Fearlessness: The Last Organizational Change Strategy

Fearlessness: The Last Organizational Change Strategy - Great interview of the ubiquitous Margaret Wheatley, who says:

The Gallup Organization did a survey that indicates how people are feeling about their workplace. Last year, more than 70 percent of the American workforce felt disengaged, up from around 33 percent in 2000. That’s what happens if you squeeze fewer people to do more work, give them shorter deadlines, measure their work using meaningless metrics, and, to top it off, treat them with profound levels of disrespect.

This is another person quoting the Gallup survey on employee disengagement.

OpinionJournal - What Happened at Haditha

OpinionJournal - What Happened at Haditha goes over the currently known information about the "massacre" at Haditha, which largely exonerates the US Military and further indicts the American press corps and some anti-war politicians:

Many, including Members of Congress, were looking for another moral bonfire to discredit the cause in Iraq, and they found a pretext in Haditha. The critics rushed to judgment; facts and evidence were discarded to fit the antiwar template.

Most despicably, they created and stoked a political atmosphere that exposes American soldiers in the line of duty, risking and often losing their lives, to criminal liability for the chaos of war. This is the deepest shame of Haditha, and the one for which apologies ought to be made.

This is one of the legacies of the Iraq War, along with the clear incompetence of the Bush Administration: the shamelessness with which the media in particular have selected a subset of facts to fit the day's narrative.

This is why the media are less and less trusted.

OpinionJournal - Al Qaeda's War of Villages

OpinionJournal - Federation: "Al Qaeda's War of Villages Signs that the terrorists are losing in Iraq." I still worry about selective filtering. I want the US to win in Iraq (whatever that means - I have some ideas on that score) so of course I want to believe good news and disbelieve bad news.

Nevertheless, steeling myself against the good news, I still smile when I read something like this. Good to know that things are trending well, and unsurprising that the major media cannot or will not report it.

Let the Sunshine In - New York Times

Let the Sunshine In - New York Times

Oh, the glory of Congressional earmarks. Let's let the NYTimes say it:

One early analysis of House appropriations and federal elections records found that every private beneficiary of Representative John Murtha’s [D-PA] recent earmarks, dished by way of his powerful defense appropriations seat, has requited with campaign cash. That’s 26 separate earmarks in three years costing scores of millions, with $413,250 eventually flowing into the Murtha coffers, according to the newspaper Roll Call and the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

And of course, the Democrats who took over Congress by promising to reform earmarks, didn't.

Q&A on Sharing the Mission

Q: I have employees who have not bought in to the mission here. I care a lot about what we do and I'm excited to come to work each day. A lot of them just punch the clock and do the minimum that's required. How do I get them to buy into a bigger mission than just collecting a paycheck?

A: Fortunately, most people want to work for something more than a paycheck. Your challenge is to tap into that desire.

First, you have to have some sort of mission at work that's worth caring about. It needs to be something noble, something people can be proud of working on and identifying with.

Second, as a leader you need to connect daily activities to that noble goal. When you give praise or make a point of noticing something, say more than "that was good work" - mention also that it was good because it supports that noble goal. (You have to be honest - empty or insincere praise stinks, and is obvious.) It could be "That was a great job - you were very patient with that complaining customer, and kept cool, and were very professional. You set a wonderful example for the newer sales clerks. That's the kind of service that will make us the best shoe store in the world."

Third, you need to have a genuine interest in your people - that creates the relationship between you and them that allows them to care about what you care about. Just as a carpenter needs to deeply understand her tools and materials, you as a leader need to deeply understand the specific individual human beings that make up your organization. And you should find in each one something to like and respect. This is a precondition for getting them to buy in to your vision.

OpinionJournal - Rambo's View

OpinionJournal - Rambo's View: "Dianne Feinstein's $4 billion earmark for Beverly Hills comes at the expense of America's veterans."

An amazing bit of politics. California's senators are actually going to take the opportunity to raise $4 billion away from America's veterans, in order to provide a lifestyle subsidy to the millionaire residents of West LA's mansions.

Because Democrats believe the rich need to be subsidized on the backs of veterans.

How incredibly selfish of the locals, and how un-statesman-like of the politicians.

Dope Smokers - WSJ.com

Dope Smokers - editorial from the Wall Street Journal finds the flaws in the plans to raise tobacco taxes:

"Cigarettes have become every pol's favorite tax target, and last year Trenton raised its cigarette tax to $2.575 per pack -- the highest state levy in the nation. Governor Jon Corzine forecast that the tax increase of 17.5 cents a pack would fetch $30 million in revenue to help balance the state's $1 billion deficit. Not quite. A new analysis by the Center for Policy Research of New Jersey finds that the state collected $23 million less revenue from tobacco taxes in Fiscal 2007 than it did the year before."

Ouch.

Raise the tax rate, and collect LESS in tax revenue. Hmmm.

Q&A on Silos

Q: I'm trying to work with some recruiters in my firm. I need them to help me fill a critical position. The last recruit wasn't a good fit, and we should have eliminated him as a candidate a lot earlier than we did. (We all realize now that this candidate - and how we handled him - was a failure.) I'm concerned the recruiters just don't understand my needs very well. They don't understand what sort of person I need. And I want our process to be different next time. Unfortunately their group and my group are in silos - we don't communicate well and don't understand each other. How can I best proceed?

A: Start first with building rapport. Breaking down the silo is your first job. The other challenges will be a lot easier to take on once you do that.

So, how do you start to reduce or eliminate the silos? One way to start is by increasing your level of trust and communication. (Sometimes humor can be used at this stage, if you're comfortable with that - it can help people to let go of some of their defensiveness.)

You have a silo when members of a group view each other as "us" and the rest of the firm as "them" - as in "they don't understand us" (and we don't understand them or their needs). Frequently, expectations are mis-set, and one of "them" disappoints us, or we disappoint them, and the mistrust grows.

In this case, take advantage of the recent failed recruitment. Call a meeting with your recruiters, and start off with group problem solving: brainstorming what went wrong, all the possible ways to get it right in future, and how to best proceed.

During this brainstorming, it's vital that you mention some things you personally did wrong or could have done better. This works on several levels:

First, when you admit an error, you give others permission to do the same. You're modeling positive behavior.

Second, admitting an error is vulnerable. We trust people who are willing to trust us, and you can demonstrate trust by allowing yourself to become vulnerable.

Third, your problem solving session will only be good if it brings up good issues - and that means you can't hold back. You have to talk about your mistakes.

Once you've finished the problem solving exercise, there should be a higher level of both trust and communication in the room. Use that to move on to the next step - share with them your vision of how the process should look in the future. Tell them what you look for in a recruit, contrasted with the failed recruit if necessary. Give them enough detail that they understand your needs in detail, and tell them why you need it.

One thing you've told me before is that you want to recruit for "soft" skills like the ability to work well with others - you value those higher than the "hard" technical skills. I'm pretty sure the recruiters don't know that, and don't know why you prefer that.

You have to tell them why you prefer candidates with those soft skills. Once they understand why, they can internalize your need and will do a better job finding the recruits who will fit your mold.

Consider the example of the steel workers who visited the bicycle factory. There isn't that much for the steel workers to understand about bicycles. The steel is the same steel it was before the visit. But somehow, seeing the customer using the product makes a big difference in the quality of the work. Workers who go on trips like that come back and do better work. The steel maker who visits the bike maker, comes back and makes better steel.

You need to help your recruiters see the word from their customer's perspective - your perspective.

We Have Met the Enemy, Again

We Have Met the Enemy, Again What the Deutsche Bank building tells us about what's wrong with America.

Henninger is, as usual, spot on:

The hyper-complex requirements and mindset reflected in the public record over 130 Liberty St. mirror the endless debate and litigation we've also layered into efforts to surveil and prosecute terrorists.

Yes, partisanship plays its part, but intellectual hubris and self-regard plays a larger part. We've got a society that's smarter than ever, but maybe too smart for its own good. Whether the problem before us is national security, the environment or protecting baby, we compulsively drive the system now to develop the most exquisite, complex procedures, which allow us to think ourselves both perfectly safe and ethically perfect.

Procedural perfectionism has been raised to religious status.

In other words, it's not the devil that's in the details - God is the details. All hail the details.

One really does get the impression that the Republic could fall and the word be cast back into the Stone Age, and certain (mostly Leftist) procedure freaks would be okay with that, just so long as every detail of the collapse of civilization met their criteria.

This is not to say that procedures are bad - I love good procedures and make my living following them and helping others devise good ones. One of the protections against another Leftist fetish, what Thomas Sowell calls Cosmic Justice, is to be found in the concept of procedural fairness (rather than a perfect fairness of outcomes, which would be unattainable).

The answer is unclear. Perhaps the (perhaps mythical) Icelandic tradition I once heard has it best, that once a year during the winter, the entire law is recited aloud to the people by the eldest and wisest. If a law is forgotten and none correct them, it passes out of the law. Of course, this would require that the law be short enough to read aloud (or memorize and recite) in a single winter, or even a single year. We couldn't even get through the tax code in that time...

Make Up Your Own Mine

Make Up Your Own Mine - An impoverished town strikes gold. George Soros and foreign environmentalists say, leave it in the ground - John Fund writes another excellent article about the angry knee-jerk Left that cares more about their own emotional self-stimulation than about facts or the well being of poor people:

The other side to the controversy is told in a new film that will never be shown on PBS, but is nonetheless rattling the environmental community. 'Mine Your Own Business' is a documentary by Irish filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. They conclude that the biggest threat to the people of Rosia Montana 'comes from upper-class Western environmentalism that seeks to keep them poor and unable to clean up the horrific pollution caused by Ceausescu's mining.'

Mr. McAleer, a former Financial Times journalist who has followed the mine battle for seven years, says he 'found that everything the environmentalists were saying about the project was misleading, exaggerated or quite simply false.'