"1/47"

I frequently say, "I've only learned one thing 'for sure' in the 47 years since I started doing 'this stuff.'" (The 1966 staring point goes back to my U.S. Navy Seabee days in Vietnam.) The term "for sure" is meaningful; as a scientist by disposition, I don't believe as a matter of course in "for sures." So this exception is a big deal—to me.

And that one for-sure thing is ...

WTTMSW.

Or, to clarify ... Whoever Tries The Most Stuff Wins.

In Search of Excellence was constructed around "eight basics." And the first was "A Bias for Action." As we said then, and it's become more true over time as the pace of change accelerates: Big Business's #1 problem is "too much talk, too little do." To bring the In Search message up to date, I just came across an ad for an Economist conference. The conference title: "Redefining the Speed of Business: CAN YOUR BUSINESS FAIL FAST ENOUGH TO SUCCEED?" In fact, my WTTMSW has a fuller alternative: WTTMSASUTMSTFW. Whoever Tries The Most Stuff And Screws Up The Most Stuff The Fastest Wins.

At any rate, FYI, I've included here a wee paper I did on this "1/47" topic.

Enjoy ...

Getting Stuff
(That Matters)
Done

A new short form ebook is now available thanks to our friends at New Word City. It's called Getting Stuff (That Matters) Done and it's all about execution. You certainly can't be Excellent if you're not getting anything done. So read the ebook and get started!

HCA Addendum

Attached is "Systems Have Their Place: SECOND Place." It is directly related to my remarks concerning the absolute necessity of "culture change" to address intractable hospital problems such as patient safety.

Herewith the paper's origin: This essay indirectly stems from the current American presidential primaries. Two candidates suggested that the Department of Defense's wasteful ways could be curbed by ordering the adoption of "6-sigma management." Having put in two years of Pentagon duty as a naval officer (1969-1970), I was struck by the hilarity of such a notion; I'd observed the "adoption" of miracle systems before in the DOD (PPBS/Program Planning and Budgeting System, the brainchild of SECDEF Robert McNamara), and watched their inevitable byproducts—more bureaucracy and more waste. Moreover, ideas like this, and the issues associated therewith, are near the heart of my last 35 years of professional work. Hence, with some outside urging, and with no political axe to grind on this score, I prepared this brief paper.

Download the PDF.

The Little BIG Things
Synopsis Series
#24 Change
#25 Charlie Wilson's War

It's time for two new sections in The Little BIG Things Synopsis Series. The next two sections in The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence are titled "Change" and "Special Section: Charlie Wilson's War." In Change, Tom proposes a few perhaps unexpected ways of thinking about how to make change. The Special Section presents lessons in getting things done learned from Charlie Wilson's War.

You can download free pdfs of those sections from The Little BIG Things Synopsis Series* by clicking below:

#24 Change
#25 Special Section: Charlie Wilson's War

*The Synopsis Series is an adaptation that gives you a taste of the BIG idea in each of the 163 Little BIG Things. More information on the book can be found on this page. The Synopsis Series as released thus far can be found here.

The Little BIG Things
Synopsis Series
#19 Equations

It's time for a new section in The Little BIG Things Synopsis Series. The next section in The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence is a Special Section titled "The Equations: An Engineer's View of the Secrets of Effective Implementation." In it, Tom lists the things you can do to "boost your odds of success at implementing damn near anything."

You can download a free pdf of this section from The Little BIG Things Synopsis Series* by clicking below:

#19 Equations

*The Synopsis Series is an adaptation that gives you a taste of the BIG idea in each of the 163 Little BIG Things. More information on the book can be found on this page. The Synopsis Series as released thus far can be found here.

The Little BIG Things
Synopsis Series
#7 Recession46
#8 Self

It's time for two new sections in The Little BIG Things Synopsis Series. The next two sections in The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence are titled "Special Section: The Recession 46" and "Self." The Special Section offers strategies for coping with the economic crisis. The "Self" section focuses on adjusting your attitude and working on your story, things that elevate your personal brand.

You can download free pdfs of those sections from The Little BIG Things Synopsis Series* by clicking below:
#7 Special Section: The Recession 46
#8 Self

*The Synopsis Series is an adaptation that gives you a taste of the BIG idea in each of the 163 Little BIG Things. More information on the book can be found on this page. The Synopsis Series as released thus far can be found here.

Practice

A commenter named Norman Wei recently asked Cathy if Tom rehearsed repeatedly before getting in front of the camera for one of his videos. We were pretty sure we knew the answer, but checked with Tom. Here's what he said:

"There's less of an easy answer than you'd imagine. I do not rehearse in the formal sense. On the other hand, I come close to staying up all night before a speech going over my slides—over and over and over. Perhaps over 100 times???? Of course I formally modify the slides, to the point of de-emphasizing one word and emphasizing (italics) another. But as I go through the slides I am also sub-consciously, semi-consciously going through phrasing I might use. So in a way it's damn near rehearsal, though you're also right in that the main rehearsal is 3,000 or so speeches over about 31 years."

My Kinda Guy!

Several Sunday papers reviewed Neil Sheehan's A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon. It's a "one guy against the world" story of the first order. Schriever either did a very good thing or a very questionable thing, depending on the reviewer. But what he did was clear. Against very powerful forces, such as bomber maniac and Strategic Air Command boss Curtis LeMay, Schriever proposed and developed, more or less singlehandedly, America's ICBM capability—mainstay of our defense ever since.

It is a story of a "good strategic idea" (in the real world context of the Cold War) and overcoming immense technical-engineering challenges.

But that's not why I'm writing this.

As most of you know, I think political skill is as important or more important than brilliance. And Schriever, a talented engineer, was an Uber-master Politican. The forces lined up against him amount to a list as long as your arm, with most of those named having far more rank than Schriever. Yet he prevailed—eventually convincing one of the most pragmatic people ever to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Dwight David Eisenhower.

Want to accomplish something, any-damn-thing?
Sharpen your political skills!
(And this holds for a 24-year-old non-manager working on her small part of a project almost as much as it did for Bernard Schriever.)

Mary Pennington, Ignaz Semmelweis,
And the "Last 98%"

Mary Pennington, IBD tells us (June 22), was known as the "Ice Lady." The Philadelphian saved countless lives via her successful campaigns for sanitary food practices in the early 1900s. Her engaging demeanor was such that she was time and again able to gain the support of both producers and distributors. (A Ph.D. chemist from Penn, remarkable in itself, she became the first woman employed by the USDA.)

Reading about Ms Pennington, I was reminded of the virtually opposite story of Ignaz Semmelweis, another pioneer in the field of sanitary conditions. While his work, and that of his peers, eventually had enormous impact, it fell flat for decades—in spite of the obviousness of his findings. Rather than making common cause with the doctors whose practices he was trying to alter (wash your hands), he instead did such things as writing letters to the press at times denouncing the docs, per Wikipedia, as "irresponsible murderers."

It is "just" a "Monday rant" from me reminding us, as the week begins, of that "all important last 98%" called implementation—and, of course, that implementation is a matter of respect and listening and carefully nurtured relationships 98% of the time.

Power Tools!

I've been hounding you on this topic for a while now. My mostly dormant but longtime interest in "little things" with enormous impact was rekindled after the publication of Nudge, Sway, and a couple of other books. With this post, I'm offering up a fully annotated 100-slide presentation on the topic.

The heart of the presentation is over 20 examples of Tiny Tools with Enormous Impact—from increased effectiveness in oil-finding (put the geologists and geophysicists in the same room) to dramatically reduced crime rates (patch the potholes, fix the broken windows, clean the streets) to effective dieting tools (e.g., small plates, infuriatingly slow elevators). The examples per se are of little importance—they are merely indicative of the sorts of things one can concentrate on. The toughest part of the message is that to do much with this you need an "attitude." An attitude that this sort of thing can work, and a willingness to screw around and screw around until you get it right—"do it right the first time" addicts are doomed!

On the other hand there is a lot of good news about the process:

(1) Amenable to rapid experimentation/failure is "free" (no bad "PR," no $$ down the drain).
(2) Quick to implement/Quick to roll out.
(3) Inexpensive to implement/Inexpensive to roll out.
(4) Huge multiplier.
(5) An "Attitude" required—not a one-off "program."
(6) Does not, by and large, require a "power position" from which to launch experiments—this is mostly "invisible stuff," below the radar, that most don't care about on the front end.

Take a look.
Give it a try.
Become a professional "nudgist," practiced in the Art of Nudgery.

"Welcome" Back!

Election is done.
(As I write this I don't know the result—and it's irrelevant to this Post.)
Time to get on with it.
Perhaps a tiny bit of stability in the financial markets.
Perhaps not.
In any event, recessionary pressure accelerating as we race toward the cliff.
GM sales down 45% October-to-October.
Japanese car sales as bad or worse.
Wallets clamped shut.
Consumer spending DOA.
Commercial spending DOA.

My advice:

**Put "clever" on hold.
**Basics rule!
**Execution rules!
(**Opportunism—and there may be some or a lot of room for it—is pulled off through excellence in execution, not ingenuity.)
**The game is won or lost at the front line! (More than ever, if that's possible.)
**Showing up rules!
**Excellence rules!
**MBWA rules!
**Keep it simple!
**Transparency rules: Shoot straighter than straight!
**Go for "small wins"!
**"Thoughtful in all we do"—regardless of how much yogurt (shit) is hitting the fan.
**In tough times, those who play the blame game in any way, shape, or form get the first pink slips!
(**Special for BigCo CEOs: "Opportunistically" bulking up by buying big pieces of crap at bargain prices is tempting but truly a sign of advanced brain damage.)

Managers:

**Banish gloomy from your personal demeanor—if it kills you!
(**"Sunny" is pretty stupid, too: Who do you think you're kidding.)
(**"Determined"-"Gettin' on with gettin' on" is best.)
**The great juggling act: PMA while preparing for the worst. (Positive Mental Attitude—but know the drill if the recession goes 24 months, which it easily might.)

[You'll find a PowerPoint of this list attached: "Advice for tough times. Win with the '2Es.' Execution. Excellence."]

Percy's Gang of 125: How Curved Is the Earth??? It's A Small World, After All ???

Percy Barnevik was Europe's exemplar businessman for much of the '80s and '90s. He woke up a sleepy ABB Asea Brown Boveri big time—and made about as many notable management inventions as Jack Welch along the way. I sang his praises at length in my 1992 book, Liberation Management. In particular, Barnevik's ABB was peerless when it came to internationalization and managing very far-flung ventures. Along the way, as I recall, he surprised many of us by asserting that among his cast of hundreds of thousands, with managers numbering in the tens of thousands, he really only needed about 125 true internationalists! The reality: Most of his units, and there were hundreds, served rather circumscribed markets—and the leaders' local knowledge was far more important than high marks on a "world news of the week" quiz.

So given the above, which is a reasonable description of reality as I see it, and big company reality at that, what is one to make of this headline from a recent (27 Oct) Financial Times, in a special report on executive education: "Dean Predicts Global Focus Will Dominate"? (The dean in question is Dean Dezsö Horváth, of the Schulich school of management at York University in Canada.)

I have little doubt that numerous grads of Schulich will have international careers—as will their counterparts from Wharton and Duke and Harvard. But the fact is that most Schulichers, unless I miss my bet by a mile, will mostly spend their time in firms in Canada (or the U.S.), and most of those firms' revenues will mostly come from Canada, or at most North America.

Moreover, unless the statistics lie, many, if not most, will work in privately held firms, a long way from the character or charter of an ABB or GE. And then there are the hundreds of business schools that are not grand enough to make anybody's Top 75 list—but who really help their students become better middle managers at the local utility or hospital or the like.

And ... then come the "other" 90% or 95% of American or Canadian or Italian or Polish managers, sans MBA, who work in small, or smallish, companies. Not to mention the ever so parochial millionaires next door—"lived in same town all their adult life, don't look like millionaires, don't dress like millionaires, don't eat like millionaires, don't act like millionaires," mostly engaged in "businesses that could be classified as 'dull-normal,' such as welding contractors, auctioneers, scrap-metal dealers, lessors of portable toilets, dry cleaners, re-builders of diesel engines, paving contractors ..." (from The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley & William Danko).

Not only is the world pretty damned curved, if not spherical, but the fact is that making it in giant markets at home, let alone beyond one's borders, and even if you are a giant, is damn tough—and often, or mostly, a bad strategy. The authors Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn penned an article for the Harvard Business Review with the awkward but descriptive title, "All Strategy Is Local: True competitive advantages are harder to find and maintain than people realize. The odds are best in tightly drawn markets, not big, sprawling ones." Amen—and I note that their subjects were big companies.

What's my point, if any?

***First, to continue my relentless rant against "media bias," a favorite topic this political season, and accompanying and equally pronounced "business guru bias." We are soooooooo caught up in big-public-international businesses, which are, in fact, a distinct minority of employment sites; and even, per Barnevik, the biggies globalies' managers mainly work in distinctly local contexts. (Remember, 125 out of a couple of hundred thousand were through and through globalists; the rest were busy doin' the damn work.) I am determined to keep yelling, re the likes of the Financial Times headline, and in fact Tom Friedman's flat-world treatise: "BUT THIS HAS NOTHING, N-O-T-H-I-N-G, TO DO WITH 95% OF EVEN THE OECD WORLD, LET ALONE THE WORLD AS A WHOLE."

***Second, going back to my roots, to shout: "NINETY-FIVE PERCENT OF EXCELLENCE IS LOCAL!" And local Excellence is more about mastering MBWA writ large than starring at cross-cultural studies.

***Third, to proclaim, or vehemently suggest, that rather than obsessively pursue the answer to global mysteries, we might better spend our leader-ly time improving the relationships with the [mostly local] customers and vendors and employees and communities which we currently serve.

What follows, in the spirit of the above, is very much "off the top of my head, realism be damned." It is my ten-minutes-to-write partial curriculum for my imagined very non-global business school, which focuses on "real-world basics" of "getting things done":

Core

***Managing people I, II, III, IV
***Creating and managing systems with high impact
***Leadership I, II
***Servant leadership
***Execution I, II, III
***Creating a "Try it now" environment
***Maximizing ROIR [Return On Investment in Relationships]
***Sales I, II, III, IV
***Service basics I, II
***Creating incredible customer experiences
***Accounting I, II
***Accountability I, II
***Personal calendar mastery
***MBWA I, II
***Nurturing and harvesting curiosity
***Giving great presentations I, II
***Active listening I, II
***Excellence as aspiration, Excellence everywhere

Other

***Recruiting top talent for 100% of all available jobs
***Recruiting for smile, enthusiasm, energy
***Nurturing top talent
***Helping people (employees, customers, vendors, communities) grow and realize their dreams
***The promotion decision
***Women as preeminent leaders
***Building friends through firings
***The art of ferreting out and loving weirdos
***Creating an environment of respect and decency
***The art and science of influencing others I, II
***Accountability I, II
***The preeminent role of emotion in everything
***Saying "thank you" I, II
***Apologizing
***Giving good phone
***Creating and nurturing lasting alliances
***Creating or changing a unit's "culture"
***Bringing spirit to the workplace
***Becoming the gemstone of the community
***Mastering the Internet I, II
***Appreciating and playing with new technologies
***Knowing oneself
***Marketing
***Marketing to women I, II
***Marketing to boomers-geezers I, II
***Design-mindedness as a "cultural" attribute
***Rapid prototyping of everything, and the Art of Serious Play
***Increasing the unit's metabolic rate
***Diversity power everywhere
***The power of universal transparency
***Finance

Spare Time

***Strategy
***Globalization

[For your amusement, you'll find a PowerPoint of my GTD-MBA—Getting Things Done MBA—attached.]

Spontaneous Discovery: F.A. Hayek, U.S. Grant, Herb Kelleher, and I

Below you will find a link to a new presentation. This one ("Excellence. Always. Action."), which will also become Part 7.2 of our recently updated 10-part Master Presentation, has effectively been 40+ years in the making, dating back to my U.S. Navy tours in I Corps Vietnam, as a Seabee-combat engineer (1966-1968). I claim in my presentations, but a slight exaggeration as I see it, that I have learned only one thing "for sure" in 40+ years: Action! Try it! Experiment now, with the data only 1% in! (And do it with haste!) As Herb Kelleher, founder and longtime CEO of Southwest Airlines, puts it, "We have a 'strategic plan.' It's called doing things." As biographer Josiah Bunting said of the consummate man of action and my hero-of-heroes, General Ulysses S. Grant: "He had an almost inhuman disinterestedness in ... strategy."

Immediately below, in a first for this Blog, I am reprinting a Post from 2007, with a contemporary update:

The Limits of "Systems Thinking": Surprise, Joy, Transformation & Excellence Through Spontaneous Discovery. (And a New Life Along the Way.)

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say."—C.K. Chesterton

"My only goal is to have no goals. The goal, every time, is that film, that very moment."—Bernardo Bertolucci

This summer [2007] was the summer of brush clearing.
And, it turned out, much more.

It started as simple exercise. After a day or two, scratches from head to toe, and enjoyment, I set myself a goal of clearing a little space to get a better view of one of the farm ponds. That revealed something else ... to my surprise.

At a casual dinner, I sat next to a landscaper, and we got to talking about our farm and my skills with clipper, saw, etc. In particular, she suggested that I do some clearing around a few of our big boulders. Intrigued, I set about clearing, on our main trail, around a couple of said boulders. I was again amazed at the result.

That, in turn, led to attacking some dense brush and brambles around some barely visible rocks that had always intrigued me—which led to "finding," in effect, a great place for a more or less "Zen garden," as we've taken to calling it.

Which led to ... more and more. And more.

(Especially a rock wall, a hundred or so yards long, that is a massive wonder—next year I'll move up the hill behind it—I can already begin to imagine what I'll discover, though my hunch will be mostly "wrong," and end up leading me somewhere else.)

To make a long story short:

I now have a new hobby, and maybe, ye gads, my life's work for years to come. This winter I'll do a little, but I also plan to read up on outdoor spaces, Zen gardens, etc.; visit some rock gardens—spaces close by or amidst my travels; and, indeed, concoct a more or less plan (rough sketches) for next spring's activities—though I'm sure that what I do will move forward mostly by what I discover as I move forward. (What discovers itself may actually be a better way to put it—there's a "hidden hand" here.) As I'm beginning to see it, this is at least a 10-year project—maybe even a multi-generation project.

I proceeded by trial and error and instinct, and each experiment led to/suggested another experiment (or 2 or 10) and to a greater understanding of potential—the "plan," though there was none, made itself. And it was far, far better (more ambitious, more interesting, more satisfying) than I would have imagined. In fact, the result to date bears little or no relationship to what I was thinking about at the start—a trivial self-designed chore may become the engine of my next decade; the "brushcutting project" is now leading Susan and me to view our entire property, and what it might represent, in a new light.

I was able to do much more than I'd dreamed—overall, and project by project. "Systems thinking"? It would have killed the whole thing.

Is "everything connected to everything else"? Well, duh. But I had no idea how everything was connected to everything else until I began (thank you, Michael Schrage) "serious play."

Note: Some of you will have discovered my implicit debt to the economist-of-freedom, F.A. Hayek. His stunningly clear view of market capitalism as a "spontaneous discovery process" is my intellectual bedrock, my "context" for three decades in Silicon Valley, and now even for my recreational pursuits (which are, as noted, becoming so much more than that).

One-year update, September 2008: This summer has been another one of brushcutting-inventing-discovering. Again, one thing has led to another and then another. Every step is, and I do not exaggerate, a surprise—in my opinion, a surprise of the first order. I am having more fun than ever—and the project becomes more and more ambitious. I tease that I now have a new company, RRI, Rock Revelations Inc. (Giant tree liberation has also been added to the mix.) My passion has become my obsession—and I now feel empty if the day has passed without at least a couple of hours of hard labor. And the joy of exhausting physical work—and the ability to see and touch the product—is staggering.

Above, a farm picture from this past weekend. Several have asked for pictures of the project described above. No offense, but no. The project is solely for me—and Grey Meadow Farm visitors—I am not seeking approval on a broader scale, which is part of the point of the exercise. Sorry.

[Again, the link to the Action Master.]

See How Simple What You Cannot Do Is: The 240% Factor!

Woody Allen's "Eighty percent of success is showing up" was the topic of a recent Post. One great comment (Rob) added a nice twist: "And I reckon a large part of the remaining 20% is Refusing to Go Away Again."

Coincidentally, I came across the following the next day while listening to Ernest Hemingway's Garden of Eden:

" ... Finishing is what you have to do. If you don't finish, nothing is worth a damn.

" ... Write the hardest story there is to write that you know. Start it tomorrow. The hell with tomorrow. Go and start it now.

"He sat down and wrote the first paragraph of the new story that he had always put off writing. ... The very beginning was written and all he had to do was go on. That's all, he said. See how simple what you cannot do is?"

Message-Lesson/s: The first 80% of success is showing up! The second 80% is sticking around and refusing to leave! The final 80% is finishing! See how simple what you cannot do is?

(NB: Sounds like a biography of U.S. Grant—and doubtless many-most others who succeeded against very long odds.)

Eighty Percent of Success Is Showing Up

While editing and fact-checking my latest Master presentation, Cathy came across "90% of success is showing up"—and it didn't ring true. She checked and corrected it to 80%. Our exchange encouraged me to go Googling. I immediately confirmed that I was wrong and she was right—no surprise—but also came across a lovely little essay at PersistenceUnlimited.com:

"80 percent of success is just showing up" —Woody Allen

"I often think about that quotation. It may sound easy to shrug off, but not if you look a little deeper. It doesn't just mean show up for job interviews or to work for an 80% increase in success. Showing up also means ... starting.

"For instance, did you show up at the gym today? Just showing up means you're 80% of the way to a good workout. The hard part of fighting yourself to get dressed in workout gear, dealing with traffic and the worry about pain you might experience is over. Now all that is left is to just do the workout. Pretty simple, huh? Even a child could do it.

"Same thing with opportunity. It's easier to make significant progress on a project if you simply show up to do it. Candidly, one of my hardest tasks of the day is 'showing up' for development Visual Studio. It seems simple enough ... just double click on an icon. But if I think too much about the seemingly 10,000 things I have to do once I launch it, I am much more likely to 'accidentally' launch my web browser or fiddle with e-mail.

"But once I'm in there, the work is typically easy and fun. Some days I can knock out more tasks than I planned. And I feel like a success at the end of the day.

"You can be or do whatever you want just by showing up. If you want to be an author, show up to write your manuscript every day, show up to writing classes, show up to phone calls to editors. Doesn't it make sense that someone who arrives at the door of opportunity has more success than someone just sitting at home?

"So increase your chances by 80%. Show Up!"

Nice!

Seven Billion Experts—Waiting to Be Heard!

William Easterly wrote in the Financial Times on 29 May: "The report of the World Bank Growth Commission, led by Nobel laureate Michael Spence [former dean of the Stanford biz school—tp, you know my biases], was published last week. After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders, an 11-member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4 million, the experts' answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out."

You may recall my fawning review of Easterly's The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. He argues vehemently against stencils for development imposed from on high—and in favor of tailored approaches developed mainly by the locals—with the "experts" acting as counselors.

As you might then guess, I was thoroughly taken by the title of the FT article cited above:

"Trust the development experts—all seven billion of them."

Amen!

(Attached you'll find the Easterly PowerPoint, provided earlier as case #3 in a PowerPoint titled "Three Cases" of Implementation.)

Implementation2008

Tom has stitched together several lists from recent Blogs and other sources to create an 9,000-word document, provided here in pdf form.

Against All Odds:
So What?

Columbus, whose astonishing accomplishment we Americans are celebrating today, was a loooooooooong shot—and he brought home a winner. My dearly beloved Stanford, a woeful example of a Division 1A football team, went to Southern California as a 42-point underdog to the #1 ranked Trojans—and brought home a winner, snapping SC's 35-game home winning streak in the process. North Carolina's Appalachian State, otherwise known as "who they," went to Ann Arbor at the start of the season to face #5 Michigan—and brought home a winner.

British explorer-madman Jason Lewis pedaled up the Thames and across the Meridian Line at Greenwich on Saturday, thus completing a 13-year, 46,000 mile circumnavigation of the globe using only his own power—bicycle, 26-foot pedal boat, kayak, and inline skates.

At a Saturday evening party on the Farm, leaves at VT peak, I gave a friend fighting a severe illness one of my newly acquired Appalachian State T-shirts. I told him I called it my FTO T-shirt. (F^&* The Odds.)

Long shots are long shots—but they do come in. To my mind, the essence of life is trying stuff you "have no right to try." Consider this Wilde-ism (Oscar): "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

Amen!
Happy Columbus Day!
(Canadian pals: Happy Thanksgiving.)

Tom Topic #1

It's all about tryin' stuff. It's all about experimentation. It's all about getting' on with getting' on. Which means it's all about ...

Markets. (Lots a folks tryin' lots of stuff.)
Decentralization. (Lots of folks tryin' lots of stuff.)
Freedom. (Detroit 1900, Silicon Valley 2000, America 1783-???, new China 1979-???, etc = Lots of folks tryin' lots of stuff.)

Hence one of my labors of love (= reading project) this summer is freedom per se. Amazingly (to me), the idea of liberty as we conjure it today is only a quarter millennium old. My tomes under current study:

Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History.
Michael Barone, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers.

Here's the way I see the life of individuals (top list), and organized entities (bottom list):

Go on offense.
Give everybody a shot.
Decentralize.
Try a bunch of stuff.
Make it up as you go along.
Get some stuff wrong.
Laugh a lot.
Get some stuff right.
Become a "success."

Extract "lessons learned" or "best practices."
Thicken the Book of Rules.
Become evermore serious.
Enforce the rules to increasingly tight tolerances.
Go on defense.
Install walls.
Protect-at-all-costs today's franchise.
Centralize.
Calcify.
Install taller walls.
Write more rules.
Become irrelevant and-or die.

This master process is my life's work. And my personal joy. (And horror.) viagra pharmacy online

Happy summer.
Try some stuff.

Remember Eleanor Roosevelt:

"Do one thing every day that scares you."

(Ciao, I'm heading out to the woods for my daily dose of brushcutting—a "widow maker" branch broke loose on me yesterday, which I suppose passes the E Roosevelt "scare-the-shit-out-of-myself" test.)

Quote of the Day

"Costco figured out the big, simple things—and executed with total fanaticism."—Charles Munger, Berkshire Hathaway (Barron's, 12 Feb)

Tom Wears Them Out in SF

Our Cool Friend Robert Scoble was in the audience at the Inc. event and met Tom for the first time yesterday in San Francisco. Tom wore him out. Read Robert's account of his time with Tom.

Arthur MacArthur and the Modern Day "Policy Wonks"

Forget the assignment of blame for the Iraq fiasco. That's not the point of this Post. Instead it is my virulent reaction to a particular part of Vanity Fair's (January 2007) well-reported "Neo Culpa." While the purpose was to pick on the neo-cons who philosophically beat the War Drums in 2002 and 2003, and even 2004 and 2005, that's not what set me off.

Arthur MacArthur Junior, father to Douglas MacArthur, famously told his son, as Holy Writ on the battlefield, "Never give an order that can't be obeyed." (My military bosses—the good ones, anyway—taught me the same.) My 1973-4 White House boss (and today private equity superstar) Fred Malek likewise said "Operations is policy." (Fred, perhaps not incidentally, was a West Point graduate.) That is, the idea and its execution are inexorably tied—Siamese twins, even.

Richard Perle, a principal intellectual cheerleader of the 2003 incursion into Iraq, echoed many of his fellow travelers when he told Vanity Fair, "I'm getting damned tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said 'Go and design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

Wrong.
Wrong.
A thousand times Wrong.

Or, rather: Bullshit!

Consider the likes of Jim Baker today, or George Marshall or Thomas Jefferson in times long past. The "policy advisor" must—first and foremost—consider the odds of successfully implementing the suggested policy and the consequences of not doing so or doing so halfway. I can readily wish for some desired end (and I believe Perle's end was indeed desirable), but I may not under any circumstances absolve myself from shoddy execution. As platoon commander, Arthur MacArthur's son or "policy wonk," predicting the shape and expected efficacy of execution is my responsibility as much as the concoction of a brilliant strategy.

Period.

Blocking & Tackling

People are always looking for a silver bullet to help their businesses. Silver bullets can be great, but so often companies don't succeed due to poor execution of basic things. They try to throw the bomb but forget to block and tackle.

So I loved seeing a fact in a New York Times Magazine story on Mike Oher, a star lineman at University of Mississippi who had a rough childhood. The second highest paying position in the NFL, after quarterback? Left tackle.

Norman's World

Did you know that Leon Leonwood Bean (L.L.Bean) had turned over the reins to his nephew? That nephew: Norman Ignatius Stephen Bean (N.I.S. Bean). Two days after my latest catalog arrived two of the three items I wanted were N.I.S. This happens over and over and over with these guys...

Revision!

My special presentation ... "Grant" has been superseded. The new one: "Grant-Nelson-Boyd-Bossidy." Or: Lessons from the masters of "Bias for Action" as Waterman and I put it in '82.

First Things First! Period!

Or: Don't Overlook the "Missing Ninety-eight Percent"!

Time to come out of the closet!
I care!
(I'm right.)
(I'm pretty sure.)
(Damn sure.)

I posted recently "Mike Vs Tom" about "Mike's" (Mike Porter's) preference for STRATEGY as business' primary explanatory variable. I said mine was EXECUTION (or, preferably, Execution + People) (or, preferably, Execution + People + Enthusiasm + Excellence) (or, preferably, Execution + People + Customers + Enthusiasm + Excellence).

Some who made Comments (Thank you!) said it was obviously not an "either-or" issue. You need both.

Of course you do.
Maybe.

I, in fact, do not denigrate the usefulness of a thoughtful strategy. It's just that it is ... Crystal Clear (to me!) that strategy is in fact unequivocally subordinate to Execution Excellence/Execution Mania/Bias for Action (the latter happens to be "Basic #1" from In Search of Excellence).

More broadly, my money rests on what I'll call the "Infrastructure of Excellence": Superstar People ... Customer Love ... Execution Mania ... Boundless Energy & Enthusiasm ... Relentless Pursuit of Excellence per se.

Consider U.S. Grant. (My favorite topic of late.) General Grant was an "action addict." He constitutionally had to be on the move. Grant won several battles when the Union victory tank was on Empty. Grant had many a detractor, and one principal supporter—Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had a "strategy," but it was in tatters because of timid-defensive-incompetent generals. Then, via "execution mania"/"bias for action"/"execution excellence" Grant quickly (What else?) chalked up several unexpected victories in the West: In essence, Lincoln's "strategy" became the exploitation of Grant's growing string of victories. Thence "execution excellence" opportunistically shaped & drove & took precedence over any grand conception of strategy.

Exhibit #2: Jack Welch, subject of a recent Post (& so much more). He is a presumed "strategic genius." I think unequivocally that his "genius" (& GE's in general) was/is ... Execution Mania & Inspired People Development. (And: Energy & Relentlessness.) Of course there's more to the story. Or is there? (Welch was famous for #1, #2, fix or sell—surely that ain't strategy, but a call to relentless action—or else.)

Let's introduce a (to me) closely related "debate."

First: "Strategy" vs "Execution." Next up another sacred elephant: "Leadership" VERSUS "Management." Stupid idea of the decade: "Managers do things right. Leaders do the right thing."

Why stupid? Because "great" leaders are greatest at "doin' stuff"—Grant & Welch redux. "Mere" and unloved "management" is ... as I see it ... the "dull" "do it" variable in the success equation. But in the popular formulation, "sexy" "leadership" is de facto equated with woo-woo Strategy (capital "S"). Management's the "anti-intellectual stuff you wouldn't wish on your hated Cousin Doris."

When we equate strategy with leadership we have entered the ... Dumb Zone. Churchill, it is said, was a lousy strategist—but a genius at "inspiring" a nation waaaaay down on its luck to determined and sustained action.

So? Frankly, with Churchill & Welch & Grant as models, I don't give a tinker's damn whether the leader is a "genius" strategist or not. I want my "genius" "leader" to embrace-embody*:

Energy!
Enthusiasm!
Execution Mania!
Inspired People Selection & Development!
Customer Love!
Passion for Excellence! generic viagra canadian

(*It's the so-called "soft stuff"—but that's another story. Conventional wisdom: Strategy & Numbers = HARD. People & Implementation = SOFT. Aye, the Smell of Idiots is again in the air!)

So leadership ... TO ME ... is pretty much "everything but strategy." That overstates ... but maybe not that much.

I'll go down with my ship on my priority-precedence order: "First" ... Energy-Enthusiasm-Relentlessness-Excellence-Execution-People-Customer Love. "Second" ... whatever (strategy, if you wish).

Bottom line:

Strategy ... last.
"Management" ... rocks.
XX (eXecution, eXcellence) ... rules.
Leaders embrace-embody-exude ... "soft" stuff.

There, I've said it.
Your turn ...

******

Do you love this quote as much as I do? It's from former McKinsey Managing Director Al McDonald, addressing a consulting team: "Never forget implementation, boys. In our work it's what I call the 'missing 98 percent' of the client puzzle."

Love that! Execution-Action-Implementation: THE "MISSING NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT"!

******

(Attached is a PowerPoint titled "Management Versus Leadership?" I've included in it the latest & updated version of "Grant" and, on the topic of execution, a PP titled "Bossidy.")

(Oh yeah, at the top is a 7AM photo from my morning row on Lake St Catherine—about 6 miles from my VT farm.)

More Grant

Another Comment worth lifting! Richard Cauley added this absolutely fabulous Grant quote to my "U.S. Grant" file:

"The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on."

Thanks, Richard!

(Incidentally, sounds eerily like Bill Gates in days gone by.)

My Summer Project

My summer project is Ulysses S. Grant. Just finished biography No.4. I still have the agreed-upon "best presidential memoirs" left. (Best for last.) I reveal my mini-obsession at this point because it fits the above observations like a glove. Grant was a believer in ... ACTION. A "bias for action" from Peters and Waterman/Search in 1982 is Grant in 1862. (Or Patton in '44.) Hence, I have appended a mini-presentation, which consists mainly of relevant quotes lifted from various biographies.

I have come to believe that Grant ought to have been the fifth head at Rushmore—I'm sorry he was left out. He was a genius tactician, matchless troop commander, visionary philosopher-politician, and extraordinary human being. viagra in the states

Enjoy! I've had a ball!

EXECUTION!

"I saw that leaders placed too much emphasis on what some call high-level strategy, on intellectualizing and philosophizing, and not enough on implementation. People would agree on a project or initiative, and then nothing would come of it."—Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan/Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

Spoke last night in Orlando to eCustomerServiceWorld, one of those "holy-moly"/"parade of ..." events (Giuliani, Tony Robbins, etc). After my speech, I interviewed on stage Larry Bossidy, former Chairman of Allied Signal, former GE Vice Chairman. He and consultant/strategy uber-guru Ram Charan wrote (a couple of years ago) Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. The extraordinary—and accurate, as I see it—hypothesis is that we inordinately pay attention to strategy, customers, innovation, and the like, but not the true discriminator between success and failure—implementation! Moreover, execution is the leader's Job #1, and execution is a "systematic and rigorous discipline" that can be learned and applied by one and all. The truth is, I had read the book, liked it, but had not really dived in. I have done so now (as I prepared for my interview), and I conclude that it is a genuine original, of the utmost importance!

Which led me to ...

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS! Attached you will find two. The first, titled "Bossidy," consists of some quotes from Execution that I found particularly apt. The second is a broader presentation I concocted; it's called "A Bias for Action," which a few of you may remember was Principal #1 from In Search of Excellence (our way, in 1982, of underscoring the importance of implementation ... my shorthand has been/is "too much talk, too little do").

Enjoy ...

[Also find the event slides for the eCustomerServiceWorld event here, and the longer Web version here.—CM]

A Study in Brand Dissonance

Have any of you had to suffer dealing with the United Airlines/US Airways of code share deal?

I've had a couple of run-ins with this—you show up for a US Airways flight and find out you're on United in another terminal, or vice versa. Or, you have one leg of a connecting itinerary on US Airways, and another on United, but neither airline can print a boarding pass for the other.

I've dealt with the service problems brought on by this partnership a few times now, and in each case the employees of both airlines have said to me, verbatim, "it doesn't work." One US Airways employee put it this way: "Some guys upstairs might be making money on this. But the passengers and we who work here have to deal with all the problems." Employees of both airlines have related customer service horror stories to me.

The problem is execution. I'm sure the idea sounded great on paper and in meetings. But, apparently, work was never done to properly implement the program. Customers and front line employees of both airlines are suffering. Do you think the top brass at United and US Airways are focused on fixing these problems, or are they only looking as far superficial performance stats in evaluating this program?

Words to Remember

Inducing Big Time Change is the inadvertent topic of several of today's Blogs. So I must direct your attention to my pick as "most profound statement concerning 'change management.'" It comes from Bob Stone, who created a mini-revolution in facilities management at the Department of Defense 20 years ago; then topped himself by leading VP Al Gore's surprisingly successful and mostly unsung effort in the '90s to "re-invent government."

My favorite Stone-ism: "Some people look for things that went wrong and try to fix them. I look for things that went right and try to build on them." (From Stone's Lessons from an Uncivil Servant; also see Chapter 17 of my Re-imagine!)

That is, Stone understood the utter futility of attempting to "overcome resistance to change" that inevitably occurs when one frontally attacks the current establishment and their icons of past success. Instead, success/change most often emerges from blithely ignoring the establishment's entrenched kingpins—and, instead, prowling organizational byways in pursuit of pioneers who, through sheer guts and grit, have been nefariously installing Exciting New & Revolutionary Ways of Doing Things, simply because they believed it was the Right Thing to Do. Next, our Ignore-the-Negative/Accentuate-the-Positive Change Agent (or Uncivil Servant like Stone) publicizes and celebrates the hell out of the Exciting New Stuff (and its Heroic Purveyor-Champions) ... and openly invites others to emulate this new cadre of Hero-exemplars.

If you stayed awake in Psych 101, you know Bob Stone's approach is the Basic Tenet of Rat Psychology. If you punish bad behavior, the net effect is not, as intended, to wipe it out—but, instead, to drive it underground and inadvertently entrench it. Rather, reinforcing positive behavior causes more and more positive behavior to be emitted—thence simply crowding out the negative stuff until it simply vanishes. It ain't that easy—with rats or bureaucrats—but it ain't that hard either if (if!!!) you stay the course.