Big Think

Captain Kirk, management guru? Yes, say management experts, in a clever article assessing Kirk’s management of the Enterprise. It highlights six things the typical CEO could learn from Captain Kirk:

Know when to be a pal, and when to be tough. As Kirk found when he split personalities, you can’t be too nice or too tyrannical, but have to mix both elements of your personality.

Know both sides of the story. Kirk forged a truce between a monster and some miners by finding out the root of the anger on both sides.

Know when to change. Kirk intervenes in an ancient struggle by forcibly reframing the problem. A good first step for any management dilemma.

Don’t be afraid to manage up. The example is Kirk being insubordinate (what else is new?), so it’s really about not being a yes man. What usually  happens is you don’t get your own spaceship. But Kirk’s bosses don’t like yes men, and he gets promoted.

Change your style. Don’t manage everyone the same way. Kirk didn’t.

Managing Generation Y. Same as 5, really, but more direct in reminding CEOs to value the perspective of their youngest employees.

In fact, after seeing the new Star Trek movie this weekend, I am reminded that Kirk, for all his leadership qualities, was capricious, cocksure and something of a con man. His best management skill? Having a good Hollywood scriptwriter on his side. Star Trek management will only work so well in the real world.

[Creative Commons image from memory-alpha.org]

How can 3 million job openings mean bad news for America’s economy?

Business Week argues these open jobs, in this downturn, provide “evidence of an emerging structural shift in the U.S. economy that has created serious mismatches between workers and employers.”

If you look at the jobs, most of them are in services: education, healthcare, professional and business services. Many of them probably represent a significant step down for a lot of the unemployed, and even so will require extensive training (like teaching or nursing). Business Week argues that the housing bust has made it impossible for people to move to where the new jobs are.

Its solution: Retrain workers.

Both the government and employers both need to invest in training. Business Week notes that there is $3.5 billion in the stimulus package for training. But many businesses are reluctant to train workers, as Peter Cappelli made clear in Talent on Demand. Nor will training get people out of homes.

What do you think, BNET? Can we train our way to prosperity?

We revere big hits and big ideas (this is Big Think, after all). Along come Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval with “The Power of Small,” a new book excerpted in Change This as The Small Revolution. Do not confuse this with E.F. Schumacher’s classic “Small Is Beautiful.” That was about people-focused economics. This book is about how small steps can mean big changes in a business or individual, or how small ideas can turn into big dollars.

To that end, they feature on page 8 of their essay a couple of examples of little things that yielded big rewards. One, the story of the person who decorated her children’s Crocs and wound up selling her company to Crocs itself, is really about happenstance - she happened to live near Crocs headquarters. A second one was better:

Million dollar ideas are everywhere. In fact, one just might be licking you in the face. At least that’s what happened to 52-year-old divorcee Carol Gardner. Broke, unemployed, and alone, Gardner entered her local pet store’s annual Christmas card contest in hopes of snagging the grand prize: a year’s supply of dog food. With this humble goal in mind, Gardner set forth on the photo shoot that would change her life. She plopped her 4-month-old English bulldog in the tub, fashioned a fluffy white beard out of bubble bath around her face, and pressed a button. After writing a cheeky caption, Gardner sent her entry off to the pet store, and to her surprise, she won. The card became a hit with all of her friends and family. Suddenly, the light bulb went on: she could create a greeting card business based on Zelda, her mutt of a muse. And so, Zelda Wisdom was born and shortly thereafter, Hallmark came calling, helping to turn her SMALL idea into an international line of greeting cards, gifts, clothing, jewelry, and even books.

Would this idea work in today’s economy, with small consumer spending and capital? It’s hard to say. The authors stress how small makes sense in this economy. And in theory, it does. What it means in practice may blunt the power of their book.

What do you think, BNET?

Should Chrysler’s workers (i.e., unsecured creditors) get put in line ahead of its bondholders? Of course not, under  normal circumstances. But Chrysler represents anything but normal circumstances, says Daniel Gross, Slate’s Moneybox columnist. Gross argues that the U.S. government was right to do this, in part because investors who bought Chrysler’s debt were already dealing with something besides normal capitalism. He says they got greedy, expecting the government to overpay for their assets. The government called their bluff, and now they can go to the back of the line.

Gross does say this is dangerous if it happens again. He thinks it’s a one-off event. What do you think?

“Wired to Care” will inspire either murmurs of pleasure or groans of dismay from readers. At its heart, “Wired to Care” offers a management manual for those who think business cannot be run by the numbers. “Quantitative data and facts are no substitute for real-world experience and human connection,” write Dev Patnaik and his word wizard, Peter Mortensen.

The premise is that business people will do better when they take the time to understand others – customers, partners, suppliers, potential acquisition targets. If it sounds a bit like Dale Carnegie, well, it should. Carnegie gets a big hug from Patnaik early on, for noting the obvious, that “it’s just human nature to be interested in people who are interested in you.” What does it mean for business? Patnaik says “If you want to create products and services that other people care about, you should put aside your problems and start caring about other people’s lives.”

Not profits, not sales goals – people’s lives. We read a few pleasing success stories that prove the point. Lou Gerstner saves IBM because, as an ex-customer, he knows what customers really need. Zildjian thrives for 400 years by its ability to constantly shift where its customers want it to go. Nina Planck divines that British consumers really want fresh, locally grown produce, and creates a booming business in farmers’ markets.

Patnaik then invokes science to give the theory something less squishy to stand on. In fact, he waves the neuroscience wand, discussing things like the discovery of mirror neurons by a team of Italian scientists. He also looks at research in cognitive science that shows why it’s hard for us to identify with people who aren’t like us. It’s the gentlest, most palatable science discussion a businessperson could hope for, and it blesses the book with the miraculous secrets brain science reveals. What business can’t use miraculous secrets?

To be fair, Patnaik takes care to point out that the research cited “suggests” things, rather than being definitive. But you would have to be a careful reader not to get swept up by the idea that we are in fact wired to work together, to want to connect. Hence the chapter on the Golden Rule, arguing that business success starts by revising that fabled rule, changing ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ to ‘do unto others as we would have them do unto us.’ (By the way, Patnaik gives us the biological science term for The Golden Rule, the less felicitous ‘reciprocal altruism.’)

It’s a tempting argument, but the book sits under a couple of huge shadows. One is cast by “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which argues in part that many successful companies run into trouble exactly because they listen too closely to their most important customers, and miss important market shifts. Patnaik does try to show how empathy can overcome “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” He looks at “the car wreck in slow motion” that has been the Big Three automakers over the last several decades, and argues that the automakers gradually turned Michigan into a vast corporate town, the world they wanted to exist, and removed themselves from the world they actually had to compete in. He may be right, but a weakness of the book is that it does not do much to explain how companies can avoid this problem.

Another shadow comes from the obvious problem that we are not wired to care for everyone, and some people seem wired to care for little but themselves. Empathy may have evolutionary advantages, but it also comes with costs, and in business, looking out for others can make a company look less profitable than more selfish rivals.

Still, it is hard not to like “Wired to Care.” The book reads well, and can be finished in a middling-length plane ride. Its business anecdotes are powerful. In fact, the whole thing plays on our mirror neurons. You want to empathize with Patnaik’s nice, smart, caring, successful managers. You want to be like them. Unless, of course, you don’t.

If you think the U.S government has flubbed the bailout plan, you’ll like Eric Janszen, the sometime venture capitalist and entrepreneur who runs iTulip.com. Janszen spoke at the Nantucket Conference on Friday, giving a likely preview of his book “The Post-Catastrophe Economy.”

If nothing else, Janszen is provocative. For starters, he thinks the U.S. government’s efforts to fix the economy merely guarantee an even bigger crisis in the future.

Janszen summarized government actions so far as:

• pouring money into insolvent banks
• monetizing bad debt (i.e., toxic assets)
• stimulus without restructuring (focused on shovel-ready projects, or as he put it, congressman-ready)

Tsk tsk, Janszen said. This “will not produce a self-sustatining economy. Debt will pass some threshold and we’ll have a currency crisis.”

But all is not lost. He reminds us of Churchill’s comment as a nation that will do the right thing, after exhausting all other options.

Janszen’s prescription: Read the rest of this entry »

Rod Brooks, the robotics guru who co-founded iRobot and now runs a startup called Heartland Robotics, is speaking at the Nantucket Conference. He thinks robotics has been stymied by a basic cost problem: it costs 10 times more to integrate robots into product lines than the robot itself.

That means it’s only cost-effective to use robots in high-volume, high-value product lines. He believes that he can create robots that trash this model and make it cost-effective to use robots in a wide variety of manufacturing environments, eliminating the cost advantages of countries with cheap labor.

Brooks is cagey about when this might happen. He says these are the main challenges that need to be overcome:

• make robots as visually adept as a two-year old child.
• give robots the language capabilities of a four-year old child.
• give robots the manual dexterity of a 6 year old – (this may need the development of new materials).
• give robots the social awareness of an 9-year old child.

He does not believe in humanoid robots, by the way.

Update: Brooks told me after his talk that his company does not need to solve the four challenges outlined above to be a success. He put those out as the Holy Grails of robotics. He also said he didn’t think U.S. manufacturing needed saving.

Can this vision become reality?

Jim Collins’ famous book now stands as close to a modern management Bible as exists. But Todd Sattersten of 800CEORead looks at a series of recent takedowns on Good to Great and concludes “there is enough evidence now to force us to reconsider Good To Great as the pinnacle management book of this decade.” Sattersten has been a defender of “Good to Great,” and he isn’t abandoning it entirely. In fact, he cites Robert Sutton, who is ambivalent about “Good to Great,” finding it lacking in many ways, but also says “the simple and compelling ideas in Collins’ book are probably mostly right and have probably helped a lot of leaders and managers.”

Collins has a new book coming out in May. Will you buy it?

Open innovation now approaches business cliché status, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. I went today to listen to Helmut Traitler, Nestle’s vice president of innovation partnerships, a job that Nestle created just two years ago to pursue ideas from outside the company. Last year, open innovation created $200 million in new business for Nestle, about 10 percent of its overall growth from what he calls innovation/renovation.

Granted, $200 million isn’t much for a company Nestle’s size (about $100 billion in sales). But it shows the promise of drawing ideas from outside the organization, in Nestle’s case, from universities, startups and suppliers. Traitler said the concept of open innovation, speeds development of products. Instead of needing three years, things get developed in 18 months. Researchers are spending less time juggling projects, too. In addition, open innovation presents less risk to Nestle, since development costs come after an idea is proven.

Traitler seems confident that Nestle will continue to refine its innovation partnerships strategy. For an in-depth look at how Nestle shifted from 140 years of  ‘not-invented-here’ to an open innovation culture, see this Nestle site and publication.

If your business isn’t using social media tools, now is the time, says Sharlyn Lauby in the 5 Ws of Social Media.

She reminds us that social media tools such as Twitter offer businesses a valuable form of communications. If you’re mystified by Twitter, see her notes on Dell and Zappo’s. If you think the best way to deal with social media is ignore it, see how Domino’s was embarrassed by some workers.

Her five rules are: Read the rest of this entry »