Transcendental Generalization

CSS Zen Garden: Use of PNG makes the page seem to rise out of the sea.

CSS Zen Garden: Interesting imagery all along the side makes you want to look further down.

CSS Zen Garden: Images at the top of each sidebar section create a 3D effect.

When I first built a web site for my company, Now Interactive LLC, I chose a content management program called Drupal.

What I wanted was a site where I could feature products, services, clients, partners and contact information–the usual components of a corporate web site. I also wanted to blog about product management and web application design.

My first thought was to use an excellent blogging program called Wordpress.  It gives you a blogging site along with the ability to write static pages. However,  Wordpress is narrowly focused on blogging. On the home page, you see the blog, and available free templates all look like blogs. I would have to write and maintain my static pages separately and in their entirety. It became clear that I would have to customize Wordpress, which is written in PHP, and this was something I wanted to avoid.

My personal web site is a Ruby on Rails application that links to a Wordpress blogging site. The problem is that while the content management on the blogging site is user friendly and sophisticated, the content management on the Ruby on Rails side is a bit clunky. After all, the application was not written for content management but for a personal marketing campaign (which went off extremely well).

For about a solid half-day, I tried using a Ruby on Rails application that read from a Wordpress database.  The idea was that my corporate site would be written in Ruby on Rails, while the content management (editing, tagging, categorizing, and controlling revisions) would be handled by WordPress. But after struggling to get categories to display in the right order as tabs, I decided to try something else.

I had used Joomla briefly and found it counter-intuitive and complex with its notions of menus and content that might or might not actually appear in the site. A representative from OpenSourcery at InnoTech Oregon had recommended Drupal over Joomla. Sure enough, some large companies use Drupal for impressive sites. Word on the internet was that Drupal had a learning curve, but not being one to shrink from learning curves, I waded in.

Drupal was easy to install in my hosting service. I’d probably put it at 3X the effort of the (ridiculously easy) Wordpress installation. Installation of new templates was a simple matter of copying files to the server. Drupal automatically checked for updates to itself and any installed templates. It ran a daily cron job for housekeeping.

Unfortunately, I started encountering problems soon afterward.

• I struggled to understand the difference between a Page and a Story. A Page seemed like a Wordpress page–an entire page that you managed yourself and that Drupal didn’t know much about. But I wanted to deal at a finer grain.  For example, I might want a page of partners but feature one of them on the home page. A Story seemed more like what I wanted, but it had funny features like automatically showing up on the front page.
• I figured out how you need to create content and then create menu entries pointing to the content. Much later, I realized you could create menu entries at the same time as the content.
• I put all my menu items in the Navigation menu, which gave me a very plain menu. I didn’t realize until much later that some templates treat the Primary Links and Secondary Links with special effects.
• My triumph was figuring out how to assign stories to categories and link a category to a menu item. It involves yet another concept called a “taxonomy”. This is a hierarchy of categories to which you can assign stories. A menu item can be linked to a taxonomy entry, which displays all content assigned to that entry.
• I figured out that you can order menu entries by dragging and dropping, but this is interconnected with the notion of “weight”. (What does “weight” mean for a horizontal menu?) Ordering stories on a page was much harder. Eventually, I figured out it assigns an editable timestamp to each story and displays them in reverse chronological order. By assigning the appropriate date stamps, I could alter the order in which the stories were displayed. (This is called a “kludge”.)
• One problem I ran into was when you clicked on a menu item, you would see the name of that menu item all over the [BLEEP] place. So if I clicked on “Partners” then the page would display “Partners” in enormous letters, and each content item would say, “Posted in Partners on April 25, 2009 3:45 PM”. Of course “Partners” would not show up in the URL as you would expect. Instead, it would say, “http://www.now-interactive.net/node/15″ and this was considered a “clean” URL good for search engine optimization!
• Eventually, I found a template that would not display so much [BLEEP]. Unfortunately, templates varied widely how much they could be configured, so I really just broke some less important stuff in order to fix some more important stuff.
• My friend pointed out that the menu you just selected isn’t highlighted. Duh! It turns out there is some support for this, but it requires editing CSS—but not the CSS you originally installed, because Drupal has made a separate copy!
• The interface is inconsistent. For example, assigning <none> to page and story titles ensures that no title appears, but assigning <none> to a menu name gives you a menu with “<none>” prominently featured.
• There are very few good tips and hints on the internet, and what there is is sorely out-of-date.

After all this, I began to understand why people have made a business out of being Drupal consultants. Come to think of it, my last employer had run a web site on Joomla, but used a consultant for all changes. Indeed, since I couldn’t hire one, maybe I should consider being one…

Honestly, I had no real problem with any of this. You get what you pay for, and I had been amply warned of the learning curve. Furthermore, complexity is directly proportional to flexibility.

However, recently I have been approached by people who want a fairly simple web site. In many cases, they are using FrontPage and sending files to a server using FTP, but they want to do things like

• mass e-mail campaigns to drive traffic to their site
• sell an inventory of products through PayPal
• have a private area for customers or members
• do a slide show
• allow reservation of resources
• choose a site design consistent with logo colors

Drupal can certainly do all of these things and more, but it would take me a long time to set it up for these people. Furthermore, I don’t want them to have to turn to me every time they need a small change, and I don’t want to expose them to the counter-intuitive terminology and complexity of the administration interface.

In my next post, I’ll spell out what’s really needed.

After getting laid off, one of the first pieces of professional advice I received was, “Get business cards with your contact information on them!” I had a box of 500 business cards from my employer, so it was, frankly, strange to think that they would be completely useless just when I needed them most.

The first thing I did was print up basic, black-and-white cards on a sheet of Avery Business Cards (5371) I had lying around. They were ugly, but they got the basic job done: I could easily leave my contact information with people I met.

Lo and behold: what in my inbox should appear but an offer from Overnight Prints for 100 free business cards! (Sorry, the offer expired on January 11th, but keep an eye out!) Unlike other vendors, they would not print their own logo on the back. I could design my own card, and I would only have to pay shipping. Similar offers are available from VistaPrint, Prints Made Easy (Coupon code: First One Free), and GigglePrint.com. A couple of people have also recommended MOO.com.

When you think about product marketing, you naturally think about marketing collateral: pamphlets, brochures and data sheets that help spread the word about your product. If you treat the job search as an exercise in marketing and selling yourself, you start to think about establishing a personal brand, creating a memorable impression, and making your collateral stand out from the mix. I’m fortunate to have talented graphic designers among my friends, and I tapped them for design suggestions.

For excellent examples of straight graphic designs, this series of books is available from the library:

There’s a limit to what you can do when you’re just uploading an image, but here’s one of my favorite designs from this site:

Here’s another favorite from this site:

Here’s what I settled on for myself:

I may do something more low-key next time around.

Having seen countless good and bad PowerPoint presentations and produced several of my own, I wanted to publish what I consider the most important rules of PowerPoint presentations.

1. Respect your audience. Once, I was part of a group that was refining several presentations for a conference. Upon seeing one slide rich with data, the leader of the group told the author to “dumb it down” to only the “takeaway bullets”. When I asked why, his response was that the data would confuse and overwhelm the audience. In retrospect, I am firmly on the side of Edward Tufte. Do not treat your audience with contempt, like idiots with miniscule attention spans. Do not insult their intelligence by forcing your conclusions down their throats. Instead, lead them to those conclusions by presenting complete data transparently and describing your reasoning.
2. Minimize the number of words on each slide. This has to be the most common problem I see with PowerPoint presentations. Usually, it is because the presenter is too lazy to produce separate speaker notes and documents for the audience to take away, in addition to the slides. So he ends up with a single file intended for multiple purposes: to remind him of what to say, to supplement what he says, to give members of the audience a record of what he said, and to give people who couldn’t attend the presentation a useful substitute. During the actual presentation, the presenter either reads what is written on the slides, which is a useless waste of time, or says something slightly different, in which case the slide distracts the audience from the speaker and the speaker distracts the audience from the slide.One reason people do this is that many of us learned our presentation skills in school before PowerPoint was even invented. We were taught to prepare an outline and then index cards and then deliver a speech. PowerPoint lends itself very well to this approach. But we were never taught to blow up our index cards into posters or project them on the screen, so why do we do it? The only answer I can think of is that the modern conventions of presentations demand a screen full of something while we are talking.

   Putting too many words on a PowerPoint slide has one other problem: the more words there are, the smaller they must be to fit, making them harder to see. Each line of text becomes longer, straining the eyes as they move over it.

   Replace words on slides with pictures or illustrations. Don’t describe it–show it! The human visual system can absorb a picture far more rapidly than a passage of text, and the audience can then attend to the speaker. Another great technique is simply to blacken the screen for sections of the presentation that are primarily oral. Perhaps the conclusion is: “Less is more.” whether you consider the number of words on each slide or the number of slides in the presentation.

   An interesting variation on this theme is the famous presentation on Identity 2.0 by Sxip CEO Dick Hardt. Here, the slides contain a few words at most, and serve to emphasize the speaker’s words.

3. Use subtle effects intentionally. PowerPoint makes it far too easy to put dramatic colors, fonts, transitions and animation effects in your slides. Presenters often use these as a crutch because their presentation lacks emotional appeal. Avoid these except when the effect itself serves to communicate, and choose subtle effects.
4. Three E’s: Engage or draw people’s attention to your presentation. Entertain them so they feel the time spent was worthwhile and enjoyable. Educate them so they go away with something valuable they didn’t previously have.
5. Practice practice practice.

Whenever I visited India, I wondered why the average quality of locally-made consumer goods is low. (Conversely, I wondered why the quality of goods made and/or distributed in America is high.) I’m talking about small things like the quality of the seal between a container and its lid, the color and weight of writing paper, or the fidelity of a logo or celebrity face rendered on a billboard.

There was never a shortage of ingenuity or innovation in India. I saw new product designs at every visit. Most were improvements in utility, energy efficiency or cost. Some weren’t, but the presence of these seemed to show that diversity was welcomed and free market enterprise flourished. However, due to poor quality, the operation of these products was degraded. They failed to withstand the sunlight, heat, humidity, rain, and pollution. They broke easily, sometimes in ways that were unsafe.

When I asked Indians about this, there were a couple of pat answers. One was to blame the government for not imposing and enforcing standards, especially for safety. Another was contempt for the manufacturers or the average factory worker. They were uneducated, lazy, lacked pride in their product, or simply had no commitment to quality.

Since my last visit I have adopted a new perspective, attempting to answer such questions by understanding the economic systems at play and the assumptions about business and psychology that apply—or fail to. I also have seen where my own employer focuses on quality and where it doesn’t, and why. When we look at the situation from the system perspective (“Individuals don’t produce outcomes. Systems produce outcomes.”) we see that poor quality has less to do with regulation, personal pride or commitment and more to do with purchasing power, competition, and infrastructure. I have realized that the answer to the question, “Why do Indians produce so many poor-quality consumer goods?” is simply

“Because they can.”

During my lifetime, India has had a vast population with a certain level of purchasing power. This level was (and still is, at least on average, per-capita) significantly lower than US purchasing power. As a result of international trade agreements meant to protect fledgling Indian enterprises, there were barriers to access high quality foreign goods. Awareness was also limited: if a foreign company could not hope to sell in India, then why would it bother advertising there? The result was that if an Indian manufacturer produced an item at the right price point, there was a good chance it could find a large number of buyers. This explains the proliferation of product designs.

As far as product quality was concerned, it suffered for two reasons: first, quality is perceived by immature businesses to cost money and in fact does require investment. In an otherwise rational attempt to cut costs, businesses may have chosen to sacrifice quality. Second and more importantly, the parameters of quality are defined by the consumer. Due in part to protectionist trade agreements, the vast majority of Indian consumers were unaware of what improvements in quality could mean. They lacked access to alternatives priced reasonably for their purchasing power. So, they continued to buy. When the consumer is buying without complaint, it is hard to blame the business for assuming that quality is good. It is more likely to invest in other areas. Only visitors could complain that the quality of Indian consumer goods was low, because they were accustomed to high foreign standards.

It may seem that I am not giving the Indian consumer enough credit for understanding what improvements in quality are possible. However, this is not a concern that is at the forefront of any consumer’s mind. Indeed, during my visits to India, I rapidly become accustomed to the level of quality and am surprised by the differences when I return to the US. Furthermore, as a consumer, I wish I could choose to pay a lower price for things like low-quality packaging. Do I really want to pay for a high quality seal between a container for stickers and its lid? Do I really want my drill bits a hard plastic shell?

In the US, I have observed a decline in the average quality of consumer goods as the source of most of these goods has shifted to China. The recent spate of recalls of Chinese-manufactured toys for lead contamination is the most stark evidence of corner-cutting in quality standards. Yet, consumers only seem to change their purchasing habits if personal safety is at stake.

Quality confers a competitive advantage and should therefore go up in highly competitive markets. But I think Indian regulations stifled domestic and international competition in a desire to maintain high levels of continuous employment.

This is not to say that top-quality goods could not be found in India. They could, at high prices accessible to a wealthy minority. However, the scale of such businesses was small. To enlarge their scale required an industrial infrastructure that took time to build up. This suggests that large-scale production of high-quality goods requires long value chains, specialization, division of labor.

In turn, these are founded upon infrastructure and logistics. Quality of components may be improved by outsourcing their development, but if delivery is unreliable, then a company may rationally sacrifice quality for the reliable delivery of internally-developed components.

We purchased and began using a beautiful matched set of coffee mugs. Unfortunately, while nursing coffee around the kitchen and dining area on a leisurely weekend morning, we frequently lost track of which mug was whose. This is the same phenomenon that has led to the invention of wine glass charms. The form of the mugs/glasses (perfectly matched) interferes with their function (serve a beverage to multiple people).

It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise to find a set of Hausenware mugs. They are painted identically on the outside, but the inner surface of each is a different color—form and function perfectly blended.

United Technologies published a beautiful advertisement in the Wall Street Journal showing a model of the Hamilton Sundstrand space suit. Click on the thumbnail below for a full-page PDF. NPR did an article on the company a couple of years ago.

Here is a pre-recorded version of a presentation I did yesterday at the FINOVATE 2007 Conference in New York City. This demo is, of course, a model of an improved online banking system.

In high school, I had learned to touch-type, and as an avid computer user, I got pretty good at typing fast. Soon after I started my first job out of school, a co-worker described to me how the standard QWERTY layout was specifically designed to slow down the typist, while the Dvorak layout was optimized for speed. It became a challenge between us to learn the Dvorak layout.

Our workstations were XWindows-based, and I wrote a program to re-map the keyboard. (Soon, I discovered that a built-in program, with the right configuration file, achieved the same effect far more easily.)

It took me about a month to learn the new layout. Every morning, I would map the keyboard to Dvorak, and type by consciously thinking about the fingering for each letter. My typing was slow and error-prone. To keep myself from getting completely stuck, I actually put stickers on the keys for the Dvorak layout. After a period of time, I would grow frustrated and switch back to the QWERTY layout. But, that period of time grew longer as the weeks went by. Eventually, I could go the whole day in Dvorak layout. I also found myself typing significantly faster. Today, I can type with both layouts, but find Dvorak faster and more comfortable.

I was fortunate that the new operating systems continued to support alternative keyboard layouts, so I was never far from a Dvorak keyboard.

I later discovered two additional benefits of the Dvorak layout.

• It reduces repetitive stress injury by requiring less motion from the typist
• It has (slight) security and privacy benefits: people can’t tell what I am typing by watching my fingers. I read an article in CIO magazine saying Berkeley researchers can piece together what you are typing from the sound of your keyboard, but I doubt their method will work on me.

While learning Dvorak, I might have benefited from the Optimus Maximus keyboard. Cool idea, but why is it completely flat? Even my old Commodore 64 keyboard was sculptured for easier typing:

Apple introduced the hinged Adjustable Keyboard allowing a more natural typing posture. Microsoft introduced its Natural Keyboard for the same reason.

Why are modern keyboards returning to the flat style? It is, I believe, the old mistake of allowing function to follow form.

An essay on business leadership

Employees frequently ask their managers for

• objectives, so that our actions over time, in cooperation with the actions of others, achieve some purpose, and
• the priority order of objectives, to help us make tradeoffs between different possible courses of action.

I myself have asked for — and been asked for — prioritized objectives.

Business priorities are part of a larger set of what I generally call rules that influence employee actions. These rules include

• corporate policies and procedures,
• standards of conduct in various professions (especially law, accounting, and medicine)
• social etiquettes,
• state and federal laws,
• political beliefs,
• work ethic,
• religious practices and
• moral values.

Set aside, for a moment, what the rules actually are, for a particular employee in a particular business setting. If these rules are too few or weak, then employees will follow a subset of these rules and may make up their own to compensate for the rest. The organization loses cohesion as employees pursue their own differing objectives. Lacking the resources to achieve their objectives, they may resort to political scheming to obtain them. The organization may disintegrate into chaos. It certainly fails to meet any business goals that rely on cooperation, cohesion, or communication.

If these rules are too numerous or strong, then individual creativity is stifled. The organization becomes rigid and unable to adapt rapidly to changes in the business environment. If the rules are numerous enough to be redundant, employees see them as lacking value or credibility.

However, as Wolfram has shown, a small number of properly-crafted rules lets an organization exhibit cooperation, creativity, and adaptivity.

Business leaders (who may or may not be titled managers) frequently encounter situations in which a certain set of new policies, procedures, and priorities must be followed for the organization to meet certain business goals. Examples from my own experience include

• adoption of a software development process like Extreme Programming or RUP to improve quality, manage risk, and more accurately predict when features will be delivered
• adoption of a sales methodology like SPIN Selling to increase revenue from new markets
• changes to financial reporting to provide guidance to Wall Street, to forecast sales, and to plan strategy
• reporting and governance changes for compliance with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley
• changes to marketing activities to ensure consistency of messages, preserve brand integrity, generate sales leads, and maintain a pulse on the market
• adoption of sales-force automation tools to improve pipeline visibility
• adoption of time tracking systems for activity-based costing

The question is, how to get the organization to adopt a new set of rules? For a variety of reasons, and to the incessant chagrin of managers, organizations frequently fail in the wholesale and permanent adoption of a new set of rules. Employees resist change due to fear of the unknown, fear of failure, and the comfort and rewards of the status quo. New initiatives may involve risks to which employees are averse. Rules are sometimes adopted temporarily and then are abandoned as employees turn over, become distracted, or focus on newer, urgent matters. This makes new initiatives look like fads to experienced employees, who are then unwilling to adopt them.

Old habits die hard.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

In such circumstances, leaders must institutionalize rules intentionally, one at a time.

Institutionalize

By institutionalize, I mean, make it a habit of the organization, part of “the way things are done,” part of the system.

I recently met a gentleman who inspired me with his passion for education and his commitment to turning around failing businesses through management training. He repeated something that I soon heard from some one else in a different context:

People don’t produce outcomes. Systems produce outcomes.

Now, this may seem logically inconsistent, simply because it is people who form the business systems we are talking about. Hence, they produce (or at least influence) their outcomes.

However, the points to take away from this aphorism are:

• Individuals form relationships with each other. Information, goods, services, and other forms of value flow through these relationships.
• Although an outcome — good or bad — may appear to be the responsibility of an individual, the relationships and value flows that the individual is involved in cannot be ignored.
• While a good system may help a failing person succeed, a bad system will guarantee failure for an otherwise successful person.

W. Edwards Deming had similar beliefs about the importance of systems compared with individuals. He focused specifically on teams and their ability to produce quality manufactured products, but his work strongly influenced later programs like Total Quality Management and Six Sigma. These, in turn, have been applied in high-tech and low-tech industries.

The importance of systems, compared to individuals, is driven home when we observe the phenomenon of drug addiction. Addicts who have completed rehabilitation programs frequently suffer from recidivism. (This was nicely illustrated in the movie 28 Days.) This happens because addicts typically return to systems (friendships with fellow addicts, relationships with suppliers, and stressful occupations) that motivated them to resort to drugs in the first place, and supported their addiction. Recidivism may occur despite the addict having a strong desire to stay clean and sober.

Why, then, couldn’t a properly constructed business system support constructive, cooperative behavior? Indeed, why couldn’t it produce such behaviors despite even employees who wish to be destructive or uncooperative? I believe the creation of such systems is the calling of the true business leader.

The true leader not only follows the new rule, but institutionalizes it. The true leader creates a system that ensures the rule is followed by others as time passes and as members of the organization change. This is the type of person Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, called the “clock builder”. This suggests a corollary to the above saying:

People don’t produce outcomes. Systems produce outcomes. And leaders produce systems.

To institutionalize a new rule requires the following:

• Communicate it as the current priority throughout the organization. Otherwise, individuals can claim ignorance as a legitimate reason for not following the rule.
• Establish training and practice to make it easy and natural to follow. Practice should take place in real-world environments as well as in “safe” environments where deficiencies have no consequences but can be corrected. Otherwise, individuals can legitimately claim that they haven’t been given a fair chance to learn the rule.
• Monitor levels of compliance and non-compliance. Taken too far, this can result in invasion of personal privacy and creation of suspicious environments. But by restricting monitoring to serve well-known, legitimate business objectives, such controversy can be avoided.

  Indeed, those employees who are willing to follow the rule may insist on monitoring to help ensure that every one does.

  An acquaintance who works at Microsoft once told me that his manager sometimes asks his organization, “How will I know that this policy is being followed?” By answering this question, members of the organization automatically agree to non-invasive monitoring in support of business objectives.

• Reward compliance, correct non-compliance, and promptly remove people from the organization who persistently fail to comply. The idea is that organizational incentives and disincentives must support (or at least not undermine) the following of the rule.

These seem to be the critical factors to produce a self-sustaining, critical mass of people following the rule, without outside intervention. I would venture that no rule should be considered for adoption by an organization without a willingness to invest in these critical factors.

Once these factors are established, the rule will become institutionalized. Employees will form their own system to make following the rule easy. The system will ensure the rule is followed without employees having to be consciously aware of it, and may even assure compliance by employees who are opposed to it.

Institutionalization is how the individual leader affects the group in a lasting fashion. It is, I believe, the end to be achieved by means of personal leadership — persuasion, influence, setting an example, and communicating a compelling vision. Anyone who has read the teachers of personal leadership, from Covey to Carnegie, will recognize how critical their lessons are to the process.

Intentionally

Failures don’t plan to fail; they fail to plan. — Harvey MacKay

If the institutionalization process is not pursued intentionally, it is likely to fizzle out or get diverted or co-opted. Being intentional means executing, questioning assumptions, leaving nothing to chance, and following through. The following management pathologies illustrate the difficulty of being intentional:

Micromanagers are those who insist on controlling every detail of their organization’s work. The micromanager frequently justifies this level of control by claiming critical experience or expertise that no one else possesses and that (due to time constraints or lack of proper training programs) cannot be imparted to anyone. The value that flows to such managers is a feeling of power and advantage over subordinates. (Occasionally, the subordinates derive value in being absolved of responsibility.) Micromanagement tends to destroy trust, productivity and morale. Micromanaged employees are repeatedly set up to fail and end up feeling devoid of value. Although the micromanager’s personal productivity may be high, it is still finite. When productivity expectations rise above the micromanager’s capacity, even he becomes demoralized. (My co-workers have heard me say of a micromanager, “Sure, that person can do the work of four others, but what’s he going to do when the objective requires five?”) The micromanager has intent, but pursues his ends by destructive means. He is unable to communicate intent except by imposing stifling control. Charan et. al. discuss this problem in The Leadership Pipeline. A system that rewards heroic personal productivity will tend to produce micromanagers.

Ball-rollers are managers who believe only in “getting the ball rolling”. (They might appropriately be called “place kickers,” who arrive to kick the ball and then leave!) The ball-rollers will typically invest in up-front training, and propaganda at the launch of a new initiative. They assume that once employees are prepared with this training and motivated by the propaganda, every one will use it to the benefit of the organization. These managers fail to recognize the destructive potential of employees who are excluded from the training, don’t complete it, don’t internalize it, or aren’t motivated to live it. Such employees will continue operating in existing systems and cause recidivism among the others. A system that rewards up-front efforts without regard to results will tend to produce ball-rollers.

Related to ball-rollers are re-organizers. These are managers who believe that any major initiative must be accompanied by changes in the formal reporting structure — combining organizations that were separate, separating organizations that were combined, adding roles to the organization, or removing roles from the organization. (Rarely does a manager intentionally shrink his own organization.) Re-organizations are typically successful at broad communication of a new priority. However, in my experience, they fall short on training, monitoring, and revision of incentives and disincentives, and hence fail to institutionalize new initiatives. A system that rewards sweeping changes without regard to results will tend to produce re-organizers.

Ball-rollers and re-organizers may retain intent, but fail to follow through until new initiatives are institutionalized.

In a well-intentioned reaction against micromanagement, many managers (call them un-managers) have adopted a creed of merely hiring “good” people and turning them loose. They provide little or no training or guidance but simply sit back patiently and expect the organization to self-organize productively. I recall one un-manager who claimed that his was the only “trusting” approach. Another went as far as to refer to the principles of complex adaptive systems to justify an utterly hands-off approach. The payoff to such managers is the ability to remain completely free of responsibility or accountability, having shifted it to their subordinates. The un-manager abandons all intent, leaving the definition of the end entirely to his organization. Within the organization, in the absence of guiding intent, tenuous alliances form and factions fight for domination. As Jeffrey J. Fox said, “Rampant office politics is symptomatic of a weak leader.”

I submit that while micromanagers fail to distinguish between leading and doing, un-managers have effectively abdicated leadership.

The true business leader must retain intent. Employees must know exactly what the leader wants. They must be allowed to focus on work that is connected to that end.

The process of instititutionalization proceeds whether the leader communicates intent or not. What I mean is that employees naturally and continually create systems of interaction that serve to optimize their payoffs. A leader who expresses intent can ensure that the systems created — the rules institutionalized — are in furtherance of long-term collective business objectives. In the absence of intent, like weeds in a neglected garden, selfish, short-term, and potentially conflicting rules of individuals have an opportunity to thrive.

The larger the organization is, the more intentional institutionalization must be. Small, effective teams tend to form spontaneously among individuals who happen to follow the same rules naturally. Essentially, tiny organizations form around rules, rather than rules being imposed on them. A leader has an easier time institutionalizing rules in a small organization, too, because communication is high-fidelity and rapid, monitoring is small-scale and localized, and the incentive base is proportionally small. As the organization grows, a completely different set of more formal techniques must be employed to pursue institutionalization intentionally. This, I believe, is a key reason why founding CEOs are frequently replaced early in the growth of a company.

One at a Time

A number of factors inhibit simultaneous institutionalization of a large number of new rules:

• The new rules may overwhelm the cognitive capacity of the employees trying to live by them all. This is especially true if deeply seated habits must be unlearned in favor of the new rules.
• A large number of rules may be perceived as symptomatic of micromanagement, and there may be resistance to adopting them.
• Employees may interpret the rules differently. Their interactions with each other may grow chaotic if differing interpretations clash.
• Factions may form with employees having similar priorities and interpretations. The factions may compete for domination. If factions lack critical resources, they will fail to accomplish organizational goals.

Again, those who feel it is impossible to effectively follow all the rules will resign themselves to the pursuit of selfish aims within the rules they can follow. Hence, I believe, it is important for business leaders to choose one rule and ignore others until it is institutionalized. However, once the self-sustaining, critical mass is established, it becomes possible to introduce a new rule.

Rules may conflict with each other when employees attempt to apply them in contexts that were unanticipated. If rules are institutionalized one at a time, then conflicts between rules are

• easier to predict, because employees throughout the organization can immediately see why the new rule seems contrary to the way they are currently doing things
• easier to resolve, by intentionally building explicit exception-handling procedures into the system, and
• less disruptive to the organization’s operation, because it continues to operate on the previously-institutionalized rule(s) while assimilating the new one

Metarules

Throughout this essay, I have only hinted at the necessary qualities of rules. Prospective business leaders may find the following rules about rules — metarules — useful.

1. Take care to balance specificity and generality in crafting rules. Rules that are too general (”Think!”) provide insufficient guidance to be effective and may conflict with rules being established by others. Rules that are too specific smack of micromanagement and bureaucracy (”Fill out this form if you wish to move the image by more than four pixels.”).
2. Be careful establishing rules that depend on other rules having been institutionalized. For example, don’t bother generating productivity forecasts if absenteeism is a poorly-understood problem.
3. Having some rules is critical for organizational cohesion and cooperation.
4. Having a large number of rules tends to diminish the adaptability and creativity of the organization, in addition to demanding a large investment in institutionalization.
5. Ensure that the rules are relevant and inclusive to all members of the organization. Otherwise, segments of the organization will be marginalized. These segments may develop a superiority complex, thinking they are “above the rules,” or an inferiority complex, thinking they are not part of the core team.

Conclusion

The true business leaders are those who institutionalize rules intentionally, one at a time. They successfully employ personal leadership skills to build organizations that achieve collective, long-term business objectives. By institutionalizing rules, they ensure that a persistent, self-sustaining, critical mass of individuals continues to pursue the organization’s objectives. By retaining intent, they avoid the pathologies of management, weeding out destructive systems before they can rise to dominance. By institutionalizing rules one at a time, they ensure focus, smooth operation, and a solid foundation for change.