Burning books in Whoville

In the debate around whether or not to punish the soldier who burnt the Qurans some argue that the freedom of speech is a constitutional right.  I think those who argue this point have missed a couple of key issues.  First of all, although I am not a lawyer I bet that the rights of a soldier in a war zone are not the same as a civilian in peace time USA.  Secondly, the United States constitution is not valid in other countries.  If for example it were illegal to burn Dr. Seuss books in Whoville then someone visiting Whoville could not claim protection under the constitution of their home country.  Right or wrong, Whoville has the right to determine its own laws.

Att skapa en Kick-off

Svar på en fråga från en nybliven VD om vad han ska göra på sin första kickoff. Han hade redan fått några svar från konsulter och jag kände att det behövdes lite nyansering.------------------


Det är svårt att ge några generiska råd till en ny VD. Det är så många faktorer att väga in som tex hur organisationen och individerna i organisationen mår, vad finns det för kultur i organisationen och din personlig stil och talanger.

Jag skulle vilja nyansera Kjell-Åkes budskap till dig. Det finns faktiskt inga garantier om att din Kick-off blir fantastisk. Den enkla sanningen är att många människor kommer hem ifrån Kick-Offs och känner sig mindre motiverad än när de kom ditt. (läs gärna Why We Do What We Do av Edward Deci)

Om jag var dig skulle jag inte övertolka Kjell-Åkes råd om "din energi, vilja och engagemang". Om du vill ha en lyckad Kick-off är nyckeln för dig i din nya roll som VD närvaro. Närvaro innebär mer att du lyssnar än att du pratar. Om man har barn är det lättare att förstå närvaro. Man måste se de i ögonen, lyssna på deras idéer och svara på oändliga frågor men man behöver inte alltid ge ett svar när man svarar. Med vuxna människor och barn kan man ofta svara med en fråga som "vad tycker du?". Din energi, vilja och engagemang måste vara synlig året runt inte bara på kick-offen.

Om du är genuint intresserad av att genomföra en lyckad start för ditt ledarskap se till att denna Kick-off handlar om personalen och inte om dig. Många chefer tror att det hänger på de men det hänger på din förmåga att frigöra krafterna i din organisation, frigöra inte skapa. Krafterna finns där men kommer inte alltid fram.

Du antyder i din fråga att det finns redan en del problem med murar och annat i verksamheten. Visa att du inte är räd för dessa problem och ta medarbetarnas oro på allvar. Jag har många gångar lagt en punkt först på agendan som jag kallar "Bitching and Complaining" eller "Gnälla och Klaga". Lägg 15-30 minuter på att ta fram alla "negativa" synpunkter som finns i organisationen. Låt personalen dela upp sig i mindre grupper och diskutera dessa punkter. Vilka kan vi göra något åt och vilka kan vi inte göra något åt. Var ärlig. Om t.ex. det är mycket gnäll över konjunkturen kan man ärligt säga att det kan inte vi påverka. Men vi kan diskutera hur vi gör för att göra det bästa av situationen. När man sedan har listan över "problem" som vi kan på verka kan man rösta fram de 3-5 saker som har mest effekt på verksamheten. Lova att ledningsgruppen ska ta sig an dessa och skapa handlingsplaner. Om det finns spänningar och oro i organisationen och du tar dig an de som första punkt kan man då också bordlagt "gnället" för resten av konferensen. Skulle lite gnäll trots allt poppa upp under konferensen kan du helt enkelt lägga till det på listan för att återkomma till det vid ett senare tillfälle.

Sist vill jag bara varna för ”gurus” med alltför lättsamma råd och hurtiga rop. Ledarskap är svår och alla gör misstag. Framgång kommer till dig i det vardagliga arbetet genom din förmåga att kommunicera en riktning och sedan att skapa goda förutsättningar för medarbetarna att göra det de är bra på.

Lycka till

Kelly

Not if, but how government should regulate business

I was inspired by and article by George Jarkesy the other day. In the article George quoted Calvin Coolidge who said “The business of America is Business”. That quote along with Georges comments got me thinking. If business is the business of America then what is the business of business? Or, to put it in the words of one of my old bosses when I was presenting a meandering powerpoint presentation about something he shouted out “What’s the bloody point?”. This in fact is the crucial question. What is the point or purpose of business for if in deed America is all about business the purpose of business must be the essence of America.
According to some, the business of business is to create wealth but that is at best a radical over-simplification. If you mean by wealth, money and/or things, then I would be inclined to disagree that business is about creating wealth. The fact is that nobody, at least no healthy people, strive in life only to gather money or things. What we really want is health, status, love, security and self-actualization to quote Maslov. Money and things are only of value as long as they contribute to one of our underlying and fundamental human needs. The key word in that last sentence is “value”. What the business of business “should” be about is creating value.

Then the question arises, “value for whom?” The only reasonable answer to this question is that businesses should be in the business of creating value for everyone, certainly for shareholders, customers and employees but also for society as a whole. Business shares the responsibility of creating value for society with all other institutions both public and private. All institutions exist “or should exist” for the purpose of making the world a better place. If making the world a better place is not the primary long-term objective of an institution then that institution has no place in society. It may well be that someone starts a business with the sole ambition of making money but if that business doesn’t create value for other people it will not survive. If that business is detrimental for society it should not exist.

We may all have different opinions about what a better world would look like and even if we agreed on what a better world would be we may not agree on how to get there. But we all share a common ambition of making things better. This is probably nowhere as evident as it is in the political arena. Politicians and political parties may have strongly opposing opinions and may often have hidden agendas but they all have the same fundamental message to voters. Vote for me or my party and things will be better.

But what happens if a business does not contribute to the general good of society and actually acts in ways that are detrimental to society? We regulate them! I have never met anyone who didn’t believe in government regulation of business at some level. It just makes good sense to legislate to block the creation of monopolies. It is equally prudent to control that companies don’t pollute the environment and that they provide a safe working environment for their employees. The question is not whether or not we as a society should regulate business nor is the question how much we should regulate business. Some businesses are highly regulated and there are few if any among conservatives or liberals who argue for legalization of heroin or prostitution.

The real issues are complicated and the answers must be more nuanced than the slogans being thrown around by politicians on both sides of the issues. Government, as an extension of the people, should have the right and the responsibility to protect the people from unscrupulous people and harmful business practices for the good of society.

The World's Shortest Marketing Plan (revisited)

I finally woke up to the fact that the link to my World's Shortest Marketing Plan Template had gone bad so I am taking the liberty to repost it. I hope you don't mind.


Since first blogging this marketing plan template it has been reblogged countless times and been published in many different magazines and books. The first person to reblog my template was Guy Kawasaki. Guy was also made some very interesting adaptations to it which he called The World's Shortest Marketing Plan 2.0 which was especially interesting for the digital marketing environment. Guy was also generous enough to be very clear about the source of the original template for The World's Shortest Marketing Plan.
There seems to be a never ending supply of new marketing plan templates. A google search gave 215,000,000 hits on “marketing plan”. The problem most marketing plan templates is that they are just to long. Marketing plan templates often look like a table of contents which you then fill up with substance about your own company and business environment. I have worked with templates that were in themselves over 30 pages long and before you actually start filling them with content. If you followed such a template and answered all the questions you would have a marketing plan of several hundred pages. I was recently visited by a large consulting company who suggested that we should use their template which was a mere 70 pages. Needless to say, I decided not to use their template. Don’t get me wrong, the content of most of these “long” templates is very good and if used as a shopping list over what might be done and not a list of what should be done they can be very useful.

The marketing plan is a communication tool used to give direction to the company. It is not a checklist actions or a demonstration of the marketers analytical prowess. You might think of the marketing plan as a menu describing the food that will be served at a fancy party. This description tells you what will be served and in what order. It does not give you a recipe for every dish, a description of all the various dishes that were considered but not chosen or a deep analysis of why the items on the menu where selected. Naturally someone has to create the menu and a great deal of analysis might be behind every selection but this does not need to be reflected in the menu.
Similarly, strong marketing plans are the result lots of analysis. It may well be that you want to keep all of this analysis together in one place for future reference but the marketing plan is not the right place. The marketing plan should describe target/goals and how they will be achieved during a given planning horizon (typically 1 year) in order to reach the company’s vision. Although marketers can be deeply involved in creating the vision it is typically the CEO’s responsibility. The marketer comes in to describe what underlying customer needs will be addressed with which products or services and to which customers , how will they be packaged, communicated, priced, bundled and distributed.

Some time ago I was asked to speak to a group of MBA students at the Stockholm school of economics about marketing plans. I realized that I was not at all satisfied with the templates we used or any template I had ever used for that matter for the simple reason that they were too long to be used for effective communication.

Below is a template that I created for that presentation and it has been adapted in used in several companies since then with good success. Try to answer each square in the template with no more that one page including diagrams and pictures. This will result in a marketing plan of no more than 24 pages!

Good luck!
http://thinktank.se/sv/tt/Om-Kelly-Odell/The-Worlds-Shortest-Marketing-Plan/
Click here to view or download the template.

Dump the CEO/President rhetoric

It’s time to raise a finger of warning regarding the prolific use of the "CEO President" analogy in the current primary rhetoric. The role of President of the United States may have some things in common with the role of CEO of a large corporation but then again the office of President has things in common with many different roles. The USA is not a corporation and the President is not the CEO.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with making comparisons between different roles in society to learn from similarities as well as the differences. The problem is that we often take these kinds of analogies much too far. Listening to the political rhetoric around the presidential primaries I get the uneasy feeling that many people, including some presidential candidates, actually think running the country is the same as running a company. Again, although there are clearly some similarities, the differences are so significant and so many that we should be wary of even using this analogy.

Corporations are generally not democracies. CEOs, even the best ones, are accustomed to having orders executed. As long as the CEO enjoys the support of the board he/she expects action. Good CEOs may tolerate a great deal of open hearted and even heated discussion until a decision is made but after the decision is made the CEO expects loyalty to the decision and action towards executing the decision. Opposition and competition for a corporation are by definition confined to the competition, i.e. to other companies providing similar goods and services not people within the organization.

The President of the USA does not have the consolidated power of a CEO and cannot expect to have his/her orders followed after a decision is made. The decision making process is long and complicated and usually involves so much bargaining with opposition that the final result hardly resembles the original idea. When some sort of decision is finally pushed through Congress it is still free for any and all opposition to work actively against the decision. What CEO would tolerate that kind of behavior within their own organization?

Shareholders, employees, customers and suppliers are distinctly different roles and for the most part completely different people. In government there are no investors who expect a certain return on investment. The closest role to a citizen that can be found in a corporation would be that of customer. The concept of customer may be useful in terms of government providing various services to citizens which the citizens pay for through taxes. But again, there is not a direct correlation between the recipient of the service and the payer for the service. Typically real customers have a choice but in most areas government has a monopoly on the services provided. Certainly citizens have choice in terms of voicing opinions and electing politicians to make wanted changes but this is a long slow process.

If we insist on using corporate language to describe government the best we could do is to call government a kind of "Shared Service" organization. We as taxpayers decide that certain services would be better if we share. We pool resources in order to provide those services to us. In developed democracies like the USA most political debate is focused on "how much" service should be provided not on what services. There is no real debate about wether we should provide education, healthcare, a legal system, military or welfare. The debate is more focused on how far reaching these services should be and how they should be financed.

There are employees and clearly much of the leadership skills required for leading a large company will be useful in leading these employees but corporations do not have a monopoly on good leadership. Good leaders may have honed their skills in NGOs, military, medicine, education or any number of other places.

There are opportunities to learn from corporations about efficiency in processes and good customer service but then again corporations may well have opportunities to learn from other areas in society as well.

Our founding fathers intentionally created a system of checks and balances to guarantee that too much power didn’t end up in the hands of one person or one group. CEOs are dictators. Companies are dictatorships. We have seen examples of leaders of some countries trying to implement a CEO-like leadership (ie Italy, Hungary, etc) and the end results are devastating to the democratic process.

When in doubt, good for you!

If you don't doubt your ability now and then you probably don't have any.

Deadlock or not?

It can be a daunting task to understand the implications of political decisions. What does healthcare reform really mean for me or should we invade Iraq or should we now leave Iraq once we have gotten there? Most people elect politicians they believe will represent their interests but unless you are voting for a county commissioner who has promised to fix a pothole in front of your house it can be extremely difficult to know just what is in my best interest. This self-interest is at the heart of democracy but it is also one of democracy's great faults. A professor once told me that democracy works great until people discover that they can vote themselves rich. This is basically what happened in several European countries like Greece where a majority of the people elected the politicians that promised the most benefits.

In order to simplify things we get on various bandwagons and buy into entire ideologies so that we don't have to think about individual questions that are very complicated. How could it be that highly educated people on both sides of important political decisions have such different opinions? The easy answer, if you are a member of one bandwagon or the other, is simply to draw the conclusion that the other guys are either idiots, fundamentally evil or in cahoots with someone somewhere (like big business). While any or all of these may be true and certainly are true to some extent the primary driver of dissention on important issues is the sheer complexity of the issues. It just isn’t easy!

The problem isn’t an easy one nor is the solution. A peek into the world of psychology might help us understand some of the phenomena at play in politics that cause the most damage.

There are many studies in the world of psychology that demonstrate that most people will take a benefit for themselves most of the time and not give it to another person. This is especially true if the other person is not known by the test subject or does not know who the other person is. Suppose that a generation of people in a country decide to give themselves retirement benefits that exceed the funding that they actually put into the retirement system. The rationale behind such a system might be that things will always get better and economies will always grow. In essence, no matter how you look at it one generation of voters gives themselves a benefit at the expense of coming generations. Those who will foot the bill are either too young to vote or not even born at the time the decision is made. These kinds of decisions occur all the time.

Let’s take another example. At any given time most voters do not have children in a public school system. If we say that in the USA public school is 12 years and the average life span is around 80 years and voting age is 18 then an average voter might have children in school about one fifth of their voting life. By the time the individual is old enough to vote their public schooling is over. Also consider that changes and improvements in school systems tend to take a long time so the closer a voters children get to the end of their schooling the less likely they are to be interested in investments in the public school system. It may already be clear to you what I am getting at here. Most people are going to opt for political candidates whose policies will give them the most benefit in the shortest time. Investing in school systems will tend to get a lower priority from voters than say retirement programs. And the closer you get to retirement age the more likely you are to vote for candidates who offer good retirement benefits. Voters in the middle of their lives will be more interested in policies that help them immediately. People with reasonably stable jobs with decent pay and good benefits will be more interested in tax reductions since they view taxes as a necessary evil. Something they pay for but don’t get much benefit from. Even people who don’t have stable jobs with decent pay and good benefits but who believe that they will in the near future will tend to opt for lower taxes and less benefits for other people.

Now here is the catch, most of us, will not and probably cannot, admit to being so selfish. We wrap all this seeming selfishness up in rhetoric about the American dream or that using tax money to help needy people incapacitates the needy. As it turns out it is not tax dollars that incapacitate the poor it is how they are applied.

The American dream while decidedly American in its expression is not unique to the USA. In most, if not all countries of the world things tend to go better for those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Those who can and do take control of their fates, educate themselves and struggle up the ladder tend to do better in life, at least materially, no matter where they live. It should not go without saying that if you invade a fertile continent, rich with natural resources and run off or kill the people who were already living there your chances of building wealth are much better than if you had stayed back in Europe working as a farm hand for a wealthy land owner. That said although most have heard about the American dream many Americans have never actually gotten a glimpse of it.

Once we have decided where we stand on various political issues based primarily on our own short-term interests the cognitive dissonance kicks in and we start seeking out information, arguments and analogies to confirm our beliefs. Once we have found enough “evidence” to confirm what we already had decided was true we then enter the phase of overestimating our own abilities and judgment and underestimating the views of people with divergent ideas. Since those other people are also entrenched in their own narcissistic trance of cognitive dissonance they also believe their views to be best. In the end any attempts at communication between the groups ends up in a verbal fistfight (which is about what American politics has become).

In order to navigate in a complex world we learn to generalize. At one level generalization is extremely important helping us to quickly draw conclusions about whether or not a situation is dangerous or safe, whether a berry is edible or not, or if a particular animal is food for us or if we are food for them. The problem occurs when we let these generalizations become facts and let them guide our judgment and behavior too much. Most snakes are not poisonous and most of the poisonous ones don’t want to bite us. Far fewer people are killed or injured by sharks every year than by bicycles. We have irrational judgments that cause us to fear things that are relatively safe and not to fear other things that are actually quite dangerous.

The same thing happens in politics. We tend to make broad generalizations based on our firmly held beliefs and come to conclusions that while they may sound logical are really only fantasies in our own heads. I hear republicans express genuine fear of President Obama and his policies. The same fears I heard expressed by democrats while George W was in office. It may be true that one of them was or is more dangerous than the other but the problem is that most people who have decided that Obama is dangerous for our country are not really open for discussion on the topic.

So what’s the solution? I will be the first to say I don’t know but I do have some general suggestions. As with any problem we need to begin by acknowledging that the problem exists. The problem is not “other people”. T he problem, or problems are significant and complicated and will not be resolved by platitudes and political rhetoric. Our only chance is to put our brightest minds to work across party lines. Will this happen? Short-term I doubt it. If history is any kind of teacher we will probably have to see things get much worse before the party politicians will bury their battle axes and focus on the issues facing our nation. It is not all the politicians fault. They do what they think they need to do to stay in office. They do what they think we want them to do. We need to give them a mandate to do what needs to be done and that probably won’t happen till things go to hell a bit more.