Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Bad News Sandwiches
I
once had an employee who was not doing well. She just didn’t seem to understand the nature and objectives of her role. Her work was sloppy and often had to be re-done by others. She often missed deadlines. Other employees resented her because they felt she wasn’t pulling her weight.
We needed to motivate her and get her on a new path. Or, failing that, we needed to cut our losses and terminate her. I consulted with HR about the best ways to have a “difficult conversation” with her.
HR advised me to use a “bad news sandwich”. Delivering bad news can deflate a person and de-motivate them. So you create a “sandwich” of good news/bad news/good news. In theory, that delivers the bad news without discouraging the person.
The conversation went reasonably well. I thought I delivered both the good news and the bad news effectively. I spent roughly 60% of the time on the bad news. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. She had been called in by the “big boss” and two of the three messages she heard were positive. She concluded that she was doing better than she had previously thought. Her work did not improve.
I realized that I should have paid more attention to Greek rhetoric. The Greeks taught a system of message prioritization. If you have three messages to deliver in a speech, put the strongest message first. Put the second strongest message last. Put the weakest message in the middle. Why? Because the middle message is the one your audience is most likely to forget. This is sometimes called the “primacy and latency effect” – the first and last ideas are remembered.
I was reminded of this incident when I spotted an article, “You’ve Been Doing a Fantastic Job, Just One Thing …” in a recent edition of the New York Times. The article also notes that the bad news sandwich doesn’t work (though they call it a “praise sandwich” which is analogous to calling a chicken sandwich a “bread sandwich”).
The article notes that feedback serves different purposes for people at different points in a learning cycle. Novices often lack confidence and need encouragement. Negative feedback can discourage them. On the other hand, more experienced people see feedback as a way to improve their performance. As always, it’s important to know who your audience is.
The article also questions whether it’s useful to label feedback positive or negative. Let’s say I see you riding a bicycle and say, “You’d be more efficient if you raised your saddle by two inches or so.” Is that positive feedback or negative? Sometimes feedback is just feedback.
What have I learned in all this? I’m now more likely to give “negative” feedback without the positive wrapper. I try not to be harsh but I do try to be specific. I also learned that defining a decision as “either/or” can be self-defeating. It turns out that the woman in my little story wasn’t a particularly good marketer. But she was very good at inter-personal communication and very intuitive about other people’s needs. We found her a role in the HR department and she blossomed. I thought that the decision was binary: either she improved or she would be fired. It turns out that there was another option, as there often is. The good news? No more bad news sandwiches for her.
Sustainability and Innovation
Nice axe!
When I lived in Ecuador, I climbed many of the highest peaks in the Andes. I carried an ice axe with a carbon steel blade and a shaft made of laminated bamboo. Why bamboo? Because it was very light and very, very strong. Little did I know, I was also using one of the most sustainable products in the world.
Who uses bamboo today? Dell Computer now creates packaging out of bamboo fibers rather than cardboard. Why? Partially because it’s very light and very strong. But mainly because it’s one of the fastest growing, least resource intensive fibers in the world. As with my ice axe, it’s highly sustainable.
Dell’s packaging is a small example of a wave of innovation that’s sweeping the manufacturing world. Companies realize that sustainability is increasingly important to their own survivability. It can also be an important competitive advantage within significant customer segments. Innovating for sustainability can deliver three significant benefits. First, it can reduce costs. Second, it can lead a company into new market segments. Third, those market segments are often willing to pay a premium for sustainable goods, which can mean higher margins.
According to a joint MIT and Boston Consulting Group study, interest in sustainability is growing partially because profits are growing. MIT/BCG have published the study yearly since 2010, when they first identified Sustainability Embracers “who firmly believe that sustainability is necessary to be competitive.” In 2010, 23% of the Embracers were already reporting profits from their sustainability innovations. By 2012, that number had risen to 37%.
To reduce costs, companies are increasingly asking their suppliers to reduce waste and energy use and simplify packaging. Customers — especially in Europe — are demanding sustainability “credentials”. Employees are also pressuring their employers to innovate for sustainability. Ultimately, sustainability may become a differentiator in efforts to recruit top talent.
Companies are also selling sustainability. According to the study, SAP, the huge business-to-business software company now states that its purpose is sustainability. Peter Graf, SAP’s chief sustainability officer, says, “That is why we have started to … help clients optimize their energy requirements and natural resource use across their supply chains.” Helping customers implement Green Manufacturing has to be one of the biggest B2B software opportunities over the next decade.
Dell’s example is one of resource innovation — swapping a less sustainable component (cardboard) for a more sustainable one (bamboo). Many companies are also innovating their business models to achieve greater sustainability and greater benefits from sustainability. The innovations tend to come either in value chain improvements or in market segmentation. Companies that “pull these two levers” are more likely to see profits from their sustainability efforts.
There are still obstacles of course. Companies cite various hurdles: it’s difficult to quantify the benefits, sustainability conflicts with other priorities, it increases administrative costs, and, in some cases, it may increase overall production costs. Still, a growing segment of companies is investing in sustainability. Perhaps the best predictor of success is whether a company has written a formal business case for sustainability. Those that have tend to be the innovation leaders. They are also more likely to report that their sustainability investments are generating profits.
Interestingly, North American companies are not leading this innovation wave. Though Europe is ahead of America, the real leaders are companies in developing countries, especially in Africa. The MIT/BCG study suggest that this may well be “because these regions face significant resource scarcity and population growth challenges.” This may also be an example of “reverse innovation” where innovations in poorer countries are adapted by richer countries rather than vice-versa.
Time — The Infinite Resource
Budget this!
Time, cost, and quality. Pick any two.
It’s a good thought to keep in mind when managing a project. You can choose to optimize two — and only two — of the three parameters. The third parameter will always go in the other direction. Let’s say you want something done in less time and at lower cost. By optimizing those two parameters, you’ve sub-optimized the third – quality will suffer. If you want high quality at low cost, well… it’s going to take a long time. Pick any two.
Interestingly, we only measure two of the three parameters. We have armies of accountants to keep track of how we spend our money. We have quality control experts to measure quality. We have no one who keeps track of how we spend our time. Are we spending our time wisely? Are we allocating our time based on strategic objectives? Who knows? We treat time as an infinite resource.
Though we treat money and assets and goodwill as corporate resources, we treat time as a personal resource. How you spend your time is pretty much up to you. This higher you rise in the ranks, the more you control your own time.
And that’s a practice that needs to change according to “Making Time Management the Organization’s Priority,” a recent article from the McKinsey Quarterly. As the article notes, “Time management isn’t just a personal-productivity issue … [it’s] an organizational issue whose root causes are deeply embedded in corporate structures and cultures.”
How can you change the “time culture” in your organization? The McKinsey article provides six suggestions. To save time, I’ll cover three today and three more in an upcoming post.
Create a time leadership budget – this may sound obvious but far too few organizations actually do it. When you create a proposal for a new project, you always include a cost budget. How about a leadership time budget? You can think of leadership time as a general corporate resource – just like money. Let’s say you have ten executives working on new projects. Assuming, that each works 2,000 hours per year, that’s an overall “budget” of 20,000 hours. If you add a new project, how much leadership time will it take? What will you take away to make the budget balance?
Think about time when introducing organizational change – organizational change takes enormous resources, much more than we typically estimate. That includes time. Yet we often ask managers to change things while also doing their “day” jobs. Establishing a leadership time budget can help here. So can managerial restructuring. My rule of thumb — call it the Travis rule — is that more managers mean more meetings. Reducing the number of managers can (within reason) reduce the number of hours spent in meetings and re-balance the time leadership budget.
Measure and manage time – ask your leaders to keep track of their time by keeping a simple diary. As McKinsey points out, “Executive are usually surprised to see the output from time analysis exercises, for it generally reveals how little of their activity is aligned with the company’s stated priorities.” As the old saying goes, if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Let’s exercise a little time budgeting here. Most people read at about 200 words per minute. This article is about 600 words long. So you’ve been reading for three minutes. Time to get back to work.
Give and Take and Corporate Culture
At your place of work, is it a good idea to ask for help? If you do, are you considered weak? Are you happy to ask for help or hesitant?
These simple questions about your own behavior can help illuminate your corporate culture. More importantly, they can help you understand whether your culture is pointed toward success or failure. That’s the gist of a new book, Give and Take, and an accompanying article, “Givers Take All: A Hidden Dimension of Corporate Culture” in the McKinsey Quarterly.
The author, Adam Grant, suggests that organizations should focus on developing a “giver culture” rather than a “taker culture”. Grant takes the example of various intelligence agencies in the period after the 9/11 attacks. The single best predictor of effectiveness was “… the amount of help that analysts gave to each other.”
What are the characteristics of a giver culture? It’s a long list and includes, “… helping others, sharing knowledge, offering mentoring, and making connections without expecting anything in return.” In taker cultures, on the other hand, “…the norm is to get as much as possible from others while contributing less in return.”
Grant summarizes the benefits of giving cultures, including increased productivity, improved customer care, greater innovation, and lower turnover. So why don’t more organizations commit to creating giving cultures? Because most organizations are set up to be competitive. Only one person can get that promotion. If my department gets a larger budget, yours gets a smaller one. It doesn’t pay for me to help you.
Grant suggests a variety of steps that executives and managers can take to reap the benefits of more giving cultures. One is simply to “keep the wrong people off the bus.” In the recruiting (and promotion) cycles, focus on identifying, hiring, and promoting givers rather than takers. How do you identify a taker? Three ways:
- Takers say “I” rather than “we” – they take the credit for themselves when it should be shared. (I’ve commented on this regarding the job interview process).
- They kiss up, kick down – managers may see them as supportive but subordinates will see them as little tyrants. Be sure to get references from subordinates.
- They badmouth others – similar to kiss up/kick down, takers will derogate others to improve their own relative status.
While you can hire and promote givers over takers, ultimately managers need to set the example that others can emulate. If you want employees to think outside the box, then you should think outside the box. If you want to create a giver culture, then be a giver yourself. If you pay it forward, you’ll soon be paid back.
Which Way to the Future? International Branding.
“Time flies like an arrow”, Arthur Eddington.
“Fruit flies like a banana”, Groucho Marx.
If it’s true that time flies like an arrow, which direction is it headed? Well, it depends on your culture. We’re all aware that different cultures have different attitudes toward time. In Sweden, people show up for a 7:00 dinner date at 7:00 precisely. In Mexico, people might show up half an hour to an hour later. You shouldn’t show up “on time” because your host might not be ready and that would be embarrassing.
But which way does time flow? Where, precisely, is the future? Somewhat surprisingly, it depends on how you read. People who read from left to right — as we do in English — see the future as being to the right. Indeed, good marketing charts always show trends up and to the right. (I think I could make up most marketing charts without knowing the data).
People who read from right to left — think of Arabic and Hebrew – tend to see the future as being to the left. This has important implications for public speaking. I’ve given speeches to Arabic audiences and I’m sure that I pointed to the right as I indicated activities in the future. In other words, my body language conflicted with my verbal language and probably confused the audience.
The same holds true in graphic treatments that are used across cultures. My favorite example is the FedEx logo. (I discovered this in a Scientific American Mind article). Look closely at the English FedEx logo below. In the “negative space” between the E and the X, you’ll see an arrow in white. Which way is it pointed? Well … to the future, of course.
Now look at the Arabic FedEx logo. Again, you’ll find an arrow in the negative 
space between letters. Which way is it pointed? Well … to the future, of course. It’s a good example of how different cultures see things differently. It’s also a fairly rare example of a corporation showing cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity in its advertising. FedEx should be commended.
(For an example of how the Aymara Indians of Bolivia see the future differently than the rest of us, click here).
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