A goal isn’t a mission

strategy+business, January 30, 2023

by Theodore Kinni

Illustration by VectorInspiration

There are missions, and then there are missions. One type of mission is an achievable task with a fixed goal that is often tactical and short-term in nature. The other mission is a high-level aspiration that provides direction and motivation to an organization over a long period of time. Leaders who mix up the two can put the future of their companies at risk.

The distinction between the two types of missions is dramatically illustrated in the recording of a White House meeting held on 21 November 1962. During the meeting, President John F. Kennedy and NASA’s chief administrator, James Webb, whom Kennedy appointed, had a heated argument about NASA’s proper mission.

It had been 18 months since Kennedy had called out a piloted moon landing as one of his top priorities in a special address to Congress, declaring, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Now, Kennedy was considering whether he could move the target date for the first lunar landing from 1967 to 1966, and he was grilling NASA’s leaders about the feasibility and costs of doing so.

As they wrangled over the size of the special appropriation that would be needed to fund an accelerated schedule, Kennedy suddenly tacked. “Do you think this program is the top-priority program of the agency?” he asked Webb.

“No, sir, I do not,” answered Webb. “I think it is one of the top-priority programs….” With that, an argument began that revealed the chasm between Kennedy’s view of NASA’s mission and Webb’s view. Read the rest here

Persuasion, Hollywood style

strategy+business, May 23, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Archive Holdings Inc.

I usually associate pitching with characters like the late inventor and pitchman Ron Popeil, who earned a spot in America’s cultural history—and a small fortune—hawking products such as the Chop-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, spray-on hair, and the Showtime Rotisserie and BBQ oven on late night TV. (“Set it, and forget it!”) But that’s a reductionist view, at best. Pitching is a form of interactive selling that business leaders at all levels need to master.

“We define a pitch as a scheduled meeting for the specific intention of trying to promote an idea, business project, or script,” write Peter Desberg and Jeffrey Davis in their new book, Pitch Like Hollywood. As the title suggests, Desberg, a clinical psychologist and a professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and Davis, a screenwriter and professor at Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television, look to the film industry for lessons in pitching. And rightly so. Movies and TV shows are typically sold on the strength of a pitch to studio executives that can take anywhere from an hour to several days, depending on the size of the project.

Though CEOs tend to be polished presenters, pitching a new strategy to the board or an acquisition offer to the founders of a promising startup is not the same thing as making a presentation. “The biggest difference is the interactivity. Pitching is not a one-way presentation—it’s not, ‘I’m gonna tell you, and you’re gonna sit and listen to me,’” Davis told me during a video interview with the two authors. “A pitch is less controlled. If your pitch is good, you’re involving the people you’re pitching. You are trying to get their opinions, to get to what’s important to them, and to get them to help you shape your pitch to really make it work.”

This interactivity gets to the root cause of many failed pitches—mishandling criticism. “If a catcher asks a pitcher a hostile question or points out a flaw, and the pitcher gets defensive or counterattacks, the conversation dies,” said Desberg.

For their pitch to avoid this fate, leaders should take a lesson from a story the authors relate about a creative director at an ad agency who pitched six potential campaigns to a tire company executive. When he’d finished, the exec looked at him and said, “I hate everything you’ve shown me.” Unflustered, the creative director asked, “Which one do you hate the least?” That question led to a conversation that ended in a successful campaign.

Like the creative director, good pitchers see criticism as a green light. “They’re thinking, ‘This person is trying to enter a creative collaboration with me. I’ve got to nurture the heck out of that,’” said Davis. “Show business, like all business, is more collaborative than ever. If you’re not a collaborator, you have no future in business.” Read the rest here

Getting and staying motivated

strategy+business, May 5, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by ATU Images

Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation
by Ayelet Fishbach, Little, Brown Spark, 2022

In the early years of the last century, Hanoi had a rat problem. To solve it, the French colonial government placed a one-cent bounty on the rodents, which could be claimed by anyone who delivered a rat’s tail. Thousands of tails were tendered, but Hanoi’s rat population didn’t shrink. Instead, tailless rats were running through streets, and rat farms were discovered. To make money selling rats’ tails, you need lots of rats breeding more rats. The moral of the story: be careful which behaviors you reward.

Ayelet Fishbach, the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, tells the tale of Hanoi’s rats in Get It Done. The book is a deep dive into a veritable ocean of behavioral research, including a substantial number of studies conducted by the author. This area of scholarship is so full of codicils and complications that it’s a wonder that managers can motivate themselves, let alone the people in their charge.

Consider the role that progress plays in motivation. Will you be more motivated if you focus on how far you’ve already traveled toward a goal or if you keep your attention trained on how far you have left to go? The not-so-simple answer, explains Fishbach in chapter 5, is: it depends. What’s your emotional predilection—are you a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full kind of person? Is the goal you are pursuing a conditional one with all-or-nothing benefits that are paid on completion or an accumulative one from which you derive benefits as you go? And how far along on the path are you: how close are you to reaching your goal? Your answers to those questions determine how you should use progress as a motivational force. What’s more, if you don’t ask those questions and answer them properly, the progress that you’ve made toward your goal could become a demoralizing force and an obstacle to its achievement.

Every chapter in Get It Done reiterates the multifaceted nature of self-motivation and underscores the critical nuances in the kind of advice found in sound bites on social media... read the rest here

Break the Link Between Pay and Motivation

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, April 20, 2022

by Jonas Solbach, Klaus Möller, and Franz Wirnsperger


Neil Webb/theispot.com

Pay-for-performance (PFP) compensation systems were invented in the industrial age to drive individual performance — and despite research showing that this approach is ill suited to much of the knowledge work performed in organizations today, the practice persists as the norm.

Compensation systems remain stuck in the past for several reasons. The first is, essentially, inertia: Companies have been using PFP for decades, and the best practices disseminated by compensation consultants usually derive from it. Additionally, most leaders are either not aware of the research on PFP or dismiss it as unreliable. Finally, leaving PFP behind and taking the leap required to design and implement a new compensation system can be a fearful prospect, given the potential impact on performance and results as a consequence of getting it wrong.

However, organizations may have more to lose by failing to move beyond PFP. We conducted a large-scale experiment with a target-independent compensation system. The results point to a strong business case for leaving PFP behind.

The Dysfunctional Elements of PFP

For the past 50 years, academics such as Edward L. Deci and Jeffrey Pfeffer, and pundits such as Alfie Kohn and Daniel H. Pink, have been arguing that PFP is inherently dysfunctional. This stems from two primary sources.

First, PFP is focused on narrowly defined outcomes, such as the number of sales closed, but it ignores the ways in which those outcomes are produced. This introduces the possibility that chance — or, worse, unethical behavior — will be rewarded and that the quest to achieve the promised reward will undermine other desirable behaviors, such as teamwork and collaboration.

Second, PFP provides the extrinsic motivation of financial reward, but it ignores powerful and beneficial intrinsic motivators, such as the joy of the task itself, a sense of contributing and belonging to a team, and personal development. (See “Shifting Thinking on Motivation and Compensation.”) Financial rewards prompt employees to pursue specific targets and avoid activities that do not lead directly to achieving those goals. PFP suppresses intrinsic motivation, leading at best to compliance — and it fails to nurture an enduring employee commitment to or identification with the company. In the long run, this lowers overall performance.

For all of the dysfunctions it can generate, PFP has its uses. It can drive superior performance when jobs offer little or no opportunity for intrinsic motivation. When jobs are monotonously simple or volume-driven, extrinsic motivation provides a focal point for employee effort and behavior. But PFP undermines the performance of work that requires people to explore complex problems, develop creative solutions, and achieve qualitative results that cannot be fully specified in advance. Moreover, when performance targets become obsolete, such as when production lines shut down and sales crashed during the initial round of COVID-19 lockdowns, PFP loses its motivational power because it cannot deliver the rewards that it promised.

Seeking Alternatives to Pay-for-Performance at Hilti

Leaders at Liechtenstein-based Hilti Group, which offers products and services to the construction industry, have had their own misgivings about the effectiveness of PFP and whether its focus on individual performance is out of step with the company’s collaborative culture. Read the rest here.