Look Again: Beware of Becoming Habituated

 This may become one of my favorite, go-to, oft-quoted books, like “Invisible Gorilla,” “Tipping Point,” “Black Swan,” “Abolishing Performance Appraisals,” “Progress Principle” and others of this sort that challenge our paradigms. Sharot and Sunstein alert to how easy it is to become habituated to our routines, our beliefs, our ingestion of news and friends’ stories. The “Power of Habits” taught us that 40-60% of our routines are habits: decisions we made once and don’t re-evaluate unless there’s a disruption. These authors encourage the disruption so we can avoid becoming tolerant of lying, misinformation/disinformation, risky behavior and slow adjustments to the political enterprises…and more. They also provide ways to break “the trance” that don’t provoke defensiveness, fear, flight/fight when our own ‘habits’ of thinking, deciding, acting are challenged. The book is easy to read, digest and act on, if you’re willing to “look again.” (I appreciate the opportunity to get an advance copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley.)

In business, we have a lot of habits—SOPs, policies we’ve adopted from other organizations, and other behaviors because “that’s the way we’ve always done it”—and most of us who have explored and implemented world-class, best practices know that it’s good to review, re-evaluate and revise those ways we do business. I’ve written about how we did away with work shifts in a manufacturing company. I’ve challenged the promise of social media marketing for every industry—in construction, you have to be in the project manager’s top 3 list for those rush-jobs.

Therefore, it’s wise to avoid the trap of taking for granted that what we’ve done is always the best.

Team Habits: A New Book for Org Leaders

 It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with this book--Team Habits by Charlie Gilkey to be published August 2023--as soon as I saw Gilkey’s citation of Amabile’s and Kramer’s book, The Progress Principle—a must read for any manager or leader. Of course, this book’s title “Team Habits” is also attractive since so much of business and organization life is conducted through habits (see The Power of Habits by Duhigg). We make a decision “once” and stick with it until there’s a disruption to our processes, policies, strategies, etc. Leaders and teams operate the same way. We conduct ourselves through routines that are hard to change, just like any habit. Gilkey’s book helps disrupt those “trances” by providing takeaways at the end of each chapter and, more importantly, practice ideas to implement and start creating new habits. A leader will do well to reinforce new behaviors and find ways to put obstacles in the path to “the way we used to do it” (ala the fable of Cortez burning his ships or sending them back to Spain, so that his conquistadors were forced to march forward and no chance to quit). For anyone who’s tried to create change in organizations, this is important and Gilkey provides a service to us all with his book.

Since decision-making is one of those habits that interferes with team performance/excellence and overall motivation (see Kohn’s Punished by Rewards in which he shows giving employees choice is important, and its iteration in Daniel Pink’s Drive), the author’s broad treatment of how teams and leaders make decisions is vital. I once had a CEO ask me how he could get his staff to be more empowered. I advised that his staff would continue to be “disempowered” as long as he continued to behave (i.e. handle decision-making) as he always has. The team would continue to defer to his judgment and look for his approval of ideas. He needed to decline attendance at meetings. If he did attend, he needed to put on his best “poker face”: no non-verbal cues as to his interest or dislike in any of the proposals, no raised eyebrows, frowns, sighs, smiles, drumming fingers, sitting back/forward, etc. Until he changed the decision-making process, the team was going to be stuck. Gilkey would teach this CEO about which decisions he needed to retain, which ones he should seek input before deciding and which ones the staff could decide. (What I have learned and taught as discerning when to tell, sell, consult and join your team in the decision-making. The differences are determined by urgency, responsibility and how much team ownership in the decision is evident or desired.) Gilkey’s material would also coach that team in how to make and implement decisions. 

There is a lot more here than just decision-making, but I find it’s often overlooked in team-building materials. Gilkey also covers the “traditional” topics of team structure, team composition, team dynamics and so on.  

Even team-building, team-leading veterans will glean something from this book.

Grocery Shopping and Other Business Traps

 When you go to the grocery store, or your partner does, how often are you purchasing a different brand or style of food? If you’re like most of us, you thoughtlessly wander down the aisles pulling off those same, familiar packages or produce. In the “name of efficiency” we don’t often stop to reevaluate our previous decisions unless there’s a hiccup in our system, like a stock shortage or dramatic price increase. Once we’ve made the decision about the most economical, most trusted, most nutritious, most flavorful, most delightful food stuffs, we make our shopping trip as short and painless as possible by getting the same old, same old. 

Likewise, in business, we have the same habits. Once we decide on certain service providers and suppliers, we thoughtlessly just “reorder.” Once we decide on our strategy, we rinse and repeat. Same with marketing channels and job advertising. If we make any adjustments, we increase the intensity: more, faster, harder… If one person is making the grade, hire another high-powered, more experienced person. If the sales leads aren’t happening, up the advertising budget, put it in more places, make it more frequent.

Rarely do we stop and question whether we’re heading in the right direction, targeting the right audience, seeing the gaps in competitive offerings. If there’s a problem, we want a magic pill to solve it. It’s true in our health—90% of heart disease patients don’t change their detrimental lifestyle—and it’s true in our decision-making habits. We rarely change how we do strategic planning, how we explore the unknown unknowns, etc. Even a crisis doesn’t make long-lasting changes. With a stock shortage, we go back to the comfortable, purchasing once again what we used to buy when it’s newly replenished. With strategies, we see glimmers of success and so we continue on blissfully unaware that this may lead to a dead-end, a trap.

You can reinforce habits, even business habits, with good feedback mechanisms. You can also create new habits by “burning the ships” so you can’t go back to the old way of doing things, the old standby “recipes” of strategies and decisions. Beware: even change programs don’t create lasting change.

When was the last time you made a long-lasting behavior change? When was the last time you made a significantly different, countercultural, revolutionary, industry disruption? Please don’t just thoughtlessly go down your business “aisles” plucking the same old, same old decisions and strategies off the shelves.

You’ve Woken Up the Customer!…and the Competition!

 In a recent post, I discussed marketing plans that fail to account for buyers’ habits, i.e. our target market segment’s predilection towards repurchasing, re-contracting for the same old products and services they have before. It’s like they’re in a hypnotic trance and we need to snap them out of it. Somehow, we need to figure out a disruption to that habit. (This is why a business owner’s customer list is not really an asset past 30 days of selling the company. “New management” is the disruption.) Once the disruption happens, our potential customers can rethink the decision they made some time ago to buy from our competitor.

Now what? What’s the next move?

Either through different pricing, promotion, location, features, etc. we’ve shown our target customers a competitive advantage. This may or may not cause them to come to us. As they rethink their purchasing decision—socks, for example, in the previous post—they may not only leave our competition but they may go to an indirect competitor—sandals, for example. 

This is not the only problem. We forget our competition are sentient beings capable of reacting to changes in the market also. Too many companies assume they can strip away one percent, two percent or even 20% the total customers from the competition. And the competitors will do nothing different; they’ll keep the same pricing, promotion, product features, etc. as before. Unfortunately, we don’t put ourselves in their position. We don’t consider the change from their perspective. We might only take 1% of the total market but in a highly saturated competitive field, we might be taking 10% of a competitor’s business. Would you sit back, do nothing if a competitor took 10% of your customers? Neither will they.

Our next move needs to consider the competition’s response. What if they drop prices? What if they increase the warranty period? What if they go on a social media blitz? What if they disparage us in press releases? What if they deny those customers some other product or service bought from the competitor as part of the extended product/service line that compels the customers to stick with the competition? What if they finally roll out the Version 3 prototype they’ve been working on? What if they move next door? What if they bundle other products or services in the core offering? Our strategy needs to have a menu of contingencies, anticipating our “woken” competition’s moves.

Therefore, the marketing strategy is not just phase 1 but should also include phase 2 after the competition sees what we’re doing.

Simple Business Market Plans are Often Wrong: Hypnotic Trance Theory

 At a local undergraduate college, I’ve sat in several entrepreneurial student presentations for hypothetical businesses. I’ve also been a guest lecturer at entrepreneurship classes. I’ve also coached several young entrepreneurs. I’m sure my experience is not unusual but this initial marketing plan is often what I see, with only a little exaggeration.

There are 300 million people in the US wearing socks on a daily basis—discounted from the total because of the newborns, those in southern climes who go barefoot and others who wear sandals. On average each person has 40 pairs of socks—10 for babies, 20-30 for youth, more for adults because they want different types of socks for different activities and seasons. Therefore there are 12 billion pairs of socks being bought. My new company will capture 1% of this market through innovative product, pricing, promotion through social media by celebrities and influencers. We’ll sell 120 million pairs of socks. Won’t you want to invest now at the ground floor?

[Apologies to Bombas and other new sock companies if their pitch sounded like this.]

This simple marketing plan is wrong on several levels:

• The data: each person might have dozens of pairs but they’re not replacing each pair every year. (I’m sure the average age of my pairs is 3 years. If I have to replace a type of sock every year, and I’m not wearing them every week, I’m buying a different brand next time.) Plus the average is just that and doesn’t show the statistical distribution of socks ownership: what’s the median number? Is the distribution normal or skewed, exponential…? Nor do we have socioeconomic demographic breakdown. There is some acknowledgment of geographic differences and seasonal differences but we don’t know how this influences ownership quantities or replacement volume. After these and other considerations, what really is the market potential?
• Marketing strategies are dependent on the target segment. Consumer marketing is definitely from business-to-business (B2B) marketing. The “volume” of consumer marketing is like the ocean and you’re going to throw your cup of red dye in it and hope to see some spread throughout. Not impossible but improbable for startups. When is marketing effective for the target segment—in their unaware-of-the-need phase, their research phase if any, in their okay-I’m-ready phase? If the last, how do you time it and how many of your target segment is it in any given day (think “data” again)?
• Buying habits: most of business, like most of our lives, is dominated by habits honed from previous decisions. We avoid making new decisions unless we need to. We generally buy the same things we did before, get exposed to the same media channels as yesterday, follow buying patterns that are seasonal or some other frequent triggerpoint. We basically reorder what we’ve purchased before.. We might only change if we can’t buy what we’ve done before. And there may be a few things where brand loyalty is fluid. What do we know about the sock market? How much does brand loyalty influence our target market decisions? How much is driven by immediate need? Habits are a bit like a hypnotic trance. It takes something amazing, startling or catastrophic to snap us out of our trance. (These same considerations happen in B2B marketing too. A businesses customer list is only good to the new owner for 30 days; the change in ownership snaps the customers out of their “reorder” trance. Sometimes a fresh look allows for customers to ask the dumb question—e.g. “Why are we ordering this $80/lb cold-temperature grease to slap on parts that are put in an oven?” “Don’t know. We must have ordered it once because it was all we could get and never stopped reordering it.”)

So I’d like to see how young entrepreneurs are going to snap an established customer base out of their buying (or non-buying) habits. Early adopters are not a significant market segment and there are limited number of early adopters for any single product/service niche. (There are no universal early adopters who try everything new no matter what kind of product or service it is: geography, age, sex are obvious limiters plus only the super-rich can gamble on ineffective or unsatisfactory products/services that don’t meet a need, want or reduce a pain.)

In one business, I couldn’t find the secret to getting new customers out of their habit of ordering from my competitors. I couldn’t find the trigger to bump one of those other suppliers out of the reorder plan. So I was stuck. There might have been a way but I didn’t find it. It wasn’t social media because that’s not where the customers would have looked. They already had an established and satisfactory base of service providers. No need to Google/Bing/Instagram/TikTok/Twitter/Facebook anyone else. I was also fighting against much bigger players in the market so it was a struggle to get brand recognition. 

All you budding entrepreneurs, please don’t show me plans that start with a global population. Tell me more about your target market segment’s buying habits and how you plan to snap them out of their repurchasing trance.

 

Biblical Business: Return to the Land of Goshen?

Consider 2020 and the upheaval for many businesses and the once-in-a-century recession that wasn't related to a financial crisis, or lack of demand, but to a pandemic that artificially shut down businesses and reduced demand for a most things outside of our residences. Many of us pine for the "good old days" when we understood the economy and the rules of business. We knew how to recover from recessions, knew how to market and sell to new segments of marketplace, knew how to develop new products and services to attract more customers and capture more profits. Those rules didn't help in 2020 and now going into 2021. Many business owners have adapted within their business models, but business as it used to be may not be recoverable as new work-from-home (WFH) routines have been developed. The auto, hospitality and airline industries may never recover to pre-COVID levels. There may not be pent-up demand waiting to be fulfilled when it's safe to be in crowds again.

So then what?

I'm reminded of the Israelites at a couple of inflection points in their history. The Exodus from Egypt was a key marker in their history and a point that is remembered yearly in their Passover/Seder meals. It is the model for many other transitions throughout Judaism, Christianity and Islam. However, let's take a look at it as if we didn't know the conclusion to the story.

The family of Jacob settled in a part of Egypt called Goshen (the Nile River delta). When they went there, one of the sons, Joseph (yes, of Technicolor Dreamcoat opera fame), was already there managing affairs for Pharoah's government. The population of this family grew from 70 to 600,000 men (plus women and children--the population of many 2nd-tier metro areas or the states of Wyoming/Vermont/Alaska/N. Dakota combined). By this time, several generations of Pharaohs had come and gone. The latest one in this story enslaved the Israelites--which is astounding that it happened without bloodshed, except the killing of male babies. (Moses' generation of men was lost.) 

Enslavement had nothing to do with disobedience to God; it wasn't a consequence of poor choices or disregard for the rules.

Skip ahead 80 years when Moses comes back to Egypt to lead his people.

What was the goal God could have communicated to Moses? "Hey, we'll stop this slavery thing so you can live in Goshen in peace and prosperity again." "Hey, even though slavery won't end, we'll bless you in financially." "Hey, the financial system won't change but you'll be in charge of your own organization--no more overseers." "Hey, we'll improve your worth by developing more skills than brick-making for those pyramids and farming because there's no way to build a power base from there." "Hey, we'll attract venture capitalists/private equity firms in the form of Sheba/Ethiopia, Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, etc to rescue you."

Instead, God said the "temporary" living location is finished after more than 2 centuries. It's become too painful for the Israelites to stay. Also, after generations of slavery, there was a mindset--business habits and routines--that needed to be abolished. The options of how to conduct business needed to be proven ineffective. In effect, following Cortes' example, it's time to "burn the ships" so that we can't go back into old patterns of thinking and business practices. Time to go to a whole new place, a Promised Land. A whole generation that had lived as slaves couldn't adjust to the new thinking needed for the Promised Land so the journey was delayed until the only ones who succeeded were ones who couldn't remember the "old ways".

What's your business's Promised Land? How much is it tainted by "old ways" thinking and acting? What promises do you need to focus on? How much of your team is ready for new paradigms and ready to stick with those new ways of conducting your business?

“Tell Me a Story” Gets You Farther Than Facts

It’s a marketing truth that story telling captures your customer’s hearts. Recently, I purchased a toiletry item and was pleasantly surprised that it came with a back-story: the item was manufactured and packaged by disadvantaged people who have employment because of my (and thousands of others’) purchases. My satisfaction with the item already has a base of 4 (on a scale of 10) even before I received it because of the story. Maybe not every item can have such a noble back-story but it’s important. An article recently touts that Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” is the wrong way to communicate to your customers—be they consumers, businesses, venture capitalists, etc.—and that the right way is to start with the story. The author postulates that people buy the story. It’s not the ‘why’ that captures your customer but the story behind the ‘why.’ Other marketing professionals have critiqued the use of Sinek’s tome similarly.

Starting with the ‘why’ might work for strategic planning but not so much with marketing. It’s important also that you’re honest with the ‘why’. In a recent Intelligence Squared debate on whether Silicon Valley has ‘lost its soul,’ it seems that the legendary startups weren’t created for altruistic purposes solely; the founders were also clear that they wanted to make money.

The danger in focusing on stories is that the story gets extrapolated to be generally true of the whole experience, the whole group...even of the whole universe. Suddenly anecdotes are the ‘data’ basis of decision-making. Don’t let it be. Just because the toiletry item has a great back-story doesn’t mean it is the best value (currently I happen to think so...) without getting more data.

Even though the story tells me the ‘why,’ I wouldn’t have purchased the item unless it seemed to also have great value. The ‘why’ didn’t sell me. As humans, we all want a good deal. We might appreciate that Panera Cares operated in such a way to try to feed homeless people if others would pay more for their own meal in order to subsidize the free meals but we don’t in general. We might appreciate Fair Trade goods but if they’re much more expensive than regular goods we don’t change our buying habits in general; we will once and that gives us moral license to ‘sin’ in other purchases. We might oppose slave labor, but we still buy our inexpensive t-shirts from companies we suspect utilize factories that employ ‘slaves.’

Rationalize Anything...Because It Works?

We condone a lot of things...in the past, it was slavery on economic grounds...because most things we believe are good as long as the results prove it. For example, there was controversy around Peters’ book In Search of Excellence because many of the featured companies had fallen on hard times. Therefore, the author’s recommendations came into disrepute. To combat that weakness, Collins and his co-authors of Good to Great and Built to Last looked at longer periods of time for great companies (to indicate if they were truly great even through recessions) and compared them to industry rivals to find those distinguishing characteristics that allowed them to thrive.

What we don’t know is how many companies operated like the ‘great’ companies and didn’t make it. I caution those I advise that I know what’s worked in my experience, against what hasn’t worked, but I don’t know if there are a lot more companies who have failed operating the same way I operate my companies...or a lot more companies that have succeeded using methodogies and principles that I think don’t work. We all suffer from Outcome Bias supposing that the results justify the means, rather than supposing it’s just pure luck that our processes worked this time but won’t year-after-year.

In one company, a few executives were content that change wasn’t necessary. The company had grown 15% nearly every year and that was tolerable. To grow 15% on $1M in sales requires much less effort than growing that same percentage on $100M. Change was necessary. Yet change was difficult because past performance was seen as an indicator of future results (contrary to the disclaimer in all prospectuses). Likewise, in another company, their marketing efforts were viewed as successful because it appealed to the executives of the company. As long as the marketing efforts brought in tolerable results, there was no need to change, notwithstanding that the marketing didn’t appeal to a broader segment of the target market. The company could be more successful with some marketing changes.

On an individual basis, we think we’ve gotten into our job positions through our own skill, talent, habits, personality, inherit motivations, and experience....not that we’ve been in the right place at the right time. The outcome justifies our career path. But when adversity strikes—a layoff, a termination, high turnover in our staff—we blame it on the external ‘world’. The problem is ‘their fault’, the poor economy, and so on. We’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s bad luck. (But before it wasn’t ‘good luck’ but us that achieved success...) 

If people don’t respond to our marketing appeal, it’s not that the message is wrong (it appeals to us), it’s that we’re not marketing in the right place or they’re not looking in the right place.

Accidental Diminisher: Always-On Guy

Whereas the Idea Guy as an Accidental Diminisher discourages a lot of innovative, creative thinking...and independent or thorough thinking in general...the Always-On Guy burns out the staff. It happens more in this hyper-connected technology world than ever before. Jobs used to be 9-to-5; in other words, there was a finite timeframe required to get the work done. Now we're 24/7. We can get emails, texts, direct messages at all hours of the night. We've become so connected that we demean the person who has not responded in 10-15 minutes after sending the message.

Recently, Black Friday shopping phenomenon occurred. Through retail peer pressure, stores are opening, not only on the Thanksgiving holiday, earlier and earlier on Thursday to capture the early deal-shoppers. Some--like REI--are fighting back the trend by staying closed on Friday.

Daimler Benz, the parent of Mercedes, has had a voluntary email policy in place for a few years. When you go on vacation, you can turn on a setting that automatically replies to the sender a message regarding your status, who else to contact...and deletes the email. Early in my career I rejected a smart phone because I didn't need to be accessing (or be tempted to access) emails until I was back in the office, hotel or other designated work 'site'. It was bad enough that I could access emails from the company server at home whenever I wanted and that sometimes took valuable time from the family.

However, I was known as the guy who would send emails in the middle of the night...sometimes after inspiration hit at 2 am. I made it clear that I did not expect a response until sometime in the work morning...after a thoughtful reply could be drafted. I did not expect replies at night or on the weekends and sometimes chastised my staff if they did. I also sent an engineer out of the office to see his son get an award from the school board even though a customer had just asked for a quick response to an issue. "They can wait," I orderd, "until the morning when you get back."

One company I know--and no longer in business--didn't have a vacation policy and expected 6 days/week of work. Another company that's highly successful but possibly has the lowest levels of employee engagement ever requires managers to be in the office on Saturdays whether they have work to do or not. Many read the newspaper during that time.

If you're the Always-On leader, how do you take breaks to recharge and re-create new levels of performance in yourself? If you can't find ways to do it, your staff won't either. At some point, burnout will happen to all of you. In the meantime, you're not getting the most productivity out of your team that's possible. According to Liz Wiseman and her fellow researchers, Multipliers get twice the productivity and effort as Diminishers. Accidental Diminishers--like the Always-On Guy--may not see productivity drop in half, but you're not getting the best. Everyone needs to find 'white space' according to Juliet Funt because our days are filled with '100% exertion and 0% thoughtfulness'. Covey of 7 Habits fame encouraged us to move into quadrant 2 as leaders working on the Important and Non-Urgent work: the strategic work, the improvement work. You can't have your best creative thoughts unless you're slowing down and making 'white space'.

Your Business on Crutches

I've never broken a leg but I understand the purpose and benefit of crutches. They help you make travel forward when something isn't working right. When you've healed and your physical problem is resolved, the crutches are discarded.

Unfortunately in business (and other organizations), management has a problem. They find a way to fix it enough to keep moving forward. Sometimes the fix is inspection or audit or some other QA step. Sometimes it's monitoring efforts on customer service calls. Sometimes it's a redesign of the product or service like extra reporting, project reviews, additional authorizations on purchases. For example, when management realizes there should be individual development plans, that focus gets tacked onto performance appraisals. (And then performance appraisals are trying to fulfill eight purposes, become cumbersome and don't accomplish any of its intentions well.)

The problem with this mode of operation is that the crutch becomes the fix...and keeps getting used...until it becomes a standard operating procedure (SOP). The short-term remedy turns into long-term. Very few, if any, go back and revisit what the solution should be. Crutches becomes habits and habits become traditions and "that's the way we've always done it and it works". Sort of.

When there's a problem, we often don't have time to get to the root cause and implement a long-term solution. (I've written about how Six Sigma can be in conflict with ISO and other quality management systems in this regard.) However, we need to revisit the issue and change the process inputs or make the processes robust enough to handle the causes of problems. If trash blows around on garbage-collection day because of the wind, you can put bricks on the lids...but then the truck drivers have to exit their vehicles to remove the bricks. Or you'll lose the bricks when they get dumped with the trash. Since you can't change the wind, change the trash container in a way that can handle the wind, and not make the drivers get out. If you're having a manufacturing problem or some other issue with errors, hassles, headaches, etc., don't add inspection or audit for the long-term. Add it with a "sunset" policy or procedural change that expires in a month or two. This will force the team to revisit the process, discover the real cause and install a better, more effective and less expensive solution. If skill development plans aren't happening, make them a topic of performance appraisals for a quarter until you can develop a simple, effective procedure and educate managers on it.

Look around your own organization. How many behaviors, procedures and so on are happening because there may have been a problem at one time, and the cause hasn't really been dealt with?

A New Framework for Employee Engagement

As noted before, employee engagement hasn't really gone anywhere in the past two decades. It's still a lot less than managers like to think it is. We often think we've got half our team fully engaged (enthusiastic about contributing to the vision, committed to doing their best work, etc.)--the blue line in the graphic below--but reality is that it's half of that (green line below). And we think with a some effort (which we don't have to continue forever), the engagement levels will radically improve.

We can listen to all kinds of engagement gurus but most are missing the vital framework to creating the levels of engagement in their teams that knock your customers' socks off (i.e. gets your Net Promoter Score above 50%).  4ward Associates has developed a proven framework and toolkit that creates those levels. It's starts with realizing that a manager's efforts need to be daily.

• Foundation: organizational trustworthiness deriving from manager's trustworthiness [Update July 2017: Harvard Business Review confirms this...]
• Personal Motivation: understanding each person's set of motivators (and the lowest proportion of the population is motivated by money)
• Manager's own level of engagement
• Understanding the key drivers for engagement (it's not what you think)
• Understanding how to influence change
• Daily reinforcing the change using focus, and feedback on vital behaviors and the six dimensions of influence (this is also part of the toolkit)

It's not rocket science. In fact, many successful leaders do a lot of this because it's common sense. However, it's hard because we have a hard time changing our own leadership paradigms (frameworks) that we don't embrace the new framework. We maintain the bad habits that got us into this situation even though we know it's not the best...but it's working well enough...we think.

If you miss any of the elements above, you'll be skating on the green line above (or stuck at point 1 on that particular line). It's where business has been for 50-60 years probably, ever since the dawn of the 'company man' who does the work because it has to be done but he/she would rather be doing something else.

Business Recidivism

Change is hard for individuals. On average it takes several attempts to quit smoking. Dieting is a multi-billion dollar business because we try different diets to help us with weight loss. Most heart disease patients (including C-level people), by definition in the midst of a life-threatening crisis, continue their bad lifestyle habits.

It's even harder for a group of individuals--our businesses. It's not that we resist change. We embrace change. But we revert quickly to old habits. Change programs don't succeed. That's been reported in such auspicious places as Harvard Business Review...and yet we can't keep ourselves from the Change Program Addiction!

A while ago there was research by management guru Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan points out that there are several reasons why 'successful' people continue behaviors, like their style of decision-making and other management aspects, even though the organization is failing:

• Confusion between correlation and causation: "my behavior made me successful" rather than a fortunate confluence of circumstances and continue that style as a form of "superstition" (i.e. "if I change my behavior, I'll be less successful")
• Persistence leads to stubbornness and failing to recognize that "it" is not working any longer
• Omission of failure experiences and strong memory focus on successes
• Identity found in self-perception and self-esteem; they cite a leader who acknowledges he was a poor listener but that not listening to people is part of his self-made image--new behavior could feel "phony"
• Inflated performance relative to peers: like Garrison Keillor's "all are above average", successful people believe their in the top 10-20% of all successful people
• Recognition as successful means there is heavy investment in those behaviors and management styles

On the last point, remember the story of the "Emperor's New Clothes". There was such a heavy investment in the process that it was impossible to admit that it wasn't working. That's a lot like business with our change programs. We've invested so much we can't admit that it's not working so we persevere to the point of burnout...and we ignore the program 'work' to do what we're good at doing, reverting back to old destructive habits.

Let's be courageous to recognize when our processes, systems, management styles aren't working as well as we want. If we're measuring the right things, it'll be apparent. That can support a real change...and not a change program.

Smoking Cessation

Intuitively the numbers didn't make sense. Interesting statistics were shown in a workshop today regarding smoking/tobacco use. In 1999, the US average was 23.3%. In 2014, it's down to 17.3%. Positive trend! Younger people have a higher rate of smoking than older people. (I think that's been true for decades now.) Teenage brains are believed to be more susceptible to addictive behaviors. When you add the information that 44% of smokers try to quit but only 6% of them succeed, you wouldn't think the attrition rate would be very high. Thus, you would expect the smoking prevalence to increase over the last 15 years. Or remain the same.

Smoking prevalence for 18-24 year-olds is 21.8%, about the national average in 1999. The 'inbound' population group would maintain the 20+% of the population. It drops for the 25-44 year olds slightly and in line with the cessation success rate. It seemed to me that either young adults are over-reporting their smoking habits or the success rate is higher than 6% in order for smoking to decrease 25% over 15 years.

To check my gut feel on this, I ran a simple spreadsheet simulation starting with the 23.3% in 1999. I plugged in 44% of those try to quit each year (not accounting for multiple attempts--it takes 8-9 attempts on average for a smoker to finally quit) and the 6% of those succeeding. In the first year, 0.6% of the overall population drops out of the Smokers category. Run that scenario for 15 years and the rate is 15.2% by the year 2014. Close but far enough from the reported 17.3% to question either the 44% attempting to quit and/or the 6% success rate. Or the 8-9 average attempts.

If it takes 8-9 attempts before succeeding at cessation, then the success rate would be closer to 5% than 6%. At 5% success, the projected smoking prevalence in 2014 would be 16.3%, closer to the reported number.

Either way, the 15 year overall trend is a lot lower than the 15 year demographic trend would indicate. Moving from the middle young adult category of 18-24 (21 years-old) to the middle of the next demographic category of 25-44 (35 years-old) is about 15 years. If the percentage attempting to quit (44%) and the success rate (5-6%) is correct, we'd expect the older demographic group to be in the 15-17% smoking prevalence range. They're not. They report at smoking rates near 20%! Very little drop from their younger selves.

It's another check on what the data seems to indicate. It's not all stacking up that smokers are attempting to quit at the reported rate nor succeeding at the reported rate. If smoking cessation is less successful than it used to be, we would over the next decade or so expect to see higher national prevalence for smokers.

Uphill Battle

"Everything worthwhile is uphill," John Maxwell, the leadership guru said at a recent global leadership summit. "Yet our behaviors and habits are downhill." Think "Easy Button" (sorry, Staples). Downhill thinking includes self-centeredness (what's in for me? the leader asks) and contentedness--which includes blaming others for poor results. (Think about all of the recent bad business news being blamed on the election. NFL viewership is down, restaurant revenues are down, etc. 'course English football viewership is down but can't blame that on the US election--they'll find their own scapegoat.) Uphill hopes, downhill habits: That's a big disconnect, according to Maxwell, and it's detrimental to our leadership and horribly impacts our organizations.

The solution he says are found in five "intentions":

• Value people--even the ones you don't with whom you don't like connecting or correcting
• Think of ways to add value to people
• Look for ways to add value to people
• Add value
• Encourage others to do the previous four intentions

It wasn't unlike the message Alan Mullaley, former Ford chief, had at the same leadership summit: people first and include everyone. He gave an example of having corporate teams collaborate with dealers.

Stockholders are Not the Only Stakeholders

Recently in Harvard Business Review, it was reported that 78% of CFO's would make a decision that would increase stock value even if it meant hurting the company in the long-term--such as reducing economic value. 55% would cancel a project even though it had a positive Net Present Value. What is going on here?

Sure, these decisions could increase stock price, which means more in their own and their colleagues' pockets when they cash in their shares, options, phantom shares and other stock equivalents. But it also means that it's going to be harder for the stock price to be sustained in the long run. The company's value will decrease in the long-term. The only saving grace is that three-quarters of the their competitors are willing to do the same.

Here's where you can gain competitive advantage. Do what makes sense. As Eli Goldratt says, the goal of a business is to make money now...and in the future. If you hurt the productive capability there won't be any production in the future. There's a lot of pressure, and a lot of momentum, and a habit of making decisions for the shareholders' benefit. Fight it. Be part of the one in five who's willing to make things right for the long term. As I've pointed out before, it's hard to fight habits; only 1 in 10 do. Evaluate your decisions before you make them in light of long-term value (economic value, or EVA). Challenge yourself to decide differently from what you would have decided in the past. (I'm not saying automatically do something different; I'm saying take a fresh look at the options rather than selecting the one you've made in the past.)

Gamification, the New Buzzword

What gets measured gets improved.

We all know that. We also know that if you tell me how I'm measured, I'll tell you what actions I'll take.

A new popular book is reminding us that gamifying a process or business system can help create some improvements. The author describes how it contributes to the three areas of motivation described by Daniel Pink in Drive: autonomy, mastery and purpose. However, you don't want to turn just anything into a game, just to make it fun. The concept works with employees and customers.

I know I've been intrigued by the recognition I get from different fitness apps. Does the recognition motivate me? No. I have other reasons, but they're a nice touch. So don't just gamify something by creating rewards. Alfred Kohn has already told us how incentives backfire. Gamification occurs when we have choices and the ability to modify the content of our work and collaborate with others. (Even fitness experts know that exercise and healthy eating is more successful when people do it with others.)

The Great Game of Business, the educational and consulting arm of Springfield Remanufacturing, has been doing this for decades: making business improvement like a game. However, they will tell you that first people need to understand the rules of business (the game) and learn how to keep score (finances) and then master the methods to win the game. It doesn't cheapen the effort if you're maintain a respect for the consequences of people's actions and decisions. There can be some 'game' aspects to GGOB's methodology but that's not the focus. A mini-game only gets people enthused to practice their new knowledge and create new habits of operating. We all need to get out of a rut if we want different results. Something like GGOB's mini-game can help.

Beware: there's another mean to game the system. You know about this too. It's related to the first dictum mentioned above. Tell me how I'm measured and I'll tell you how I'll behave...sometimes for my own interest and I'll figure out how to game the system. For example, we had a company that wanted to reduce rework in their manufacturing operations. The measurement was the time spent fixing and repairing assemblies. People still did the same work, but they reported it differently. Rework went down, and so did efficiency as the rework effort was recorded as first time assembly work which reduced efficiency.

Gamify your business, sure, but don't get gamed in the process.

Criteria for Success?

Recently a psychologist gave an interview about his book which disparaged the 12-step recovery programs designed to help people kick addictions. His main point was that since the programs have a 90-95% recidivism rate that they are ineffective. He pointed out that people have to go through rehab several times before it works. He suggested they be changed, improved and at minimum, stop marketing themselves as more effective than they are for all people. The programs might work for a minority of people, but most others should try other methods to kick addictive habits. He was touting his own program which seemed to be more successful.

By his criterion, most of the medical and psychological profession is a failure. 90% of heart disease patients don't change their lifestyles; they're recidivists. Even Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has varying success rates for different conditions and, according to people who have participated in it for different conditions, report that they have to go through several blocks of sessions. Sounds a lot like 12-step programs.

One thing going for this psychologist and the medical profession: they keep testing, studying, investigating better and better methods. Thus, his last complaint against 12-step programs is that they haven't really changed much since they were developed 80 years ago. Well, I can't say much about that. CBT has been around since Freud though. Most of the testing about CBT is to test its efficacy against other methods such as pharmaceuticals, different ...ectomies, etc.

We have all faced trying to change a bad habit, and we have all failed to some extent, just ask any of our spouses. We all fail until we find the right moment and the right method to create a change. Then whatever method we've used is a success. It might be the method or it might be an accumulation of methods (the 1000th time our spouse has told us to do something...?!). Our organizations might have tried Total Quality Management, Just-in-Time, Lean, Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints, Quick Response Manufacturing...and any other organizational change method (that also have failure rates of 65-85%) and it's often not until we start concept XYZ and everything falls in place that we find operational and strategic success. Does that mean all the other methods have been failures? Or does it mean that we've created enough of a critical mass in organizational dynamics to turn the corner and no matter what the "new" method is, it's going to be a success?

Influence is More Than Creating Motivation

Whether we're talking about sales or change management or just pure leadership, influence is important. Too often we focus on the motivation aspect of it, and think we're done with our part of the bargain. Now, if only they'd get with the program, it'd be smooth sailing.

Joseph Grenny at a recent leadership summit outlined a matrix around influence. It confirmed what a lot of us knew. I've been involved in community-wide efforts to improve health. I noticed that peer pressure plays a big part in creating and maintaining good habits. Not only peer pressure, but a support structure is important--if I'm eating salad, it's helpful if everyone else is too and not grinding down greasy bacon cheeseburgers in front of me. I've also learned that changing organizational structures to encourage the new behaviors is important. Eli Goldratt talks about creating an offer that can't be refused because it cuts to the core need of your customer. Historically, Cortes scuttled some ships and sent the others back to Spain to eliminate an option of retreat for his men. I've changed policies that reduce the probability that people will do the less-effective actions. Insurance companies and the government are good at changing organizational structures to get the right thing: they're called payroll deductions. On the motivation side, we're great at providing incentives.

Grenny points out it's more than finding personal and structural motivation, creating a social network that helps and changing organizational structures. You also need to provide the means to acquire the personal skills to take advantage of the change.

In the personal, social and structural elements, we as leaders need to provide the motivation and the abilities in those areas to be successful.

Needles in a Haystack

Big Data is useful, but calling it 'big data' is like saying an elephant is in the same family as a dormouse (it's not, by the way, nor are they in the same taxonomical order). If every 32-bit byte was worth a penny, Wal-Mart's yearly expansion of retail data would wipe out the US government's deficit. Add Kroger,Target, Walgreen's, Amazon.com, and others: the government would have a surplus, even if data were taxed at 0.1 cents per byte. But I digress.

Lots of companies are using the data to focus marketing efforts on their customers. They're looking for patterns. Netflix developed a successful show based on their viewers habits. Target sends out baby product promotions when they notice women following the pattern of buying multivitamins and skin lotion a few months after that. They found a pattern in earlier customers and now apply it to current ones.

A worry about this analysis of 'big data' is that there's not an effort to look into causes, only correlations. I've blogged about the dangers of correlations that are unrelated to causes before. Analysis of data is one step toward getting information, but it's not the final step. Even one of the authors points out a correlation that seems strange and struggled to find the cause: orange cars have proportionally less maintenance problems than any other color. There's just too much data and too little time to not only find the patterns and correlations but to be able to analyze the data for causes.

What about the accuracy of the data? Couples might share on-line retail accounts. If it's in the guy's name, Target might miss out on the marketing of baby products. In a family or a group of close friends, swapped purchases would really distort the analysis or make it moot. Societal norms change. Those changes might invalidate what we might research, conclude and develop for marketing plans. Non-profits are discovering this as charitable giving trends have been evolving over the last twenty years. Workplace policies have been modified as new generations enter the labor market with different expectations and work styles.

If we collect too much information, are we obliterating the really useful? Are we hiding the needles within the haystack?

Is There an Antidote?

Toxic leaders are said to charm, manipulate and undermine their followers intentionally leaving them worse off than when they entered the scene. Perhaps you've worked for one...or two. You probably struggled with the politics of the situation, felt like you were walking on egg shells just waiting for one to break and a big mess would become yours, and you would get the blame.

Chaleff in his book Courageous Follower would still encourage us to speak up, give feedback to the leader (after some preparation, of course), give support to the organization's goal and purpose. We might also need the courage to leave.

Jean Lipman-Blumen in an article published in the Ivey Business Journal suggests several personal and organizational options to overcome a toxic boss. The personal options are: 1) do some investigation on the boss's history; 2) create a coalition; 3) avoid confronting the boss alone; 4) if you must, create a strategy to undermine and oust the boss; and 5) lastly, you can always leave. Organizationally, she suggests term limits, 360 degree reviews for feedback to the boss, "respectable departure options" and a democratic selection process.

Unfortunately, Chaleff and Lipman-Blumen ignore the fact that a significant portion of our organizations are composed of people with High S as a behavioral style--the amiable types. These people don't want to rock the boat, or experience any change that might induce insecurity. They avoid confrontation and any hints of conflict. Good luck finding enough High D's--drivers, dominating, seeking challenge and action behavioral types. Creating a coalition is going to tough. Finding enough people willing to go together to confront the boss will be even less probable.

Also, we know from Coens' and Jenkins' work (Abolishing Performance Appraisals) that 360 reviews are fraught with biases and inaccuracies. ("If I tell her she's doing a good job as boss, maybe she'll say the same about me.") If the toxic boss reports to the board, we know most boards are ineffective in discovering the leader is toxic. In addition, there's a conflict of interest where the directors "owe" their position and pay to the leader. Most toxic leaders have surrounded themselves with an entourage through which truth has difficulty penetrating.

Even if you have a great opportunity and are extremely persuasive in convincing the toxic boss to change his ways, nothing will change. Despite a crisis, 67-90% of us still continue to act the same way, making the same decisions that led us into the crisis originally. CEO's who are heart disease patients still continue the same habits that got them into trouble. As long as the bad leader behavior occasionally gets results, it will be enough to encourage the toxic boss to continue doing what he has always done. "Oh, so-and-so doesn't know what they're talking about. It sounded right. But it doesn't work. My way is working. That's why I'm the boss."

If you work for the Devil who wears Prada, I think your choices are two: pray for a miracle (perhaps your boss will be a ten-percenter and actually change) and/or leave.