No one is more in the NOW than mom. She doesn’t miss an opportunity to guide, teach and protect her kids.

In daily work as managers we experience many teachable moments. These are those little opportunities that pop up in every day work life when just that right situation arrives to help an employee learn. How often do you make the time to take advantage of these valuable moments?

Five things you can count on mom to do for her kids:

1. Keep them safe.
2. Teach them skills.
3. Help them learn to get along with others.
4. Teach them to admit their mistakes.
5. Praise them when they do right.

How do these lessons translate for managers?

1.  Keep them safe   

Mom knows how to balance order and freedom, slowing letting her kids have more and more autonomy as they demonstrate the ability to apply it. She does this to keep them from getting hurt or hurting others. In the NOW work world we need our people engaged, and yes we have a long history of wanting them to simply do what they have been told to do. Now we need them to think, make decisions, and watch for opportunities that move our organizations closer to its goals.

But fear prevents actions. So in the NOW world your people will be cautious to step into it and start making decisions. As they do, stay near so you can help them recognize when the direction they are headed is one you know won’t work. It’s okay to get bumps and bruises and learn from experience, but broken bones need to be avoided. Guide people who are stepping up to help them be successful. Success breeds confidence and confidence comes from a track record of appropriate decisions.

2.  Teach them skills

Mom is on the lookout to teach new skills to her youngsters. She’s great at spotting the perfect opportunity to learn – the point in time when the lesson will help the child achieve something they want.

Your employees are not children, but as they move into the NOW world (see Business at the Speed of NOW) they are learning new skills that are preparing them for success in the real-time economy. These new skills – problem solving, collaboration, decision making – are skills you need them to have so they can thrive in our new NOW world.

3.  Help them learn to get along

Oddly, few of us were blessed enough to have been taught skills such as constructive conflict or the basics of collaboration. As Americans we seemed stuck in the belief that it is better to be polite than to be honest about what you think. The net result is we often simply avoid dealing with things that involve differing views or concerns about people’s performance because we believe it will be uncomfortable and awkward.

Mom knows just what to say to her kids to help them hear what she is saying. She knows her children and realizes that when they are not getting along with others that it is an opportunity to bring in new skills. Mom knows that in any given situation you don’t have to be rude to say what you are really thinking. You just need to choose your words thoughtfully and constructively before you open your mouth. The way in which Mom corrects her children is incredibly important.  The words and the tone determine whether the child can hear the message without being shamed and managers need to master this approach, too.

4. Teach them to admit their mistakes.

We all make mistakes, yes, even mom. The best mom is the mom who knows when she has lost her cool that she needs to circle back around and tell the children that her response was not the right way to handle the situation. Mom will admit her mistakes so she can teach her kids that when they make mistakes they can also admit them.

As managers we have to use mistakes to teach not to punish. We have to also make it safe to make mistakes by acknowledging our own.

5.  Praise them when they do right

Mom knows the best encouragement is to acknowledge when her kids are doing the right things. She also understands each child has unique needs for acknowledgement. One child might treasure a big hug while the other sees a piece of chocolate as a great reward for a job well done.

As humans we thrive on recognition, but each of us have unique needs in that space. Acknowledging an employee at a company meeting is motivating for some and brings great embarrassment to others. When in doubt, a handwritten old-fashioned thank you note works well for most people. That said, take time to recognize people who take risks and step into the NOW world.

My mom died a few years back, and I do miss her, but whenever I think of her I remember her always-steady hand in preparing me for life. We can learn a lot about management from reflecting on the lessons mom taught us.

Thanks, mom.

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Everybody wants to be a leader. Nobody wants to be a manager. Why?

Leadership is cool. It’s inspirational. We cherish and honor great leaders. We devour books about Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, John Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and Margaret Thatcher.

But who wants to read a book about a great manager. Boring. Dull. Uninteresting.

While leaders do dramatic and exciting things, managers work the infinite details. While leaders create visions and rally people to bring the vision to life, managers detail out plans, manage costs and meet deadlines.

While management is harder work than leadership, that’s not to say anyone can be a great leader. It takes a very special set of talents and skills to lead. But one thing is true about leadership–it is an emotionally appealing role. We love the feeling we get from being around someone who inspires us, and we all wish we could emulate what he or she does.

We don’t feel the same emotional appeal about the role of manager.  The problem with management is that it demands hard work, discipline and a willingness to sort through the morass of execution details. It requires long attention spans and the willingness to sort through the complexity needed to get things organized. It also demands lots of judgment calls, lots of candid conversations, and the willingness to talk about what isn’t working.

Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, John Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, and Margaret Thatcher are not only great leaders, they are great managers as well. These leaders all understand the details of their business. Apple did not become one of the most successful businesses in history without both great leadership and great management. The iPad would be a worthless innovation if Apple could not bring it to market in vast quantities at a competitive price with a high level of reliability – that demands great management.

The reason I say management is harder work than leadership is brought to life in the fact that people who write management books (me included with my book Business at the Speed of Now) want their books to sound like they are leadership books. We do that because we know people prefer to buy leadership books.

The reality is that not everyone can be a great leader. And while we never have enough great leaders, most of us need to put our heads down and do the hard work that makes us a great manager. If you desire to be a great manager, study what it takes to plan effectively and learn to manage the work to deliver on the plan.

We need great managers. Be one.

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For too long we have believed culture can’t be changed. But that’s because we have misunderstood the mechanisms that shape it.

While many people take credit for this piece of wisdom, management sage Dr. Peter Drucker is the person most commonly thought to have first uttered the phrase, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

Its popularity has been earned by its simple clarity and truth.

Until we understand the relationship between culture and strategy, every strategy is at risk. It’s critical to test strategy against culture, but even more critical is the challenge of creating a highly agile culture. According to Wikipedia, “Organizational culture is the collective behavior of people that are part of an organization…formed by the organization values, visions, norms, working language, systems, and symbols, it includes beliefs and habits. It is also the pattern of such collective behaviors and assumptions that are taught to new organizational members as a way of perceiving, and even thinking and feeling.”

A simple but dramatic example of this conflict: an organization with a long history of cut-throat bottom-line competitiveness that attempts to initiative a corporate social responsibility program, will probably see the effort fail. The program is completely at odds with how the business has long operated. Like a virus in the human body, the organizational white cells will gather around the change and kill it.

While understanding the implications of culture on strategy is critical, the elephant in the room for most leaders is how to change culture. I love the acronym for what shapes organizational culture: STAR…

• Stories – by telling certain tales of what happened in the past (whether the events were positive or negative) the organization reveals  what it considers important
• Taboos – the spoken or unspoken rules and norms of behavior reveals what is sacred or forbidden
• Artifacts – the symbols from the past that people point to reveals what is valued or given special meaning
• Rituals – the long-standing routines and practices reveals what is respected and treasured How does one change culture?

It is not that mysterious. I have seen success over and over again when significant culture change begins with changing the management system.

In Business at the Speed of Now I demonstrate how to create a “now” organization that thrives in today’s Mass Customization driven economy. The NOW Management System shapes the culture by shaping an organization’s stories, taboos, artifacts, and rituals. A shift in the management system is a major change in rituals (especially the Quarterly Target Reviews) and becomes the forum for creating new stories about the culture, altering the taboos and creating new artifacts.

A culture that engages its people and maximizes their authority to improve the customer experience, drive out waste and leverage revenue opportunities will enable every aspect of strategy.

Whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner, culture is the key to good competing.

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Thirty years ago when the notion of improving processes began to get traction in the U.S., it held great promise. But one problem has kept the promise from becoming a full reality.

It’s too complicated!

How many organizations have shelves of binders chalk full of process maps and standard operating procedures? Lots. With the hope of improving performance it is common that the hard work is done to document processes and standard operating procedures.  Again, the hope is to once and for all eliminate the confusion.

The problem is once it’s written down no one ever looks at the binder again. Unless it’s time for training new employees and then we dust off the binders and hope maybe this batch of people will follow standard procedures.

I have struggled with this dilemma for a long time myself because I know the value of understanding how work should be done – the value of using processes to accumulate and transfer knowledge. I write a lot about management as a process in my book Business at the Speed of Now. But the freight ain’t worth the price.

There is a simpler way. Like in the classic scene in the movie The Graduate, its one word that matters most.  While Dustin Hoffman’s character was told it was all about “plastics”, in the case of process improvement you would well advised to understand “Checklist.”

If you want people to follow a process, create a process checklist that focuses them on the handful of factors that determine the processes success. Here are three things to think about in creating a useful checklist:

1. Keep it simple – never more than 10 items
2. Avoid the classic checkbox; instead require the recording of useful data (a dimension, the cycle time it took, a category or type of repair, etc.)
3. Use the data collected to monitor performance, make further improvements and learn

If you put the right things on your checklist, the most important things for the people who work the process to pay attention to, you will get all the benefit of that boring material in the binder without following that hideous manual you know you put somewhere.

A great book to learn more about this is The Checklist Manifesto. I recommend it.

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It may be tempting to dismiss the millennial generation as a bunch of spoiled brats, however we have something important to learn from the millennial mindset. The millennial outlook on life is forcing previous generations to reconsider some serious workplace issues. A key driver in the shift from a Mass Production driven economy to one based on Mass Customization is the millennials approach to life.

Often called the “trophy kids,” parents of these children replaced the old adage that, “Children should be seen, not heard” with “The sun rises and sets on our children’s wants and needs.” As a result, this generation disdains hierarchy and authority.

The millennial generation’s teachers focused on building self-esteem insisting every child gets a gold star regardless of the quality of their work. According to Dr. Nicole Lipkin, author of Y in the Workplace: Managing the “Me First” Generation, this generation lacks resilience and exhibits weak critical thinking skills. Spoiled or not. millennials want their products and services customized to fit their particular wants and needs.

While it is easy to focus on the negatives of this generation, in Business at the Speed of NowI explore three major positive aspects of the millennial generation:

• Strong bias for the healthy integration of work and non-work life
• Deep unwavering commitment to social responsibility
• Low fear of change that enables their creativity and inventiveness

My own belief about millennials is that their positives actually align with beliefs of previous generations with one huge difference: this generation is intolerant of compromise. This impatient generation struggles to understand when something needs to change in their workplace why it is not changed NOW. They have little respect for slow chain-of-command decisions and they are used to instant gratification.

The power in these aspects of generational difference is that they insist that wrongs should be righted as soon as they are discovered. When they see a solution they pressure management to make the change immediately and if they hear, “It will take about six months” it is a completely unacceptable answer.

I share and value the beliefs of this generation, however like many in my baby boomer generation the temptation to compromise is ever present. So, what are the implications of the millennial mindset for how we run our organizations and how we engage our people? I think we need to remember that when something is wrong we should make it right – NOW. If a process is broken or a customer is wronged, our people need to have the skills and authority to solve the problem in real time.

While millennials may come across as self-absorbed and spoiled, it might be worth looking beyond appearances and instead focus on the underlying social good they are calling on us to do.

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One of the great beliefs we have as managers is that our job is to listen to our employees’ ideas and then go implement those that we find valuable. Sounds like a great idea. But as managers we know the reality is that a good many employee ideas just don’t make business sense.

My last week’s post was titled Engaging Employees: The Economics of Micro Ingenuity. In that post, I referred to research that shows for every employee that crosses over from being disengaged (meaning they do only what they are told to do) to engaged (meaning they make decisions and implement improvements without being asked), you can expect to add an incremental $13,000 to the bottom line each and every year.  That’s $13,000 per year per employee. Just do the math.

So if employee ideas often don’t make business sense, how is it possible that when employees implement their own ideas they somehow magically bring great results?

In traditional low-engagement organizations there are five reasons employee ideas are only half-baked if they were baked at all:

1. The idea solves a problem that is not really a problem
2. The idea addresses a problem in some other department, addressing work they do not understand
3. The solution has negative impacts the employee has not considered or intended
4. The cost of the solution exceeds its benefits
5. The solution addresses a problem’s symptom not its root cause

In organizations where employee engagement is high, as I explain in Business at the Speed of Now, it is high because management has worked hard to ensure employees know where the organization is going, they understand their specific accountabilities, and they know how to effectively use facts to solve problems.

Then, when employees know they are expected to implement their own ideas they actually come up with ideas that focus on the things they can control. They also focus on improvements in the areas where they have a lot of knowledge, experience and insight.

As a manager if you routinely experience employees coming to you with half-baked ideas, you might want to look in the mirror and ask yourself why the ideas are not focused on the work the employee controls.

When employee ideas focus on the routine work they do and know well, and they have data-driven problem solving skills, the ideas almost always make good sense.

What’s been the most half-baked suggestion an employee has ever made to you?

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BY JOHN M. BERNARD

Wouldn’t it be a dream if every employee could add $13,000 to the bottom line of your business each and every year? No need to dream because research shows that’s exactly what happens when an employee shifts from being disengaged to engaged.

Every employee has ideas for taking waste out of their routine work. Some frontline workers see simple things that can be done to improve the customer experience and others have easy-to-implement ideas that can grow revenue.

In Business at the Speed of Now I demonstrate the economics of small ideas. A simple example is that if an employee has an idea, and that idea removes a small amount of waste from a repetitive process, it doesn’t take much of an idea to save $1,000 annually. So, using simple math, if you have 100 employees and each saves $1,000 by implementing one equivalent improvement idea each, your business adds $100,000 to its bottom line.

Now, keeping the same math in mind, if each of your 100 employees implements 10 ideas annually and each saves $1,000 then your business will enjoy $1 million more on the bottom line every year.  This is how the economics of micro ingenuity pays off.

This may seem like a wild dream, but not when you realize that Toyota’s employees on average have been implementing 70 ideas annually for more than 30 years, according to Toyota expert and author Norm Bodek. At the same time General Motors implemented one idea per employee every seven years. Yes, you read that right. And this fact reveals why Toyota has grown at a much faster rate than GM, which was once the most powerful company in the world.

Toyota is a NOW company, General Motors lives in the THEN world.

Micro ingenuity is a powerful reality, and in my experience is the one true sustainable competitive advantage a company can build. But how does Toyota do it?

Next week I’ll share how Toyota focuses employee ideas on the practical reality of their daily work – the work employees can and should control.

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Enthusiastically Kathy takes her idea to improve customer response time to her boss, Gabriel. Gabe is a good guy and he’s so glad he found Kathy to fill a vital position in customer service. She’s doing exactly what he had hoped she would do–bring innovative ideas to him, which he hopes will get Gabe’s boss off his back about the poor customer service satisfaction scores of the past six months.

But there’s a problem with Kathy’s idea.

To implement the change Gabe needs the cooperation of production. That requires he take the idea to his boss, who then has to work with the vice president of production. But Gabe’s boss and the VP of production don’t get along.

Dead end.

Kathy’s idea is dead on arrival and is headed straight to the idea pit. Plus, Kathy’s level of engagement is going down due to the mixed messages she is getting about bringing innovative ideas to the department.

This situation illustrates one of the common reasons good ideas die young.

What causes great ideas to be tossed into the idea pit? The top five reasons are:

1. Poor internal working relationships/organizational politics
2. Differing or conflicting objectives
3. Managers who are just too busy to take time
4. Employees who don’t know how to develop and sell an idea
5. The absence of data to validate the idea or the problem it solves

A fraction of employees ideas ever get implemented primarily because those ideas have to go up and down the chain of command and across the organization. And unless ideas are presented with data that validate they are big enough and how the economics justify management’s time, they get discarded because of the simple reality that there are bigger fish to fry. That’s why in a LinkedIn poll we conducted 80 percent of managers said that less than 10 percent of employees’ ideas ever get implemented. Sad.

I often ask managers this question: “Is the key thing a manager can do to engage employees is to listen to their ideas and increase the number that get implemented?”

The consensus of the room is always yes.

However, in reality I don’t believe this happens. Management is already the primary bottleneck to the implementation of ideas. There is no way they can find the time to process all of the ideas employees have.

To create a high engagement organization employees must be able to implement their ideas without the direct involvement of management. I know this is provocative, but it is possible. I’ve seen it happen and what a difference it makes!

For employees to be able to take action management has a lot of work to do to enable them. Employees need to understand where the business is going, what they are accountable for, and how they are expected to solve problems.

We’re wasting a lot of creativity and passion with our out-of-date THEN management thinking, as I describe in detail in Business at the Speed of Now. In the end analysis, it won’t take enthusiastic Kathy long to learn Gabe can’t help get her great ideas implemented.

After she sees a few ideas tossed in the idea pit, she’ll stop sharing her ideas. What a waste!

What do you think causes ideas to get tossed in the idea pit?

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In 1987 when Japan’s hot breath was being felt on the back of the neck of U.S. automakers, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Its intent was to inspire U.S. organizations to do what Japanese companies had been doing since the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers founded the Deming Prize in 1950.  The Deming Prize had inspired Japanese companies to test themselves against a rigorous set of best-practice management standards.

I’ll skip the detailed history lesson and cut to the chase.

“We have a problem Houston!” The problem is that most U.S. organizations suffer from the 7 Deadly Sins of Management, which I elaborate on in detail in Business at the Speed of Now (pages 28-38). The 7 Deadly Sins of Management are:

1. Lack of clear direction
2. No line of sight
3. Unclear accountability
4. Inconsistent language
5. Poor issue transparency
6. Insufficient resources
7. Inadequate tools/skills

Leadership is about vision, setting tone, inspiring people and working from a deeply held set of values. If you want to read the best blogger I know on leadership read Dan Rockwell’s Leadership Freak.

But the work of management is to prioritize and organize work, set up measures, connect people, eliminate fear, communicate progress, and make sure the right resources are in the right place at the right time.  I am sorry to say the work of management is tedious and detailed work. And because of that a lot of us are guilty of not wanting to do that work. Heh, life is short and who wants to spend it working in the weeds.

However, by avoiding the detailed work of management, the 7 Deadly Sins of Management propagate in our organizations. But the 7 Deadly Sins of Management come at a heavy price because it causes our people  to disengage.

There are several reasons our people can’t engage.  They can’t engage because they don’t understand where the business is going. They can’t engage because they don’t see their part. They can’t engage because they don’t know what they are accountable for and they don’t understand the language of the business. To top it off  our employees suffer from the fear of making problems visible, inadequate resources and tools, and weak training.

It’s a wonder our people even show up to work at all!

Of course I am being dramatic. But what I am saying here is more commonly true than not. Our people don’t engage and can’t engage because management is not doing its complete job.

Management’s job in this Mass Customization world is to enable people to act on every opportunity every time in order to meet customer needs. For that to be possible, we have to eliminate the sins that prevent our people from being engaged.

Let’s sin no more.

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TM: Welcome to the Now Inside podcast, where we uncover why leaders are moving from conventional management approaches to the Now Management System so they can compete in the Now.

I’m your host Tom Moore and we’re joined by John Bernard, chairman and founder of Mass Ingenuity and author of the book titled “Business At The Speed Of Now: Fire Up Your People, Thrill Your Customers, And Crush Your Competitors.” John’s book recently became an Inc Magazine best seller and we get Now Inside access to him – starting now.

Welcome. Thank you for joining us. The first podcast of Now Inside. My name is Tom Moore and I’m here with John Bernard. Welcome John and congratulations on your book becoming one of Inc Magazine’s best sellers.

JB: Well thanks Tom, pleasure to be with you here today and I’m looking forward to doing this series with you.

TM: Fantastic. Well let’s just jump right in. The first question I have for you is what caused you to write this book?

JB: Well that’s a good question, my wife asks that question a lot because it’s a lot of work to write a book. But really the reason I wrote the book is because the messages in it need to be said. The way we’re running organizations today leaves a tremendous amount on the table and primarily what we lose are the talents and gifts and skills and contributions of people that work in our organizations. I think we have to address it. I think it’s core to why our enterprises –whether they’re private or public sector- are not as good as the world has to offer and as we once were. I think that’s really the challenge and I wanted to put that message out there and get us thinking about how we actually run our organizations.

TM: Okay. Can you just describe a little bit about what is business at the speed of now?

JB: Absolutely. It’s essentially that business is done in real time and everything happens in an instant, including customer experiences, including whether or not we capture revenue, including what it costs to run the business. So we live in a real time world and we have to think about the fact that it’s our employees on the front line who determine all of the decisions that move the business forward and if they can function in real time then our business can be successful in a real time world.

TM: What are some of the perspectives you hold as you look at this need for business at the speed of now?

JB: Well I think that first if we’re going to face this we’ve got to see there’s a problem. We need to understand what that problem is. My belief is that we’re using outdated models of management.  We’re living based on models from the mass production era – we’re in an era of mass customization.

So I think one, we need to see the problem; two, we need to believe they can be solved, that there actually are ways to shift our ways of thinking, our ways of managing, our ways of leading, to create far more productive organizations in the real time that really reach in to the talents and gifts of the people who work for us. And the third thing is I think what people can do with the book is use the tools in it to begin to solve the very problems that the book presents. So I really had hoped with the book that I’d accomplished those things, help us see the problem, believe it can be solved, and understand where to start and how to go after moving to a business that does business at the speed of now.

TM: What sort of background have you had in these various situations in the past that you could share with us?

JB: Through my career I’ve worked in all kinds of businesses, either as an executive or as a consultant. I ran a supercomputer manufacturing plant where we were building circuit boards that were worth $25,000 a board and every decision, everything that was done could result in a good board or a bad board. And in the complexity of that and the complexity of even the most common businesses –a retail business, a manufacturing business, a high tech business, even government organizations– I’ve had experience in all of those realms and the reality is we all face pretty much the same challenges and that’s how we make decisions and make them quickly and make them effectively and make them effective at the level where the knowledge is.

TM: Alright. Thank you. What hopes and dreams do you hold for the readers or the listeners of this podcast?

JB: I think inspiration is important, but it’s not enough. I hope the book provides inspiration but more importantly that it gives people some practical tools that they can put to work, tools that actually work and make sense. The book is sort of the sewing together of a lot of methods and techniques and models into a system that pulls off the very things we’re talking about; real time economy, tapping into the talents and gifts of people, focused at driving a better customer experience, driving better revenue growth, and making sure you do all that at the lowest possible cost. That’s really what every organization is trying to do today.

TM: What hopes and dreams do you have for the individuals out there that are not in the leadership position but maybe are striving to be there someday?

JB: Well I think that the experience we all want in work is the same – and that’s to make a difference, to be a part of something, to be able to influence it, to shape it. I hope that people who read this book and listen to these podcasts are really trying to figure out what that means in practical reality. Not in theory, not in ideals, but in execution. That to me is what translates ideas, theories, and values into action and that’s where it matters – when we actually do it.

TM: Well I look forward to digging in. I appreciate you being here today and kicking us off on this podcast series.

JB: Thanks Tom.

TM: For those listening in, John invites you to join him on his blog located at www.massingenuity.com or on his Facebook, which is https://www.facebook.com/NOWInside.

In addition, I wanted to let you know that John’s book can be purchased through Amazon.com and a lot of the major outlets. So look for the next podcast where we’ll continue pursuing how leaders can thrive in the Now.

Thank you for listening and see you next time.

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