Friday, September 26, 2008

Dings in the Green Monster

Familiarity with our everyday reality sometimes blinds us to meaningful and critical nuances. It usually takes an outsider to sense, appreciate and bring to our attention that which may be as obvious as the nose on our face.

What got me thinking about this little truism is the Green Monster, the famous leftfield wall in the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park. Or, more precisely, how it once was shown to me.

The New England Sports Network (NESN) broadcasts virtually every Red Sox game, both at home and on the road. The exception is when ESPN or FOX decide a particular game’s import merits a national audience. While I prefer the commentary, humor and observations of the regular NESN announcers – Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo - one ESPN broadcast earlier this year opened my eyes to a wonderful little truth about the uniqueness of 96-year-old Fenway.


The most dominant feature of Fenway, as any baseball fan knows, is the “Green Monster,” the 37-foot wall that shortens leftfield to a mere 310 feet (Fenway’s centerfield “triangle” being 420 feet). It creates a nightmare for visiting leftfielders, unsure how to play a careening line drive that may hit the wall at various angles 10, 20 or 30 feet above their heads.


Never before that particular ESPN broadcast did I really appreciate the Green Monster. During a lull in the action, ESPN focused one of its cameras closely on the wall and suddenly it became apparent, as the announcer noted, that there were dozens upon dozens of dings, dents, and pockmarks in the green sheet metal sheathing – testimony to the years of line drives that produced hits, many of which spelled the difference between victory and loss. It gave me pause, and made me wonder which long-since-retired All Stars created which ding, dent and pockmark.
It conveyed a sense of history, like the still visible bullet holes in the exterior walls of the École Militaire that bear witness to the last firefight in Paris as it fell to the German army in June 1940.

It took an outsider to notice that little nuance, something that the local guys never mentioned. Sure, Remy and Orsillo are probably well aware of it. No doubt they can see the pockmarks in the wall every time they watch a line drive rebound fiercely off the wall. But they don't really see them. The dings are a fact of everyday life in Fenway and not worth a second thought, much less an NESN close-up or an exegesis about it.

What does that tell us about how we conduct business, or go about our daily lives?

Coming home from an exotic foreign vacation, we try to hang on to the newness of everything as we return to the banalities of everyday life. We promise ourselves that we’ll look at every familiar facet of our life with new eyes and fresh insight. But we can’t. It’s not human nature to be able to bend reality and pretend that everything old is new again.


We need to learn to listen to that other opinion, the unique insight – even though it may seem off-the-wall. It is that other insight, that unique way of looking at things that can open new vistas to our everyday world, whether it be the world of business or that of our personal lives.


Our own Green Monsters have become something so familiar to us that they cease being monsters at all. They become a toy, like the bobble head “Wally” dolls sold at Fenway, the faux team mascot, a cute, cuddly Sesame Street-like rip-off that neutralizes the otherwise scary concept of a monster. It is a monster that is easy to live with, easy to conceive, easy to ignore in the wallpaper that surrounds our lives.


If we can bring in the outsider’s view, or imbue ourselves with that view, we can see with new eyes the world with which we are so familiar. We can be tourists in our own land and gain new insights into how we operate in that context, better able to be honest with ourselves about our weaknesses and strengths, about the dings in our own Green Monsters.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

The Man Who Loved Typewriters

Don’t judge me harshly, please, and think that this is just a weak attempt to get off on the cheap here by clipping and pasting someone else’s writing as my own blog entry. But I couldn’t resist sharing this little gem, discovered and shared with me by my father, a loyal reader of this blog. (Thanks, Dad.)

It comes to us courtesy of that lively masterpiece of journalism, The Economist, the English news weekly that persists in that old-fashioned journalistic custom of publishing stories without bylines. Would that others emulated the practice, we might have far fewer hyper-inflated egos pontificating at us. (Remember how good Talk of the Town in The New Yorker used to be without bylines?)

That aside, I hope you will enjoy this beauty from the magazine’s September 18 edition that recalls a simpler era when writing without aid of pen or pencil required knowing the qwerty system and strong, nimble fingers.
As someone whose first jobs were in newspapers using manual typewriters, this story speaks to me.


Martin Tytell, a man who loved typewriters, died on September 11th, aged 94

ANYONE who had dealings with manual typewriters—the past tense, sadly, is necessary—knew that they were not mere machines. Eased heavily from the box, they would sit on the desk with an air of expectancy, like a concert grand once the lid is raised. On older models the keys, metal-rimmed with white inlay, invited the user to play forceful concertos on them, while the silvery type-bars rose and fell chittering and whispering from their beds. Such sounds once filled the offices of the world, and Martin Tytell’s life.

Everything about a manual was sensual and tactile, from the careful placing of paper round the platen (which might be plump and soft or hard and dry, and was, Mr Tytell said, a typewriter’s heart) to the clicking whirr of the winding knob, the slight high conferred by a new, wet, Mylar ribbon and the feeding of it, with inkier and inkier fingers, through the twin black guides by the spool. Typewriters asked for effort and energy. They repaid it, on a good day, with the triumphant repeated ping! of the carriage return and the blithe sweep of the lever that inched the paper upwards.

Typewriters knew things. Long before the word-processor actually stored information, many writers felt that their Remingtons, or Smith-Coronas, or Adlers contained the sum of their knowledge of eastern Europe, or the plot of their novel. A typewriter was a friend and collaborator whose sickness was catastrophe. To Mr Tytell, their last and most famous doctor and psychiatrist, typewriters also confessed their own histories. A notice on his door offered “Psychoanalysis for your typewriter, whether it’s frustrated, inhibited, schizoid, or what have you,” and he was as good as his word. He could draw from them, after a brief while of blue-eyed peering with screwdriver in hand, when they had left the factory, how they had been treated and with exactly what pressure their owner had hit the keys. He talked to them; and as, in his white coat, he visited the patients that lay in various states of dismemberment on the benches of his chock-full upstairs shop on Fulton Street, in Lower Manhattan, he was sure they chattered back.

A drawer of umlauts

His love affair had begun as a schoolboy, with an Underwood Five. It lay uncovered on a teacher’s desk, curved and sleek, the typebars modestly contained but the chrome lever gleaming. He took it gently apart, as far as he could fillet 3,200 pieces with his pocket tool, and each time attempted to get further. A repair man gave him lessons, until he was in demand all across New York. When he met his wife Pearl later, it was over typewriters. She wanted a Royal for her office; he persuaded her into a Remington, and then marriage. Pearl made another doctorly and expert presence in the shop, hovering behind the overflowing shelves where the convalescents slept in plastic shrouds.

Mr Tytell could customise typewriters in all kinds of ways. He re-engineered them for the war-disabled and for railway stations, taking ten cents in the slot. With a nifty solder-gun and his small engraving lathe he could make an American typewriter speak 145 different tongues, from Russian to Homeric Greek. An idle gear, picked up for 45 cents on Canal Street, allowed him to make reverse carriages for right-to-left Arabic and Hebrew. He managed hieroglyphs, musical notation and the first cursive font, for Mamie Eisenhower, who had tired of writing out White House invitations.

When his shop closed in 2001, after 65 years of business, it held a stock of 2m pieces of type. Tilde “n”s alone took up a whole shelf. The writer Ian Frazier, visiting once to have his Olympia cured of a flagging “e”, was taken into a dark nest of metal cabinets by torchlight. There he was proudly shown a drawer of umlauts.

Mr Tytell felt that he owed to typewriters not only his love and his earnings, but his life. In the second world war his knowledge of them had saved him from deploying with the marines. Instead he spent his war turning Siamese keyboards into 17 other Asian languages, or customising typewriters for future battlegrounds. His work sometimes incidentally informed him of military planning; but he kept quiet, and was rewarded in 1945 with a medal done up on a black, familiar ribbon.

Each typewriter was, to him, an individual. Its soul, he reminded Mr Frazier, did not come through a cable in the wall, but lay within. It also had distinguishing marks—that dimple on the platen, that sluggishness in the typebars, that particular wear on the “G”, or the “t”—that would be left, like a fingerprint, on paper. Much of Mr Tytell’s work over the years was to examine typewritten documents for the FBI and the police. Once shown a letter, he could find the culprit machine.

It was therefore ironic that his most famous achievement was to build a typewriter at the request of the defence lawyers for Alger Hiss, who was accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviet Union. His lawyers wanted to prove that typewriters could be made exactly alike, in order to frame someone. Mr Tytell spent two years on the job, replicating, down to the merest spot and flaw, the Hiss Woodstock N230099. In effect, he made a perfect clone of it. But it was no help to Hiss’s appeal; for Mr Tytell still could not account for his typewriter’s politics, or its dreams.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Maintaining a Sense of Urgency

Through good times and bad, through crises and times of change, businesses that thrive, grow and succeed are those best able to maintain a sense of urgency.

But just what does that mean, to maintain “a sense of urgency?”

Many people equate urgency to lots of tasks being done quickly and frantically. If you check your thesaurus, you won’t find that urgency, quickness and franticness are synonyms. Unfortunately, too many people buy into that myth. And that’s exactly the wrong approach when a business is contending with a crisis or profound change. While complacency is certainly the wrong way to respond to challenging circumstances, a false sense of urgency can often be more dangerous.

In his latest book, A Sense of Urgency, John P. Kotter ably explains the difference between the three responses and provides a very useful guide for businesspeople facing change, crises and challenges. Kotter, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership Emeritus at Harvard Business School, has been lecturing and writing about leadership for years.

He has authored three outstanding books on the subject in the past decade, that have become invaluable for today’s business leaders: Leading Change, The Heart of Change and Our Iceberg is Melting. This latest book carries forward and develops the themes of the previous three while folding in and updating much of what he learned in the intervening years.

The essence of true urgency lies in doing the right things the right way. It is “ridding oneself of unproductive tasks that add little value to the organization but tend to clog managers’ calendars and impede necessary action.” It is not allowing subordinates to “delegate tasks up” to you. It is that and much more.

No doubt you’ve dealt with managers who appear to be operating with urgency. They run from meeting to meeting, always checking their BlackBerry, coming in early and leaving late. Perhaps you’ve even been guilty of false urgency. According to Kotter (and our own observations), managers like this tend not to get a lot accomplished, and rarely contribute to addressing the immediate crises.

Kotter defines complacent behavior as “unchanging activity that ignores the organization’s opportunities or hazards, focusing inward.” He says that a false sense of urgency is aimless, “frenetic behavior leading to exhaustion and stress.”

Complacency is built on a feeling that the status quo is basically fine. On the other hand, false urgency is built on a platform of anxiety and anger. By contrast, the true sense of urgency is action that is alert, fast moving, and focused externally on important issues.

That external focus is so important that Kotter devotes an entire chapter to it. In fact, bringing the outside world in is one of his four tactics to achieve urgency.

As noted, a complacent organization is one that is inwardly focused. He writes, “An inwardly focused organization inevitably misses new opportunities and hazards coming from competitors, customers, or changes in the regulatory environment. When you don’t see opportunities or hazards, your sense of urgency drops.”

Bringing the outside world in can take many forms, and Kotter cites a number of examples. For instance, bringing in the voice of the customers helps the organization become more cognizant of what it is doing right (and wrong), and how it might improve its products, services and customer support in ways that assure and improve customer loyalty.

The outside world, as Kotter notes, is a constantly changing beast, with new challenges always popping up. New technologies arise that could mean the death knell of your business or, conversely, make your business more valuable if those technologies are leveraged correctly.

An important component of urgency, which Kotter only obliquely mentions, is the central role of communications. Unfortunately, he falls into the usual trap of referring to organizational communications repeatedly in the context of a function performing various tasks. In fact, effective communications – both internally and externally – are implicit in truly urgent behavior, though he fails to say so.

Leaders and managers operating with urgency are very clear in their communications and keep their people in the loop. They engage regularly in lively discussion, dialogue and debate inside the company, and assure that the information they impart to the organization is both timely and relevant.

Despite Kotter’s oversight and his omission of that key point, it’s a fine book with some very important counsel for today’s manager.

Friday, September 12, 2008

"We?" or "They?"

Ever notice how fickle sports fans can be? Last Sunday, before the New England Patriots-Kansas City Chiefs game started, fans interviewed in the parking lots were saying, "We're going to win the Super Bowl this year!"

But something terrible happened during the game. In the first quarter, the Patriots’ star quarterback, Tom Brady, took a solid hit to his left knee, crumpled to the turf in pain and, as we would later learn, is out for the season with torn medial and anterior cruciate ligaments (MCL and ACL). After that, fans were heard saying, "I don't think they can win this year without Brady."

How quickly things change from “We” to “They.” It's not unique to New England, nor is it unique to sports. I guess it's just human nature to want to associate with winners but to distance ourselves from losers – even perceived losers.

The same is true within the corporate world. In a winning company, one that is on top of its game like Google or Apple, the employees typically talk about the company in the first person plural. "We own the market."

But when a company is struggling, it's often "They don't know what they're doing. They have driven this company into the ground." In those cases, employees assume no responsibility for the decline of the company. It’s someone else’s fault – namely, the CEO and/or the management team.

When clients engage me to assess their internal culture and the quality of their employee communications, I usually conduct numerous interviews and focus groups with managers and employees. I listen closely for that “we” and “they” – whether front-line employees use the first or third person plural in reference to their employers.

Frankly, in that I usually have been brought in to address perceived problems, it’s more often the latter, as in, “They tried that before and it didn’t work.” And, “they never listen to us,” etc. In cases where the companies are struggling, rarely do we hear statements like, “We’re having a tough time.”

It goes to my original point here. People, by nature like to be associated with winners, and tend to distance themselves from losers. But for a company facing difficult challenges, what is the tipping point between "We" and "They?” How can leaders create that sense of ownership that is so important through good times and bad?

While the answer to those questions is unique to each situation, the commonality to all is effective communications – which is to say, relevant information conveyed in a regular and timely manner via dialogue, discussion and debate among and between leadership, managers, supervisors and employees. Where that is the norm, the sense of ownership is far more prevalent than not. You are more likely to hear employees using “we” than “they.”

People might point to a successful organization and say that developing that sense of ownership in a winning environment is easy. But I push back and say, what’s the chicken and what’s the egg?

More likely, the organization is successful because the environment of dialogue, discussion and debate is well established. People at all levels have a voice in the operation and, at the same time, they have a clear understanding of the company’s vision and mission, as well as the strategies that are driving them in that direction. Course corrections in the face of competitive threats and a changing marketplace are communicated clearly and regularly. There is no such thing as a “fair weather” employee. There is little opportunity for disassociation to fester, even when the chips are down.

Of course, the professional football team metaphor is imperfect because the average fan is not an employee and has no personal stake in the outcome of team’s season – unless that fan bets on the team. For a going concern, the average employee indeed has a personal stake in the health and well being of his or her company: his or her livelihood.

So it behooves company leadership to assure that its employees stay engaged, fully comprehending how they contribute every day to the ongoing health of the business. Only then will they see that they share responsibility for its success or failure. Only then will they think of the company as their own, in the first person plural.

Monday, September 8, 2008

The Concertina of Life

One day last month, I perused my bookshelves looking for something to read for a trip I was about to take and landed on an old book I hadn’t read in years: "The Thousand Mile Summer," written in 1959 by Colin Fletcher.

Fletcher, a Welshman, fought with the Royal Marines in World War 2, and then traveled the world before settling permanently in the United States in 1956. He was the author of several outdoor books. His more noted titles were his second and third books, "The Man Who Walked Through Time," and "The Complete Walker" – the former a memoir of his hike that covered the length of the Grand Canyon below the rim; the latter a comprehensive guidebook for aspiring back country hikers. "The Complete Walker," updated four times, became the Bible for backpackers.

"The Thousand Mile Summer" concerns his hike up the spine of eastern California in 1958, from the Mexican border to Oregon - up the Colorado River, through the Mojave Desert, Death Valley, into the Sierras, and north. It took exactly six months to the day, from March 8 to September 8. And so, today marks the 50th anniversary of the walk's completion. At the book's end, as he reflects on the experience and how he had told the tale, he writes the following:

"There is a difference in shape between a journey as it happens and a journey as you remember it. At the time, there it is – day after roughly equal day. But when you look back afterward (and especially when you talk or write about it) memory pushes and pulls at time as if it were a concertina. The vivid moments expand, so that they stand out like cameos. The dull periods contract, until whole weeks become compressed into thin shims."

This paragraph really struck me. If you think more broadly about "journey" to imply the many experiences that comprise our lives, it makes perfect sense. We all do much the same. It's a wonderful metaphor, the idea of life’s memories as a concertina. The daily routines, with all their banalities, are compressed into the thin shims, while those joyful moments, sometimes so brief and fleeting, expand, stand out and over-shadow everything else.

The clever and creative among us are able to weave the pleasurable moments into larger-than-life events. Sometimes, we exaggerate some details while ignoring others. Indeed, a good storyteller, one who can entertain in relating personal experiences, is one who is able to play that concertina, expand the moments of joy and excitement to come alive and become something larger than they were.

Fletcher, who passed away last year at the age of 85, teaches us the importance of focus, of winnowing out that which is unimportant. His tale examined in wonderful detail the unusual people he met along the trail, the beautiful vistas of the eastern Sierras he witnessed, the harsh heat of Death Valley, and the like. Yet the last several hundred miles toward the Oregon border, his tale speeds to a conclusion, falling into the "thin shims" of his story. (He admits, “The last three weeks of the hike were dull.”)

I think of his words a lot lately, assessing how I might approach each new day, whether it will be a thin shim or whether I can make it stand out like a cameo. In the end, it is we who make those choices.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

"Inside Steve's Brain"

Before someone points out the obvious… Yes, I am very intrigued by Steve Jobs and his chief creation, Apple Inc. For good reason. I have owned and used Apple computers since 1984. Since buying my first Macintosh in 1989, I’ve never used anything else and cannot imagine why I would ever buy a Windows-based machine.

Knowing my bias and interest, my friend and colleague, Gary Grates, alerted me to a new book last week he was certain I’d appreciate. He was right. The book is Inside Steve’s Brain,” by Leander Kahney, news editor for Wired.com.

The book is about the way Steve Jobs thinks, how he operates, how he built Apple, his successes (and mistakes), his stunning innovations, and his most unique approach to the world. But it’s a lot more than that. It is a business book full of valuable ideas and insights into one of the hottest companies of our time. In addition to all that the reader will learn implicitly, the book makes it easy by concluding each chapter with a helpful summary list of “Lessons from Steve.”

Jobs’ success is not a simple formula, and thus deserves a book-length exploration that a blog entry cannot fulfill. But here’s the crux. Steve Jobs finds the best people, attracts them and, once he has them on board, allows them the freedom to do their best work. At the same time, he demands perfection. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Known for his abrasiveness, Jobs bisects the world into "geniuses and bozos." He weeds out the bozos.

Collaboration is central to how Jobs operates. The book compares how Apple approaches product development versus the typical auto company. At Apple, the design, engineering, manufacturing and marketing teams work side-by-side throughout the development process so there is little chance of miscommunication. Not so at other companies:

…Jobs has said it’s like seeing a cool prototype car at a car show, but when the production model appears four years later, it sucks. “And you go, what happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory! … What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”

Pixar, Jobs’ other baby, is discussed within the context of how he puts together teams of talented people and allows them to thrive. The book contrasts Pixar’s way of doing things to the typical Hollywood approach. Pixar, by the way, is not headquartered in the LA area but in Emeryville in the East Bay.

In Hollywood, every one is a free agent: directors, writers, actors, etc. The deal is pitched pulling together the various talent. As Kahney notes, the people are finally working together smoothly about the time the filming is wrapped up. Pixar operates on the opposite model.

At Pixar, the directors, screenwriters, and crew are all salaried employees with big stock option grants. Pixar’s movies may have different directors, but the same core team of writers, directors, and animators work on them all as company employees. In Hollywood, studios fund story ideas – the famous Hollywood pitch. Instead of funding pitches and story ideas, Pixar funds the career development of its employees… At the heart of the company’s “people investment” culture is Pixar University, an on-the-job training program that offers hundreds of courses in art, animation, and filmmaking. All of Pixar’s employees are encouraged to take classes in whatever they like, whether it’s relevant to their job or not.

It’s no surprise that Jobs has earned remarkable allegiance from his people. We can see the results for ourselves in the great products those people create and the sales of those products. I’d read before the sales statistics for the iPod, but the book reiterates them and they’re worth repeating here as a demonstration of the success of the Apple model.

According to analysts, the company is on track to sell 200 million units by the end of 2008, and 300 million by the end of next year. Some analysts think the iPod could sell 500 million units before the market is saturated – which would make the iPod a contender for the biggest consumer electronics hit of all time. The current record holder is the Sony Walkman, which sold 350 million units during its 15-year reign in the 1980s and early 90s. Incidentally, Kahney writes at length contrasting Apple and Sony and how they develop and market new products.

What I find most telling is Apple’s (and Jobs’) near-total focus on the customer experience (in contrast to companies like Sony). While most companies just make products, Apple’s approach reflects the title of a 2005 Forrester Research study: “Sell the digital experiences, not products,” which the book cites. Chapter 6, on Innovation, concludes with the following “Lessons from Steve.”

  • Don't lose sight of the customer: The [Macintosh] Cube bombed because it was built for designers, not customers.
  • Study the market and the industry: Jobs is constantly looking to see what new technologies are coming down the pike.
  • Don't consciously think about innovation: Systemizing innovation is like watching Michael Dell dance. Painful.
  • Concentrate on products: Products are the gravitational force that pulls it all together.
  • Remember that motives make a difference: Concentrate on great products, not becoming the biggest or the richest.
  • Steal: Be shameless about stealing other people's great ideas.
  • Connect: For Jobs, creativity is simply connecting things.
  • Study: Jobs is a keen student of art, design and architecture. He even runs around parking lots looking at Mercedes.
  • Be flexible: Jobs dropped a lot of long-cherished traditions that made Apple special - and kept it small.
  • Burn the boats: Jobs killed the most popular iPod [the Mini] to make room for a new thinner model. Burn the boats, and you must stand and fight.
  • Prototype: Even Apple's stores were developed like every other product... prototyped, edited, refined.
  • Ask customers: The popular Genius Bar idea came from customers.

If that’s not a formula for success, I’d like to see one that is.