Getting Through Our Hitting Slumps

The other day, I was watching a Red Sox game on TV. As a batter stepped to the plate, the announcer, Don Orsillo, noted that he was in the middle of a long hitting slump, having gone hitless for some 15 games.
          Orsillo asked Steve Lyons, the color commentator that night, whether players in that situation get demoralized and spiral even further into a funk. Lyons had played nearly 20 years in the Major Leagues for the Red Sox and three other teams. So his answer was insightful.
          “If you’re in a hitting slump like that,” he said, “you go to the ballpark the next day fully confident that you’re going to go four-for-four. Nobody in that situation goes to the game expecting to extend the hitless streak.”
          And here was Lyon’s most telling comment: “You are not in the Major League if that’s your attitude. And you will not make it in the big leagues if you don’t have tons of confidence.”
          My first reaction was his insight’s application to my own attitude. In fact, that kind of thinking is applicable in how people operate as business managers and leaders.
          Clearly the more successful people in business – the ones playing in the “majors” – are those that can walk away from defeats and see them as learning experiences, who start each new day fully confident that that day they will go four-for-four.

Leaders’ Winning Attitude
By extension, people that become leaders will guide their companies to success if they are able to imbue their people and their organizations with the same attitude, sustaining confidence after defeat, always moving forward with self-assurance.

          Yes, it’s tough to do that. And the leader who is able to consistently buck up his/her team’s confidence through trials and after stinging defeats is respected and, more importantly, heeded whenever times get tough. Communicating confidence like that is not so much words and speeches as it is leading by example.
          For instance, it is instructive to watch how General Motors’ new CEO, Mary Barra, addrresses her company’s current challenges around massive vehicle recalls. Clearly those recalls represent failures and mistakes at several levels of the organization, failures and mistakes that got repeated.
          The task before Ms. Barra is to right the ship and get GM back into a winning formula of developing, manufacturing and marketing high quality vehicles that people want to own.
          To do that, she needs to encourage her people to learn from their mistakes. She must remind them that what once made GM great were its people. She needs to convince them that that excellence still resides within them, and to move forward with confidence as a unified whole.
           Her employees must see Ms. Barra herself consistently operating with confidence, demonstrating through her own actions the central role of excellence and quality. All the while that central tenet must be echoed in her spoken and written words.
          In the end, she will be judged on how quickly and how completely she turns around the ocean liner known as General Motors. It is no small task, to be sure. So if she is successful in the end, if GM resumes its role as the world’s leading auto company under her guidance, she will go down as one of GM’s greatest leaders. And it will be because she led her organization with confidence.

Sustaining a Winning Attitude
Leadership excellence, in that regard, is not just for those who must right a foundering ship like GM. It is also seen in leaders able to sustain excellence and innovation. In that respect, the jury is still out – and getting impatient – with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO who inherited the venerable cloak of excellence and innovation from the late Steve Jobs.
          At the annual Worldwide Developers’ Conference in San Francisco every June, Jobs would habitually thrill Apple fans with groundbreaking new products: iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.
          Since Jobs’ death in October 2011, when Cook took over as CEO, there have been no new such groundbreaking products. Rather, Cook and his team have merely improved existing products and expanded established lines.
          Analysts were getting restless, sensing the vacuum, so Cook told them in late 2013 that 2014 would see Apple introduce a plethora of new products. Earlier this week at the 2014 WWDC, Cook and his team introduced exactly zero new products, only system software upgrades. So we are halfway through 2014 and Cook has failed to make any progress toward his promise.
          As outsiders, we cannot know how well Cook has filled Jobs’ leadership shoes in his nearly three years in the role. Nor do we know how well he has established himself as an inspirational leader. But that tenure should be long enough for anyone to do so, and from outward appearances, it isn’t clear that Cook has succeeded.
          Oh yes, Apple is still thriving and is still highly valued. It still makes great products. And yes, that’s likely because Cook is one of the best operational leaders in the business – the reason Jobs hired him in the first place and the reason he was promoted. But the competition has caught up with and, in some cases, surpassed Apple’s innovation. 
          Has Cook instilled the kind of confidence in his people that Jobs once did? The genius of Steve Jobs lay not only in his innovative vision, but also his ability to convince people they were better than they thought they were. Jobs was the kind of guy who would go to the plate in the midst of a hitting slump and know – just know – that his next swing of the bat produce a hit. Jobs was supremely and contagiously confident. Is Tim Cook? 

          “The greatest manager has a knack for making players think they are better than they think they are.” – Reggie Jackson

"I Speak. You Listen."

The conventional understanding of employee communications can be summed up in four words: “I speak. You listen.”

            In other words, many people believe that employee communications is simply top-down, with messages and information emanating from senior managers for consumption by the broad mass of employees. This approach rests on a set of questionable assumptions:

• Individual employees will actually receive the message when they are supposed to receive it.
• They will fully understand it.
• They will know what to do as a result of getting it.
• They will act accordingly.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Assumptions like that are the height of arrogance and have a tendency to sneak up behind you and bite you when you least expect it. It’s never good for business. 

A hierarchy of responsibilities 

In fact, effective employee communications involves a hierarchy of responsibilities for everyone in the organization, from the CEO to the individual front line employee; a hierarchy that develops and sustains on-going dialogues, discussion and debate up, down and across the organization, among and between leadership, managers, supervisors, and employees.
            A few years ago, we were working with a client company and helped them discover the truth in this, and then helped them implement it – to their enormous benefit, I might add. The hierarchy of responsibilities we developed with them, with a few tweaks, could be adopted for any organization’s communications.
            It begins in the executive suite, with the establishment of strategy, direction toward achieving that strategy, the story behind it, and the rules of engagement – i.e., how the business and people will operate in the quest.
            For their part, managers must comprehend and activate the strategy, interpreting it for their respective teams and/or business units to make it relevant and meaningful to them, and then engage their teams regularly in discussion, dialogue and debate to make it come alive.
            Managers must also establish mid-point and end targets for their teams to aim for, how they will measure progress toward those targets, and be ready and able to adjust and adapt as events and needs dictate or unforeseen roadblocks arise.
            To this last point, that means that managers must pay attention to where the business is going, where their industry is headed, the effects of the current economy on both, and how employees are impacted.
            At the same time, managers must encourage a two-way conversation by asking employees the right questions, and jointly identifying problems, challenges, opportunities and gaps early. 

Employees take ownership 

The last segment of the hierarchy of responsibilities – that of the employees – is the one most often overlooked. In fact, without it, communications, no matter how well planned and executed, will fail.
            Employees’ responsibilities demand that they be independent thinkers. They need to be actively engaged in the business at all times, conscious of its health as well as that of its market and industry.
            Employees must be active listeners, with a strong desire for continuous learning. And lastly, rather than just bring problems to their supervisors, they must pose ideas, suggestions and solutions.
            This set of responsibilities is key. This is employee engagement.
            It’s not enough just to announce a directive that employees be engaged. Employee engagement in a healthy operation is a continuous state of affairs where information flows readily up, down and across the organization, without a lot of impediments or formalities about who can and cannot talk to whom. It’s where people feel valued, regardless of their role, where their ideas, suggestions and solutions are welcomed, even if they can’t be acted on for whatever reason.
            Employees are emotionally tied to the business, conscious of their own connection to its welfare and how their performance contributes to its success… or failure.
            It’s an organization where their good work is rewarded, not just with promotions and pay increases but also with recognition and acknowledgement, or maybe just a simple “thank you” when it’s called for.
            In the end, isn’t that why we do what we do – to contribute to and be part of a healthy, thriving organization, and be appreciated for it?

Employee Activism in a Social Media World

While contending daily with a highly competitive environment and multiple cost pressures, all in the context of constant change, every business today must also deal with stakeholder activism from assorted audiences, especially shareholders, environmentalists, and consumer advocates.
      One segment less frequently discussed is the employee audience, whose activism is quickly emerging as perhaps the most critical one. In a world where social media like Facebook and Twitter have established an increasing presence and value within business, some might conclude that employee activism there carries with it a high risk of harming an organization’s brands and reputation. That might be the case where such activism is not understood or appreciated by leadership, or where employee engagement and internal communications are not high priorities.
      In an insightful in-depth report just released, it becomes readily apparent just how critical this audience segment is, and how businesses can best assure that the activism of their employees reinforces their goals and the business’ purpose, while supporting their brands and reputations.
      “Employees Rising: Seizing the Opportunity in Employee Activism” presents the findings of Weber Shandwick and KCR Research, which surveyed some 2,300 employees around the world at companies with more than 500 employees. While their findings may not surprise those of us in the field of employee engagement and communications, they should really open the eyes of business leaders and managers. 

Employee Engagement 
Let’s start from the premise that a healthy business is one that engages its employees, where internal communications is part of the fabric of the organization. Anonymous quotes throughout the report provide helpful insights into how typical employees define employee engagement.
      In an earlier blog, I defined employee engagement as “the ability of an organization’s workforce to assimilate, comprehend and act on the priorities and needs of the business in a timely and effectual manner.” I think that is pertinent in this context.
      Employee engagement in a healthy operation is a continuous state of affairs where information flows readily up, down and across the organization. It’s where people feel valued, regardless of their role, where their ideas, suggestions, and solutions are encouraged and welcomed.
      So if your employees are truly engaged in the business, if your communications are open, honest and frequent, then employee activism outside the business is likely to break to your advantage. As the report notes, “…employees are already taking matters into their own hands and, left unattended for too long, will define their employers’ brands and reputations on their own. Social media enhances this risk, but also the opportunities.” (Emphasis mine.)
      So why not leverage that?
      Weber Shandwick’s 24-page report goes into great depth examining the value of employee activism, as well as its drivers, its upsides and downsides, various social media outlets, how employee activists are using them, and how to encourage appropriate employee activism.

The Value of Internal Social Media 
While much of the report’s focus is on the external social media we all know and use, in its prescriptive section, the report alludes to internal social media as a means of engaging and communicating with employees.
      In fact, there is more advantage to it than that. Internal social media, such as Yammer or Jive, help people better understand and appreciate what their peers are saying about the organization, its products/services, and its customers. In that sense, it becomes a valuable learning and cross-fertilization tool.
      At the same time, internal social media channels can also serve as sources for people to mine for their own external commentary. Lastly, these media allow employees to get accustomed to and comfortable with writing about their employer in a social media context. 
      The meat of the report and its greatest value comes in its second half where it delves into the six different types of employees (“The Workforce Activism Spectrum”) in the context of their relative activism, and how these various segments of employees can be encouraged to become “social stewards” for the organization. 
      The paper parses the six types and their characteristic behaviors, and provides ideas and approaches for engaging them, communicating with them, and leveraging the positives while minimizing the impact of the negatives.
      Certainly employees who defend their companies in personal conversations with friends and family, and who proselytize for its products and services in one-on-one circumstances carry very high credibility.
      I’d venture to say, however, that credibility is not as high in the context of external social media. Left unsaid in the report is the fact that, in public social media, positive external comments about one’s employer are often taken with a grain of salt. After all, why would someone bad-mouth the company that gives him or her a paycheck?
      That’s not to say it has no value, but employers who put too much weight in positive social media commentary by their people should take a broader view.
      It really comes down to developing and sustaining an engaging internal environment, one where employees feel their ideas and insights are sought and welcome, one where every employee feels valued, able to contribute to the company’s long-term success.
      In that context, no matter the venue, you can rest assured that your employees’ activism will support your company and its brands, while enhancing your reputation.

Making the Most of Teleconference Calls

For most of my career, I’ve worked remotely. That is to say, I have had a home office for the past 20-plus years and worked both for established companies and agencies, as well as operating as an independent consultant. When friends hear about my set-up, they often express envy about the short commute, but always add something along the lines of, “I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t have the discipline.”
      In fact, my greatest challenge consistently has been associated not with self-discipline but with telephone technology, in particular, teleconference calls: not the content of the calls, but the general lack of protocol in most teleconference calls.
      The Wall Street Journal reported last month in an article about this topic that time spent in conference calls in the U.S. is “expected to grow 9.6% a year through 2017, according to Wainhouse Research, a Boston market-research firm… about 65% of all conferencing is still done by audio calls.”
      In that the expanding global economy continues to ensure that employees and outside contractors will increasingly be operating off-site, often at considerable distance from headquarters, the need for better teleconference technology and, especially, protocols for its use are imperative.
      Assuming that we have to continue to contend with unintelligible voices, people in the conference room who speak too loudly or not loudly enough, and other sins of teleconference calls, etc., let’s establish some ground rules to minimize the challenges and make the best of a less-than-perfect technology.

• First of all, we shouldn’t think of teleconference calls as “just another meeting.” When there are several people in a conference room and one or more people tied in via the speakerphone, it should be treated as a different kind of meeting versus a purely face-to-face meeting.
• All participants should approach teleconference calls with good manners, exhibiting the utmost patience with and consideration of others, especially the people who dial in remotely. That means staying on topic, not engaging in side conversations, and not interrupting others.
• Establish an agenda ahead of the meeting, including a purpose and desired outcomes. Agendas and goals should be clearer and more explicit than for face-to-face meetings. Distribute the agenda before the meeting.
• Also before the meeting, provide a list of attendees and their roles, spelling out who will be in the conference room and who will be dialing in remotely.
• If possible, limit the number of participants to no more than eight or nine. More than that and it tends to get chaotic.
• Be sensitive when one or more of the remote participants don’t know all the people in the room. When we are all accustomed to working together in an office space, we are used to people’s voices and their unique vocal mannerisms. Outsiders and newbies dialing in aren’t. So it’s imperative that people identify themselves each time they speak.
• Start the meeting with introductions, including name, role, and reason for participating in the meeting (if it’s not obvious). Participants who don't know each other should introduce themselves, explain their roles in the project at hand and explain what they hope to get out of the meeting.
• When latecomers enter the room, they should similarly introduce themselves. Likewise, people dialing in late should announce themselves.
• Appoint a moderator. If the group leader is dialing in remotely, the moderator should be in the conference room, though deferential to the leader. The moderator is responsible for maintaining order and discouraging side conversations. The moderator should also make sure that remote participants get a chance to offer their two cents to the discussion.
• People in the conference room who wish to speak should be recognized, by name, by the moderator. They should move closer to and speak directly into the microphone.
• Remote participants should keep their phones on mute until they speak. Too often, ambient noises like a barking dog come blasting into the conference room speaker.
• If you are on a line that has elevator music for the hold function or you don’t know, then don’t put your phone on hold.
• The moderator should notice when remote participants are silent for too much of the meeting and actively seek their opinions and insights on the topic being discussed. Being remote, it is sometimes difficult to cut in because the switch on the speakerphone tends to favor the voices in the room over those that are remote. The moderator should assume that silent remote participants have been unable to cut in.
• If someone in the room cracks a joke and the room dissolves into laughter, the moderator should let the others know who said what and repeat the joke, if necessary.
• Meeting participants in the room should be sensitive to the absence of nonverbal cues such as facial expressions for remote participants. If necessary, the speaker or the moderator should help remote participants follow along by indicating that a comment was delivered with a grin or a frown, for instance, thereby helping them gain better contextual meaning, such as intended irony.
• If someone in the room has to leave early, they should excuse themselves aloud so that those on the phone know that that person is no longer in the room. Similarly, if you're on the phone and have to leave early, say so before hanging up.
• Like any meeting, there should be a note-taker.
• As the meeting wraps up, the moderator should restate the conclusions and go-forward actions, along with assigned responsibilities and deadlines. If a follow-up meeting is necessary, take advantage of participants’ presence and set up the next meeting then and there.
• Before closing, the moderator should invite any final comments from the remote participants.
• The note-taker should type up and distribute the notes as soon as possible after the meeting, inviting participants to amend them as deemed necessary.

Bottom line: teleconference calls, like all meetings, should be seen as significant investments of people’s time and energy. Treat them as such by ensuring the full participation of all attendees, including those dialing in remotely. Getting into the habit of following these simple rules will assure that teleconference calls are well worth the investment.

Employees are Key to a Superior Customer Experience

Back when AT&T was the monopolistic entity providing telephone service, Lily Tomlin played a recurring role as “Ernestine,” a telephone operator. After treating a caller rudely and hanging up, she would grin sourly, snort and say, “We’re the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to."

      As they always say about comedy, it works best when there’s a grain of truth to it. And in those days, AT&T was The Phone Company – a.k.a., “Ma Bell” – and had virtually no competition.
      To those of us on the receiving end, it often felt like AT&T could and did operate any way it wished without fear of losing customers. Ernestine’s sneering uncaring attitude was emblematic of how people perceived Ma Bell.
      How far we’ve come in our choices. The end of the AT&T monopoly, and the advent and rapid growth of mobile telephony have marginalized conventional telephones. But more than just the landscape of the phone business has changed since the day of Ernestine. The drivers and predictors of business success also have changed.
      In a brilliant and insightful book titled Outside In, Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research make the case that today, the chief avenue to business success is the customer experience, i.e., “How your customers perceive their interactions with your company.”
      Even monopolies like the old Ma Bell couldn’t get away with abusing customers and expect to stay in business today. All businesses must excel at the customer experience or risk the onset of a death spiral that will end in their demise.
      Assuring that people become loyal customers involves making it easy to find, buy and use your products/services. This is a complex exercise encompassing all components of and people within your organization.
      At its heart, the authors explain, the customer experience is what happens when your customers try to:

• Learn about your product/service offerings
• Evaluate them
• Buy them
• Use them
• And, if necessary, get help when they have a problem with them.

In the end, it’s about how customers feel about those many different encounters. Are they happy, excited and reassured, or disappointed and frustrated?
      Outside In first defines the customer experience and describes its value before delving into the disciplines of superior customer experience, and the paths that companies can take to assure that the customer experience becomes central to their business. 

Engaging employees in the mission 

Though the book touches on the subject throughout, from my perspective, the ability of a company to engage its employees in the company’s larger mission will shape its ongoing ability to deliver a superior experience for customers time and time again – thus assuring their continued loyalty and positive word-of-mouth. In other words, every employee must be engaged in delivering that superior experience.
      It’s not just the customer-facing people – those in the retail stores or the people who provide support and sales on the 800-number. It involves everyone. Even if you banished Ernestine and her kind from your company, that would not be enough to assure a superior experience for all customers.
      The CEO of a client company spoke at the quarterly town meeting for the employees last fall about the unacceptable level of customer defections they were experiencing. She said, “These are things that we can control. This isn’t just about customer service. This isn’t just about retail stores. This is everybody in the business understanding how each one of us impact this.” And she’s right.
      We once helped a financial services company as it made a radical change in the way it went to market. Instead of focusing on the financial products it created and sold as it always had, it shifted its focus to its largest customer segment – small business owners – and their unique needs. The change was obvious and a relatively easy shift for the customer-facing employees. Not so everyone else.
      The employees that developed, marketed and supported the new products and services had a tougher shift. So our communications strategy sought to engage the entire organization in the monumental change by helping them better sense the world in which customers bought and used its offerings.
      The resulting program required managers to engage their teams in detailed exercises – using actual video interviews with small business owners – to be better able to think like them and fully appreciate the challenges they faced. The goal of the program was to help them make the connection between the products the company provided and how they could help customers surmount their challenges.
      We knew the program was a success when we heard that the IT department – about as far removed from customer interactions as any department – figured out how they could contribute to improving the total customer experience. It made quite a difference.
      No one else in the organization outside of IT would ever have identified that opportunity for improvement. No one else would have imagined that an internally focused operation could have such an impact on the customer experience.
      The point is, the entire organization must think like a customer and appreciate the challenges and needs of customers. That way, they will do their job most effectively toward the company’s larger mission of delivering a superior customer experience.

Driving Effective Employee Communications

The “Sunday drive” is an old-fashioned concept. The family piled into the car and Dad would then drive around aimlessly. The idea was to see nearby sites with which the family was previously unfamiliar. It would start with a whimsical notion of a quiet country road, just seeing where it would take them, and the adventures, scenes, and surprises it might bring. 
      In these days of high gas prices and little free time, however, it is a rare if not altogether forgotten pastime for a quiet weekend. Just the same, imagine jumping in your car and backing out of the driveway without a destination. At the end of the driveway, do you go left or right? And once you’ve made that decision, then what?
      Yet some people in business today operate their employee communications function in much the same manner. Their “cars” are the tools and channels at their disposal to communicate with employees: newsletters, executive emails, and speeches delivered at town hall-type meetings. They create 12-month schedules for what they will write about when.
      Just because they have those tools and schedules, their default mode is to use them to deliver often-irrelevant information to employees.
      What is frequently missing, however, is a sense of the organization’s destination, like that meandering Sunday drive. So employee communications rambles around without a consistent set of relevant messages, without links to the direction in which the organization needs to go, without a sense of what employees need, ultimately toward no coherent end.

The Communications Plan is your GPS 

Effective employee communications requires a plan tied to the realities of the business and where its leadership is driving it. Unlike that Sunday drive without an end in mind, the business’ ultimate destination determines whether you figuratively go right or left.
      An employee communications plan is like a GPS, guiding decisions and ensuring that the right information gets to the right people at the right time through means that reach them effectively. With your destination programmed in, your GPS will guide you via the most direct route.
      There is a practical way to develop an appropriate communications plan for any given set of circumstances. But it requires some work, serious thought, and analysis. Nevertheless, the initial steps are always the same, regardless of the circumstances.

• What is your objective? A typical objective is to engage your internal audience in the challenges and opportunities the organization faces. This requires that they receive relevant and timely information that will help them see how what they do every day can help the organization surmount the challenges and take full advantage of the opportunities.
• Who is your audience? The people that work in your company are not a faceless monolith. Internal audiences are as diverse as external ones. Are you an international bank or are you in manufacturing? Are your employees unionized in multiple plants, or field salespeople working on commission spread across a continent selling medical devices? Define the audience both specifically and generally, in ways that mean something to you and your management team.
• What do you know about your audience? Learn as much as possible about your internal audience. Again, consider their position within the company, their relative sophistication and their responsibilities. What you communicate must be relevant and actionable. How you deliver information should take into account their preferred means of receiving information, be it email, videos, face-to-face meetings with their supervisors, or some combination. Don’t overlook whether employees can access online information readily. Factory floor workers or retail store salespeople, for example, can’t rely on a daily intranet update for the latest company news.
• What should they know, and what should they do with that knowledge? Perhaps the most critical series of questions cuts to core of employee communications. What is it that you want employees to know, and why? What do you want them to do as a result of getting your communication, and why? If your communications are of the “FYI” ilk, you’re probably wasting everyone’s time — while neutralizing the importance of future critical communications in a “boy who cries wolf” manner.
• How will the effort be measured? It’s one thing to make plans but still another to establish the means by which we measure the outcome to determine whether they achieved their objectives. So a core element of the plan must be measurement, which is more than just a return-on-investment exercise. It also helps guide future planning, enabling you to assess the ways that the plan fell short and where it worked best, thereby helping you learn important lessons for future such efforts.

Answering these questions will put you in a better position to develop an appropriate and effective communications plan consisting of what (content), when (timing), how (through what vehicles) and, specifically, to whom (target audiences).
      In short, the key to successful employee communications lies in fully understanding your audience, what they need to know and why, and what they should do with the information you give them.

The Impermanence of Corporate Culture

About seven years ago, a friend of mine – I’ll call him “Bob” – joined a Silicon Valley start-up, which I will call “Dot.Com.” He was among the first employees and knew he was taking a huge career risk. But he was footloose and fancy-free at the time, young, newly divorced and feeling the urge to start fresh in a new city, with new challenges.
       Seven years later, he’s one of the veterans. In the office, he often wears a San Francisco Giants jersey with the number “11” because he’s Employee #11 – that is, the eleventh person to join the company that now numbers nearly a thousand employees in locations from the Bay Area, to Austin, New York, Boston, London, and Singapore.
       His company is about to go public and he stands to reap an immense financial windfall from his tens of thousands of stock options. Yet, he’s eager to leave.
       Asked why, Bob replied that the company isn’t the same as it was in its founding days. He explained that the sense of camaraderie that infused and inspired the core team as it worked long hours and struggled to launch its web-based services model has evaporated. In its place are policies, procedures, politics, and hassles – and not a lot of fun, he adds.
       We pressed the question, wondering whether the culture of the organization had changed. He looked puzzled. “Culture?” he asked. “Look. All I know is that we worked hard, we worked long hours, and we played hard. We had a strong sense of mission that we would conquer the world. We went about it in a single-minded way, as a team.”

Riding the roller coaster
That Bob is now leaving is not an uncommon phenomenon in that world. Previously successful start-ups like Apple, Microsoft, Google and countless others have experienced mass migrations around the time of their IPOs. Newly and comfortably wealthy, a lot of their leading talent felt free to cut the strings, desirous of riding that roller coaster again. So there’s that aspect, too – that desire to experience the thrill of creation once again. 
       But the transience that is a corporate culture intrigues and invites further exploration. How does a company culture form? What sustains it? Is culture permanent? Does a company culture evolve with time? How? Why?
       The short answer is, a culture is no more static and definable than is the business organization in which it lives. We know from experience and observation that static businesses ultimately cease being. In that change and challenges will always assault organizations, remaining an unchanged operation is a recipe for eventual failure. So the culture of the organization evolves with the changes and challenges that the business confronts and surmounts.
       Not to put too much of an egghead spin on it, but it helps to read what an academic has to say on the subject. According to MIT’s Edgar Schein, one of foremost scholars on culture, organizational culture is “a pattern of basic assumptions – invented, discovered or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration – that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”
       Phew!

It’s a Darwinian thing
Okay, that’s a long-winded (but accurate) way to describe the internal dynamic of a team as its members confront the issues and tests that comprise the foundation of an enterprise’s creation. As Schein goes on to point out, the culture of an organization evolves – in fact, it must evolve – to adapt to the evolution of the world in which it operates. Again, as noted here (and more famously by Charles Darwin), a failure to adapt is to accept expiration.
       So if we think about the many external inputs that impose change on organizations, it’s obvious why a culture evolves. As Bob’s company grew, its opportunities expanded. The size, sophistication and demands of its growing customer base grew too. What satisfied Dot.Com’s early customers – many of which were also small companies – wouldn’t work for the far more demanding and exacting Fortune 500 companies it was now servicing.
       Bob’s company hired additional staff to help tackle and solve the fresh unknowns, problems and challenges its newer customers brought it. And with each new staff member came a new way of approaching such challenges. Those new approaches may or may not have meshed with the culture of the previously small company.
       With each new challenge, with each new staffer, the culture changed just a little. Amassed over the seven years of an improving balance sheet, with dozens and then hundreds of new employees being added, the culture known by Bob and his teammates from the early days had evaporated.
       Is that a good thing? Well, if Dot.Com is a thriving business, solving heretofore-unsolvable problems for other businesses, then yes, it’s a good thing. But if you’re Bob, longing for the fun days of being in a startup, it probably isn’t. No wonder it’s time for Bob to move on.
       Change is a good thing because with it comes growth, success and profitability. And an evolving culture.

Living on Technology’s Leading Edge

In the last decade of the 19^th century and early years of the 20^th century, the biggest problem confronting the people of New York City was the massive amounts of horse manure in the streets. In addition to its offensive odor and having to step carefully when crossing a street, there was a constant health hazard, especially in the hot summer months.  

      The city’s leaders wrestled with means to control it. Increasing the numbers of cleaning crews was insufficient. Among the proposals considered was putting limits on the number of horses allowed in the city. But that wasn’t practical. America’s most populous city, like all others, relied on horses to pull the carriages that conveyed passengers, and the wagons that delivered essential goods.  

      About the time the city fathers were at wit’s end, their problem was solved in a totally unexpected way: The arrival of the internal combustion engine and mass-produced automobiles. Within a decade or so, nearly all horses – and horse manure – disappeared from the streets of New York, replaced by horseless carriages. Problem solved. 

Ethernet goes *poof* 
In a similar vein, beginning in the early to mid-1990s, owners of office buildings scrambled to retrofit their structures with miles and miles of Ethernet cable to accommodate the need to connect all desktop computers to the Internet and local area networks. Yet, despite the massive investments in money and man-hours, within a decade, the need for Ethernet was virtually eliminated with the advent and widespread adoption of WiFi.

      Both these circumstances point up a core irony of technology: While we all welcome the capabilities and conveniences that technology gives us, at the same time it is not something that we can foresee and easily anticipate. Rather, it is something for which it is nearly impossible to plan.

      Consequently, no matter how prescient we may think we are as a society, we cannot foresee the effects that an unimagined technology would have on our lives and infrastructure after the fact.

      This challenge occurred to me while taking a tour of my town’s 45-year-old high school, which is in bad need of replacement. Over the years, the school administration had cobbled together various upgrades to sustain a campus that would provide the most current learning environment. But eventually, they just ran out of options.

      Take yourself back to the late 1960s and try to imagine what a high school building would require in terms of infrastructure 50 years hence. For one, they needed a library with enough shelf space to accommodate thousands and thousands of books.

      So here we are in 2013 and it’s time to replace that dinosaur – a dinosaur whose the library has been renamed the “Media Center,” with a fraction of the numbers of books envisioned 45 years ago. In their places are computer workstations, which no one could have imagined 50 years ago.  

Secretarial pool 
This dinosaur also has miles of unused Ethernet cable that had been strung above classroom ceiling panels some 20 years ago, and a computer center located in the same classroom where many high school girls 40 years ago learned to type in anticipation of joining the secretarial pool after graduation.
      And that’s to say nothing of the changes and accompanying expenses that new regulations and laws would impose on public buildings – including schools – the most prominent of which was the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. In addition, the advances in energy efficient construction alone make replacement imperative, if for no other reason than to save gobs of money in fuel and electricity costs.
      How do we account for changes that we cannot comprehend needing 40 and 50 years hence? If we couldn’t anticipate WiFi less than 10 years before it became widespread, how are we going to anticipate the next unknown technological leap and accommodate it accordingly? Thinking about business, how can we anticipate and incorporate the necessary changes that we cannot know?

      The short answer is, we can’t. But, we must approach unknown change with an open, inquiring mind, recognizing that today’s decisions work best in today’s world. In thinking through those decisions, in weighing the pros and cons of one choice versus another, are we adequately considering unknowns?
      Those “what if’s” can come back to haunt us. Those decisions that involve multimillion dollar capital investments must be made in the context of a discrete time frame, fully cognizant that even that time frame could shift quickly if something as momentous as the invention of the mass assembled automobile comes along to wipe the slate clean.
      Our planning window of opportunity, by the way, shrinks as fast as technology advances. A 10-year planning time frame is a vanishing luxury – if it exists at all.
      At its core, that’s what change is all about. That’s what we need to manage for, no matter the nature of our business. It means we must be nimble, always open to new ideas and new ways of thinking about challenges and potential solutions and opportunities.

What are you doing today to reinvent your business for tomorrow?

The day Apple introduced the iPod was the day it ceased being just a computer company – not that many people realized that at the time. In fact, Steve Jobs may have been the only one who did. But over the next few years, as succeeding and improved iterations of the pocket music player came out, the idea gradually sunk in that Apple had expanded beyond the realm of the Macintosh.
      The notion became permanently etched into the public’s consciousness with the subsequent introductions of the iPhone and iPad. Sure, Apple continued to produce evermore powerful, functional, and sophisticated computers and laptops. But Apple had morphed into a lifestyle company: a purveyor of tools and technologies that make our lives more pleasant, to some degree easier and, in many ways, more portable.
      What Apple and Steve Jobs figured out was how those tools and technologies perfectly linked to one another to create a unified whole that redefined for the world what Apple was and what it was capable of doing and giving us.
      In a similar vein, it’s unlikely that anyone who draws a paycheck from Nike thinks of the company as a shoemaker. When Bill Bowerman, the exceptional University of Oregon track coach, borrowed his wife’s waffle iron in the 1960s to make the sole for his ideal running shoe, he invented Nike. Little about the company today would be familiar to him.
      Today, the company’s Nike+ system allows runners to monitor and track each workout by means of sensors in their shoes to download data through Bluetooth into devices like iPhones. Via a Nike Internet platform, runners can share performance data online and receive customized advice from Nike coaches. Now that’s something Coach Bowerman would have loved.
      But that’s only one small part of what Nike does and is capable of today. 

Amazon and Google 
Amazon is not just an online bookseller. In addition to selling just about any and all consumer products, Amazon is now in direct competition to Netflix, streaming its own movie and TV series catalogues. 
       Rumor has it that Amazon wants to get into the cellphone business, too – with free cellphones, no less. Jeff Bezos just bought the Washington Post. Any guesses as to what that might mean for Amazon (and the Post)?
      Google is not just a search engine but, well, Google is now into nearly everything: from tablets, smartphones and the Android operating system that runs them, to office productivity software, and advertising, with a self-driving car in the wings.
      What these organizations have in common is that they didn’t stand still within the narrow confines of how the world perceived and defined them. Instead, they grasped the essence of their craft and passions, and understood where they excelled. They asked themselves what that implied, where it might take them, and what was possible. And they haven’t stopped asking those questions yet.
      Companies too numerous to name hewed to the tight concept of themselves, and continued to practice their trade efficiently and repeatedly. As a result, many of them either no longer exist or are a mere shadow of their former selves.
      While being in business in a capitalist system means you must grow, growth for its own sake is ultimately fruitless. What gets people out of bed in the morning and commuting to jobs at places like Apple and Nike is the thrill of constantly reinventing their businesses, of expanding the realm of the possible.
      The growth, success and profitability that those companies subsequently realize are the outcomes of that effort, not the reasons for the pursuit. When business leaders confuse the two, the end is in sight.
      What are you doing today to reinvent your business for tomorrow?