In Search of Excellence

For any who delights and is confounded by the structure and functions (or lack of) of large organizations this book is a delightful read, the first two thirds of it anyway. The authors have done extensive research to come up with their eight points that according to them are indicative of an organization's long term success and health (some of them sound repetitive and start to tire toward the end).

It is interesting to note that many of the great companies of the time of the first publication for this book in the mid eighties - HP, IBM, Digital, TI, etc - are either struggling to remain relevant or are not to be found anywhere anymore. This is not to say that the recommendations in the book are not meaningful but it does point out the complexity and the unpredictability of the world in which organizations operate. It does, however, is indicative of the book's failure at noting and addressing the requisites for sustaining a culture of excellence through the market demands, changing leadership, large expanse of time, and disappearing founders, which often leads to value corrosion - the root of all cultural sickness.

One of the most critical aspects of good leadership is the passing of the baton, developing other leaders who can take the torch forward while deeply understanding and upholding the values on which an organization succeeds. Both HP and IBM have severely suffered since the loss of their founding fathers. In spite of having good leaders come and go they no longer carry the glean with which they once used to shine.

One other area where I found this work lacking was that it never touched upon in detail on what it considers as "excellence". One could construe from the writings that to the authors excellence is about a work culture where people naturally feel empowered and motivated, organization's output is innovative and ever fresh, and financial results are strong. To me these are results of excellence but not excellence itself.

I have often asked myself about excellence, it's presence and its absence, and how do we know when we are in presence of excellence and how to tell when we are witness to sloppiness. Excellence shines of its own accord. It is hard to put a definition around excellence. It is almost a spiritual quality, which is hard to confine in a definition but easier to express in what it is not or how it expresses itself. To me excellence is beauty, it is the bringer of delight, desirable yet unexpected, it exudes a pride of craftsmanship, it is skill in action, it is the WoW! factor, it makes the ordinary seem extraordinary, it is love, passion, pride, quality, and competence manifested. Excellence above all is an expression of genuine care.

Interestingly, all of the above attributes of excellence are an outer expression of an inner experience. These cannot really be forced by external means. Excellence requires a certain level of willingness to excel coupled with the skill to do so and a challenge that engages that skill adequately. It reminds me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on Flow.

The organizational structure then has to address this indirectly by creating an environment in which the workers can experience such inspiration and intrinsic desire to do great things with utmost care. Most cultures today fail miserably at inspiring their workers. This has partially to do with our acceptance of defects, sub par results, and being more focused on money than on quality.

I think Antoine de Saint-Exupery captured it most sublimely when he said, "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." I cannot think of anything more succinct, more beautiful, or more powerful to communicate what is at stake here and where we are going wrong.

Some of the good quotes and insights from the book:

1. The primary role of a CEO is to manage values for the organization.

2. Leadership should have the courage to acknowledge a great product and pursue it even if the numbers at the outset do not favor its launch. Corollary, almost no big invention (so labeled after the fact) is ever used as originally intended: computers were seen to have only a handful of applications, transistors were developed for a tiny set of military uses, diesel locomotives originally were perceived as useful only in freight yard switching, Xerography was aimed at a small existing part of the lithography market (mass copies were not at all a driving force in either the invention or the early marketing).

3. People are the greatest asset to an organization and this needs to be given more than lip service. 

4. "The majority of business are incapable of original thought because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason" - David Ogilvy

5. "...the numerative, analytical component has an in-built conservative bias. Cost reduction becomes priority number one and revenue enhancement takes a back seat".

6. "If quantitative precision is demanded, it is gained in the current state of things, only by so reducing the scope of what is analyzed that most of the important problems remain external to the analysis" - John Steinbruner (Harvard)

7. "...the only way to count the spines of the sierra... is to sit in a laboratory, open an evil-smelling jar, remove a stiff colorless fish from the formalin solution, count the spines and write the truth.... There you have recorded a reality which cannot be assailed - probably the least important reality concerning either the fish or yourself.... It is good to know what you are doing. The man with this pickled fish has set down one truth and recorded in his experience many lies. The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, nor does he smell that way."

8. "Professional management today sees itself often in he role of a judge who says 'yes' or 'no' to ideas as they come up.... A top management that believes its job is to sit in judgement will inevitably veto the new idea. It is always 'impractical'." - Peter Drucker

9. (Faith and) not logic is the true engine of scientific progress.

10. We are more influence by stories than by data.

11. We all like to think of ourselves as winners. 

12. "Punishment does not suppress the desire to "do bad". The person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best he learns how to avoid punishment." - B F Skinner

13. The management's most significant output is getting others to shift attention in desirable direction (through positive reinforcement - specific, immediate, reward small wins, reward with intangibles (such as attention, small rewards), unpredictable and intermittent reinforcement works better).

14. "You are more likely to act yourself into feeling than to feel yourself into action". - Jerome Bruner (Harvard Psychologist)

15. Some basic needs in an organization:
      a) People's need for meaning
      b) People's need for modicum of control
      c) People's need for positive reinforcement (to think of themselves as winners in some way)
      d) The degree to which actions and behaviors shape attitudes and beliefs rather than vice versa.

16. "Profit is like health. You need it, and the more the better. But it's not why you exist."

17. Gordon Siu´s bees versus flies trying to escape from a bottle:
"If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle horizontally, with its base to the window, you will find the that bees persist, till they die of exhaustion or hunger, in their endeavor to discover an opening through (the base) while the flies, in less than two minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite side. . . It is the bees´ . . . intelligence, that is their undoing in this experiment. They evidently imagine that the issue from every prison must be where the light shines clearest; and they act in accordance, and persist in too-logical action. . . and the greater their intelligence, the more inadmissible, more incomprehensible, will the strange obstacle appear. Whereas the featherbrained flies, careless of logic . . . flutter wildly hither and thither, and meeting here with the good fortune that often waits on the simple. . . end up by discovering the friendly opening that restores their liberty to them"

18. One of the great advantages of being new in a company is that you are thoroughly unaware of what cannot be done. 

19. "I lean more to being a believer of low cunning and expediency.... How do you go about starting a job? You have the people who read everything; they don't get anywhere; and the people who don't read anything - they don't get anywhere either. The people who go around asking everybody and people who ask nobody. I say to my own people, "I don't know how to start a project. Why don't you step out and do an experiment?" - By the man who invented the transistor

20. Make cost of experimentation less than the cost of fail-proofing the idea (it usually already is).

21. Results-first approach. Focus immediately on tangible results. 

22. Big town halls with decked up presentations are merely distractions away from real conversations. 

23. Innovation is a numbers game - No matter how small the odds are of any one thing's working, the probability of something's succeeding is very high if you try lots of things.

24. "The way you stay fresh is that you never stop traveling, you never stop listening, and you never stop asking people what they think." Rene McPherson

25 "Substituting rules for judgement starts a self-defeating cycle, since judgement can only be developed by using it" - Dee Hock, Visa

26. "Set and demand standards of excellence. Anybody who accepts mediocrity - in school, in job, in life - is a guy who compromises. And when the leader compromises, the whole damn organization compromises." - Charles Knight, Emerson

27. "You cannot accomplish anything unless you have some fun.... Encourage exuberance. Get rid of sad dogs that spread gloom" - David Ogilvy

28. The most critical problem is that in the name of "balance" everything is somehow hooked to everything else. The organization gets paralyzed because the structure not only does not make priorities clear, it automatically dilutes priorities. In effect, it says to the people down the line: "Everything is important; pay equal attention to everything." The message is paralyzing.