Barnes & Conti Blog

Last month, The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “Don’t Dismiss Office Politics—Teach It.” The article eloquently states that people who succeed in their careers—and help their companies succeed—know how to play office politics that benefit themselves and their companies.

From the article:

When talented executives combine a knowledge of what their company needs with an ability to get things done, everyone benefits. Conversely, when a promising career falters because of poor political skills, companies have to spend time and money finding a replacement, and performance suffers in the meantime.

Being politically savvy is not about pushing others down or being untruthful to advance your own cause. Instead, it means building networks—relationships—with people inside and outside your company who can provide useful information and assistance. It means not picking fights over issues that aren’t critical. It means informing others in the company about your contributions and accomplishments, and asking for advice and help, particularly from those senior to you.*

We were delighted with many aspects of the article. Our Exercising Influence program has been teaching the skills necessary for mutually beneficial office politics for years. Influence skills are all about building relationships, networks, and getting things done. Just in case you’re reading about Exercising Influence for the first time, the program teaches influence through specific Expressive and Receptive influence behaviors.

Expressive behaviors such as “Refer to Goals and Benefits” and “Envision” build the kind of relationships that benefit everyone. Receptive behaviors, such as “Ask Open-Ended Questions” and “Identify with Other,” build trust in dealing with senior co-workers. Indirect influence is also important in office politics, especially the tactic of disengaging. When you disengage, you decide not to pick a fight. We like to explain disengaging as “living to influence another day.”

The complete article can be read by following this link. Here’s to hoping you can influence your way to successful office politics—and better business results.

*”Don’t Dismiss Office Politics—Teach It” by Jeffrey Pfeffer, The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2011

by Lauren Powers, Senior VP, Business Development

As I have been following the recent stories about the problems at Penn State, I have been trying to understand how so many people stepped away from doing the right thing. I found this aspect of the story almost as horrifying as the alleged acts of sexual abuse of a minor.

I am sure that the people who chose not to intervene directly and/or contact the authorities are basically good people, but within this close and somewhat isolated organization, they collectively made some very bad decisions. I know little about football, but I think this is an example of the negative side of an organizational culture at work. We define organizational culture as the “set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterize a company or organization and enable it to achieve its goals.”

What occurred here in relation to the operational norms of this culture? Division I Football is a relatively insular organization. Players and coaches “grow up” in it and there are few outside influences. It is a paternalistic, hierarchal organization led by a commanding leader. Its outcomes are measured in terms of wins and losses which translate to dollars. An athletic program often finds itself in a defensive position, fighting to secure its place in an academic setting in relation to other vested interests. With this organizational pressure, leaders and coaches may feel they are under a microscope and that their success is largely dependent upon how well they can manage others’ perceptions of their good intentions and important accomplishments. Read the rest of this entry »

Barnes & Conti CEO Kim Barnes and longtime friend of Barnes & Conti, Beverly Scott of Bev Scott Consulting collaborated on the 2nd edition of Consulting on the Inside: A practical guide for internal consultants. The book is published by ASTD Press and will be available this week, on February 18.

According to the publisher:

Consulting on the Inside, A Practical Guide for Internal Consultants by Beverly Scott and B. Kim Barnes, is a solid resource for internal consultants at all experience levels. Readers will better understand their role and discover many ways to improve their performance and make greater contributions to their organizations. This book includes advice on how to:

• maintain an outsider’s objectivity while applying an insider’s knowledge   of the organization
• build relationships while being up-front about challenges and issues
• design a role to fit the client’s needs and the organizational situation
• handle roadblocks and deal effectively with difficult clients
• market consulting services within the client organization

Readers will find a thorough examination of the eight phases of the consulting process, a comprehensive analysis of the differences between internal and external consultants, key skills for success in the internal consulting role and many personal stories and examples from internal consultants in fields ranging from organization development to information technology to marketing. Consulting on the Inside provides a complete toolbox for getting the job done, including tips and techniques, checklists, forms, sample agreements, and ready-to-use agendas.

Congratulations to Bev and Kim on the book! I’ll have a link up as soon as the book is available for purchase.

In another fascinating article on Bloomberg Business Week entitled “How to Make a Great Business Great,” Authors Mark Thompson and Brian Tracy share insights in the importance of investing in your company during times of recession, and how small companies are able to compete and even rival larger ones during economic downtimes. Mark Thompson says that the key is innovation.

From the article:

Mark Thompson: Most successful companies started small and took market share from larger competitors to succeed. Why should any small company be able to compete against big companies that have more money to spend on experienced people, better equipment, better distribution and service for customers, etc.? It shouldn’t be possible, but the one core competency that big companies avoid (and managers often sabotage, even while pretending to support it) is the one thing that makes little companies win. It’s innovation. All innovation requires experimentation and all experiments require failure. How many big companies tolerate failure? Would you like to be fired, demoted, or humiliated? Not likely. Managers in big companies avoid risk and failure. They think they can avoid it, but eventually it catches up with them. Small companies have no choice but to take risks that are relatively bigger (and [they] fail more often) than their larger competitors.

This is also true about individual people. According to our global research in 110 nations, successful people take risks and fail more often than unsuccessful people. Winners ultimately set themselves apart, innovate more, get smarter, more skilled over time, and get ahead because they make themselves vulnerable to risk. Ironically, unsuccessful people don’t worry enough about winning. They are more concerned about avoiding failure, which severely limits their ability to grow. (1)

Innovation takes risk, and risk takes failure. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote an article about Steve Jobs as an innovator and idea mover. There is an often told story—possibly apocryphal, but most likely not—that in the early days of Apple, Jobs was telling people that they weren’t failing enough! In other words, to come up with great ideas, you have to have failures, too.

Large companies can innovate too. We keep hearing good things from our Managing Innovation clients. With their permission, we’ll be sharing some of these successes with our readers.

1) “How to Make a Great Business Great” by Marshall Goldsmith, Bloomberg Business Week, November 19, 2010

The Drucker Lectures is a recent book collecting some of the lectures of the late management expert Peter Drucker. Bloomberg Businessweek recently published online excerpts from this book, which is a must-read for fans of the late Professor Drucker. My wish for this new year—and for many to come—is that more and more companies and businesses would heed the management expert about short-term opportunity:

The question that must constantly be asked is: “If we are doing something because we see the short-term opportunity, will it make it more difficult for us to obtain our long-term results? Or will it help? And vice versa.”

There’s an old medical proverb that says it doesn’t help much if a sick, old woman is going into surgery tomorrow to save her life and she dies during the night. But it also doesn’t help if she survives the night and dies during surgery. So you have to have short-term results and long-term results, and the two have to be compatible and yet they’re different. And so this is the challenging task ahead of us. What are results? How do you define them? How do you balance them?

Now the fashion is to look at quarterly earnings only. But go back to the 1950s, when General Electric brought in Ralph Cordiner as CEO. He reorganized GE, and tried to think through how to measure its results. And Cordiner basically operated on the assumption that shareholders didn’t matter.

This was the prevailing belief—and reality—up until very recently, up until the rise of the pension funds over the last 10 years or so. Now, having these big institutional investors owning such a very large share of big American companies is not a good thing because the pressure is always short term. I’ve seen more mistakes being made so that the stock will be up five points or what have you. And I think that this is a very real danger. (1)

Drucker saw mistakes made and genuine danger in focusing on the short-term in general, and focusing on short-term profits and stock prices in particular. Unfortunately, our publicly-traded companies are obsessed with the short-term: shareholders, quarterly profits, and stock prices above all else.

If the esteemed Peter Drucker couldn’t influence people to look more towards the long-term, it’s doubtful that we at Barnes & Conti could. We have, however, noted a certain amount of buzz around the concept of “strategic thinking.” We’ve also given our venerable Strategic Thinking program a full revision.

Read the rest of this entry »

In light of the tragic shooting in Tucson, Arizona this past weekend and President Obama’s call for “more civility in our public discourse,” I did a quick search through the Barnes & Conti archives to see what—if anything—I could find that was relevant.

Long-time readers of our newsletter might remember the Spring of 2005, when the topic was “Debate and Discourse in 2005.” I quote Barnes & Conti CEO Kim Barnes from that newsletter:

Picture this: an alien anthropologist lands on planet Earth in 2005. The alien makes a point of observing much of what passes for debate in the media, in academia, and in meeting and conference rooms of organizations. The alien might very well conclude that humans engage regularly in the sport of taking turns destroying one another’s ideas. To an alien who had never engaged in this peculiar “sport,” the rules of engagement and scoring system would hardly be obvious…

…Why, then, are so many “debates” characterized either by personal attack and ad hominem argument or, conversely, by public passivity and private cynicism?

…I suspect that all these negative characteristics are true—at least partly—because most of us have had very few opportunities to experience a truly constructive debate. The models we are exposed to are not generally ones we wish to emulate. Fear of conflict or retribution can silence dissent. Ideas are often passed along without being exposed to critical thinking—and some of them are bad ideas. Innovation is stifled when disagreement is not invited, encouraged, and supported. “Political correctness” becomes the enemy of excellence.

Kim Also offered ten ways to deal with unconstructive debate behaviors; I quote three of them below:

Dealing With Unconstructive Debate Behaviors (excerpt)

Some of what passes for debate in today’s polarized media sounds rather more like a screaming match or playground name-calling contest. Unfortunately, as more and more people are exposed to this style of (non) communication, some of it has filtered into corporate meeting rooms and teleconferences. You may one day find yourself facing such a situation, and it is best to be prepared. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind:

1. Keep your cool. Never allow an ad hominem argument or accusation to push your defensiveness buttons, or you may find yourself the focus of a feeding frenzy.
   Example: “What is the concern behind that question?”
2. Stay rational. Your adversary would prefer to fight the issue on an emotional or polarized basis. Your best offense is to remain perfectly reasonable.
   Example: “That’s an interesting point of view…how did you arrive at that conclusion?”
3. Ask the other person to clarify his or her position or rationale. Do this calmly but persistently until you think you understand it (even though you don’t agree).
   Example: “What is the basis for that position? Explain your rationale to me.”

You can read both articles in their entirety on our website.

Let me conclude by quoting President Obama’s speech last night:

“…let’s remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.”

This past October, Bloomberg Businessweek ran an article that provided rare insight into one of today’s innovators, Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The article was in the form of an interview with former Apple CEO John Sculley, the man who was, albeit briefly, Steve Jobs’ boss. According to Sculley, Job’s way of working—of moving the idea into action—was to start with the industrial design, and start with that from the user’s perspective:

“Steve had this perspective that always started with the user’s experience; and that industrial design was an incredibly important part of that user impression…”

“Steve’s brilliance is his ability to see something and then understand it and then figure out how to put it into the context of his design methodology—everything is design.”

Sculley, of course, has not been with Apple for a number of years. Yet, he cites  evidence to prove that Steve Jobs continues to work from the design first:

” …A friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day. And this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple), and as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking, because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.”

How does this “work from the design” play out into moving ideas into hugely successful products and services? Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you who didn’t get our holiday newsletter, let me quote an excerpt from Kim Barnes’ holiday greeting to all our friends, fans, clients, and colleagues:

This has been an interesting year for many of us. (I am reminded of the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times!”)  It has been a year of change and loss as well as excitement and opportunity…

One of my favorite and most uplifting moments this year came in a conversation with one of our partners in Chile. He mentioned that the amazingly quick—though still incomplete—recovery from the earthquake, their success in the football World Cup, and finally the extraordinary rescue of the trapped miners gave Chileans a new view of themselves. Having lived through a terrible dictatorship for so many years, doing things “the Chilean way” had been a rather sarcastic term—but now it had become positive. My colleague smiled and I was struck by how quickly it had been possible to turn attitudes around. Of course, things there have changed for the better slowly and surely over a period of years, but it took these dramatic events for people to catch up with themselves.

My wish for everyone for the new year is that we all look down, or up, or out, and notice that things are improving—though far too slowly—and that we allow ourselves to celebrate what we have and what we have learned. We are wiser, perhaps a little tougher and more thoughtful than before, a little less prone to wishful thinking—but maybe more open to new ideas and change…

We wish everyone a joyous holiday season and a happy, healthy, prosperous and fascinating new year—with a new, can-do view of ourselves, our families, our businesses, our nations, and our world.

Again, happy holidays to all! The blog will back after the New Year.

For those of you who are not subscribers, the Barnes & Conti Holiday Newsletter—along with our “virtual feast” of six tempting recipes—is available online. To further entice you to read the entire newsletter, here is one of my favorite articles from it, by Lauren Powers, our Senior Vice President of Business Development. Enjoy!

The Smoking Oven: Lessons in Gratitude
by Lauren Powers

I had the most unexpectedly wonderful Thanksgiving despite having no oven. For that, I am grateful!

On the Tuesday before the holiday, I decided to use the self-clean function of my one-year-old-oven—one year to the day; this would become a very important time frame! As luck would have it, 40 minutes into the cleaning cycle—and after a lot of heat and smoke—my oven blew out the electricity in our home and in my range.

Just as the smoke was pouring and the electricity was blowing, my husband walked into the house with a fresh 20-pound turkey from the Farmer’s Market. The big bird was for the dinner we would be cooking and serving for 14 people at our home in just two days. No biggie, I thought… we’ll figure it out. I remained remarkably calm, for me.

I called the appliance store, got referred to the appliance repair service, and had someone come out on Wednesday. We learned that our warranty was up that Tuesday, and we just made it to the day…so here goes my my first expression of immense gratitude…the defunct oven was still under warranty! Naturally, they needed to order a part, so our home oven was not going to be available to cook the twenty-pounder. No worries, I had a plan B. Read the rest of this entry »

Courage and Croissants

Suzanne Saxe-Roux is a longtime friend of Barnes & Conti’s who recently published a book entitled Courage and Croissants: Inspired Joyful Living. Suzanne is a consultant, coach, and speaker who specializes in life/work and lifestyle issues. We’d like to tell you about the book, not only because Suzanne is a friend, but because it deals with an issue that is important to all of us at Barnes & Conti: joie de vivre. (Our annual holiday newsletter, with recipes and wine recommendations reflects that. Look for the holiday newsletter in a week or two).

Courage and Croissants also appears to be about change management, albeit in a very personal way. Suzanne and her husband made a lifestyle change that some of us only dream about. Here’s a brief description of the book: