Category Archives: Book Reviews

Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

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LEAN IN

A CLOSER LOOK AT A CONTROVERSIAL MUST-READ

In her controversial best-seller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, Facebook Chief Operations Officer Sheryl Sandberg suggests that many women react to the substantial challenges they face on their career paths by choosing to be self-limiting. When faced with pivotal turning points that could affect their ability to achieve the highest levels of leadership, a large percentage of women step back rather than take Sandberg’s suggestion to lean in.

Sandberg’s decision to focus on women’s internal struggles has drawn criticism that she does little to offer solutions for the institutional problems that present the most apparent barriers to the goal of creating more female leaders. A closer look at Lean In reveals that Sandberg is fully aware of the barriers women continue to face on the path to power. She simply prefers to attack them by helping women achieve leadership positions. This would enable women to have a more substantial stake in the decision-making processes that shape (and will ultimately smash) the current obstructions.

The Personal and the Professional

The self-help process provided by Lean In is contained in a series of chapters that interweave advice for a better career with relevant research and personal anecdotes from the author. Sandberg’s stories are likely the material that is doing the most to fuel the book’s fire as a topic of conversation.

Some tales, such as the story about Sandberg asking a private equity fund’s senior partner for directions to the women’s restroom, combine a pinch of humor with a strong dose of reality about the state of gender equality in the 21st century. Other incidents, such as Sandberg’s discovery that her daughter had lice while the pair were guests on the private plane owned by eBay, unintentionally provide more talking points about the growing concern over economic inequality in the United States.

Solid Advice for Everyone

Despite the protests, many of the core messages in Lean In have genuine merit for workers of both genders. She recommends that people have a short-term plan for career and personal advancement (Sandberg prefers an 18-month plan). She also addresses the importance of stretching one’s abilities by taking assignments that, while not directly labeled as a promotion, offer better opportunities to expand one’s skills.

Sandberg also deftly provides guidance from expert sources. One of the book’s best takeaways for readers is the advice Sandberg received from current Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. While Sandberg debated the merits of working for the nascent tech giant, Schmidt pointedly told her that the only deciding factor for choosing where to work is whether or not the company would rapidly expand. “When companies grow quickly,” Sandberg writes, “there are more things to do than there are people to do them.” Schmidt summarized the philosophy by saying, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

The problem, in Sandberg’s opinion, is that too many women either choose to get off the rocket just as its countdown nears launch or, worse yet, never get on at all. She spends a good portion of the book attempting to resolve the tug-of-war between career and family that she feels stops many future female leaders in their tracks. While her opinions in this area are left for readers to debate, there is enough good content in Lean In to make it a worthwhile read for men and women alike.

The Three Signs of a Miserable Job

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We searched our archives for this book review on a topic that is just as relevant today as when the book was written in 2007. You can also watch our webinar with Patrick Lencioni to gain more insight into this topic.

SEEING THE SIGNS

Great pay. Interesting work. A fancy title and an assistant. These are the elements that make for a truly great job, right? One where the person lucky enough to have it is happy, content and eager to go into work each day. Meanwhile, those people unlucky enough to be stuck in low-paying, less glamorous jobs, like waitresses, garbage men and editorial assistants, are bound to be miserable and plagued by those “Sunday Blues,” even on a Wednesday.

Not so, according to Patrick Lencioni, author of The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (And Their Employees). Fascinated with why people stay in demoralizing, unfulfilling positions since watching his father trudge off to his own miserable job day after day, Lencioni has paid close attention to the work world, continually refining his theories about job satisfaction.

At first, he too fell for the misconception that well-paying, interesting work is all that is necessary for job satisfaction. He even changed his own career based on this theory. But then, Lencioni says, “… I met more and more people with supposedly great jobs who, like me, dreaded going to work… The theory crumbled completely when I came across other people with less obviously attractive jobs who seemed to find fulfillment in their work… And so it became apparent to me that there must be more to job fulfillment than I had thought.”

In The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, Lencioni explores the overlooked, and actually simple and obvious, causes of job misery in the hope that addressing these causes will not only minimize high turnover rates affecting many businesses, but, more importantly, end the suffering that job misery causes for many.

Once Upon a Time…

The author frames his theories as a fable, telling the story of Brian Bailey, a man who “love[s] being a manager.” Bailey, a recently retired CEO, begins the tale thinking that he and his wife will be moving to Lake Tahoe to enjoy a life of leisure; but only weeks into his retirement, his managerial instincts are challenged by a less-than-stellar experience ordering takeout from a neighborhood pizzeria. Bailey wonders why the pizzeria’s employees seem so miserable, particularly in comparison to their counterparts at other area restaurants, and soon seizes the opportunity to become the pizzeria’s weekend manager in order to investigate the cause of the staff’s misery and how to alleviate it. The reader journeys with Bailey as he works to increase the staff’s job fulfillment, discovering along the way a no-nonsense method for transforming a miserable job into a great one.

Defeating Immeasurability, Anonymity and Irrelevance

Lencioni’s fable utilizes the microcosm of the pizzeria, with its small staff and stakes, to illustrate the three elements that can make any job miserable: immeasurability, anonymity and irrelevance. In order to experience true job fulfillment, employees must be able to measure their progress and level of contribution in a way that does not depend on the whims or subjective views of their managers. According to Lencioni, they must also feel “understood and appreciated for their unique qualities by someone in a position of authority… People who see themselves as invisible, generic or anonymous cannot love their jobs, no matter what they are doing.”

Finally, employees must have a clear idea that their work matters, that it has relevance for others. Lencioni provides vivid, relatable examples of each of these misery-causing factors in his depiction of the pizzeria’s employees and their situation when Brian Bailey enters their lives.

The story of how Bailey then turns this miserable situation around provides a blueprint for any organization — regardless of size or industry — to increase job fulfillment for its staff. The reader watches Bailey develop his theory of job fulfillment and combat feelings of immeasurability, anonymity and irrelevance among his staff. Lencioni presents his readers with a simple, straightforward cure that depends upon effective, empathetic management, and offers hope for everyone affected by job misery. Ultimately, Lencioni’s business-fiction format keeps his work from being relegated to the dry, academic realm of the textbook, but still provides readers with valuable theories.

How Strategy Really Works

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PLAYING TO WIN

LEARN TO WIN FROM AN ALL-TIME GREAT CEO

A.G. Lafley knows something about successful corporate strategies. As former CEO of Procter & Gamble (P&G), Lafley, with the help of strategic adviser Roger Martin, doubled P&G’s sales and quadrupled its profits. In Playing to Win, Lafley teams up with Martin, now the renowned dean of the Rotman School of Business in Toronto, to outline a step-by-step process for developing and implementing a successful strategy.

The Five Choices

This process is built on a set of five integrated choices. “These choices and the relationship between them,” the authors explain, “can be understood as a reinforcing cascade, with the choices at the top of the cascade setting the context for the choices below, and the choices at the bottom influencing and refining the choices above.” One of the first examples used in the book is P&G’s Oil of Olay product, once a floundering brand known derisively as “Oil of Old Lady.” Building on their framework, Lafley and Martin break down the cascade of strategic choices that led to the brand’s impressive turnaround. Here are a few of them:

  1. What is our winning aspiration? This choice refers to “the purpose of the enterprise,” the authors write. For Oil of Olay, it was to become a leading skin care brand again.
  2. Where will we play? This second choice identifies specifically where the product or company will compete. The Oil of Olay brand stayed with its mass market retailers (e.g., Target and Wal-Mart) rather than the prestige stores (e.g., Macy’s). But it positioned itself as a “masstige” product — higher end (and higher priced) than the traditional mass market beauty product.
  3. How will we win? This question must be answered with a clear value proposition and a path to competitive advantage. Among Oil of Olay’s winning strategies was producing a better anti-aging skin care product — a product at the right price (e.g., not too low) that would entice the prestige customer base.
  4. What capabilities must be in place? The task here is to define the activities and competencies that support the where-to-play and how-to-win choices. Oil of Olay, for example, was able to leverage P&G’s strengths in consumer understanding and brand building.
  5. What management systems are required? Likewise, strategists must define the systems, structures and measures required to support the choices. Oil of Olay was also able to leverage P&G’s systems as well as its channel and partner systems.

This framework can be applied at all levels of the company, including the organization level, strategic group or, as in the example above, the single business unit, the authors write. Clearly, the choices need to support each other among the different levels.

A Do-It-Yourself Guide

While most of the book is dedicated to the five-choice framework, Lafley and Martin offer two additional tools to support the strategic choice process. The first is a structured methodology for analyzing the company — specifically its industry, customers, relative position to competitors and the potential competitor response to your strategic choices. The authors also offer a “reverse engineering” process to test potential strategic choices.

Tools, of course, can go only so far. Reading this book will not make you into another A.G. Lafley — his success at P&G is much more than a function of methodologies. However, by helping strategists focus on the important where-to-play and how-to-win questions, Playing to Win is an invaluable map that gives business leaders at least a fighting chance for a successful journey.

The Underlying Logic of the Office

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THE ORG

THE OFFICE GOES UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

Bureaucracy that hampers productivity, outrageous salaries for those at the top, cutthroat office politics, endless meetings that everyone knows are useless — there must be a better way to get things done than through today’s dysfunctional organizations. Isn’t there?
The short answer, from Columbia Business School professor Ray Fisman and his co-author, Harvard Business Review Press editorial director Tim Sullivan, is: there isn’t. Of course not all organizations are perfectly designed and managed — no doubt, there is always room for improvement — but as Fisman and Sullivan demonstrate in their book The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office, today’s organization is still the structural unit for our world. Yes, too much time is spent in meetings, and the politics of the workplace will always create roadblocks to success. But for Fisman and Sullivan, much of the frustration and concern that our organizations inspire are the result of give-and-take that is not only inherent but unavoidable in our economic system. Through scores of in-depth case studies of organizations ranging from the Baltimore Police Department to the island nation of Samoa, the authors explain why organizations are structured and managed as they are — in other words, the “underlying logic” to it all.

How Much Can the Org Do?

For instance, take the task of structuring the job so that employees are incentivized to be highly productive. Police departments, for example, might incentivize police officers by rewarding them based on number of arrests. Theoretically, this might seem logical, but on closer examination a number of issues arise. First, is it truly better to arrest 10 loiterers, or even car thieves, as opposed to one murderer?

Even more complex is the fact that the job of a police department is not to make arrests but to keep the city safe. Thus the measure of “success” a police department uses for its officers actually reflects a failure of the department’s mandate. Even more important, the chosen incentive in this case might actually discourage officers from doing their job — keeping the city safe — because the initiatives and work that could help to keep the city safe is not rewarded. This is a very real problem, as the authors found in Baltimore. The answer is that the “org” — as the authors call it — can plan, structure and impose only so much. At some point, the police officers themselves must recognize the job they have to do and must act accordingly. And this is exactly what happens, the authors write. After a period of “cowboy” policing — making lots of showy arrests — many cops settle into a routine of keeping the peace in which arrests are the means and not the end.

The bottom line is that structuring organizations based on high-powered incentives and rational economic principles might seem logical, but real life is different. The best organizations balance incentives with an acknowledgment of intrinsic motivation, which itself can be as high powered as any carrot — just ask any entrepreneur.

Guardians vs. Stars

Organizations do fail, and fail through their own fault. The subprime mortgage meltdown resulted from incentives that pushed loan officers to approve as many loans as possible, regardless of the risk of those loans. The problem, as the authors explain, is that these mortgage companies and banks did not have the guardians watching over the stars. Any organization needs to have stars swinging for the fences — but those stars are not going to worry about the risks; thus, the same organization needs to have guardians to ensure the quality of the quantity being brought in by the stars. The banks had no guardians ensuring the quality of the loans being approved, which was a recipe for disaster. The subprime mortgage experience explains, write the authors, “why we’ll always have oppressive bureaucrats, and free-thinking entrepreneurs oppressed by them. And that’s okay.”

The simple phrase “that’s okay” is the beating heart of this lucid, well-researched book. The organizations that we deal with — and their policies, structures and rules — will no doubt continue to frustrate us, but the fact is that despite the give-and-take, compromises and seeming unfairness, today’s organization is still the best vehicle to get things done. Organizations may not be perfect, but that’s okay.

The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

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TO SELL IS HUMAN

WHY THE OLD RULES OF SELLING DON’T APPLY

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, author Daniel Pink notes in his new book To Sell Is Human, 1 out of every 10 Americans works in sales. Is that less than before? Certainly. But have the Internet and online shopping brought the sales function to the precipice of extinction, as so many have predicted? Not quite, Pink writes. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data (replicated by corresponding statistics in other developed countries) vastly understates the amount of “selling” going on when we consider what selling, according to Pink, really entails: “persuading, influencing and convincing others.”

This is what he calls “non-sales selling.” Most people, Pink explains, are involved in non-sales selling, no matter what their profession. Examples cited by Pink include physicians who sell patients on a remedy, lawyers who sell juries on a verdict, teachers who sell students on the value of paying attention in class, entrepreneurs selling to funders, writers selling to producers and coaches cajoling players to play their best. In fact, it’s no longer completely accurate to see producing and consuming as the two most important economic activities, Pink writes. “Today, much of what we do also seems to involve moving,” he explains. “That is, we’re moving other people to part with resources — whether something tangible like cash or intangible like effort or attention — so that we both get what we want.”

Why Sales Is So Important

Why are so many people devoting their valuable time to selling when the practice is allegedly in decline? Pink offers three reasons:

  1. Entrepreneurship. The past few years (thanks in great part and a bit ironically to the Internet) have seen the rise of small entrepreneurship — small shops or one- or two-person enterprises selling, as Pink writes, “services, creativity and expertise.” For these small-business owners and micro-entrepreneurs, there is no dedicated sales force to bring in the customers; they are their own sales forces.
  2. Elasticity. Once upon a time, Pink writes, “if you were an accountant, you did accounting.” However, intense competition and economic conditions have forced organizations to go “flat” — or at least flatter. As a result, functions are no longer rigidly separated as in the past. Job descriptions are broader and usually involve some kind of selling.
  3. Ed-Med. Education and health are among the fastest-growing industries, and as the examples of the teachers and physicians above demonstrate, much of education- and health-related work involves non-sales selling. “Of course,” Pink notes with characteristic humor, “teaching and healing aren’t the same as selling electrostatic carpet sweepers. The outcomes are different. A healthy and educated population is a public good, something that is valuable in its own right and from which we all benefit. A new carpet sweeper or gleaming Winnebago, not so much.”

The New ABCs

When selling is mostly “moving” people, the old rules of selling no longer apply. After making his case for the predominance of non-sales selling in our lives, Pink outlines the different strategies for 21st-century selling. He begins, in the second section of his book, by showing how the traditional mantra of selling, “Always Be Closing,” has been replaced by a new set of ABCs: Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity. Attunement is to be in harmony with those around you — which is why, Pink writes, extraverts are not the best salespeople. They don’t take the time to become attuned. (Introverts aren’t necessarily the best, either, Pink notes.) Buoyancy is knowing how to always be “afloat” in a difficult world of constant rejection, thanks to one’s resilience and optimism. Clarity, in Pink’s approach, refers to the art of problem finding — different from the traditional emphasis on problem solving. Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity are the attributes of the new successful salesperson. In the final section of the book, Pink outlines the three core abilities — knowing how to pitch, how to improvise and how to serve — required to succeed.

Pink, a best-selling author whose books include Drive and A Whole New Mind, has once again expanded his readers’ perspectives on how the world really works, with insight and humor bolstered by solid research.