Selling Your Sole Fillets

[A talk I delivered at my last TM meeting, the assignment being 'Research Your Topic' - it went over very well. ]

Credibility. Backing up my ideas with those of others I've researched. That's what this whole talk is supposed to be about, right?

Then surely, the worst thing I could do to establish my own credibility would be to question that of my sources, right?

Yeah, absolutely, no doubt about it. Eh, oh well. I'll accept that handicap. Questioning my sources, brazenness, we're off to a great start.

Yet I think that's entirely the right attitude to the kind of question I've asked. How do you succeed in business? Given the different responses to this question, and how contradictory they can be, there's only one clear answer.

No-one knows.

Let's be clear what I'm not saying here. I have no doubt business schools teach some valuable lessons, and I'm not questioning the talent of people like Richard Branson, or Donald Trump.

It's just that these people aren't following a script.

The best ice-hockey players like Wayne Gretzky don't go where the puck is, they only care where it's going to be. Physics can tell you where it's going to be, but you can drill someone on F = d/dt(mv) all day and it probably won't make them a better sportsperson very quickly. What do great businesses need to follow? What people want.

Aha! Market research! Focus groups!

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What who wants?

Well, consumers, obviously, right? Sure, but that's forgetting the other side of the coin. The producers – whoever they are, employees, volunteers, yourself. Fledging businesses often have a technically-minded person at the helm, too often overly focused on the consumers and what they're creating for them, that they neglect the very fabric of their business; the people in it and how they're organised.

As far as Psychology has come, it can't predict people as well as Physics can a puck. Great businesses can't tell the future any better than others – what do they have to teach us?

It's easy to think of expert athletes or entrepreneurs, or mature businesses as these troves of accumulated knowledge, but there's more beneath the surface. They know their limitations, they've seen their past performance and know how to compensate for their weaknesses – as individuals and as teams. This awareness is rarely conveyed or appreciated. Perhaps because they take it for granted, it doesn't apply to others, or even if it is communicated, others don't realise its importance.

Know thyself. I don't follow the bible much, but Jesus was on to something there.

We don't change much as individuals, but the world we live in is becoming more and more complex. Are our businesses shifting with it? McDonalds is famous for its business model, which is as finely tuned as any of its burgers. Most of its employees are only there to turn the cranks in the machine. Its standardised system is what has made it so successful.

Is this mechanistic, impersonal structure relevant to our modern technical world?

Look at Google's famous 20% time, where 20% of their engineer's time can be spent doing whatever they want, however they want. Half of their new products come out of this – such as GMail, or Google News. Or the so-called Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, where people aren't kept to schedules, only results – coming to work when they want, and optionally attending meetings, has almost across-the-board resulted in increased productivity, worker satisfaction, and decreased turnover.

Maybe we haven't appreciated people enough. Conventional wisdom has been that financial rewards are an effective way of motivating people to do great work.

Nearly 40 years of research flies in the face of these beliefs. For example, studies funded by the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States found that for tasks requiring “even rudimentary cognitive skill,” larger rewards “led to poorer performance.”

Rewards have the effect of narrowly focusing the mind. For the requirements of factory-like chores, narrow focus works wonders, but in tasks requiring out-of-the-box thinking typical of the modern era it actually does harm.

Traditional management is fine if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, self-direction is the way to go. Intrinsic motivators, like autonomy – directing our own actions – and purpose – the feeling that what we're doing matters. Hey, even road-kill picker-uppers whistle on the job.

Surely both McDonalds and Google have lessons to teach us, but their difference speaks to a larger principle: There is no sure path to success in business. Questioning not just what they've done, but why they've done it, seems a good place to start though.