Geoffrey Colvin in Fortune Magazine (October 2, 2006 – Managing in Chaos) suggested that companies are not really structures or machines or collections of assets. They are groups of people. Business changes quickly, humans slowly. The biggest problem for managing in chaos is getting people in groups to behave in new ways. Companies and people can change and Geoffrey Colvin sites Intel’s decision to abandon dynamic random access memory (DRAM) – a product that built their early success and go into microprocessors. Andy Grove called this an inflection point for Intel or “a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change.” (Andrew S. Grove – Only the Paranoid Survive) What structure can help companies manage chaos and change and continue to adapt?
Maslow talked about Basic needs and deficiency characteristics. In business it applies, as well. Neurotic companies are companies that fail. Companies fail, along with other complex determinants, due to unfulfilled needs for safety, good people, great products, respect, and prestige. Healthy companies succeed. Healthy organizations have a superior perception of reality; an increase in problem-centering; more democratic structure; and greatly increased creativeness, just like Maslow’s self-actualized individuals. Further healthy companies minimize the dangers and enhance the attractions. These companies understand that anxiety kills curiosity and exploration. The best companies must serve two masters at once: they understand the world of competition; and they defend against the world of competition. It is a struggle between fear and courage. As fear increases, it will cut the impulse to learn or know and at the same time factors that increase courage, freedom, and boldness will free our ability to learn, adapt, know, and grow.
What should companies do? Being profitable is not enough. Companies need to look at company characteristics and they need to look from the bottom of the pyramid upwards. Companies need to remediate basic, lower (deficiency), unhealthy characteristics that will create the environment for healthy higher (being) characteristics to flourish. Run risk profiles. Are your workers safe? Do you have lots of sick days, injuries? Some companies pay for health clubs and monitor if the workers use them or have gyms on-site. Find staff friendly things to do that do not cost much. For example: compressed work weeks; telecommuting; relaxed dress codes; and flexible work hours. Management must instill trust, recognize achievement, and develop a sense of purpose and teamwork. Fortune noted that their top 100 Best Companies to work for averaged 85 years in business, while the national average was less than 20 years.
Some questions companies should ask:
• Do your workers feel secure?
• Do you have open, fear-free communication?
• Do you seek out ideas throughout the company?
• Do you reward courage, though an idea might fail?
• Do you have realistic, attainable goals and measures of success?
• Do you have common goals, chemistry, and shared experiences?
• Do workers respect and trust one another?

Companies that truly care about their employees, are willing to change from the bottom up, who encourage boldness, and are willing to take risks will be the survivors.

“A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” (Herm Albright)

There are managers who manage through fear and intimidation and managers who focus on the positive to manage their teams. I believe that you get better, more long lasting results from leaders who focus on the positive. Positive leadership inspires and motivates us to achieve more than we would have on our own. Granted being positive alone is not enough. Leaders must have vision, commitment and confidence. Leaders must communicate with clarity. Leaders must be consistent, yet adapt to an ever changing business landscape. But ultimately leaders need to take responsibility and instill trust in the people who work for them. True leaders take the blame for failure and never take credit for success. It is the leader’s ability to build great teams and have those teams do the right things that creates success.
A leader needs to focus on the positive and be positive. Negativity does not excite and brings down morale and the energy of the team. Focus on what people, teams, and companies do best and ask: How can you improve on what you do best? How would you know that you have improved? And what would it mean if you did improve? Will improvements have a positive impact and will you be able to measure that impact? You need to know that you have improved and how that improvement has helped. This defines the right things to do and gives you the proper focus.
Again, the stress is on looking at difficulties and hurdles in a positive way and taking a positive approach, creating an environment that believes in itself and believes in success.
“The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.” (Unknown author from www.thinkexist.com)

For a really good positive leadership site go to Terry Starbucker’s site http://www.terrystarbucker.com/

Good leadership, as Peter Drucker has so succinctly stated, is working on the right things. The devil is in the detail and subtleties. For example, you have an SAAS product with existing customers that does not support IE8 and you are starting to get calls. IE8 is starting to get popular, so you want to support it, but your next release is a month away. Do you hot fix it, moving resources away from your next release or wait? Of course the best answer would have been, realize months ago that this would have been an issue, and schedule it into a release. So for next time, lesson learned, but what about right now? Leaders need to have a long range vision and balance that vision with the tyranny of the immediate. Responding only to the immediate will doom you to failure, but not responding to immediate needs will also doom you to failure. Incorporating the immediate into your long range vision, allowing for the inevitable and unpredictable, will give you the flexibility to respond, but also keep you moving towards a better future. Lesson learned…plan for Windows 7.

Trust – You must have a team you trust to accomplish the work that needs to be done. They also need to trust you. You need to do what you say and say what you mean. Be balanced, fair, and honest.

Team – You must have a team with complementary skills, good chemistry, and passion.

Credit – You must take the blame for failures and give credit to your team for success. Look for ways to praise, always about specific accomplishments. Always thank your team and always verbalize your appreciation. Honestly care about your team and show that you care. If you don’t care for your team, change it.

Inspiration – You must inspire and motivate your team. To do that you need to understand your team’s “stories,” which means you need to understand what motivates each person; what goals they have; and what will help each team member to achieve their goals and your goals.

Vision – Peter Drucker said, “Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things.” A leader must have the right vision and be able to communicate that vision clearly and consistently. Part of vision is setting goals for yourself and your team that are linked to the company goals and vision. You should also establish a detailed scorecard that has specific responsibilities, requirements and characteristics of each job position, so that everyone knows exactly what they should be doing.

Rewards – Giving credit and accepting blame is a good start. Financial rewards are nice, but not always possible. Public recognition is free and should be done liberally. There are lots of other free rewards. Some examples of free benefits would be to let people dress as they choose, work from home, and have flexible work hours.

Integrity – Leaders must be honest, set a good example by working hard, be knowledgeable, stay calm under pressure, and keep your team informed. Hiding information, being deceitful, or being lazy will drag down your team and you will lose your best people.

Optimism – Leaders have to feel positive about their teams, their company, and the work that everyone is doing. If you are not optimistic, you have to change your team until you believe in the team success. If a leader isn’t optimistic, then no one will believe in the work and believe it will be successful.

Growth – Leaders build leaders. Leaders help everyone get better and reach their goals, as well as meet company goals. Good leadership promotes growth. Not everyone will be a leader, but everyone can get better every day. Empower your people and help them improve and grow. Learn from your mistakes and help others learn from their mistakes.

Have Fun – My daughter and I go to a camp each year south of San Francisco at Jones Gulch. There are lots of activities, including zip lines, canoeing, and climbing walls. The instructors go through all the rules and preparations and then ask all the girls to yell out the final rule…HAVE FUN!!! Work is the same way. There is a lot to do; it is very complex and hard; but great leaders create an environment that is collegial, safe, and fun. People need to like each other, engage each other and enjoy the environment. So have fun.

Andrew S. Grove (one of the founders of Intel) famously is credited for the phrase, “Only the paranoid survive,” which became the title of his book where he talked about inflection points. In the preface of “Only the Paranoid Survive” Andy Grove wrote: “… a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.” Mr. Grove also had a nice chart showing a business at an inflection point either dropping to the bottom or reaching new heights. So is the United States at an inflection point? I would say yes indeed, but the frightening fact is that we might be headed towards the downward spiral of the inflection curve. After World War 2 the United States was able to take a leadership role in the global economy and we have remained in that role more than 60 years. The first chink in our armor came in the seventies with the growth of manufacturing in Asia and continues with outsourcing of intellectual capital throughout the world. What frightens me is our lack of focus on what is important. We spend billions on unwinnable wars and have allowed our education system to fall into shambles. Exporting low-value manufacturing is one thing, but not creating the best engineers, artists, designers, researchers, inventors, and teachers is unconscionable. We need to train the best to be the best. Instead of spending billions in Iraq and Afghanistan, spend billions on schools. Teaching should be a potential career choice of our best and brightest. Make it hard to be a teacher, hard to stay a teacher and pay them obscene amounts of money. We are at an inflection point…it is just that we are heading the wrong way. To continue to quote Andy Grove, “…strategic inflection points do not always lead to disaster. When the way business is being conducted changes, it creates opportunities for players who are adept at operating in the new way. This can apply to newcomers or to incumbents, for whom a strategic inflection point may mean an opportunity for a new period of growth.” We have a chance to radically change the world. No other country has the economic might and infrastructure to take back the world economic leadership. If we focus, we can dominate the future of technology, biology, nanotechnology, solar, and medicine. The choice is ours. Focus on being the creators, the innovators, and scholars. We should be the first country who no longer needs fossil fuels. We should be the best provider of medicine and health. The best creations in technology, biology and nanotechnology should be from the United States. Like your mother always told you, make right choices.

Fair disclosure – I currently manage a group of project managers as part of my responsibilities and I have been a project manager for many years, so naturally I think the rarest skill of all is good project management and good project managers. I also think good leaders are just as rare. So why are project managers so rare? Perhaps it is the skills that are required are hard to find in one person.
Project managers need to be a driver; an organizer; a facilitator; a psychiatrist (how else can you distinguish between fact and fiction on estimates?); a great communicator; a great leader; well organized; a bridge between the business and technology (or in some cases the bridge between the business needs and wants); relentless; and personable. A great project manager understands the art of project management and the science of project management.

“You may con a person into committing to an unreasonable deadline, but you cannot bully them into meeting it.” (Edwards, Butler, Hill, and Russell)

The art of great project management is the execution of the soft-skill portion of the job. Great project managers are relentless, but actually great project managers are relentlessly nice. How do you instill fear so that people do not want to miss deadlines, but at the same time make people want to meet deadlines? Great project managers are a driver, but let people get the job done and give people the feeling they have done it themselves. A great project manager knows when to push and when to back off. That is art. You can teach it, but it takes time since it is the subtleties of the art that make a great project manager.

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” (Sun Tzu)

The science of project management is easier to comprehend and those blessed with a scientific mind can grasp the use of Microsoft Project and other common project management tools easily. Managing the compilation of the tasks is difficult and the best project managers act as bridge between those who need something (or want) and those who can provide. Getting the design right and getting the tasks captured to create that design is the heart of the science of project management. Great communication is important, but great listening is even more important.

“The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time the last 10% takes the other 90%.” (Stephen Seay on his blog: http://projectsteps.blogspot.com/2006/03/collection-of-project-management.html)

Project managers also need the ability to question estimates and know when estimates are incorrect or else the schedule will not reflect reality. And of course the job of the project manager’s manager is to make sure that the right tasks are there and not too many tasks. This requires understanding the product you are scheduling and is where science and art combine. People do not like to be questioned, but you do have room to push intelligently and wisely.

So if you have a good project manager, give them a raise. There are not many out there.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” (Stephen Seay on his blog: http://projectsteps.blogspot.com/2006/03/collection-of-project-management.html)

I was on the Larkspur ferry this morning on a beautiful day; sun shining; the bay placid; and the view of Marin County, Angel Island, and the Golden Gate Bridge exceptional. Behind me a row starts that I could hear, but not see. A man complains to the woman, sitting next to him, who was reading her newspaper and apparently brushing the paper across his face. The woman responds strongly and gets up and moves in a huff. After the boat docks in San Francisco, a very tall and husky man, who was sitting across the aisle from the row, stands over the seated man and tells him that from now on he should not sit in that section of the boat because of his treatment of the woman. The seated man, now cowed by the husky man, apologizes, but says he tried to avoid the woman’s paper repeatedly, and was only trying to get her to stop. The seated man seemed truly apologetic and I thought maybe I should say something, but walked away and headed for work, rather than to continue to escalate the conflict. I had not seen what the woman had done, nor heard what the seated man had said, and understood the tall man’s motivation for protecting the woman. It got me to thinking about conflicts in the workplace and sure enough I get to work, and overhear an argument in the office next to mine, that appeared to be destructive rather than constructive. There are great numbers of people at work that I really enjoy and I am able to voice my differences without rancor and resolve issues easily and with whom I work efficiently, but others that I honestly do not enjoy and with whom I have a difficult relationship that is very inefficient. Fully functioning teams have great chemistry, enjoy each other, and tend to enjoy each other’s company outside of work. The conflict next door was between two people who do not like each other and have never worked well together. A number of work psychologist suggest that you should voice disagreements and that will help resolve them. My experience is that without the bond of friendship you cannot resolve differences. Friendship overcomes cultural differences, internecine squabbles, and is the best glue to fix arguments and issues. Building great teams takes years and involves finding the right mix of people who respect one another, have different strengths that complement one another, and who genuinely enjoy working with each other. It reminds me of something my daughter said after visiting my work one Friday. “I thought you said this was work. Everyone seems to be your friend and you are all having fun.”