A dog's life

This is Buddy. He is recently rescued and, at six, has diabetes. He is a fair bit of work and worry, but he doesn't feel as if he is. As most days are a fair bit of work and worry, I wonder if there are lessons to be learned from Buddy about making the business setting feel as if it isn't.

Buddy accepts the fact that he needs help. He has a schedule, to which he is committed, and a territory he protects. Buddy is open to those he meets, but cautious, relying on his nose to tell him if a deal is worth doing. He is focused daily on the bottom line -- in his case, three meals a day, two insulin shots a day and four walks a day -- and responds well to the prospect of a bonus.

He offers on-going feedback and is as quick to warn of danger as he is to act to meet it. He is loyal, but understands that allegiances can shift -- should shift -- to better manage the bottom line. Mostly, he is a survivor; watching, analyzing and hoping that his self-interest aligns with others. Afterall, it may be good to be the top dog, but there is security in the pack.

Hmmm, there may be something to this.

Breaking the reality barrier

I have always been fascinated by decision making. I mean, why do we do the things we do? So often, the choices seems illogical, even counter to our own self-interest; but, there you go.

Perhaps we want to be loved, and so, therefore, make decisions we think will lead best to that. Perhaps we want to paint ourselves into a corner, making decisions that force our own hand. Perhaps we really want something other than our public face might disclose, leading to decisions that seem paradoxical. Or maybe we just don’t know, day-to-day, what the hell we want.

Some people really do seem to know what they want. You know them -- single-minded of purpose, quick to move, angry at a missed opportunity to get closer to their goals. The rest of us often envy these men and women, particularly when we waffle on whether to lease or buy, paper or plastic, for here or to go.

Field researchers, academics, psychologists, ethnographers and a host of other professionals are fascinated by decision-making, too. We've read about having too much choice or not enough, be led to choose whatever default has been set or chafing at the guidance or about how every decision we make is the right one no matter how weird or counter-productive it might seem.

Of course, understanding why someone else makes the decision he or she makes is a lot easier to decipher than why we've made any particular choice. From our professional perch, we can see the how others act in three-dimension and total context. When we look at ourselves, we focus to flatter. Even the "half-empty" types among us are capable of seeing too rosy a reflection.

But when you consider the number of decisions each of us makes each day, having a better way to pick and choose what we'll do, how we'll do it and when we'll do it can have a real effect on the way things turn out. Urging people to focus on reality is a common approach. "Keep it real," "Get real" and "Focus" are but three of the bumper stickers we use to draw out attention to the here and now. I wonder though if a commitment to the facts really helps us make better decision. Because just as we focus on our eyes to avoid a nose too large for our face; so, too, do we see the facts and figures in hope that they add up as we had guessed.

No, it is not reality that will give us a fighting chance to make the best decisions. It is really a focus on the future that will better do the trick. It is better to decide on the basis of our aspirations rather than our situation; better to choose because of of who we hope to become rather than from where we have come.

Reality is a persistent hurdle. A child may want to be a truck driver or an astronaut or a teacher. Reality intrudes and he or she may wind up in law school or on the job they took because of realities -- food, clothing and shelter. A newly minted college graduate may want to go to grad school or write or travel. But then reality intrudes -- the burden of loans, an ill parent or a spouse. Or an established professional may want to expand, invest or innovate when those "realities" of margin, risk management and scarce resources choke off the choice.

Reality is an influence, but it does not need not to increase the drag coefficient on your career. Better to focus on aspiration. In this way, the decisions are easier to make and aligned from the start and along the way. By using what comes next as the guide for what happens now, there is a better chance of making the future happen which, as I see it, is the reason we make decisions in the first place.

Truth theorem

Some things are true for the moment, some things are true for longer and some things are just true. The current culture, no matter what your view, seems more comfortable with a theory of relativity rather than immutability.

At a time (there is that aspect of relativity) when authenticity is the most important quality to be found in a company, a colleague or a politician, truth has even more relevance (there it is again).

As the late Jack Palance as "Curly," the only real cowboy in the movie, said in "City Slickers," the key to life is "just one thing." It falls to each of us to figure out what that one thing is. Today, for people interested in building and leading successful teams, that one thing is truth.

And nowhere is truth and the trust it engenders more meaningful than when it grants an adherent permission to lead. This is certainly true now. The question is: is it always true?

At a time, in the current climate, when companies are built and held together less on a promise and more on the basis of a mission, an idea, a shared commitment, the truth is a powerful weapon; the truth of a company's goals and its performance, the truth of an employee's role and opportunity and the truth of circumstances and market shifts that affect it all.

It is this last - the truth of what's changed - that most tests the persistent commitment to sharing enough to keep people's trust.

The best intentions can be undone by the questions raised by the grind of the day-to-day. A valuable colleague may leave to take another job ("What does he know that I don't?"), a client can take its business elsewhere ("How safe is my job?"), a competitor may draw the spotlight of publicity ("When are we going to be showcased?") and the pace -- of growth, success, public notice, internal communication -- may become uneven ("What are they not telling us?").

In each instance, it is a test of leadership to anticipate (and therefore prevent) or diagnose (and therefore cure) any problems undermining the health of the corporation, and health is a measure of trust.

What is also persistently true is that whether the news is good or not, it needs to be said. In politics, the prize often goes to those who speak truth to power. In business, the truth needs to be told to all. For some, this is too high a bar to clear. For the rest, the shield of trust that results is worth the risk of bad news.

It is the only hope that success will be true for more than a moment.

Too much "why" knowledge, not enough "how"

A former colleague tells a story of an annual road trip with college buddies. In anticipation of the NCAA basketball “Final Four” weekend, they convene in Los Angeles then drive to Las Vegas to watch the game amid the noise and color of the casinos.

On one such trip, the car broke down “in the middle of nowhere” and, as my pal tells it, “there were four guys with a total of seven college degrees, under the hood staring in silence at a smoking engine.” One finally said what they all knew to be true – “too much ‘why’ knowledge, not enough ‘how’ knowledge.”

I am reminded of that story every time a management team, confronted with its own version of a smoking engine, stares blankly; fixed more on why they are stalled and not enough on how to get going again. It is understandable. It reflects a human urge to analyze, a political urge to lay blame and a business urge to not admit mistakes. In combination, the urges don’t add up to urgency, they can paralyze -- and time passes.

The better approach is to bring a little balance to the equation. It may not be possible to find more “how” knowledge when stalled on the road, but you can eliminate a fair bit of the overwhelming wealth of “why” knowledge. Pare down the analysis to that which can help reveal the best next steps; the rest is hand-wringing.

Focus the team on the business goal. For those four guys in the desert, it was a weekend in Las Vegas. Rather than staring at the engine, they should have been looking for their AAA cards and reaching for their cell phones or recalling the last pay phone they passed. For the management team, there are revenue objectives, program goals and other targets to hit.

The danger is to be labeled, as has Dilbert’s pointy-headed boss, as having a “bias for action.” You can hear the derision in the phrase even as you say it to yourself. But there is nothing wrong with action when the course is clear. In fact, when the course is clear, inaction is malfeasance.

The truth is that a smoking engine is not an unusual event, it is quite the norm in businesses that rely more and more on innovation, customer relationships and intellectual capital. The more business depends on people, the more likely there will be smoke.

We are taught that in a real fire, the best way to deal with smoke is to keep our head down low and covered. Dealing with the smoke of business requires quite the opposite; a counterintuitive approach. By keeping our heads up, we are better able to know what our options are for continuing to make progress against our goals. We stand a real chance of figuring out what to do next.

There is real value in knowing what to do next and value is why we set out on the road in the first place.

Balance is good for more than your diet

It is pretty clear that business success depends on more than the best products at the best price at the right time and in the right color. Marketing can overwhelm those qualities in a competitor and fashion can move a market in the blink of an eye.

At no time is this more the case than in the winning, keeping or losing of a customer relationship. Companies who focus on the product attributes to the exclusion of addressing customer anxieties, however tenuously linked to the goods, often find themselves fighting to keep the contract. And mostly losing.

The notion is particularly ripe, as they say in the law. As the year slows to a close, companies routinely review their relationships. Do we sign on again for another year? Do we shop for a better deal? If we do, should we do it formally or discretely? These matter-of-fact questions can either rage into a fire or die out for a lack of air. The direction often depends on whether the service of the last year met not just the product specs, but customer expectations.

The notion of customer expectations is even more important in light of the fact that no product or service meets all its promises. Cars get recalled, computers freeze up, yogurt passes its freshness date, orders get shipped in pieces and things still get lost in the mail. What allows companies and customers to look past these events is performance.

First and foremost is the way the product or service performs. But equally important is the way companies conduct – or perform – their business. Do they listen? Does their behavior suggest they actually hear? Are they responsive? Is it on a timetable that leads to a market advantage – for the customer? Do they invest? In their products? In the customer relationship?

The questions – metrics – make a long list that can make product performance a lot less relevant that many of us might like. The formula is more complex and compounded for a professional services firm where intellectual property is a hard-to-measure product in the first place.

This is not a new business problem; nor is it one that has not drawn a lot of attention and recently. Some companies have reorganized their sales teams to create global or national account directors so that one person will be persistently close to the customer. Other companies have adopted aggressive customer feedback systems, not just authoring a method by which compliments and criticism can make their way to management, but by soliciting the best and worst. Still others have created customer advocates at the senior-most levels of management.

The goal in each case is to stay close, to anticipate and make sure that product and company performance doesn’t get out of balance, that neither falters and that each meets the spec and unspoken need of customers.

Blog, blog, blah

The attention people are giving to the power of blogs and the influence of the blogosphere is understandable and justified. By all reports, individual points-of-view have leapfrogged public confidence in what companies and institutions say; and blogs have made every individual a publisher.

My concern, though, is that by focusing on what’s new, we may be overlooking what’s true.

Should a company be aware of what is being said and who is saying it? Sure. Should the company have people who participate in the discussion? That's OK, too. But is there a chance a company can prevent something from taking root in the blogosphere? Nope. As an indication, it could not be done even before the blogosphere's “big bang.”

Think about the stories of satanic symbolism in the P&G logo, spider eggs in Bubble Yum or prune juice in Dr. Pepper (that one is from the 1930s!). All pervaded nicely, thank you, well before the blogosphere. All required diligent, consistent and sometimes legal response. All required a review of practices and engagement with the media of the moment. All tested the faith of each company’s constituents.

And that is the point. The traps may be digital, but the best communications strategy remains flesh-and-blood. When someone speaks ill of you, who will refute it?

Technology is putting pressure on the most un-technological aspects of a company. Do we have positive values? Are we living by those values? Do we have a track record that can help make a misstep an event and not an on-going saga? Did we move quickly to repair the damage?

Like a mayor or governor or senator, communications executives ought to be dealing with the blogosphere by getting in front of it; by getting our own houses in order, as these days they are all made of glass.

It requires, today as it always has, getting closer to employees, customers, partners and investors – the full set of a company’s constituents. And everyday requires proof of the promises we’ve made, even though, unlike in politics, success can come at less than a vote of 50.1 percent.

What the blogosphere has done is remove the last thin wall between what companies say and do from being seen and heard anywhere. But the response can’t just be to do a bet