What Makes a Leader?

by Daniel Goleman

It was Daniel Goleman who first brought the term “emotional intelligence” to a wide audience with his 1995 book of that name, and it was Goleman who first applied the concept to business with his 1998 HBR article, reprinted here. In his research at nearly 200 large, global companies, Goleman found that while the qualities traditionally associated with leadership—such as intelligence, toughness, determination, and vision—are required for success, they are insufficient. Truly effective leaders are also distinguished by a high degree of emotional intelligence, which includes self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill.
These qualities may sound “soft” and unbusinesslike, but Goleman found direct ties between emotional intelligence and measurable business results. While emotional intelligence’s relevance to business has continued to spark debate over the past six years, Goleman’s article remains the definitive reference on the subject, with a description of each component of emotional intelligence and a detailed discussion of how to recognize it in potential leaders, how and why it connects to performance, and how it can be learned.

Every businessperson knows a story about a highly intelligent, highly skilled executive who was promoted into a leadership position only to fail at the job. And they also know a story about someone with solid—but not extraordinary—intellectual abilities and technical skills who was promoted into a similar position and then soared.
Such anecdotes support the widespread belief that identifying individuals with the “right stuff” to be leaders is more art than science. After all, the personal styles of superb leaders vary: Some leaders are subdued and analytical; others shout their manifestos from the mountaintops. And just as important, different situations call for different types of leadership. Most mergers need a sensitive negotiator at the helm, whereas many turnarounds require a more forceful authority.
I have found, however, that the most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but mainly as “threshold capabilities”; that is, they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions. But my research, along with other recent studies, clearly shows that emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership. Without it, a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive, analytical mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader.
In the course of the past year, my colleagues and I have focused on how emotional intelligence operates at work. We have examined the relationship between emotional intelligence and effective performance, especially in leaders. And we have observed how emotional intelligence shows itself on the job. How can you tell if someone has high emotional intelligence, for example, and how can you recognize it in yourself? In the following pages, we’ll explore these questions, taking each of the components of emotional intelligence—self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill—in turn.

Evaluating Emotional Intelligence
Most large companies today have employed trained psychologists to develop what are known as “competency models” to aid them in identifying, training, and promoting likely stars in the leadership firmament. The psychologists have also developed such models for lower-level positions. And in recent years, I have analyzed competency models from 188 companies, most of which were large and global and included the likes of Lucent Technologies, British Airways, and Credit Suisse.
In carrying out this work, my objective was to determine which personal capabilities drove outstanding performance within these organizations, and to what degree they did so. I grouped capabilities into three categories: purely technical skills like accounting and business planning; cognitive abilities like analytical reasoning; and competencies demonstrating emotional intelligence, such as the ability to work with others and effectiveness in leading change.
To create some of the competency models, psychologists asked senior managers at the companies to identify the capabilities that typified the organization’s most outstanding leaders. To create other models, the psychologists used objective criteria, such as a division’s profitability, to differentiate the star performers at senior levels within their organizations from the average ones. Those individuals were then extensively interviewed and tested, and their capabilities were compared. This process resulted in the creation of lists of ingredients for highly effective leaders. The lists ranged in length from seven to 15 items and included such ingredients as initiative and strategic vision.
When I analyzed all this data, I found dramatic results. To be sure, intellect was a driver of outstanding performance. Cognitive skills such as big-picture thinking and long-term vision were particularly important. But when I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels.


Source:hbr.org

Killed by Groupthink

Maria Trautmann On October - 25 - 2010

Groupthink is when a group of people are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group and their striving for unanimity overrides their motivation to discuss alternative options. The term was coined by psychologist Irving Janis in the 70s. When the cohesiveness is high, close-knit groups try to minimize conflict to reach consensus and may take inferior decisions that kill imagination. Groups are highly selective when examining information and fail to seek expert opinion. Members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the group’s comfort zone for fear of upsetting the group’s balance. In pursuit of group cohesiveness, individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking may be lost.
There are eight symptoms of groupthink to look out for:

• illusion of invulnerability – excessive optimism
• belief in inherent morality of the group – causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions
• collective rationalization – not challenging the group’s assumptions
• out-group stereotypes – those who are opposed to the group are perceived as weak, biased, spiteful, or stupid
• self-censorship – censoring ideas that deviate from the group consensus
• illusion of unanimity – silence is viewed as agreement
• direct pressure on dissenters – towards any member who questions the group
• self appointed mindguards – members who shield the group from dissenting information

Most commonly cited examples of groupthink are:

• Bay of pigs invasion of Cuba by the Kennedy administration
• Roosevelt’s complacency before Pearl Harbor
• Truman’s invasion of North Korea
• Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war
• Watergate
• Regan’s Iran-Contra arms deals
• Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima
• Challenger NASA space shuttle disaster
• More recent examples: Enron, Northern Rock, Lehman Bros, RBS and HBOS

So how can we avoid groupthink:

• Use external experts
• Set-up multiple working groups
• Appoint a “devil’s advocate”
• Senior management to avoid expressing opinions
• Discus ideas with trusted people outside of the group
• Examine all effective alternatives

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com

Real creativity

Where does it come from? What is it?
Well, if you're disheartened by my previous post about licensing your idea, here's the punchline: Real business creativity comes from boundaries.
Inventing something cool that can't be implemented isn't creative. It's mostly a waste.
I think that inventing the unimplementable is a fine hobby, but it's also a bit of a crutch. Yes, of course we need big visions and big ideas, but not at the expense of the stuff you can actually pull off.
So, let's get specific:
If you've decided you want to create a breakthrough in your area of expertise (say Ajax coding), then either be prepared to launch and run it when you're done, or have a clear licensing strategy in mind, one where you're not the first person in history to pull it off.
If you've decided to invent a great idea for a book, better be ready to write it too, and either find a publisher or publish it yourself. There's no market for book ideas.
If you want to do creative ads, it helps to have clients willing to run them.
These constraints are the best part of being creative, as far as I'm concerned. I couldn't imagine writing Superman comics. The rules are too vague. There are too many choices. In non-profits and organizations and even in politics, the rules are pretty obvious (sometimes they're too obvious). So the real creativity comes in navigating those rules in a way that creates a breakthrough.
One of my favorite triumphs of all time happened on my first day of work at my first real job, 1984, Cambridge, MA. No voice mail in those days. I was employee #30. I walked in and there was a plastic carousel, about 18 inches in diameter, with 40 slots in it. Like thin slices of pizza, but 4 inches deep. Each slot had a sticker with a name typed on it. Not in any order, particularly.
Every day, when you went into work, you had to spin the carousel around and around until you saw your name, and then grab whatever pink slips had your phone messages on them.
Now, there are 100 better ways to do this system. Faster and easier. But 99 of them required getting a new carousel or device.
Instead, I grabbed a paper clip and put it on my slot. I could find my slot in a heartbeat now.
Within a day, the carousel was covered with flags and widgets and more. Problem solved.
See the rules. Keep most of them. Break one or two. But break them, don't bend them. (thanks to Curt for various inspirations).


Source:http://sethgodin.typepad.com

9 Attitudes of Highly Creative People

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips

Yesterday I looked at 5 methods for being creative. Today I’d like to look at some attitudes to build into your approach if you want to be a more creative person:

1. Curiosity

I’ve written previously on the topic of curiosity because I’m convinced that it is an essential skill to build as a blogger. Learning to ask ‘why’, ‘what if’ and ‘I wonder…’ are great questions to build into your life if you want to be a more creative person.

2. Seeing Problems as Interesting and Acceptable

One of the problems of the Western mindset is that we often see problems or obstacles in life as unacceptable parts of life. We avoid pain or suppress it when it comes and in doing so don’t often see and feel symptoms that are there to tell us something important. Creative people see problems as a natural and normal part of life – in fact they often have a fascination with problems and are drawn to them.

3. Confronting Challenge

Many of the most creative ideas through out history have come from people facing a challenge or crisis and rather than running from it asking ‘how can I overcome this’?

4. Constructive Discontent

Creative people often have an acute awareness of what’s wrong with the world around them – however they are constructive about this awareness and won’t allow themselves to get bogged down in grumbling about it – they take their discontent and let it be a motivation to doing something constructive.

5. Optimism

Creative people generally have a deeply held belief that most (if not all) problems can be solved. No challenge is too big to be overcome and no problem cannot be solved (this doesn’t mean they’re always happy or never depressed – but they don’t generally get stumped by a challenge).

6. Suspending Judgment

The ability to hold off on judging or critiquing an idea is important in the process of creativity. Often great ideas start as crazy ones – if critique is applied too early the idea will be killed and never developed into something useful and useable. (note – this doesn’t mean there is never a time for critique or judgement in the creative process – it’s actually key – but there is a time and place for it).

7. Seeing Hurdles as leading to improvements and solutions

This relates to some of the above – but by ‘hurdles’ I mean problems and mistakes in the creative process itself. Sometimes it’s on the journey of developing an idea that the real magic happens and it’s often out of the little problems or mistakes that the idea is actually improved.

8. Perseverance

Creative people who actually see their ideas come to fruition have the ability to stick with their ideas and see them through – even when the going gets tough. This is what sets apart the great from the good in this whole sphere. Stick-ability is key.

9. Flexible Imagination

I love watching a truly creative person at work when they’re ‘on fire’. They have this amazing ability to see a problem or challenge and it’s many potential solutions simultaneously and they have an intuitive knack at being able to bring previously disconnected ideas together in flashes of brilliance that seem so simple – yet which are so impossible to dream up for the average person.

Is Creativity tied to Personality Type or Can it be Learned?

As I read through this list of traits of creative people – the question that I find myself asking is whether creativity is tied to personality type or whether it can be learned.
My own uneducated answer to this question is – ‘yes’.
Some people are just creative – they don’t train themselves to think like they do and they often don’t even know that they are any different from the rest of us – it’s just who they are.
However I believe that we can all enhance our ability to be creative over time.
Tomorrow I’m going to round off this mini-series of posts on creativity by suggesting a few practical things that those of us wanting to enhance our creativity might build into our lives.


Source:problogger.com

7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creative Output

January 5th, 2007 by Steve Pavlina

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After my last article on experiencing creativity, there was a question in the resulting forum discussion about how to enter this highly creative flow state, the state where you lose all sense of time, your ego vanishes, and you become one with the task in front of you.  Is this peak creative state a rare chance event, or can it be achieved consistently?
For me the creative flow state is a common occurrence.  I usually enter this state several times a week, staying with it for hours at a time.  I’m able to routinely enjoy the flow state as long as I ensure the right conditions, which I’ll share with you in a moment.
My first memories of habitually entering this flow state date back to the early 80s when I was learning BASIC programming.  After school I’d rush through my homework in order to spend hours in front of my Atari 800 writing, testing, and tweaking programs just to see what the machine could do.  Sometime around 8pm I’d notice my hunger, realize that the family had already eaten dinner, and ask my mom, “Why didn’t you call me when dinner was ready?  I’m starving!”  She’d invariably claim to have called me 3-4 times, usually with me verbally acknowledging, “I’ll be there in a minute.”  Either I had no recollection of this happening, or it was like trying to recall a fuzzy dream memory.  Did she really call me, or did I imagine it?  I was so engrossed in my creative hobby that I became oblivious to what was going on around me.  If I did acknowledge my mom, it must have been an unconscious reaction.
For the past 25 years, I’ve relied heavily on these tune-out-the world creative periods for a variety of tasks encompassing many disciplines:  computer programming, game design, arts and crafts, web development, articles, speeches, Photoshop work, sound effects recording, school papers, and lots more.  Today these periods are essential for my blogging work.
For most of my life I took these creative spurts for granted.  As a teenager I attributed it to being left-handed.  But I later realized I’d developed a process for initiating and sustaining these creative periods.  I can’t guarantee these rules will be as effective for you as it is for me, but I suspect that with a little practice you’ll find them quite effective.
Here are my 7 rules for optimizing the highly creative flow state:
1. Define a clear purpose.
To enter the flow state, you need a goal.  Decide what you want to create and why.  Vague intentions don’t trigger the flow state.
If I sit down with the thought of cranking out a new article or doing some generic website work, I rarely enter the flow state.  I need a more focused intention like, “I’m going to write an article about my rules for creativity.”  Children do this automatically.  A simple, straightforward purpose like, “Let’s build a castle with these blocks” is all you need.
If you’re working on a large multi-session project like a book, state your purpose for this single creative session.  What do you want to accomplish right now?  Create an outline?  Design a character?  Write a scene?
Don’t overqualify your purpose.  You need enough clarity to give yourself a direction but not so much as to put yourself in a box.  You purpose should be an arrow, not a container.  Adding too many constraints can stunt your creativity by limiting your options.
2. Identify a compelling motive.
In addition to a goal for your creative session, you need a reason to be creative.  Why does this task matter to you personally?  What difference will it make if you can be creative?  Why do you care?
If I don’t care about a task or project, I can’t summon the flow state.  In school I could trigger the flow state easily when doing assignments I liked, but if I thought an assignment was pointless or stupid, I’d only go through the motions without crafting anything particularly original.
It’s much easier to be creative doing what you want to do vs. doing what you have to do.  One thing that often happens when people quit their jobs and go to work for themselves is that their creative output soars.  Even among those strange job-holding folk, being able to select your next project from a few options is often used as a reward, especially in technical fields.
The more compelling the motive, the more likely you are to summon high levels of creativity.  Imagine that your inner creative resources are lazy, and they need a damned good reason to roll out of bed and go to work for you.
My best creative output occurs when I’m working on something that will simultaneously benefit myself and others.  Being at the extremes of either selfishness or selflessness isn’t effective.  I write my best articles when I’m passionate about the topic and expect my writing will genuinely help people.  The anticipated impact needn’t be huge — writing a humorous piece to make people laugh is a perfectly effective motive.
3. Architect a worthy challenge.
To awaken your full creative potential, the difficulty of your creative endeavor must fall within a certain challenge spectrum.  On a scale of 1-10, where 1 is trivially easy and 10 is impossible, I’d say the optimal creative range is 5-9 with a 7-8 being ideal.
If a task is too easy, you don’t need to be particularly creative, so your creative self will simply say, “You can manage this one without me.  Come back when you have something worthy of my attention.”
If you consider a task too hard or too complicated, your beliefs will get in the way of your creativity, and you’ll end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.  Even if you manage to hit the creative zone, it will be unsustainable because you won’t recognize the validity of the ideas that come through.  When you feel a task is nearly impossible, it’s usually because the solution, if it exists, is way outside your comfort zone.  These are the kinds of problems where your creative self will come up with solutions like “quit your job” or “end your marriage.”  The solutions may be perfectly valid, perhaps even brilliantly correct under the circumstances, but you’ll be very resistant to accepting them.
What if you want to do creative work that doesn’t fall within the optimal challenge spectrum?  Fortunately there are many ways you can modify a task to adjust the challenge level.  If a task is too easy, you can add more constraints, just as you’d add weight plates to a barbell.  If a task is too hard, you can break it down into smaller chunks, like tackling a page or a chapter instead of a whole book.
Sometimes when I work on an easy task, I’ll boost the difficulty to push myself into the optimal creative range.  If I’m writing an article that seems too easy for me, I can increase the challenge by injecting humor, writing in an unusual style, or adding some other twist.  A while back I wrote a popular article on the Meaning of Life, which was a personal account of what I consider to be the most difficult period of my life (getting arrested for grand theft and being expelled from school).  Writing the article didn’t require much creativity because recalling those experiences was a straightforward, linear task.  To introduce more creativity into the piece, I decided to use Depeche Mode song and album titles for all the subheadings.  The challenge was to make them fit the text without seeming too odd.  This extra constraint made composing that 6400-word article a lot more fun.  Whenever you read an article of mine where the style seems a bit unusual, it’s a safe bet I’m boosting the challenge to be more creative.
You might assume a very easy task is a good thing, but being in the sweet spot of challenge is better.  Tackling something that’s too easy is like strength training with weights that are too light.  It’s mind-numbingly boring and won’t produce results.  Being properly challenged is more fun, helps you grow, and yields a meaningful sense of accomplishment.
4. Provide a conducive environment. 
You’ll find that certain environmental conditions make it easy for you to enter the flow state, while other conditions make it nearly impossible.  The optimal environment varies from person to person, so you’ll need to experiment to find what works best for you.
Some people seem to work best in stimulating, active environments.  Author Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink) claims to have written at least one of his books entirely in public places like coffee shops.
I work best in a private, quiet environment.  I do virtually all my creative work alone in my home office with the door closed.  I’ve previously written an article on Creating a Productive Workspace, so I won’t reproduce that advice here.  But the basic idea is that different workspace layouts can have a noticeable effect on your creative output.  I’ve found certain feng shui principles helpful, such as positioning my desk to be in the “commanding position” with my back to the wall and where I can see the door.
When I’m doing challenging creative work, I usually don’t listen to background music at all, although sometimes I’ll play non-vocal new age or classical music.  However, I’ll listen to trance music (with or without vocals) when plowing through routine tasks.  I suggest experimenting with different types of music to see what effect it has on your ability to reach and maintain the flow state.
5. Allocate a committed block of time.
Imagine your mind is like a computer.  The more you can take advantage of the computer’s resources, the more creativity you harness.  To free up the most resources for your creative task, you first need to unload all nonessential processes.  This means closing programs like Ego 1.0, Physical Sensations 1.3, and Distracting Thoughts 2.0.  If you want to maximize your creativity, you need to hog as much of the CPU as you can get.
It normally takes me about 15 minutes to begin to enter the flow state, and I’m solidly entranced after about 45-60 minutes.  By the end of the first hour, I’m just getting into the task.  My real creative output happens in hours 2, 3, 4, and beyond.
It isn’t until after the first hour that the creative task is fully loaded into my mental RAM, and my CPU is finally dedicating its full capacity to the task at hand.  This is the state of deep concentration.  In this state distracting thoughts that would otherwise knock me out of state no longer arise.  I’m completely locked on, and I’ll keep plowing through my creative work until stopped by a force like fatigue or hunger.
When I begin an article, I don’t know how many words it will be or how long it will take to finish.  Sometimes I’m done after 90 minutes; other times I’m still going after 5 hours.  When I’ve written articles to target lengths (like 1000 words) or to target times (like 2 hours), I usually churn out the kind of vapid drivel you’ll find in fluffy print magazines.  With a tight deadline I can still finish something, but it won’t be anywhere near what I create with an open-ended schedule.
I recommend a minimum continuous block of 3 hours for a serious creative task, preferably closer to 6 hours.  That may sound like a lot, but once you’re cranking away in that glorious flow state, you’ll barely even notice the passage of time.  It’s better to allocate too much time than too little.  It’s a real downer to finally hit the flow state and have to stop after 30 minutes because you must attend to another commitment.  Feel free to schedule your routine tasks into 30-60 minute blocks, but give yourself as much time as possible for highly creative work.
6. Prevent interruptions and distractions.
If you can’t keep yourself from being disturbed by urgent phone calls, emails, or drop-in visitors, you won’t consistently achieve and maintain the flow state.  You must do whatever it takes to prevent unnecessary interruptions during your creative periods.  Make arrangements to ensure you won’t be disturbed except in an absolute emergency.
Once I’m in the flow state, I can handle a minor interruption like a bathroom break or grabbing a snack without falling out of state.  My mind will still be churning on the original task, and I can easily pick up where I left off.  But if I do something that requires a context change such as making a phone call or checking my email, I’ll begin losing my flow state.
When I begin a creative task, I tell Erin I’m “going to my cave,” so she knows not to interrupt me.  I clear my desk of unnecessary items, ignore the phone, disable my instant messenger, and close all programs except those required for the task at hand.  I do what I can to prevent interruptions, but even when they occur I usually just ignore them.
If you work for someone who expects you to produce creative work but makes it impossible for you to tune out interruptions, fire your boss.  If you can’t maximize your creative output, you’ve lost your greatest leverage for producing value.  That will cripple your earnings potential, since your income is a function of your ability to produce value.
Respect the value of your creative periods, and don’t permit yourself to be interrupted.
7. Master your tools.
Creating a tangible piece of creative work requires tools such as a computer, guitar, or pencil.  Even though it may take years, you must achieve basic competency with the tools of your trade before you can consistently enter the flow state.
Put in the time to take those piano lessons, attend those programming classes, or devour those Photoshop tutorials.  Of course there are degrees of mastery, but the more you develop subconscious competence with your tools, the easier it is to enter and maintain the flow state.  When you’re in the flow state, you won’t be worrying about where your fingers need to be, what buttons you need to click, or what words you need to type.  Your subconscious will handle those details for you while you remain focused on the high level composition.
The reason I can maintain the flow state when writing articles is that I’ve taken the time to develop my writing skills and to master the software I use to turn my ideas into published works.  I don’t pretend to be a literary genius, but I’m competent at turning my thoughts into words, sentences, and paragraphs without much difficulty.  On my first high school essay, I did the best I could and received a C+.  I didn’t understand the basic concepts of composition like unity and coherence.  But I had a fantastic English teacher in my freshman and sophomore years.  He was challenging and even a bit sadistic, but I put in the effort to learn grammar and composition and earn an A in his classes.  By the time I graduated high school, I could write articles, essays, and reports with relative ease.
On the other hand, when I’m not competent enough with my tools, I can’t enter the flow state.  Despite using Adobe Photoshop for many years, I never invested the time to master its complex interface because I only used it intermittently.  Consequently, I seldom achieve the flow state when using Photoshop because I spend too much time consciously thinking about the low-level action steps.  This stunts my creativity because I remain stuck in my left brain instead of shifting into my right brain.
After your creative flow state churns out your first draft, you’re always free to go back and edit it later.  Get the creative, right-brain part done first.  Then go back and do a logical, left-brain pass to make refinements and correct any problems.  For my articles that includes spell checking, tightening up the wording, making cuts, etc.
Entering and maintaining the highly creative flow state is a skill, not a blessing, an accident, or a fluke.  By habitualizing the rules above and adapting them to your situation, you can experience the flow state as a regular, perhaps even daily, occurrence.  And once you learn to harness the power of flow, your creative output will soar.


Source: http://www.stevepavlina.com/

Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact

by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh

For most of the 20th century, the compact between employers and employees in the developed world was all about stability. Jobs at big corporations were secure: As long as the company did OK financially and the employee did his or her job, that job wouldn’t go away. And in the white-collar world, careers progressed along an escalator of sorts, offering predictable advancement to employees who followed the rules. Corporations, for their part, enjoyed employee loyalty and low turnover.
Then came globalization and the Information Age. Stability gave way to rapid, unpredictable change. Adaptability and entrepreneurship became key to achieving and sustaining success. These changes demolished the traditional employer-employee compact and its accompanying career escalator in the U.S. private sector; they are in varying degrees of disarray elsewhere.
We are not the first to point this out or to propose solutions. But none of the new approaches offered so far have really taken hold. Instead of developing a better compact, many—probably most—companies have tried to become more adaptable by minimizing the existing one. Need to cut costs? Lay off employees. Need new skills? Hire different employees. Under this laissez-faire arrangement, employees are encouraged to think of themselves as “free agents,” looking to other companies for opportunities for growth and changing jobs whenever better ones beckon. The result is a winner-take-all economy that may strike top management as fair but generates widespread disillusionment among the rest of the workforce.
Even companies that have succeeded using minimalist compacts experience negative fallout, because the compacts encourage turnover and hamper employee productivity. More important, although the lack of job security indirectly creates incentives for employees to become more adaptable and entrepreneurial, the lack of mutual benefit encourages the most adaptable and entrepreneurial to take their talents elsewhere. The company reaps some cost savings but gains little in the way of innovation and adaptability.
The time has come, we believe, for a new employer-employee compact. You can’t have an agile company if you give employees lifetime contracts—and the best people don’t want one employer for life anyway. But you can build a better compact than “every man for himself.” In fact, some companies are doing so.
We three come from an environment where the employer-employee relationship has already taken new forms—the high-tech start-up community of Silicon Valley. In this world, adaptability and risk taking are acknowledged as crucial to success, and individual entrepreneurs can have a big impact if the networks they’ve built are strong enough.
Two of us (Reid and Ben) recently wrote a book, The Start-up of You, that applied the habits of successful tech entrepreneurs to the work of building a fulfilling career in any field. Obviously, not every industry works like a start-up business. But most firms today operate in a similar environment of rapid change and disruptive innovation.
Tiny start-ups out-execute corporate giants all the time, despite seemingly huge disadvantages in resources and competitive position. Start-ups succeed in large part because their founders, executives, and early employees are highly adaptable, entrepreneurial types who are motivated to out-hustle, out-network, and out-risk their competitors—and who thus generate outsize rewards.

Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Compact

by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh

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Recruiting, training, and relying on such a workforce can be scary. After all, if you encourage your employees to be entrepreneurial, they might leave you for the competition—or worse, they might become the competition. This is an everyday reality in Silicon Valley. But smart managers here have realized that they can encourage entrepreneurial mind-sets and increase retention by rethinking how they relate to talent within their organizations. What’s more, many have come to understand that they can benefit from employees who do leave for other opportunities.

Don’t Be Afraid of Entrepreneurial Employees

This is the beginning, we think, of the new kind of compact that’s needed today. Although it is most evident in the tech world, we’ve seen elements of it elsewhere—at consulting firms, for example. The chief principle underlying it is reciprocity: Both parties understand and acknowledge that they’ve entered into a voluntary relationship that benefits both sides.
Mutual investment was implicit in the old lifetime employment compact, to be sure. Because both sides expected the relationship to be permanent, both sides were willing to invest in it. Companies provided training, advancement, and an unspoken guarantee of employment, while employees provided loyalty and a moderation of wage demands. The new compact acknowledges the probable impermanence of the relationship yet seeks to build trust and investment anyway. Instead of entering into strict bonds of loyalty, both sides seek the mutual benefits of alliance.
As allies, employer and employee try to add value to each other. The employer says, “If you make us more valuable, we’ll make you more valuable.” The employee says, “If you help me grow and flourish, I’ll help the company grow and flourish.” Employees invest in the company’s adaptability; the company invests in employees’ employability. As former Bain CEO Tom Tierney used to tell recruits and consultants, “We are going to make you more marketable.”
The reciprocal compact may be unsentimental, but it depends on trust nonetheless. Because the parties are seeking an alliance rather than just exchanging money for time, it can build a stronger relationship between them even as it acknowledges that relationship’s finite life in the organization. This allows both sides to take more risks, investing time and resources to find global maxima rather than simply seeking local peaks.
Netflix’s compact with its employees is an example of what these new arrangements can look like. In a famous presentation on his company’s culture, CEO Reed Hastings declared, “We’re a team, not a family.” He gave managers this advice: “Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving in two months for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep at Netflix? The other people should get a generous severance now, so we can open a slot to try to find a star for that role.” The new compact isn’t about being nice. It’s based on an understanding that a company is its talent, that low performers will be cut, and that the way to attract talent is to offer appealing opportunities.
We’ve found three simple, straightforward ways in which organizations have made the new compact tangible and workable. They are (1) hiring employees for defined “tours of duty,” (2) encouraging, even subsidizing, the building of employee networks outside the organization, and (3) creating active alumni networks that facilitate career-long relationships between employers and former employees. Let’s look at each in turn.
Establishing a “Tour of Duty” If you think all your people will give you lifetime loyalty, think again: Sooner or later, most employees will pivot into a new opportunity. Recognizing this fact, companies can strike incremental alliances. When Reid founded LinkedIn, he set the initial employee compact as a four-year tour of duty, with a discussion at two years. If an employee moved the needle on the business during the four years, the company would help advance his career. Ideally this would entail another tour of duty at the

The tour-of-duty approach works: The company gets an engaged employee who’s striving to produce tangible achievements for the firm and who can be an important advocate and resource at the end of his tour or tours. The employee may not get lifetime employment, but he takes a significant step toward lifetime employability. A tour of duty also establishes a realistic zone of trust. Lifelong employment and loyalty are simply not part of today’s world; pretending that they are decreases trust by forcing both sides to lie.
Why two to four years? That time period seems to have nearly universal appeal. In the software business, it syncs with a typical product development cycle, allowing an employee to see a major project through. Consumer goods companies such as P&G rotate their brand managers so that each spends two to four years in a particular role. Investment banks and management consultancies have two- to four-year analyst programs. The cycle applies even outside the business world—think of U.S. presidential elections and the Olympics.
Properly implemented, the tour-of-duty approach can boost both recruiting and retention. The key is that it gives employer and employee a clear basis for working together. Both sides agree in advance on the purpose of the relationship, the expected benefits for each, and a planned end.
The problem with most employee retention programs is that they have a fuzzy goal (retain “good” employees) and a fuzzy time frame (indefinitely). Both types of fuzziness destroy trust: The company is asking an employee to commit to it but makes no commitment in return. In contrast, a tour of duty serves as a personalized retention plan that gives a valued employee concrete, compelling reasons to finish her tour and that establishes a clear time frame for discussing the future of the relationship.
The Wharton School polls its students about their satisfaction with their pre–business school jobs. It has found that students who came to it from “terminal jobs”—two-year analyst programs, for example—are more positive about their work experience than their peers are. Terminal jobs are generic versions of tours of duty; personalized tours would probably produce even more positive feelings.
In 2003 Matt Cohler was a management consultant who wanted to become a venture capitalist, although he lacked start-up experience. He began working for Reid at LinkedIn, where the two mapped out a two-year tour of duty. After that time was up, he and Reid agreed to extend the tour while they figured out what Matt could do next. Six months later Matt had the opportunity to join Facebook as one of its first five employees. Although Reid didn’t want to lose Matt, he advised him to take the position, which would bring diversity to his start-up experience and move him closer to his goal. After three years at Facebook Matt became the youngest general partner at Benchmark, a prominent venture capital firm.
Action item: Construct personalized, mutually beneficial tours. Work with key employees to establish explicit terms of their tours of duty, developing firm but time-limited mutual commitments with focused goals and clear expectations. Ask, “In this alliance, how will both parties benefit and progress?”
When possible, a tour of duty should offer an employee the possibility of a breakout entrepreneurial opportunity. This might involve building and launching a new product, re-engineering an existing business process, or introducing an organizational innovation.

This approach can’t be executed by a central HR function; you’re making a compact, not drawing up a contract. We’re not suggesting that you negotiate a guaranteed arrangement that spells out all the specifics—a rigid approach is the opposite of an entrepreneurial mind-set. You’re building a trust relationship that’s based on the employee’s actual job, so the conversations must be handled by direct managers.
Engaging Beyond the Company’s Boundaries Henry Ford once complained, “Why is it that every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a mind attached?” But these days, of course, minds dramatically amplify the value of hands—and they become even more powerful when they’re able to engage with minds outside the company.
No matter how many smart employees you have, there are always more smart people outside your company than within it. This is true of all organizations, from one-person start-ups to the Googles of the world.
You can engage with smart minds outside your company through the network intelligence of your employees. The wider an employee’s network, the more he or she will be able to contribute to innovation. Martin Ruef, of Duke University, has found that entrepreneurs with diverse friends scored three times as high as others on measures of innovation. To maximize diversity and thus innovation, you need networks both inside and outside your company.
Therefore, employers should encourage employees to build and maintain professional networks that involve the outside world. Essentially, you want to tell your workers, “We will provide you with time to build your network and will pay for you to attend events where you can extend it. In exchange, we ask that you leverage that network to help the company.” This is a great example of mutual trust and investment: You’re trusting your employees by giving them the resources to build their networks, and they’re investing in your business by deploying some of their relationship capital in your company’s behalf.
Those networks should encompass the entire environment in which your business operates, including customers and competitors alike and serving as platforms for information on new technology and other trends. For example, at the venture capital firm Greylock, where Reid is a partner, tapping the investment professionals’ external networks is an important part of product review meetings. Someone might ask, “What new technologies are you hearing about? Which ones should we investigate?” The insights gained translate into better decision making and more value for Greylock’s portfolio companies. The partners at another top venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, have their own creative spin: At the beginning of every meeting, they award a cash prize for the best industry rumor someone has heard. You don’t have to be in venture capital to adapt such techniques for your company.
The power of external engagement helped define the history of Silicon Valley high tech, as chronicled in AnnaLee Saxenian’s 1994 book on technology clusters, Regional Advantage. In 1970 some of the world’s largest technology firms were located in Boston’s Route 128 corridor. Today none of the 10 largest tech firms are; Boston’s primacy has been snatched away by Silicon Valley. What made that possible? External networks.
Massachusetts companies typically preferred secrecy to openness and rigorously enforced noncompete clauses to prevent employees from jumping to rival firms or starting their own. Silicon Valley has long had a more open culture (and lacks enforceable noncompete clauses), and this has permitted the development of much denser and more highly interconnected networks—which make it easier for people to innovate. The area even gave rise to a term, “coopetition,” that reflects the fact that working with competitors can be mutually beneficial. Consider Netflix again: It runs its streaming video service on Amazon’s cloud platform, even though Amazon’s Instant Video is a direct competitor.

Action item: Encourage network development. In The Start-up of You we wrote, “Your career success depends on both your individual capabilities and your network’s ability to magnify them. Think of it as IWe. An individual’s power is raised exponentially with the help of a team (a network).”
Just as an individual’s power rises with the strength of her network (IWe), a company’s power rises with the strength of its employees’ networks. Value each person’s network and her ability to tap it for intelligence; make it an explicit, acknowledged asset. An employee who keeps her LinkedIn profile current or builds a big personal following on Twitter is doing right by your company, not being disloyal to it. And make a candidate’s network strength and diversity a priority when hiring. Bringing in employees with strong networks is good; hiring people whose networks complement rather than overlap those of existing employees is even better.
One of the techniques we recommend for individuals is to maintain an “interesting-person fund” to take people in their networks out to coffee. The corporate equivalent is a “networking fund” for employees. To make sure your company reaps the full benefits, establish two requirements for tapping the fund. First, employees have to leave your corporate campus; you want them to get “outside the building” to build a more diverse external network. Second, they must report back about what they learn so that the gains are shared. Most companies allow employees to expense business lunches, but few allow them to expense networking lunches. Yet if you’re a top executive, you probably have such lunches all the time, and your company benefits as a result. Make it not just acceptable but expected for your people to do the same.
HubSpot, a Massachusetts-based marketing software company that, in its words, believes in “invest[ing] in [the] individual mastery and market value” of every HubSpotter, keeps it even simpler than that. Interested in a book? Mention it on the internal company wiki, and the book will show up on your Kindle. Want to take somebody smart to lunch? Company policy is: “Expense it. No approval needed.”
The network intelligence flowing into your company needs to be a top management concern, with specific programs to strengthen and extend it. For highly networked and entrepreneurial employees, this is one of the primary criteria for judging your attractiveness as an employer.
Building Alumni Networks The first thing you should do when a valuable employee tells you he is leaving is try to change his mind. The second is congratulate him on the new job and welcome him to your company’s alumni network.
Just because a job ends, your relationship with your employee doesn’t have to. Corporate alumni networks are a prime way to maintain long-term relationships with your best people. As Cindy Lewiton Jackson noted while she was the global director of career development and alumni relations at Bain, “The goal is not to retain employees. The goal is to build lifelong affiliation.”
Some industries and firms have long understood this. McKinsey & Company has operated an alumni network since the 1960s; the group now has upwards of 24,000 members (including more than 230 CEOs of companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue). Booz Allen Hamilton’s network has 38,000 people.

One obvious benefit of alumni networks is the opportunity to rehire former employees. The Corporate Executive Board reports that rolling out the CEB Alumni Network doubled its rehire rate in just two years. But the value goes far beyond that. Your alumni are among your most effective means of external engagement. They can share competitive information, effective business practices, emerging industry trends, and more. They understand how your organization works and are generally inclined to help you if they can. Bain’s Tom Tierney has observed, “Our number one source of high-quality new business is our alumni.”
It may be that management consultancies have pioneered corporate alumni networks because the organizational practices of those firms (two-year analyst programs, “up or out” advancement, encouragement of consultants to take positions with clients) align so well with the concept—but the practice is spreading. LinkedIn now hosts thousands of corporate alumni groups, including those of 98% of the Fortune 500 companies. Such groups are often informal, not official; they spring up because alumni want to stay in touch with and help one another. In a study from the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, only 15% of the companies surveyed had official alumni networks, but 67% had independently organized, informal groups.
You might fear that running an alumni network is an admission of failure—a sign that your company can’t retain its best people. But your alumni are likely to form a network anyway; the only real question is whether your company will have a voice in it. Alumni are fallow resources waiting for you to tap them. So why don’t you?
Action item: Utilize your exit interviews. The traditional exit interview represents a lost opportunity. Instead of collecting perfunctory feedback that they’ll probably just ignore, your managers should gather information that can help you maintain long-term relationships with departing employees (and induct them into your alumni network!). Keep a database of information on all former employees: personal e-mail and phone, LinkedIn profile, Twitter handle, blog URL, areas of expertise, and so on.
The exit interview is also a trust-building opportunity. Many employees have sat through grimly polite or even resentful parting talks. You can make your company stand out by emphasizing the ongoing nature of the relationship. This is also, of course, an opportunity to learn about ways the company and you can do better. Departing employees are more likely than current ones to be honest, and the flaws in your business and organizational practices may be on their minds. Listen closely to what they say.
If the employee who’s leaving is one of your stars, you should provide an even higher level of service (assuming he handles his departure professionally and doesn’t take the rest of the organization with him). Such folks are likely to go on to great things and to be the hubs of their networks, which could prove very valuable to you. As with the tour of duty, aim for a two-way flow of value; you need to provide benefits if you expect to receive them. The benefits you offer may depend on the business you’re in. For example, management consultancies often give free insights to alumni who have joined industry clients. If you’re a consumer company, offer alumni discounts in addition to the customary employee discounts. The cost is minimal, and the trust and goodwill gained can be substantial. Some might consider it extravagant to “reward” employees who have left, but that view misses the point. Most employees don’t leave because they’re disloyal; they leave because you can’t match the opportunity offered by another company.
If you don’t have the resources to set up a formal alumni network, you can support the informal networks that arise on LinkedIn or Facebook. Your assistance can cover the gamut, from giving financial rewards to alumni who help your firm to handing out company swag or paying for pizza during a meetup. Even distributing an alumni newsletter can contribute to an ongoing cordial relationship at practically no cost.
The Virtuous Circle An employee who is networking energetically, keeping her LinkedIn profile up to date, and thinking about other opportunities is not a liability. In fact, such entrepreneurial, outward-oriented, forward-looking people are probably just what your company needs more of.

How do you square the need for such people with the reality that many of them won’t stick around forever? First, by accepting that reality. A CEB study of 20,000 workers identified by their employers as “high potentials” found that one in four of them planned to be working elsewhere within the year (see “How to Keep Your Top Talent,” HBR May 2010). Once you get past this scary truth, you’ll find it easier to achieve honest, productive relationships that support your employees’ ambitions. This will make your employees more effective on the job and may actually keep them around longer.
The key to the new employer-employee compact we envision is that although it’s not based on loyalty, it’s not purely transactional, either. It’s an alliance between an organization and an individual that’s aimed at helping both succeed.
In the war for talent, such a pact can be the secret weapon that helps you fill your ranks with the creative, adaptive superstars everyone wants. These are the entrepreneurial employees who drive business success—and business success makes you even more attractive to entrepreneurial employees. This virtuous circle has created a competitive advantage in talent for Silicon Valley companies. It can work for your company, too.


Source:hbr.org

 

How to survive creative burnout

By Scott Berkun, June 2004
The longer you work at creating things, whether it’s software, websites, essays or paintings, the greater the odds you’ll hit a day where you don’t feel like doing it anymore. Up until then, you may have heard others describe burnout, but you just shrugged it off as superstition, or perhaps believed yourself immune. But the day it hits you, the world seems suddenly grey. What was once fun and challenging feel stupid and annoying. Or perhaps the things that used to motivate or move you don’t resonate at all. You feel nothing for them. It all just seems like so much more crap to deal with. If this sounds familiar, or you fear that this day is in your future, this essay is for you.

How to know when you’re burned out

The first thing to realize is that everyone’s creative energies come from different places. The reasons you might feel stuck or empty will be different from your friends and co-workers. So don’t be surprised that while you’re feeling low, others around you aren’t. Creative work, no matter how it’s defined, is personal stuff, and comes from your unique combination of qualities and feelings that make you, you. So just because you’re not running through the halls screaming about how much you love your job, while the rest of the people on your floor are dancing in the halls, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. You’re you: they’re not. You should not want to be them, and they should not want to be you (What a boring world we’d have if we were all simultaneously trying to be someone else. Oh wait…).
To be yourself you have to sometimes deal with feelings that only you are feeling. Burnout means you’ve pushed your creative energy beyond the point of recovery. Like a well of water, creative energy replenishes itself slowly over time. A person who has pushed their creative well too hard for too long will, like its watery counterpart, one day find it empty. They’ve pushed too far. Usually by the time you notice something is seriously wrong, there’s very little left to work with. Burnout then is something, once experienced, a wise person learns how to avoid and manage (which we’ll talk about later). But right now, lets cover some of the common signs that you’ve become toasty:

• You dread waking up (unless this is not unusual for you)
• You don’t care about something you were passionate about
• You saw the title of this essay and felt a ray of hope
• Inspired, motivated creative people annoy you
• Everything seems gray and pointless
• You’re drinking or eating more, or showing whatever your signs of depression are
• You find it hard to relax
• It’s impossible to do basic you’re capable of

But be warned: before you chalk it up to creative burnout, be aware that there are some other problems that can easily be confused with it. How is the morale in your workplace? Are people generally ok and happy, or is the vibe downbeat or postal? There may be other issues going that are having a negative emotional impact on you. It might not be creative burnout, as much as some other unhealthy workplace or work relationship issue. Most probably, there are several issues you’re dealing with at the same time, including issues at home or with family, that are contributing to how you’re feeling. Sorting it out can take time, and it’s rarely helpful to blame everything going on in your life on one or two specific events, people, or environments.

Surviving burn out

Using the well example again, what would you do if you ran out of water? Would you become one with your couch, pizza in hand, watching movies all day long, leaving it to the fates to decide if you’ll ever drink water again? I think not. You’d go out to the store, or perhaps to a neighbor’s house and ask to borrow some of theirs. Burnout is entirely survivable. Creative people get burnt all the time, to varying degrees, and many of them develop the habits that allow them to come back, sometimes stronger or more motivated that they were before. The well will fill again all on it’s own, unless you do something really really stupid (Say, start taking drugs, staying all night and trying to plow through even though that never works for you, giving up completely and joining the army, etc.)
The best place to start with survival tactics is with your teammates and co-workers. Pick the one person who you relate to best, and tell them how you feel. “Hey, dude, I’m so burned out right now.” 9 times out of 10 you’ll get more support and encouragement than you expected. If the person you confide in is cool and empathetic, they’ll hear you out, ask you what they can do tell help, and establish a base camp of support. Even if the conversation lasts 25 seconds, you’ll feel more human, and the burden of crappy feelings won’t be on your shoulders alone. If you have specific things they can do to cheer you up, name them. Be specific.
Do you want them to try and make you laugh? Do you want encouragement? Do you want them to listen to you vent and complain now and then? Dance outside your office when they walk by? They can’t know how to help you if you don’t tell them. If your manager understands anything about creative work, it’s in his or her interest to help you deal with burnout. Even with the most calculating and evil manager, if you report to them you’re an asset to them. When you’re toasty, you’re at risk of crashing completely and become entirely useless.
So even if they see you as a yuppified form of urban cattle, they want you producing and creating over the long haul. If they can convert weeks of malaise and crappy work into a handful of days, it’s entirely in their interest to do so. It’s pure economics. A more likely situation is that, if your manager is paying any attention at all, they already know there’s something wrong. They can sense the difference in your behavior in meetings, and see the quality or precision of the work you’re producing. A good manager would ask and investigate to find out what’s wrong (it’s their job), but some don’t know what to say. In that case, it’s up to you.
Here’s an easy way to go: “Hey boss. I’m concerned about something. I haven’t been as motivated as I’d like on this project for the last 2 weeks. I’m trying to figure out why, and it’s possible I’m burnt out on some aspect of this work. If you have suggestions for me, I’m open to them, but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of what’s going on. I’ll keep you posted as I figure out what we can do about it.” By starting a conversation like this, you take responsibility for you burnout. You score points with you manager (and with yourself) for be aware of what’s going on, and taking a mature and open course of action about it. Generally, things go better for person A, if person A takes action about what person A is feeling. For myself, I can’t say I’ve always been person A, but I realize that when I take the weaker, easier, person B path of ignoring and denying the entire situation (any my feelings about it), it rarely works to my advantage. Person B’s life expectancy, and quality of life, is probably never as good person A.

Survival tactics

In then end, I’ve found that talking with other people won’t dramatically change the way you feel. It’s important to talk and express things, since expressing feelings is the only way to work through them, but in the end, change only comes from within. Change is slow, tricky and unpredictable, but everyone has certain triggers or experiences that help them shake things up more than others. Since everyone’s different, the approaches for how to work through it often have to be discovered by you. Here’s some of the things that I know have worked for me, and other designers and engineers I’ve worked with, but I recommend serious experimentation on your own:

• Plan an escape. Take a day off and do the most dramatically easy but fun thing you can think of. Go see a matinee downtown, have a fantastic lunch, shop, browse, and walk. Be as indulgent as you can stand, and drag as many of your friends along with you. (Offer to return the favor with them when they’re burnt out.). Use a vacation day, or a sick day (Isn’t burnout a form of poor mental health?)
• Laugh. Whatever it is you find funny, bring more of it into your life. Whether it’s certain people, films, tv shows, plays, books. Choose to laugh.
• Scream. I’m a believer in primal screams. I always feel better after I’ve yelled at the top of my lungs for no particular reason, doubly so if I’m pissed off about something. Practice different screams, such as yelling ordinary words (“Papaya!!!”) vs. generic scream sounds (“Aaaaaaaagggh!”). Get friends and co-workers to participate if you can. Even if alone, and you have to do it into a pillow or underwater to not upset the neighbors, do it anyway. You’ll feel better, I promise.
• Fun time: how much time per day do you do stuff purely for fun? Just because you like it and for no other reason? Why isn’t this number larger? What is more important than fun and happiness over the course of a lifetime?
• Sleep & Exercise. Unfortunately, our minds are connected to our bodies, and if we treat our bodies poorly, well, our minds kind of get pissed off. I’ve found that if I’m not getting enough exercise, I’m about half as useful to the world than otherwise. Start taking a walk every day. Go swimming. Have more/better sex. Free up your body, and your mind will follow.
• Travel: Get in the car, pick a direction, and drive. Grab friends, or not. Bring food, or not. Play music really loud, or just roll down the windows, and stick your head out (pssst.. this is a good time to scream). Use some vacation time, or ask for time without pay so you can stretch out your time (and your time may be more valuable than your money).

Beginning again

After you’ve made some effort to escape, and let the well fill up again, it’s time to get back to work. Sometimes the toasty feeling remains, even though you’ve filled up your credit cards, have seen every new film, and are exercising and laughing daily. Even with the most understanding boss or teammates, most people can’t afford to escape for very long. The work and the deadlines may have slipped back, but the work is still there. Here’s some advice for how to start again, and reconnect with the work at hand.

• Break things into smaller pieces. If you can’t design the whole website, or code the whole function, break it down. What are the smallest meaningful pieces to work with? Work on a page. Can’t do a page? Work on part of a page. Get down the smallest bit you feel you can manage, but do it. Like Guthrie said, take it easy, but take it. After you do one piece, find the strength to do the next one. If you can’t, go for a walk, call a friend, but then come back and try again. And on and on. One small piece at a time. If you’re lucky, once you’ve got a few pieces done, you’ll hit your stride and it won’t seem so bad. If not, just slug it out. At least you’ll be able to say tommorow you did something today.
• Look at the worst pieces of work you know of. The worst writing. The worst painting. The worst web design. Worst whatever. Do you feel anything when you look at the crap? Does it annoy you? Make you angry? Is there still a response there at all? Some energy somewhere in your gut? Can you redirect it?
• Repeat above, only with the best piece of work you know. Go to a museum, or your favorite building. Watch your favorite film, read your favorite book. Do you get any energy there? Anything you can bring with you into your own project?

Avoiding burn-out

After you’ve gone through it once, you might fall victim to the arrogance of invulnerability. The false idea that since you’ve been burnt to a crisp once and survived, you can do it again. Don’t be stupid. It’s pure denial you’re feeling, not confidence. As long as you take on tough assignments and push yourself creatively you run the risk of going to far, and to live up to your potential as a creative person, you have to find ways to push yourself without pushing too far.

• Change your work environment: What do you do at work when you feel stuck (not burnt out, but just stuck on a problem)? Are there things you can do to your cube or office to help you deal with those times? Posters of work that inspires you? Things that make you laugh? Music that helps you think through a problem? You spend 8 hours a day in that space: it’s worth taking a couple of hours to improve it by even 5 or 10%. If you suck at this and don’t know where to start (e.g. you’re male), ask a friend to help you out.
• Project assignments: How do you decide what project assignments to take? How can you find more variety in your work, so that there’s a chance you’ll develop new interests, or new skills? Real growth is the best burnout prevention technique. It’s easier to stay interested if the work and the people stay interesting.
• Work on more than one project at a time. My wife, an artist, never works on one painting at a time. When she feels stuck on one, she’ll move over to another and it always seems fresh and interesting, compared to the work she just left. I find the same thing with writing and designing. Find ways to give yourself alternatives, so that you can still be productive, while having the choice to temporarily skip a problem you are annoyed by or frustrated with.
• Managers and work relationships. Do you like the people you work with? I don’t know how long I could be creative if I fundamentally didn’t like or get along with my boss, or most of my co-workers. The real problem might not be creative at all. It might be the unhealthy nature of your work relationships. Time spent improving relationship skills creates the potential for change, while banging your head against the wall every day and complaining to friends probably doesn’t.
• Career & Lifestyle: How long have you been doing what you’re doing? Do you expect to do it forever? Perhaps you need bigger changes in your life that you’re getting. A new friend, a new lover, a new city, a new company, a new hobby, might be the only way to move your life forward.

Know Thyself

However you choose to deal with your situation, pay attention to yourself. What works and doesn’t work for you? When did you feel most inspired in your life? Least? What things in your life seem to influence your morale and motivation? No one can answer these questions but you. It’s often harder to figure out and listen to what your own needs are than to take advice from others. The sooner you sit down and allow your own truth to come out, the better off you’ll be.


Source:http://scottberkun.com

Ten Great Ways to Crush Creativity

Leaders have more power than they realize. They can patiently create a climate of creativity or they can crush it in a series of subtle comments and gestures. Their actions send powerful signals. Their responses to suggestions and ideas are deciphered by staff as encouragement or rejection. If you want to crush creativity in your organization and eliminate all the unnecessary bother of innovation then here are ten steps that are guaranteed to succeed.

1. Criticize

When you hear a new idea criticize it. Show how smart you are by pointing out some of the weaknesses and flaws which will hold it back. The more experienced you are, the easier it is to find fault with other people’s ideas. Decca Records turned down the Beatles, IBM rejected the photocopying idea which launched Xerox, DEC turned down the spreadsheet and various major publishers turned down the first Harry Potter novel. The same thing is happening in most organizations today. New ideas tend to be partly-formed so it is easy to reject them as ‘bad’. They diverge from the narrow focus that we have for the business so we discard them. Furthermore, every time somebody comes to you with an idea which you criticize, it discourages the person from wasting your time with more suggestions. It sends a message that new ideas are not welcome and that anyone who volunteers them is risking criticism or ridicule. This is a sure fire way to crush the creative spirit in your staff.

2. Ban brainstorms

Treat brainstorming as old-fashioned and passé. All that brainstorms do is throw up lots of new ideas that then have to be rejected. If your organization is not holding frequent brainstorm sessions to find creative solutions then you are not wasting time on new ideas. Instead you are sending a message to staff that their input is not required. If people insist on brainstorm meetings then make them long, rambling and unfocused with lots of criticism of radical ideas.

3. Hoard problems

The CEO and senior team should shoulder the responsibility for solving all the company’s major problems. Strategic issues are too complicated and high-level for the ordinary staff. After all, if people at the grass-roots knew the strategic challenges the organization faces then they would feel insecure and threatened. Don’t involve staff in serious issues, don’t tell them the big picture and above all don’t challenge them to come up with solutions.

4. Focus on efficiency not innovation

Focus solely on making the current business model work better. If we concentrate on making the current system work better then we will not waste time on looking for different systems. The current business model is the one that you helped develop and it is obviously the best one for the business. After all, if the makers of horse drawn carriages had improved quality they could have stopped automobiles taking their markets. The same principle applied with makers of slide rules, LP records, typewriters and gas lights.

5. Overwork

Establish a culture of long hours and hard work. Encourage the belief that hard work alone will solve the problem. We do not need to find a different way of solving a problem – rather we must just work harder at the old way of doing things. Make sure that the working day has no time for learning, fun, lateral thinking, wild ideas or testing of new initiatives.

6. Adhere to the plan

Plan in great detail and then do not deviate from the plan regardless of circumstances. ‘We cannot try that idea because it is not in the plan and we have no budget for it.’ Keep to the vision that was in the plan and ignore fads like market changes and customer fashions – they will pass.

7. Punish mistakes

If someone tries an entrepreneurial idea that fails then blame and retribution must follow. Reward success and punish failure. That way we will reinforce the existing way of doing things and discourage dangerous experiments.

8. Don’t look outside

We understand our business better than outsiders. After all we have been working in it for years. Other industries are fundamentally different and just because something works there does not mean it will work here. Consultants are generally over-priced and tell you things you could have figured out anyway. We need to find the solutions inside the business by working harder.

9. Promote people like you from within

Promoting from within is a good sign. It helps retain people and they can see a reward for loyalty and hard work. It means we don’t get polluted with heretical ideas from outside. Also if the CEO promotes people like him then he can achieve consistency and succession. It is best to find managers who agree with the CEO and praise him for his acumen and foresight.

10. Don’t waste money on training

Talent cannot be taught. It is it a rare thing possessed by a handful of gifted individuals. So why waste money trying to turn ducks into swans? Hire our kind of people and let them learn our system. Work them hard, keep them focused on our business model and do not allow them to fool around with crazy experiments. Workshops, budgets and time allocated to creativity and innovation are all wasteful extravagances. We know what we need to succeed so let’s just get on with it.


Source: http://www.lifehack.org

What Is the Theory of Your Firm?

by Todd Zenger

Photography: Courtesy of Pace Gallery

Artwork: Tara Donovan, Untitled, 2008, polyester film

If asked to define strategy, most executives would probably come up with something like this: Strategy involves discovering and targeting attractive markets and then crafting positions that deliver sustained competitive advantage in them. Companies achieve these positions by configuring and arranging resources and activities to provide either unique value to customers or common value at a uniquely low cost. This view of strategy as position remains central in business school curricula around the globe: Valuable positions, protected from imitation and appropriation, provide sustained profit streams.
Unfortunately, investors don’t reward senior managers for simply occupying and defending positions. Equity markets are full of companies with powerful positions and sluggish stock prices. The retail giant Walmart is a case in point. Few people would dispute that it remains a remarkable firm. Its early focus on building a regionally dense network of stores in small towns delivered a strong positional advantage. Complementary choices regarding advertising, pricing, and information technology all continue to support its low-cost and flexibly merchandised stores.
Despite this strong position and a successful strategic rollout, Walmart’s equity price has seen little growth for most of the past 12 or 13 years. That’s because the ongoing rollout was anticipated long ago, and investors seek evidence of newly discovered value—value of compounding magnitude. Merely sustaining prior financial returns, even if they are outstanding, does not significantly increase share price; tomorrow’s positive surprises must be worth more than yesterday’s.
Not surprisingly, I consistently advise MBA students that if they’re confronted with a choice between leading a poorly run company and leading a well-run one, they should choose the former. Imagine assuming the reins of GE from Jack Welch in September 2001 with shareholders’ having enjoyed a 40-fold increase in value over the prior two decades. The expectations baked into the share price of a company like that are daunting, to say the least.
To make matters worse, attempts to grow often undermine a company’s current market position. As Michael Porter, the leading proponent of strategy as positioning, has argued, “Efforts to grow blur uniqueness, create compromises, reduce fit, and ultimately undermine competitive advantage. In fact, the growth imperative is hazardous to strategy.” Quite simply, the logic of this perspective not only provides little guidance about how to sustain value creation but also discourages growth that might in any way move a company away from its current strategic position. Though it recognizes the dilemma, it offers no real advice beyond “Dig in.”
Essentially, a leader’s most vexing strategic challenge is not how to obtain or sustain competitive advantage—which has been the field of strategy’s primary focus—but, rather, how to keep finding new, unexpected ways to create value. In the following pages I offer what I call the corporate theory, which reveals how a given company can continue to create value. It is more than a strategy, more than a map to a position—it is a guide to the selection of strategies. The better its theory, the more successful an organization will be at recognizing and composing strategic choices that fuel sustained growth in value.
The Greatest Theory Ever Told Value creation in all realms, from product development to strategy, involves recombining a large number of existing elements. But picking the right combinations out of a vast array is like being a blind explorer on a rugged mountain range. The strategist cannot see the topography of the surrounding landscape—the true value of various combinations. All he or she can do is try to imagine what it is like.
In other words, leaders must draw from available knowledge and prior experience to develop a cognitive, theoretical model of the landscape and then make an educated guess about where to find valuable configurations of capabilities, activities, and resources. Actually composing the configurations will put the theory to the test. If it’s good, the leader will gain a refined vision of some portion of the adjacent topography—perhaps revealing other valuable configurations and extensions.


Source: hbr.org

The Secret to Creativity

The secret to creative thinking is to start with good problems. Then you need to turn those problems into thought provoking challenges. After that, great ideas will almost invent themselves.
Almost every creative idea is a potential solution to a problem. Einstein's theory of relativity was about solving a discrepancy between electromagnetism and physics. Post-its were about finding a use for not very sticky glue. Picasso's cubist paintings were about solving the problem of representing three dimensional space on two dimensional canvases. And so on and so on.
Before you even think about generating ideas, you need to turn your problem into a challenge. Because if you start generating ideas to solve the wrong problem, you may have great ideas - but they will probably be lousy solutions.

A self-employed woman is window shopping and sees a beautiful dress. She thinks that it would be perfect for an upcoming reception where she hopes to impress prospective clients. Sadly, the dress costs €3000 and her bank account is nearly empty. She thinks to herself: "how could I earn €3000 in order to buy that dress?" She might come up with some great ideas.
But the truth is, her problem has nothing to do with the dress. Her problem is that she needs to develop new business. One way to do that is to acquire new clients. Wearing a stunning dress to a reception might be one method of solving that problem. But there are many more solutions - and a lot of them are probably more cost effective than a €3000 dress, particularly if she hasn't much money.
Instead, she should be asking herself: "How might I acquire new clients for my business?" or better still, "In what ways might I develop more business?"
The latter question or challenge might lead to ideas like offering existing clients new products or services; increasing her prices; asking for referrals and other activities that have very little to do with new dresses and a great deal to do with building her business.

Most people are like the woman in the story above. When they have problems, they immediately look for solutions, sparing nary a thought for the problem itself. Creative people know better. They start by examining the problem and turning it into a creative challenge.
The best way to get started on turning your problem into a challenge is by writing down your problem in the centre of a sheet of paper. Now, try and break the problem down. Ask yourself "Why is this a problem?", "What is causing this?", "What is behind this?", "What other issues are at stake?" and so on. Ask "why?" until you can no longer answer yourself. Write all of your answers on the sheet of paper. At this stage, the core problem as well as key relevant issues will be apparent. Let's call this the big problem.
The next step is to turn the big problem into one or more short, simple challenges. Challenges usually start with

• "In what ways might I/we...?"
  
• "How might I/we...?"
  
• "What kinds of... might I/we...?"
  

Keep your challenges as simple as possible. Avoid:

• Restrictive criteria
  Restrictive criteria block open creativity. Leave them out of the challenge - but use those criteria later when it comes time to evaluate ideas.
  
• Combining two or more challenges in a single challenge.
  Combining two or more issues in a single challenge (such as "how might we earn more income and work less?") tends to confuse brainstormers and results in ideas which fail to solve either problem. Best to divide such challenges into individual challenges and brainstorm one at a time. Start with the most important challenge first.
  
• Ambiguous challenges
  A challenge such as "need money" isn't really clear and is likely to result in ideas that are not really clear. Make your challenges clear to everyone. And phrase them using the words above.
  

Once you have got your challenge, you will find it remarkably easy to generate ideas that solve it. But before you start brainstorming, there are a couple of things you should bear in mind..

• Generate ideas first. Nothing more. Only after you have finished generating ideas should you even think about reviewing them and decide which one(s) to implement.
  
• When generating ideas, whether alone or in a group, prohibit any criticism whatsoever. Moreover, it is essential that you make note of every idea no matter how silly, daft or impossible it may seem. The silliest ideas are sometimes the most creative and often highly inspirational.
  
• Do not stop at the first idea that comes to mind. The first good idea that comes to mind is seldom the most creative - largely because it is almost always the most obvious. Better to generate lots of ideas and then decide which ideas to choose.
  

Thus the secret to generating great ideas is to start with a great challenge. Then generate, generate, generate ideas.


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