The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

How much thinking is involved when you get into your car and drive back out of your driveway? Unless it is one of your first few times performing this activity then you are not likely to be pulling up memories of other times you have backed out of your driveway nor are you consciously making various decisions such as opening the car door, turning the key, pressing on the break and so on. Instead our brains are running on auto-pilot because these activities have become habits. This is one of the most important concepts regarding habits that readers will come across in The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, which is the highly acclaimed, bestselling book by Charles Duhigg.

Don’t Get Fooled Twice

Much has been written regarding how to conduct post-project assessments with the goal of gathering best practices and lessons learned. In future blogs I will add my own ideas and experiences regarding this critical process as well. But before we get there, I don’t think near enough has been written (or has stuck with us) regarding how to make sure an organization doesn’t learn the same lesson multiple times. Unfortunately I have seen this happen on too many occasions in the past, so here are some of my tips to prevent an organization from getting fooled twice.

Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies by Jim Stengel

Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies is a new book by Jim Stengel that provides a detailed review of how creating a stong brand ideal is correlated with long term organizational success, along with providing steps for implementing and maintianing a strong brand idea. I found this book to be an intriguing meeting of Jim Collins’ Good to Great (business success factors) and Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy(study of neuromarketing). Unlike the Collins’ “Great” series of books which identify successful companies and then draws conclusions on what made them great, Stengel set out to prove that building a strong brand ideal is correlated to organizational success. The author approaches this goal by providing results of his research and several case studies which show the dramatic impacts of building or re-building a strong brand ideal.

Multipliers: A Q&A with author Liz Wiseman

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman demonstrates how Multipliers can have a resoundingly positive and profitable effect on organizations—getting more done with fewer resources, developing and attracting talent, and cultivating new ideas and energy to drive organizational change and innovation. I recently had a chance to connect with Liz and ask her a few questions about her bestselling book.

Thanks Liz for taking time from your busy schedule to answer these questions.

Q: In the "Instill Ownership and Accountability" section of Multipliers, you recommend letting people remain accountable for their actions and experience consequences. This is a message I experience difficulty in applying since typical management training says that managers should protect their staff. Under what situation, if any, do you believe managers should attempt to protect their staff from the consequences of their actions?

A: This question is at the heart of the art of good management.  It is certainly naive to suggest that managers should just let their people fail and experience the sting of real learning.  But, I find that in working with management teams on this question, they find that there is far more room for experimentation that they initially thought.  Here's a quick mental exercise:   Take out two pieces of paper.  On one, make a list of everywhere it is OK to let someone live out a mistake or fail. On the other, make a list of where it isn't OK and you need to intervene.  Focus on the criteria.  Challenge yourself by making the second list no more than half as long as the first list.  My guess is that two things will happen:

1. You will see that there is a lot more room to experiment that you might feel and

2. You will develop a short set of criteria that you can use to recognize when you need to step in. 

Typically this criteria is something like, "when it is business ending, life ending, or career ending (for them or you!)."  Often the criteria for when it is OK to let failure happen sounds like this: "when the opportunity for learning is bigger than the cost to the business." 

Doing this exercise as a management team can be a powerful way to shape the culture and the environment for learning and performance.

The art of management comes in finding this right balance.  When is the mistake too costly and might seriously jeopardize the business or the person?  I like to think of this as finding the right size wave — one where someone will learn from their mistake and not be swept out to sea!  Check out my new Right Size Wave video for the full story.

Lean Project Management: A Q&A with author Larry Leach

Lean Project Management: Eight Principles For Success by Larry Leach takes you through all of the steps to plan and execute projects using the exciting new Lean and Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) methods. I recently had a chance to connect with Larry and ask him a few questions about his latest book.

Thanks Larry for taking the time from your busy schedule to address these questions.

 
Q: One of the goals of Lean Project Management (LPM) is to eliminate waste in projects and as you note in your book, one of the biggest wastes is initiating projects that produce goods/services that do not meet customer needs. Along those lines I have rarely encountered organizations that follow a formal process to review in-flight projects and were willing to kill projects that were not on the path to meeting customer needs. Why do you think organizations are unwilling to kill in-flight project and how should we address this issue?

A: My direct experience isn't with product development projects where this issue predominates although I have run into cases where projects shouldn't have started in the first place. The problem with unwillingness to kill projects may relate to some well-known psychological phenomena called the "Sunk Cost Fallacy" and the "Endowment Effect". One way I can see to overcome it is with periodic reviews to specific criteria by people who have no history with the projects and an explicit evaluation method that only allows them to assess the project as if it were a new investment to start at the time of the evaluation.