari Books Online; filed under Business, communication, influence and persuasion, management, managing yourself.

By Theodore Kinni

Theodore Kinni has written, ghosted, or edited more than 20 business books. He was book review editor for strategy+business for 7 years.

I’m usually oblivious to anything more subtle than a bonk on the head, but even I couldn’t miss the body language in a recent episode of a fair-to-middlin’ TV political drama. In it, an actress playing the U.S. Secretary of State, who is suffering from post-traumatic stress after single-handedly thwarting a coup in Iran, is meeting with an actor playing the President’s chief of staff, who wants her to make a high-stakes appearance on a national TV news program. The chief of staff presses her, asking if she is ready to do the show, and the actress, shaking her head, says, “Absolutely.” He walks away happy.

Clearly, the chief of staff has not read Body Language: It’s What You Don’t Say That Matters (Capstone, 2012) by Robert Phipps. “You’ll typically see this sort of incongruence between words and body language when people are under pressure to do something they don’t really want to do,” explains the UK-based body language expert. “It’s often accompanied by a ‘shoulder shrug,’ which generally indicates one of two things: either ‘indecision’, being caught between a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No;’ or an outright contradiction of the verbal ‘Yes’.” ...read the rest here

Business in Fiction

"And by this time his financial morality had become special and local in its character. He did not think it was wise for any one to steal anything from anybody where the act of taking or profiting was directly and plainly considered stealing. That was unwise — dangerous — hence wrong. There were so many situations wherein what one might do in the way of taking or profiting was open to discussion and doubt. Morality varied, in his mind at least, with conditions, if not climates." --Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912)

"Had not a long, practical struggle with life taught him that sentiment in business was folly?" --Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925)

"Be nice to incompetents and they'll be nice back. Be nasty and they'll still be incompetent, so what do you gain by making an enemy?" --John Burdett, Bangkok 8 (2003)

"The world has no pity on a man who can't do or produce something it thinks worth money." --George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)

"Even the building was creepy: long windowless corridors and flights of stairs that stripped your sense of direction to nothing, tepid canned air with too little oxygen, a low witless hum of computers and suppressed voices, huge tracts of cubicles like a mad scientist's rat mazes." --Tana French, In The Woods (2007)

"Only a lunatic would fail to distinguish between himself and his representative self. This banal distinction may be most obvious in the workplace, where invariably one must avail oneself of an even-tempered, abnormally-industrious dummy stand-in, who, precisely because it is a dummy, makes life easier for all others, who are themselves present, which is to say, represented, by dummies of their own." -- Joseph O'Neill, The Dog (2014)

He had indeed conversed so entirely with money, that it may be almost doubted whether he imagined there was any other thing really existing in the world; this at least may be certainly averred, that he firmly believed nothing else to have any real value." -- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)

"You invariably find among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as an entitlement." -- E.L. Doctorow, City of God (2000)

"Employers are like horses. They require management." --P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

"SECRETS ARE LIES
CARING IS SHARING
PRIVACY IS THEFT"--Dave Eggers, The Circle (2013)

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world." -- John LeCarré, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

"I can well imagine forms of servitude worse than our own, because more insidious, whether they transform men into stupid, complacent machines, who believe themselves free just when they are most subjugated, or whether to the exclusion of leisure and other pleasures essential to man they develop a passion for work as violent as the passion for war among barbarous races." -- Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (1963)

"Because if you truly want to become filthy rich in rising Asia, as we appear to have established that you do, then sooner or later, you must work for yourself. The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they're not particularly fattening. So don't share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can." -- Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, (2013)

"They copied all they could follow,
but they couldn't copy my mind.
So I left 'em sweating and stealing,
a year and a half behind." -- Rudyard Kipling, The Mary Gloster (1894)

"The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is you're a salesman, and you don't know that." -- Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

(1949)

"Every exercise of power incorporates a faint, almost imperceptible, element of contempt for those over whom the power is exercised." -- Sandor Marai, Embers (1942)

"Go to a tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop--men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties but still 'boys.' But that is your fate if you do your job well--with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.

I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity--and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience." -- Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)

"'Alex. Are you still buying advertising space?'
'For as long as the job doesn't require one to have a brain.'
'It's always nice to talk to a man who enjoys his work.'
'Fortunately I enjoy the money a whole lot better.'" -- Philip Kerr, The Pale Criminal (1990)

"'Oilmen are gamblers, most of them, and they'd rather take a little chance than spend a lot of money. Or wait for the technology to catch up.' He added after a moment, 'They're not the only gamblers. We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff'" -- Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty (1973)

"I'm tempted to point out that our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it's the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy." -- Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (2008)

"I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all."
-- Ogden Nash, Song of the Open Road, Happy Days (1933)

"When I go into the back entrance to our business, I smell the beans and the roasters and antiseptic-lacquered-with-fruit smell of the floor cleanser, and then, even more faintly, the strange bleary artificiality in the air, characteristic of enclosed shopping malls. The ion content in the oxygen has been tampered with by people trying to save money by giving you less oxygen to breathe. You get light-headed and desperate to shop. The air smells machine-manufactured, and the light looks manufactured or maybe recycled from previous light." -- Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love (2000)

"Some of us loved killing an hour of the company's time and others felt guilty for it afterward. But whatever your personal feelings on the matter, you still had to account for the hour, so you billed it to a client. By the end of the fiscal year, our clients had paid us a substantial amount of money to sit around and bullshit, expenses they then passed on to you, the consumer. It was a cost of doing business, but some of us feared it was an indication that the end was near, like the profligacy that preceded the downfall of the Roman Empire. There was so much money involved, and some even trickled down to us, a small amount that allowed us to live among the top one-percent of the wealthiest in the world. It was lasting fun, until the layoffs came." -- Joshua Ferris, Then We Came To The End (2007)

"The last line was so far away that the men were specks-bobbing bug-like fixtures, moving in what seemed to be a rainbow-haze of reds and yellows and blues. Those were the spray-painters, Simpson explained, and some of them made as much as seven dollars a day. He did not explain that they had no teeth after six months, little eyesight after a year, and that their occupational expectancy was about three years. In all likelihood he was not acquainted with these facts, and he would have been annoyed at their recital. To the best of his knowledge, there wasn't any law compelling a man to be a spray-painter." -- Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder (1946)

"Since those birds were up around the top, the top numbers in one of the three biggest agencies in the country, with corner rooms at least twenty by twenty and incomes in the six figures, it had of course been years since any of them had personally dialed a number in an office. To expect them to would be against all reason" -- Rex Stout, Before Midnight (1955)

"What I'm getting at, Bobby, is you may notice, over time, as you study and learn, a certain amount of chicanery in this business of ours. But don't let that dismay you. It's just the nature of the business we're in, part and parcel of the good old capitalist system that's gonna make us both rich men before we die." -- Clancy Martin, How to Sell (2009)

"I'm a bookkeeper, and, the way I see it, there's nothing to life but bookkeeping...One rule is this: that if the risk of a transaction is very great it should not be considered at all, no matter what profit it offers if it is successful. That's one of the basic rules that should never be broken. You apply that rule to the idea of committing a murder and what do you get? There's too much risk, so you don't do it. The idea is no good. It's all a matter of debit and credit..." -- Rex Stout, Prisoner's Base (1952)

"I must look Ralph up and question him. He'll be in hiding by now, of course, but he's worth hunting out. He always has the most consistently logical and creditable reasons for having done the most idiotic things. He is" - as if that explained it - "an advertising man." -- Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse (1929)

What Ted has read lately

The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

Terrific novel set in North Korea-Orwellian and Dickensian at the same time.

Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges

Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges

by Tim Sanders

First book I've seen on what has to happen backstage--within the seller's company--to close big, complex, winner-take-all sales.

American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

Great read that marries mythology with modern-day America

Shakey: Neil Young's Biography

by Jimmy McDonough

A great bio, a must-read for Young fans, and terrific insight into the creative process and how to keep it alive

The Blackhouse

by Peter May

Terrific murder mystery set in Hebrides

Agile Talent: How to Source and Manage Outside Experts

Agile Talent: How to Source and Manage Outside Experts

by Jon Younger

Addresses a big problem: the inability of companies to get full value from external talent. Academic-style read. The solutions are aimed at big companies that hire a lot of outside help.

Some Buried Caesar

by Rex Stout

Nero and Archie get embroiled in a double murder on the way to an orchid competition upstate. Good one

City on Fire

by Garth Risk Hallberg

Adding Hallberg to my authors to watch list. Ambitious and mostly terrific novel set in NYC in late 70s. Could have been cut by a third, but the characters and story-telling pulled me thru.

Reading, Writing re: Management