The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies(blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
blogs.harvardbusiness.org
The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/03/the-real-secret-of-thoroughly.html
10 comments
Jeff Bezos also practices this at Amazon, http://www.shmula.com/987/jeff-bezos-5-why-exercise-root-cau...
The company'd be much better off if he applied the same standard to the development side of the company, which has an average tenure of around 12-18 months for developers (more senior devs tend to leave more quickly than junior devs).
Really? Why is that? I always thought Amazon was a great place to work in.
When I was interviewing for jobs to get out, I encountered close to a dozen ex-Amazon folks... none were at all surprised that I wanted to leave, and one even said that he only joined Amazon for the resume pad.
My experience was basically that they hired me because "senior developers should be good at wading into bad code" rather than for anything vaguely resembling the sorts of engineering tasks that they grilled me for during the interview process.
Most of the software I got stuck with was a nightmare of bad design and rushed hacks. It was also a technological step backward from a government contracting job.
And then there's the problem of supporting all of that crap...
And the benefits aren't all that good, to boot.
Most of the developers I've talked to who worked there didn't like it, and the more senior they were, the less they liked it.
My experience was basically that they hired me because "senior developers should be good at wading into bad code" rather than for anything vaguely resembling the sorts of engineering tasks that they grilled me for during the interview process.
Most of the software I got stuck with was a nightmare of bad design and rushed hacks. It was also a technological step backward from a government contracting job.
And then there's the problem of supporting all of that crap...
And the benefits aren't all that good, to boot.
Most of the developers I've talked to who worked there didn't like it, and the more senior they were, the less they liked it.
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Call 10,000 people and give them each a coin. Ask them to toss it ten times.
Chances are one will get ten heads in a row.
This doesn't mean they have a secret you can learn, or that they can teach you how to flip ten heads in a row straight off, or that they can do it again or event that they can flip one more head.
We have a world where millions of businesses were started, some are very successful - most folded - that doesn't mean the successes have a secret you can copy to copy their success. Or even a non-secret.
I'm not saying business success is as random as tossing a coin, but self-selecting the successful companies to study is a very biased sample, and that doing what they do to get the results they get is not a guaranteed strategy.
Chances are one will get ten heads in a row.
This doesn't mean they have a secret you can learn, or that they can teach you how to flip ten heads in a row straight off, or that they can do it again or event that they can flip one more head.
We have a world where millions of businesses were started, some are very successful - most folded - that doesn't mean the successes have a secret you can copy to copy their success. Or even a non-secret.
I'm not saying business success is as random as tossing a coin, but self-selecting the successful companies to study is a very biased sample, and that doing what they do to get the results they get is not a guaranteed strategy.
Having read a number of business books, this article fits right in. "The secret" to write a popular business book is to take one simple idea, and fluff it up to the size of a dirigible by repeating the point in different ways, and adding lots of anecdotes to make it a better 'story'.
Yeah, the financial secret to most financial secret books is to write financial secret books.
People say this sarcastically, but has anyone ever gone down this path intentionally, knowing they don't have a secret, but pretending they do?
Back in the day when magazines were things you read and they had weird little classifieds sections in the back. I responded to one "Make money blah blah, send $2 and SASE to..." a few weeks later my get rich "book" arrived it was a couple photo copied pages that described taking out ads in magazines "Make money blah blah, send $2 and SASE to..." and sending photo copied copies of the photo copied pages to any suckers naive enough to send you $2.
I was a child, and $2 was relatively cheap way to learn that lesson.
I was a child, and $2 was relatively cheap way to learn that lesson.
SASE is "self-addressed stamped envelope," if anyone missed that.
Simple and beneficial, but hard for greed-minded people to grasp.
Interesting points. It sounds like Michael and Issy have a lot going for them, and that they have a hard-to-find constellation of virtues, traits, and skills. It is that constellation that has brought about the atmosphere of trust, general goodness, and business success to the Four Seasons. It is the boss's aura that propagates to all levels of the organization, trust being but one matter.
The key to success is in people, starting with the person at the top of the pyramid. A bad boss cannot formulate success by inverting his personality or by adopting a daily "secrets to success" checklist to fervently abide by because he will fail eventually. That is a guarantee.
So if you want to be successful, you have to be good and hire good people. And if you can't hire good people it is probably because good people are hard to find (and probably expensive). That is why success is hard to achieve.
To push it one step further, an organization with lots of (or some) not-so-good people will not achieve trust, at least not to the fullest extent. A slacker causes other people to become embittered because they have to compensate. Slackers are not trusted. Gossipers are not trusted. Liars are not trusted. Greedy bosses are not trusted. Greedy bosses do not trust.
The key to success is in people, starting with the person at the top of the pyramid. A bad boss cannot formulate success by inverting his personality or by adopting a daily "secrets to success" checklist to fervently abide by because he will fail eventually. That is a guarantee.
So if you want to be successful, you have to be good and hire good people. And if you can't hire good people it is probably because good people are hard to find (and probably expensive). That is why success is hard to achieve.
To push it one step further, an organization with lots of (or some) not-so-good people will not achieve trust, at least not to the fullest extent. A slacker causes other people to become embittered because they have to compensate. Slackers are not trusted. Gossipers are not trusted. Liars are not trusted. Greedy bosses are not trusted. Greedy bosses do not trust.
Without even clicking the link I can tell the "secret" is either something extremely vague as "work hard" or something that wouldn't hold to the simplest statistical test.
Man, this guy really likes staying at the four seasons.
"Michael practices proximity management. Every month he meets informally with each employee group. No agenda. No speeches. Just conversation. That helps him solve problems"
Isn't this basic job of the manager? Why do academics and industry label common sense with lame terms?
Isn't this basic job of the manager? Why do academics and industry label common sense with lame terms?
This exactly reinforces the advice from a talk Bob Metcalfe gave a year ago.
The bottom line, and the secret:
Great sales people create an opportunity to fulfill a commitment -- even when one doesn't naturally exist -- and then fulfill it.
The bottom line, and the secret:
Great sales people create an opportunity to fulfill a commitment -- even when one doesn't naturally exist -- and then fulfill it.
There have been a few attempts to methodologize a more "consultative approach" to Sales, notably SPIN Selling, Strategic Selling and Solution Selling.
The last of these has been the most successful, and interestingly it was cooked up by a tech. support guy, Mike Bosworth, who was "persuaded" to try his hand at Sales.
I have tried to summarize the essence of Solutions Selling here: http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/01/distillation-of-solu... and have just released a product, bSelling, intended to support this kind of approach: http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-web-based-prod...
The last of these has been the most successful, and interestingly it was cooked up by a tech. support guy, Mike Bosworth, who was "persuaded" to try his hand at Sales.
I have tried to summarize the essence of Solutions Selling here: http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/01/distillation-of-solu... and have just released a product, bSelling, intended to support this kind of approach: http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-web-based-prod...
Sound great for a non-technical company.
In the drier example they give, the GM is able to understand the initial symptoms, follow the chain of inference, and identify the root cause.
What about the case where the chain of problems involves highly technical ones that the GM is really in no position to answer?
Before you say that tech companies should be run by hackers, consider that even unfamiliarity with a sub-project can make an otherwise competent techie give retarded advice.
In the drier example they give, the GM is able to understand the initial symptoms, follow the chain of inference, and identify the root cause.
What about the case where the chain of problems involves highly technical ones that the GM is really in no position to answer?
Before you say that tech companies should be run by hackers, consider that even unfamiliarity with a sub-project can make an otherwise competent techie give retarded advice.
That's the real secret between human beings.
What is a friend?
What is a friend?