8 Rules For Creating A Passionate Work Culture

Several years ago I was in the Thomson Building in Toronto. I went down the hall to the small kitchen to get myself a cup of coffee. Ken Thomson was there, making himself some instant soup. At the time, he was the ninth-richest man in the world, worth approximately $19.6 billion. Enough, certainly, to afford a nice lunch. I looked at the soup he was stirring. “It suits me just fine,” he said, smiling.

Thomson understood value. Neighbors reported seeing him leave his local grocery store with jumbo packages of tissues that were on sale. He bought off-the-rack suits and had his old shoes resoled. Yet he had no difficulty paying almost $76 million for a painting (for Peter Paul Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, in 2002). He sought value, whether it was in business, art, or groceries.
In 1976, Thomson inherited a $500-million business empire that was built on newspapers, publishing, travel agencies, and oil. By the time he died, in 2006, his empire had grown to $25 billion.
He left both a financial legacy and an art legacy, but his most lasting legacy might be the culture he created. Geoffrey Beattie, who worked closely with him, said that Ken wasn’t a business genius. His success came from being a principled investor and from surrounding himself with good people and staying loyal to them. In return he earned their loyalty.
For the long-term viability of any enterprise, Thomson understood that you needed a viable corporate culture. It, too, had to be long-term. So he cultivated good people and kept them. Thomson worked with honest and competent business managers and gave them his long-term commitment and support. From these modest principles, an empire grew.
Thomson created a culture that extended out from him and has lived after him. Here are eight rules for creating the right conditions for a culture that reflects your creed:
1. Hire the right people
Hire for passion and commitment first, experience second, and credentials third. There is no shortage of impressive CVs out there, but you should try to find people who are interested in the same things you are. You don’t want to be simply a stepping stone on an employee’s journey toward his or her own (very different) passion. Asking the right questions is key: What do you love about your chosen career? What inspires you? What courses in school did you dread? You want to get a sense of what the potential employee believes.
2. Communicate
Once you have the right people, you need to sit down regularly with them and discuss what is going well and what isn’t. It’s critical to take note of your victories, but it’s just as important to analyze your losses. A fertile culture is one that recognizes when things don’t work and adjusts to rectify the problem. As well, people need to feel safe and trusted, to understand that they can speak freely without fear of repercussion.
The art of communication tends to put the stress on talking, but listening is equally important. Great cultures grow around people who listen, not just to each other or to their clients and stakeholders. It’s also important to listen to what’s happening outside your walls. What is the market saying? What is the zeitgeist? What developments, trends, and calamities are going on?
3. Tend to the weeds
A culture of passion capital can be compromised by the wrong people. One of the most destructive corporate weeds is the whiner. Whiners aren’t necessarily public with their complaints. They don’t stand up in meetings and articulate everything they think is wrong with the company. Instead, they move through the organization, speaking privately, sowing doubt, strangling passion. Sometimes this is simply the nature of the beast: they whined at their last job and will whine at the next. Sometimes these people simply aren’t a good fit. Your passion isn’t theirs. Constructive criticism is healthy, but relentless complaining is toxic. Identify these people and replace them.
4. Work hard, play hard
To obtain passion capital requires a work ethic. It’s easy to do what you love. In the global economy we can measure who has a superior work ethic, who is leading in productivity. Not many industries these days thrive on a forty-hour work week. A culture where everyone understands that long hours are sometimes required will work if this sacrifice is recognized and rewarded.
5. Be ambitious
“Make no little plans: they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” These words were uttered by Daniel Burnham, the Chicago architect whose vision recreated the city after the great fire of 1871. The result of his ambition is an extraordinary American city that still has the magic to stir men’s blood. Ambition is sometimes seen as a negative these days, but without it we would stagnate. You need a culture that supports big steps and powerful beliefs. You can see these qualities in cities that have transformed themselves. Cities are the most visible examples of successful and failed cultures. Bilbao and Barcelona did so and became the envy of the world and prime tourist destinations. Pittsburgh reinvented itself when the steel industry withered. But Detroit wasn’t able to do the same when the auto industry took a dive.
6. Celebrate differences 
When choosing students for a program, most universities consider more than just marks. If you had a dozen straight-A students who were from the same socio-economic background and the same geographical area, you might not get much in the way of interesting debate or interaction. Great cultures are built on a diversity of background, experience, and interests. These differences generate energy, which is critical to any enterprise.
7. Create the space 
Years ago, scientists working in laboratories were often in underground bunkers and rarely saw their colleagues; secrecy was prized. Now innovation is prized. In cutting-edge research and academic buildings, architects try to promote as much interaction as possible. They design spaces where people from different disciplines will come together, whether in workspace or in common leisure space. Their reasoning is simple: it is this interaction that helps breed revolutionary ideas. Creative and engineering chat over coffee. HR and marketing bump into one another in the fitness center. Culture is made in the physical space. Look at your space and ask, “Does it promote interaction and connectivity?”
8. Take the long view 

If your culture is dependent on this quarter’s earnings or this month’s sales targets, then it is handicapped by short-term thinking. Passion capitalists take the long view. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in five years. The culture needs to look ahead, not just in months but in years and even decades.
The writer Arthur Koestler said that a writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years’ time. Lasting influence is better than a burst of fame. Keep an eye on the long view.
Excerpted from Passion Capital: The World's Most Valuable Asset © 2012 by Paul Alofs. Published by Signal, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
[Image: Flickr user PurpleMattFish]

via fastcompany.com

_________________________________________________________________________

If you're not irate in the first 10 minutes of reading, if I don’t provoke you to revolutionize your management and leadership from think to execute, if you aren’t teetering on the brink of reaching for the Maalox, if you don’t innovate like a banshee, then I have failed you. 
To learn more about how uncanny abilities can increase your competitive advantage and top line growth contact us for a consultation. 
Jim Woods CEO & President, InnoThink Group
A leading strategy, innovation and hypercompetition consultancy.
www.innothinkgroup.com
719-649-4118

Do The Ends Really Justify The Means? Actually, Sometimes They Do.

Before dismissing this article by Tom McNichol hear him out. He makes a valid point. So, here is one for you. In rebuilding your organization for the new normal, do the ends justify the means? But...when considering Mr. Jobs accomplishments, perhaps they do. For business is in a battle of hypercompetition. Most businesses even in this downturn continue to belie an unimaginative and myopic agenda. No one can ever accuse Mr. Jobs of that. Jim

Apple's founder and CEO could be a cruel and nasty guy. He was also the greatest chief executive of our time. Don't go thinking those two things are related.

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Steve Jobs was a visionary, a brilliant innovator who reshaped entire industries by the force of his will, a genius at giving consumers not only what they wanted, but what they didn't yet know they wanted.

He was also a world-class asshole.

Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography of Jobs offers a revealing look at what the author has called "good Steve" and "bad Steve." Good Steve was brilliant, charismatic, a champion for excellence, an alchemist who turned a moribund computer company into gold. Bad Steve was petulant, rude, spiteful, and controlling, a man who thought nothing of publicly humiliating employees, hogging the credit for work he hadn't done, throwing tantrums when he didn't get his way, or parking his Mercedes in handicapped spots. For several years, he even denied the paternity of his daughter so that the child and her mother had to live on welfare.

The ease with which people can possess astonishingly contradictory qualities is one of the mysteries of human nature; indeed, it's one of the things that separates humans from, say, an Apple computer. Every one of the components that makes up an iPad is essential to the work it produces. Remove one part and the machine no longer performs its job, and not even the Genius Bar can fix it. But humans are full of qualities that are in no way integral to their functioning in the world. Some aspects of personality have little or no bearing on whether a person performs well, and not a few people succeed in spite of their darker qualities. You can be a genius and an asshole, but the two aren't necessarily causally linked. In fact, there's a strong body of evidence to suggest that there are plenty of assholes who aren't geniuses at anything other than ... being assholes.

The next batch of business books: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Assholes, The One-Minute Asshole, and Who's The Asshole Who Moved My Cheese?

But such subtleties may be lost on CEOs, middle managers and wannabe masters of the universe who are currently devouring the Steve Jobs biography and thinking to themselves: "See! Steve Jobs was an asshole and he was one of the most successful businessmen on the planet. Maybe if I become an even bigger asshole I'll be successful like Steve."

This sort of flawed thinking -- call it asshole logic -- isn't something that's necessarily endorsed by Jobs's biographer.

"(Jobs) was not the world's greatest manager," Walter Isaacson said in a recent interview with 60 Minutes. "In fact, he could have been one of the world's worst managers."

But asshole logic, not surprisingly, tends to ignore facts that don't sanction one's own assholery. This distorted reasoning was already prevalent before Steve Jobs's death, and is only likely to spread as Isaacson's biography closes in on becoming the best-selling book of 2011. Five years ago, when Stanford professor of management science and engineering Robert Sutton was researching his book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't, he ran across a disconcerting number of Silicon Valley leaders who believed that Steve Jobs was living proof that being an asshole boss was integral to building a great company.

Sutton's counter-thesis was that assholes--which he defined as those who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who focus their hostility on the less powerful--poison the workplace and induce qualified employees to quit and are therefore bad for business, regardless of the asshole's individual talent or effectiveness.

When Sutton published an article in the Harvard Business Review advancing his theory, he was amazed at the reaction. He had published other articles in the Review, many of them longer and better researched, but nothing provoked the response that his asshole article did. Sutton received well over 1,000 emails, and gathered countless horror stories, including one about a worker undergoing chemotherapy whose boss told him he was "a wimp and a pussy." How do you create an “Apple-like” culture that drives consumer growth?

What an asshole!

Sutton decided to expand the article into a book, and wound up interviewing dozens of Silicon Valley leaders and insiders. When Sutton would advance the notion that assholes are bad for business, one person after another had the same reaction: "What about Steve Jobs?"

"Even people who worked with Jobs told me that they'd seen him make people cry many times, but that 80 percent of the time he was right, " says Sutton. "It is troubling that there's this notion in our culture that if you're a winner, it's okay to be an asshole."

So many people advanced Steve Jobs as evidence that asshole CEOs build better companies that Sutton somewhat reluctantly included a chapter in his book on "The Virtues of Assholes," with Steve Jobs as Exhibit A. There is some evidence that "status displays" by aggressive bosses can motivate workers and give slackers a kick in the pants. And effective jerk bosses usually aren't assholes all the time, they're able to turn on the charm when the situation demands it, something Steve Jobs, by most accounts, was very good at doing. And it helps for companies to have skilled subordinate executives that are good at cleaning up after the Asshole-in-Chief, much like the sad-faced men carrying shovels who walk behind circus elephants.

But Sutton's book makes clear that for the most part, assholes are bad for the bottom line, to say nothing of the human toll they exact. There are plenty of very successful companies that aren't led by assholes - Google, Virgin Atlantic, Procter & Gamble and Southwest Airlines among them. Likewise, there are legions of assholes who lead companies that aren't successful, in part due to their own bad behavior.

With the death and canonization of Steve Jobs and the emergence of the Jobs biography as a kind of sacred text for managers, the ranks of bosses who see Bad Steve's nastier traits as something to imitate is liable to swell. It's unlikely the book will make despots out of thoughtful, fair-minded middle managers. It's far more probable that it will turn bosses who are already assholes into even bigger assholes, raising the temperature of the worst actors so that they become that most combustible of workplace figures, the flaming asshole.

Already, the web is full of articles that hold up Steve Jobs as the model of how to lead and succeed in life, with titles such as "Ten Leadership Lessons from the Steve Jobs School of Management" and "21 Life Lessons from Steve Jobs." Most of these works prefer to focus on Good Steve, but it may not be long until business book authors hone in on the timeless lessons to be drawn from Bad Steve's asshole ways. The titles write themselves: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Assholes. The One-Minute Asshole. Who's The Asshole Who Moved My Cheese?

The fact is, Steve Jobs didn't succeed because he was an asshole. He succeeded because he was Steve Jobs. He had an uncanny sixth sense about what consumers wanted, an unmatched ability to adapt existing technology and turn it into something new, and a commitment to quality that turned ordinary Apple customers into fans for life. Being an asshole was part of the Steve package, but it wasn't essential to his success. But that's not a message most of the assholes in the corner offices want to hear.via theatlantic.com

 

Speaking  

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth.  

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118.  

 

 

 

Do The Ends Really Justify The Means? Actually, Sometimes They Do.

Follow Us

Before dismissing this article by Tom McNichol hear him out. He makes a valid point. So, here is one for you. In rebuilding your organization for the new normal, do the ends justify the means? But...when considering Mr. Jobs accomplishments, perhaps they do. For business is in a battle of hypercompetition. Most businesses even in this downturn continue to belie an unimaginative and myopic agenda. No one can ever accuse Mr. Jobs of that. Jim

Apple's founder and CEO could be a cruel and nasty guy. He was also the greatest chief executive of our time. Don't go thinking those two things are related.

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Steve Jobs was a visionary, a brilliant innovator who reshaped entire industries by the force of his will, a genius at giving consumers not only what they wanted, but what they didn't yet know they wanted.

He was also a world-class asshole.

Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography of Jobs offers a revealing look at what the author has called "good Steve" and "bad Steve." Good Steve was brilliant, charismatic, a champion for excellence, an alchemist who turned a moribund computer company into gold. Bad Steve was petulant, rude, spiteful, and controlling, a man who thought nothing of publicly humiliating employees, hogging the credit for work he hadn't done, throwing tantrums when he didn't get his way, or parking his Mercedes in handicapped spots. For several years, he even denied the paternity of his daughter so that the child and her mother had to live on welfare.

The ease with which people can possess astonishingly contradictory qualities is one of the mysteries of human nature; indeed, it's one of the things that separates humans from, say, an Apple computer. Every one of the components that makes up an iPad is essential to the work it produces. Remove one part and the machine no longer performs its job, and not even the Genius Bar can fix it. But humans are full of qualities that are in no way integral to their functioning in the world. Some aspects of personality have little or no bearing on whether a person performs well, and not a few people succeed in spite of their darker qualities. You can be a genius and an asshole, but the two aren't necessarily causally linked. In fact, there's a strong body of evidence to suggest that there are plenty of assholes who aren't geniuses at anything other than ... being assholes.

The next batch of business books: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Assholes, The One-Minute Asshole, and Who's The Asshole Who Moved My Cheese?

But such subtleties may be lost on CEOs, middle managers and wannabe masters of the universe who are currently devouring the Steve Jobs biography and thinking to themselves: "See! Steve Jobs was an asshole and he was one of the most successful businessmen on the planet. Maybe if I become an even bigger asshole I'll be successful like Steve."

This sort of flawed thinking -- call it asshole logic -- isn't something that's necessarily endorsed by Jobs's biographer.

"(Jobs) was not the world's greatest manager," Walter Isaacson said in a recent interview with 60 Minutes. "In fact, he could have been one of the world's worst managers."

But asshole logic, not surprisingly, tends to ignore facts that don't sanction one's own assholery. This distorted reasoning was already prevalent before Steve Jobs's death, and is only likely to spread as Isaacson's biography closes in on becoming the best-selling book of 2011. Five years ago, when Stanford professor of management science and engineering Robert Sutton was researching his book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't, he ran across a disconcerting number of Silicon Valley leaders who believed that Steve Jobs was living proof that being an asshole boss was integral to building a great company.

Sutton's counter-thesis was that assholes--which he defined as those who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who focus their hostility on the less powerful--poison the workplace and induce qualified employees to quit and are therefore bad for business, regardless of the asshole's individual talent or effectiveness.

When Sutton published an article in the Harvard Business Review advancing his theory, he was amazed at the reaction. He had published other articles in the Review, many of them longer and better researched, but nothing provoked the response that his asshole article did. Sutton received well over 1,000 emails, and gathered countless horror stories, including one about a worker undergoing chemotherapy whose boss told him he was "a wimp and a pussy."

What an asshole!

Sutton decided to expand the article into a book, and wound up interviewing dozens of Silicon Valley leaders and insiders. When Sutton would advance the notion that assholes are bad for business, one person after another had the same reaction: "What about Steve Jobs?"

"Even people who worked with Jobs told me that they'd seen him make people cry many times, but that 80 percent of the time he was right, " says Sutton. "It is troubling that there's this notion in our culture that if you're a winner, it's okay to be an asshole."

So many people advanced Steve Jobs as evidence that asshole CEOs build better companies that Sutton somewhat reluctantly included a chapter in his book on "The Virtues of Assholes," with Steve Jobs as Exhibit A. There is some evidence that "status displays" by aggressive bosses can motivate workers and give slackers a kick in the pants. And effective jerk bosses usually aren't assholes all the time, they're able to turn on the charm when the situation demands it, something Steve Jobs, by most accounts, was very good at doing. And it helps for companies to have skilled subordinate executives that are good at cleaning up after the Asshole-in-Chief, much like the sad-faced men carrying shovels who walk behind circus elephants.

But Sutton's book makes clear that for the most part, assholes are bad for the bottom line, to say nothing of the human toll they exact. There are plenty of very successful companies that aren't led by assholes - Google, Virgin Atlantic, Procter & Gamble and Southwest Airlines among them. Likewise, there are legions of assholes who lead companies that aren't successful, in part due to their own bad behavior.

With the death and canonization of Steve Jobs and the emergence of the Jobs biography as a kind of sacred text for managers, the ranks of bosses who see Bad Steve's nastier traits as something to imitate is liable to swell. It's unlikely the book will make despots out of thoughtful, fair-minded middle managers. It's far more probable that it will turn bosses who are already assholes into even bigger assholes, raising the temperature of the worst actors so that they become that most combustible of workplace figures, the flaming asshole.

Already, the web is full of articles that hold up Steve Jobs as the model of how to lead and succeed in life, with titles such as "Ten Leadership Lessons from the Steve Jobs School of Management" and "21 Life Lessons from Steve Jobs." Most of these works prefer to focus on Good Steve, but it may not be long until business book authors hone in on the timeless lessons to be drawn from Bad Steve's asshole ways. The titles write themselves: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Assholes. The One-Minute Asshole. Who's The Asshole Who Moved My Cheese?

The fact is, Steve Jobs didn't succeed because he was an asshole. He succeeded because he was Steve Jobs. He had an uncanny sixth sense about what consumers wanted, an unmatched ability to adapt existing technology and turn it into something new, and a commitment to quality that turned ordinary Apple customers into fans for life. Being an asshole was part of the Steve package, but it wasn't essential to his success. But that's not a message most of the assholes in the corner offices want to hear.via theatlantic.com

Speaking 

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth. 

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. 

 

 

Snap a photo of physical junk mail, become unsubscribed

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Snap a photo of physical junk mail, become unsubscribed

Seattle-based Readabl’s PaperKarma mobile app lets users submit a photograph of each piece of junk mail they’d like to stop receiving, and then works to make that happen.

30th March 2012 in Life Hacks.

No one likes junk mail, and the average US household receives some 850 pieces of it over the course of a year. Whereas French Pubeco aims to shift such communications to the online sphere, Readabl’sPaperKarma mobile app lets users submit a photograph of each piece of junk mail they’d like to stop receiving, and then works to make that happen.

Roughly 44 percent of unsolicited mail in the US ends up in landfills each year without ever being opened, according to Seattle-based Readabl. Aiming to help address that problem, the company’s PaperKarma app enables users to simply snap a picture of an unwanted piece of junk mail and press “send” to become unsubscribed from the mailing list that generated it. The company explains: “We work closely with the source companies to help you unsubscribe from catalogs, magazines, credit card offers, etc. and optionally – i.e., if you explicitly choose to – convert you to the corresponding online (email) versions.” Launched earlier this year, the free PaperKarma app is now available for Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone.

Of course, unwanted mass mailings aren’t just a problem for consumers — such fruitless effort also represents a significant waste for the companies that send them. How can your brand help to reduce the many resources wasted this way?

via springwise.com

Speaking  

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth.  

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118.  

 

Learn Fast. Learn To Adapt: Dare to Be an Entrepreneur

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One of the reasons I came to this country is that America is a land of opportunity and a country of freedom. One can easily think of so many examples: Condoleezza Rice, although born amid racism in the South, recalled her mother once told her, “You can be anything you want to be.” And the governor of California used to be a bodybuilder and movie actor — something you can’t find in other countries.

While all these stories are inspiring, I am often troubled by the questions that implicitly or explicitly come across to new entrepreneurs: “Have you done this before?” “What P&L responsibilities did you have in the past?” “Do you have experience as a CEO?” One person even told me openly (with good intentions) that I should be prepared to be replaced six months after I raise the funds for my own company!

For a first-time entrepreneur, these questions can be very intimidating — and if you are not strong enough, you can begin to doubt yourself. The most dangerous thing of all is that, after enough people start thinking this way, it can be mistaken as a truth. I have seen some founders looking for “a CEO who can lead the company to the next level” before they themselves even tried!

While it’s important to examine many facets of an entrepreneur’s background, especially if he or she is raising institutional funds, the very notion that founders cannot lead their companies to success is totally fallacious. If a bodybuilder and movie actor can be a governor, why can’t you and I be entrepreneurs?!

I encourage all first-time entrepreneurs to challenge themselves to learn fast, fail fast, and grow fast, in real time with their new ventures. Condoleezza’s mother is right. There is no limitation of our true potential, except the limitation of our own imagination! via businessweek.com

 

Want to increase the sustainability of your innovation initiatives or need a speaker?   Contact us or call 719-649-4118.

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A leading consulting firm specialized solely in enabling organizations of all sizes in all industries develop top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition.