Agile Management

"[O]ne of the biggest wastes these days..is waste of talent, that a lot of people in the organization are capable of being far more innovative than they’re ever being asked to do."

"They don’t want to be 10 layers below a CEO just executing what some middle manager is telling them they should be doing. They want to be involved in important projects, feeling like a team, and feeling like they’re making important contributions."

"[I]f you create a great team, they are capable of doing far more than most management teams think they are capable of doing today."

"[T]he biggest challenge for traditional management– who wants to have a command control, hierarchical mode of working with linear timelines and dates and arbitrary commitments that are forced on the workers– this is like a total shift, because coming out of the lean context, lean is a pull system."

"[I]t means that a senior executive has to stop giving command and control orders to what a team should be doing. And they’ve got to stop fragmenting their best workers over so many projects. It is not uncommon for me to run into very capable senior executives who have no more than 5% or 10% of their time allocated to myriad projects, and that’s just catastrophic."

"[Y]ou [have to] understand the dangers of multitasking, what that does to the quality of the products, to the morale of the workers, to the productivity of the teams, multi-tasking is a killer. So we have to teach executives that it is not a good thing to fragment the workers. It’s not a good thing to overturn their decisions. It’s not a good thing to put 50 people on a team as opposed to nine people on a team."

"[G]ive the senior executives enough of an education that they don’t unintentionally kill the effort, that they don’t overturn their decisions, that they don’t interfere, that they don’t pull team members off partway through the project."

Understanding Agile Management. (2016). Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on April 23, 2017 from https://hbr.org/ideacast/2016/04/understanding-agile-management

Technical Interviewing is a Broken Process

"After drawing on data from thousands of technical interviews, it’s become clear to us that technical interviewing is a process whose results are nondeterministic and often arbitrary. We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process..."

"[C]oming up with interview questions and processes is really hard, so despite their differing needs, smaller companies often take their cues from the larger players, not realizing that companies like Google are successful at hiring because the work they do attracts an assembly line of smart, capable people... and that their success at hiring is often despite their hiring process and not because of it. So you end up with a de facto interviewing cargo cult, where smaller players blindly mimic the actions of their large counterparts and blindly hope for the same results."

"The worst part is that these results may not even be repeatable…"

"After looking at thousands of interviews.., we’ve discovered something alarming: interviewee performance from interview to interview varied quite a bit, even for people with a high average performance."

"At the end of the day, because technical interviewing is indeed a game, like all games, it takes practice to improve. However, unless you’ve been socialized to expect and be prepared for the game-like aspect of the experience, it’s not something that you can necessarily intuit. And if you go into your interviews expecting them to be indicative of your aptitude at the job, which is, at the outset, not an unreasonable assumption, you will be crushed the first time you crash and burn. But the process isn’t a great or predictable indicator of your aptitude. And on top of that, you likely can’t tell how you’re doing even when you do well."

"A noisy, non-deterministic interview process does no favors to either candidates or companies. Both end up expending a lot more effort to get a lot less signal than they ought, and in a climate where software engineers are at such a premium, noisy interviews only serve to exacerbate the problem."

"[I]n the absence of a radical shift in how we vet technical ability, we’ve learned that drawing on aggregate performance is much more meaningful than a making such an important decision based on one single, arbitrary interview. Not only can aggregate performance help correct for an uncharacteristically poor performance, but it can also weed out people who eventually do well in an interview by chance or those who, over time, simply up and memorize Cracking the Coding Interview. [E]ven after just a handful of interviews, we have a much better picture of what someone is capable of and where they stack up than a single company would after a single interview, and aggregate data tells a much more compelling, repeatable story than one, arbitrary data point."

Lerner, Aline. (2016), You can't fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview. Interviewing.io. Retrieved on April 21, 2017 from http://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-without-fixing-the-technical-interview/

Lerner, Aline. (2016), After a lot more data, technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary. Interviewing.io. Retrieved on April 21, 2017 from http://blog.interviewing.io/you-cant-fix-diversity-in-tech-without-fixing-the-technical-interview/

Collaboration, Alignment and Distributed Decision-Making for Product Success

"[S]iloed product and technology teams lead to missed opportunities, project delays or sometimes straight-up project failure."

"When such teams are not aligned in process and execution, differences in vision and capability are not recognized until time, money and brainpower have already been spent. That’s far too late to discover they don’t see eye to eye on a product’s feasibility or potential value to the company."

"Very early on in the innovation process, product managers must partner with technical experts who can provide a real-world perspective into the scope of a proposed new product."

"Innovative companies must place a strong priority on distributed decision making whereby many people with skills in different areas are employed to come to a consensus on which products to pursue and how to proceed. Be forewarned that such processes require highly skilled technical personnel and a clear plan for how the group will come to actionable decisions. Establishing a highly competent product owner who can serve as a linchpin in the product lifecycle, removing organizational gaps and ensuring a more comprehensive product vision is realized, can help facilitate that process."

Digital Innovation Best Practices: Early Partnerships Ensure Success. (2017). Magenic. Retrieved on April 20, 2017 from https://magenic.com/media/2247/wp_mgnc-digital-innovation-best-practices-early-partnerships.pdf

Agile Model of HR

"[A]gile principles are key to supporting the kind of continuous learning, continuous talent acquisition, and transparent processes that enable organizations to attract, develop, and engage talent in the twenty-first century."

"The 'Agile Model of HR' states that human resources' job is not just to implement controls and standards, and drive execution—but rather to facilitate and improve organizational agility. This changes HR's mission and focus. Driving agility means driving programs that create adaptability, innovation, collaboration, and speed."

"[A]gile HR strategies include:

• Training leaders at all levels of the company to act as hands-on coaches, not 'managers'
• Designing the organization into small, high-performance teams that set their own targets
• Creating customer interactions within all groups and functions in the company
• Delivering a strong, focused mission and values to keep everyone aligned
• Creating systems with lots of transparent information, i.e., what are our goals, who is working on what project, who are our experts
• Implementing 'systems of engagement' not just 'systems of record,' i.e., collaboration, information-sharing, project management
• Building a focus on continuous learning and learning culture at all levels
• Implementing a strong external employment brand that attracts 'the right type' of people
• Hiring and promoting experts, not general managers
• Encouraging and teaching people to give each other direct feedback
• Creating programs for peer-to-peer rewards and recognition
• Developing programs to foster diversity in teams"

What is Agile HR? And is it right for you?. (2016). HRSG. Retrieved on April 7, 2017 from http://resources.hrsg.ca/blog/what-is-agile-hr-and-is-it-right-for-you

Agile Model of HR. (n.d.). Bersin by Deloitte. Retrieved on April 7, 2017 from https://www.bersin.com/Lexicon/details.aspx?id=15373

Bersin, Josh. (2012). Building the Agile Enterprise: A New Model for HR. Bersin by Deloitte. Retrieved on April 7, 2017 from https://www.slideshare.net/jbersin/impact-2012-keynote-josh-bersin

Jack Welch on the Role of HR

"HR is the driving force behind what makes a winning team. We make the argument that the team that fields the best players wins. HR's involved in making sure we field the best players."

Unleashing Productivity

Eliminate Bureaucratic Drag
"More people are working in big, bureaucratic organizations than ever before. Yet there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation."

"The average company loses more than 25% of its productive power to organizational drag, processes that waste time and prevent people from getting things done.... This often happens as a company grows, as the tendency is to put processes in place to replace judgement."

"A myriad of studies have documented the time lost to low-value management processes, from budgeting to the performance review....[A]s much as 50% of all internal compliance activity is of questionable value."

Create Pockets of Excellence
"The average company follows a method of unintentional egalitarianism, spreading star talent across all of the roles.... Companies like Google and Apple, however, follow an intentionally non-egalitarian method. 'They select a handful of roles that are business critical, affecting the success of the company’s strategy and execution, and they fill 95% of these roles with A-level quality'...."

"In addition, rewards were applied to team performance; no one person on the team could receive an exceptional performance appraisal unless the entire team did."

"'For every member of the team that is not a star player, productivity declines'.... 'If 100% of the team is star players, productivity is extremely high.'"

Raise Workforce Engagement
"An engaged employee is 44% more productive than a satisfied worker, but an employee who feels inspired at work is nearly 125% more productive than a satisfied one.... The companies that inspire more employees perform better than the rest."

Vozza, Stephanie. (2017). Why Employees At Apple and Google Are More Productive. Fast Company. Retrieved on April 3, 2017 from https://www.fastcompany.com/3068771/how-employees-at-apple-and-google-are-more-productive

Hamel, Gary and Zanini, Michele. (2016). Excess Management Is Costing U.S. $3 Trillion Per Year. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on April 3, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2016/09/excess-management-is-costing-the-us-3-trillion-per-year

The Future of Work

On Hierarchy
"In the old way of thinking, organizations were shaped like pyramids with all of the power and communication flowing from the top to the bottom. That meant that executives controlled everything about the company and the smaller workers at the bottom were simply powerless cogs in the machine. The system may have worked well in the olden days of agriculture and manufacturing, but it is completely outdated today. Hierarchy breeds bureaucracy and red tape and makes it difficult for anyone to have a voice. Instead, organizations are looking to flatten out and to give power to employees at all levels."

On Work Hours
"A continuing concern for employees in 2016 is the increased need for flexibility. [...] With the availability of technology, remote offices and telecommunications, there is no reason why employees cannot be offered flexibility by employers."

"Employees are much more productive when they can choose a work schedule and location that fits their lifestyle, whether that's working early mornings from home or evenings from a shared work space. The workplace is increasingly global, which means employers needs to be flexible to make sure they employees can work and connect with whoever they need to."

On Annual Performance Reviews
"HR managers don't find the reviews effective, and they can often be incredibly stressful to employees. After all, can a single once-yearly meeting really dictate your workplace success and pay? Instead, forward-thinking organizations are moving to more frequent conversations that are less formal. These real-time check-ins allow employees and managers to touch base to discuss projects and get feedback in a way that is more accessible and useful to implementing change right away."

Morgan, Jacob. (2017). 5 Workplace Practices That Are on Their Way Out. Inc.. Retrieved on March 30, 2017 from https://www.inc.com/jacob-morgan/5-work-practices-that-are-on-their-way-out.html

Young Entrepreneur Council. (2015). 10 Workplace Trends That Will Change the Way You Manage. Inc.. Retrieved on March 30, 2017 from https://www.inc.com/young-entrepreneur-council/10-workplace-trends-that-will-change-the-way-you-manage.html

Lessons from the Gig Economy

"The most impactful lesson that traditional companies can learn from the gig economy is to judge all workers, including employees, on their results, not on when and where they do their work."

"Not one study suggests that working in an office eight hours a day, five days a week maximizes employee productivity, satisfaction, or performance. In fact, any data that exists on work in an office reveals that most employees aren’t engaged, waste a lot of time in the office not working, and that employee underperformance persists despite the omnipresence of management. Even worse, the direct costs of maintaining the traditional office-based workplace are high. CBRE estimates that the typical company in the U.S. spends upward of $12,000 per employee per year for office space. It’s hard to find a return-on-investment case for office space, and much harder still to find any company that makes a compelling one."

"Study after study after study demonstrate that independent, remote workers are more productive, satisfied, and engaged than their office-bound colleagues. Recent surveys of 8,000 workers by McKinsey’s Global Institute and nearly 900 independent workers by Future Workplace and Field Nation find that those workers, freed from the constraints of office life, report higher levels of satisfaction and greater productivity. These results aren’t surprising since remote work eliminates the wasted time of commuting, the stress of constant exposure to office politics, and the death of the workday by a thousand paper cuts of interruptions and meetings."

"[M]ost managers enjoy working at a company in which employees are managed by time and place. After all, it’s pretty easy to see who is at their desk between 9 and 5. It’s much harder to develop, measure, and evaluate the specific value and results that each employee produces. Managers will have to work a lot harder under a system that focuses on tracking performance, instead of time in an office chair."

"Labor is the most expensive and valuable resource at most firms. Managing this resource by time and place is a crude, empirically unproven, inefficient, and costly approach. The biggest lessons that companies can learn from the gig economy are to separate work from the office, and to measure employees based on what they produce, deliver and solve, not the hours they spend in the office. Put simply, companies need to stop measuring what doesn’t matter, and start measuring what does."

Mulcahy, Diane. (2017). Will the Gig Economy Make the Office Obsolete?.  Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on March 28, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2017/03/will-the-gig-economy-make-the-office-obsolete

Steve Jobs On Leadership, Management and Hiring

"The greatest people are self-managing. They don't need to be managed. Once they know that to do, they will go, figure out how to do it. They don't need to be managed at all. What they need is a common vision. That is what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it and getting consensus on the common vision."

Cognitive Assessments More Reliable Than Interviews At Predicting Employee Success

"Tricia Prickett and Neha Gada-Jain, two psychology students at the University of Toledo, collaborated with their professor Frank Bernieri and reported in a 2000 study that judgments made in the first 10 seconds of an interview could predict the outcome of the interview.

The problem is, these predictions from the first 10 seconds are useless.

They create a situation where an interview is spent trying to confirm what we think of someone, rather than truly assessing them. Psychologists call this confirmation bias, “the tendency to search for, interpret, or prioritize information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses.” Based on the slightest interaction, we make a snap, unconscious judgment heavily influenced by our existing biases and beliefs. Without realizing it, we then shift from assessing a candidate to hunting for evidence that confirms our initial impression."

"In other words, most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds."

"In 1998, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter published a meta-analysis of 85 years of research on how well assessments predict performance. They looked at 19 different assessment techniques and found that typical, unstructured job interviews were pretty bad at predicting how someone would perform once hired.

Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance. This is somewhat ahead of reference checks (explaining 7 percent of performance), ahead of the number of years of work experience (3 percent)."

"The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it."

"The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent). In contrast to case interviews and brainteasers, these are actual tests with defined right and wrong answers, similar to what you might find on an IQ test. They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability will make most people successful in most jobs."

"Last year’s Wall Street Journal story on the legal implications of personality testing received substantial circulation. And it shed light on some of the limitations of personality testing: an employee’s personality does not predict whether the person can learn the job tasks quickly or think critically.

With the average length of an employee’s job tenure at three (3) years for employees between the ages of 25-34, it’s increasingly important to identify job applicants who can be effective on the job, quickly.

Hiring managers will turn to objective pre-employment tests that can evaluate whether a candidate can do the job or learn the job quickly, such as Cognitive Tests and Work Sample (Simulation) tests.

Personnel Testing Council presenter Dr. Scott Highhouse reminded a group of practitioners in November that cognitive assessments are even more reliable than structured interviews at predicting employee success."

Bock, Lazlo. (2015). Here's Google's Secret to Hiring the Best People. Wired Business, Retrieved on March 21, 2017 from https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/

Appelman, Shoa. (2015). 5 Pre-Employment Test Trends You Need To Know About. TLNT Talent Management and HR, Retrieved on March 21, 2017 from https://www.eremedia.com/tlnt/5-pre-employment-test-trends-you-need-to-know-about/

Empowering Knowledge Workers

"ROWE (results only work environment) is a fantastic framework that needs to be adopted in places employing knowledge workers. You should be measuring the output of your workers, not the amount of time you can see them sitting in your office. [...] If you really think your employees will not be working if you cannot look over their shoulder to check, you have the wrong way of looking at the relationship with your employees... You should be hiring people who are engaged by their work and believe in the company’s mission. If people slack off when you aren’t watching them, your company has a disease, and you have discovered a symptom. You cannot treat this symptom and expect the disease to be cured."

"In the case of working from home/remote work, some employees do not do their best work from home, or simply don’t like it. That is fine—but you should trust your employees and treat them like adults. Let them make the call for themselves. Remove the training wheels and let them fail. If they cannot succeed in a hands off environment, do you really think babysitting them is going to work?"

"In 'Introduce Process Only As A Last Resort,' we look at how process often times helps the bad and hurts the good. Bad actors in an organization will figure out what the rules and the process are and follow them to a letter. Then they’ll find a way to slack off within these boundaries."

"Before introducing new process, ask yourself and those in your organization, what is the problem we’re trying to solve? Is there any way we can solve this problem without creating a new system? Even something as simple as a basic rule can subvert a team member’s intrinsic motivation. Think of it this way: if you hand fed someone everyday of their life, this individual would be reliant on you feeding them to survive. They would not have discovered that they need to find a food source 3+ times a day in order to survive. They might eventually figure it out, but it would be a challenging transition. It would require a much more conscious effort to stay satiated and able to focus on other goals."

"Without process everywhere, it makes the lives of management harder. This is one of the reasons middle managers love process. However, the goal of an organization should not to be to provide cushy jobs for middle managers. This job should be hard, and it is not for everyone. It requires people skills, leadership, and an almost super human ability to stay in tune with a team. It is very hard to find good leaders who can do this job well. [...] Bad middle managers can utilize the burdensome process to their advantage just as easily as bad actors on the front lines. Great leaders do not need rules or process. Those who follow them do so willingly, and do amazing things with their autonomy. They relay the right information back from the front lines, good or bad, and make key suggestions which often make or break the outcome of battles."

"Fight the introduction of process at all costs. Empower your employees and your fellow team members by avoiding it. Believe in the people around you, and if they fail, keep the safety net just harsh enough that a lesson will be learned. Counter intuitively, less process will help your organization run smoother, and ensure it is filled with the right kind of people."

Lhert, Yan. (2017). If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely, you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place. Quartz. Retrieved on March 17, 2016 from https://qz.com/891537/if-you-dont-trust-your-employees-to-work-remotely-you-shouldnt-have-hired-them-in-the-first-place/ 

Lhert, Yan. (2016). Introduce Process Only As A Last Resort. Medium. Retrieved on March 17, 2017 from https://medium.com/@yanismydj/introduce-process-only-as-a-last-resort-21bd25e53eb#.s9ze5kgv6

A Culture of Learning and Innovation

"A 'learning culture' is an organization-wide belief that the company’s strategy, mission, and operations can continuously be improved through an ongoing process of individual and organizational learning. It includes a set of investments, programs, and processes to study areas of weakness, explore causes, and exploit opportunities to improve and learn at all times and at all levels."

"A sustainable culture of innovation requires organisation-wide commitment. It must be driven from the top-down. Executives, managers and people leaders all have a role to play to endorse creativity, idea-sharing and collaboration. Although most organisations encouraged creativity and innovation as a corporate value, for many it wasn’t underpinned by other aspects required to create a thriving culture of innovation. Absent for many was a culture that promoted risk-taking and entrepreneurial behaviour, and an environment of trust in which employees could challenge existing assumptions, try new ideas, and fail."

"Recognizing and rewarding innovation is key to establishing a culture of innovation. There was a mismatch between the number of organisations that say they recognise and reward innovation, and those with established performance management practices for doing so. This suggests that companies are willing to adopt innovative processes without the support of HR. Innovation cannot be truly optimised without ongoing, iterative feedback. Despite a market shift in emphasis from annual performance reviews to continuous feedback, the majority of companies aren’t there yet."

Skilbeck, Rebecca. (2017). Driving a Culture of Innovation. PageUp Talent Lab. Retrieved on March 13, 2017 from https://www.pageuptalentlab.com/driving-culture-innovation/

Learning Culture. (n.d.). Bersin by Deloitte. Retrieved on March 13, 2017 from http://www.bersin.com/lexicon/Details.aspx?id=13116

Time to Ditch Annual Performance Reviews?

"When it comes to workplace events that produce resentment and anxiety, few score higher than the big annual performance review. Calls to end this time-consuming and often unproductive practice have gone unheeded — until now. Recently, Adobe, Kelly Services, GE, Deloitte and PwC have ended them, and the rippling out to smaller firms and other sectors appears to be underway. To which many say: good riddance."

"Other companies are rethinking their practices, too. Accenture’s 330,000 employees are undergoing what CEO Pierre Nanterme has called a “massive revolution” in which timely, personalized employee feedback is replacing annual evaluations and rankings. Whether you agree or disagree with UCLA researcher Samuel Culbert’s assessment that performance reviews are “a curse on corporate America,” it’s nonetheless clear that they’re falling out of favor."

"Companies such as Juniper and Adobe stopped giving people a one-to-five rating or evaluating employees on a “performance curve,” also known as the “forced ranking” approach. They were still differentiating performance in various ways, and still using a pay-for-performance approach, just not through a simple rating system. 

By early 2015, around 30 large companies, representing over 1.5 million employees, were following a similar path. No longer defining performance by a single number, these companies were emphasizing ongoing, quality conversations between managers and their teams."

"To my way of thinking, a one-side-accountable, boss-administered review is little more than a dysfunctional pretense. It's a negative to corporate performance, an obstacle to straight-talk relationships, and a prime cause of low morale at work. Even the mere knowledge that such an event will take place damages daily communications and teamwork."

"Once-a-year goals are too “batched” for a real-time world, and conversations about year-end ratings are generally less valuable than conversations conducted in the moment about actual performance. 

But the need for change didn’t crystallize until we decided to count things. Specifically, we tallied the number of hours the organization was spending on performance management—and found that completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings consumed close to 2 million hours a year. As we studied how those hours were spent, we realized that many of them were eaten up by leaders’ discussions behind closed doors about the outcomes of the process. We wondered if we could somehow shift our investment of time from talking to ourselves about ratings to talking to our people about their performance and careers—from a focus on the past to a focus on the future."

Buckingham, Marcus and Goodall, Ashley. (2015). Reinventing Performance Management. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on March 8, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management

Duggan, Kris. (2015). Why The Annual Performance Review Is Going Extinct. The Future of Work. Retrieved on March 8. 2017 from  https://www.fastcompany.com/3052135/the-future-of-work/why-the-annual-performance-review-is-going-extinct

Rock, David and Jones, Beth. (2015). Why More and More Companies Are Ditching Performance Ratings. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on March 8, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2015/09/why-more-and-more-companies-are-ditching-performance-ratings

The End of Annual Performance Reviews: Are the Alternatives Any Better?. (2016). Knowledge@Wharton. Retrieved on March 8. 2017 from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-end-of-annual-performance-reviews/

Want to Raise Productivity? Let Employees Work From Home

"The results we saw at Ctrip blew me away. Ctrip was thinking that it could save money on space and furniture if people worked from home and that the savings would outweigh the productivity hit it would take when employees left the discipline of the office environment. Instead, we found that people working from home completed 13.5% more calls than the staff in the office did—meaning that Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. They also quit at half the rate of people in the office—way beyond what we anticipated. And predictably, at-home workers reported much higher job satisfaction."

"One-third of the productivity increase, we think, was due to having a quieter environment, which makes it easier to process calls. At home people don’t experience what we call the “cake in the break room” effect. Offices are actually incredibly distracting places. The other two-thirds can be attributed to the fact that the people at home worked more hours. They started earlier, took shorter breaks, and worked until the end of the day. They had no commute. They didn’t run errands at lunch. Sick days for employees working from home plummeted. Search “working remotely” on the web, and everything that comes up will be supernegative and say that telecommuters don’t work as hard as people in the office. But actually, it’s quite the opposite."

Bloom, Nicholas. (2014). To Raise Productivity, Let More Employees Work from Home. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on March 2, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-employees-work-from-home

Making Remote Work Work

"Hire the right people. Having remote team members requires that we hire people who can deliver technically while working independently. At the same time, the fact that we do not have to maintain physical offices leaves us room to pay higher wages than others and attract top talent."

"Focus on outcomes. After spending as much effort as we do in bringing the right people into the firm, it only makes sense to set them free. The first and most important step in doing this is to set expectations. We tell our new teammates exactly what outcomes matter to us, and reward them for achieving and exceeding those outcomes."

"Help employees choose, and be responsible for, their own adventure. By determining the right floor and not restricting the ceiling, and by paying for value (once they exceed their outcome, consultants are paid a commission proportional to the additional work they deliver), we put the choice of how hard to work in a consultant’s hands."

"Outside of client work, we allow teammates to invest in other areas, and even provide them resources when required. For instance, we often announce an innovation budget and invite applications to pilot ideas. As a result, our teammates voluntarily design new practice areas, conduct cutting-edge leadership research, and write books. We’ve noticed that our team members adopt a strong sense of commitment to the responsibilities they take on and do not abandon them when the going gets tough. They feel true ownership. Our leadership team ensures that this balance between choice and commitment, and the value of owning the outcome, is a respected, celebrated cultural attribute."

"Centralize thoughtfully. We focus on letting our team members be the “CEOs” of their professional lives, but we have learned over time that not every aspect of choice adds value. For example, we previously enabled consultants to choose their own health care plan providers, and even set up their home office the way they wanted, but have since moved to a company plan and standard IT package to launch our team. This makes their lives easier without taking away the choices that truly matter. While there are more instances of such centralization, our leadership team maintains a very high bar for such decisions because too much control can erode mutual trust."

Street, Randy, Wang, Dina, and Tetali, Vamsi. (2017). What 20 years as a Remote Organization Has Taught Us About Managing Remote Teams. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on February 27, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2017/02/what-20-years-as-a-remote-organization-has-taught-us-about-managing-remote-teams

Learning to Learn

"The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage."

"Learning organizations are skilled at five main activities: systematic problem solving, experimentation with new approaches, learning from their own experience and past history, learning from the experiences and best practices of others, and transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization."

"Learning organizations are not built overnight. Most successful examples are the products of carefully cultivated attitudes, commitments, and management processes that have accrued slowly and steadily over time. Still, some changes can be made immediately. Any company that wishes to become a learning organization can begin by taking a few simple steps.

The first step is to foster an environment that is conducive to learning. There must be time for reflection and analysis, to think about strategic plans, dissect customer needs, assess current work systems, and invent new products. Learning is difficult when employees are harried or rushed; it tends to be driven out by the pressures of the moment. Only if top management explicitly frees up employees’ time for the purpose does learning occur with any frequency. That time will be doubly productive if employees possess the skills to use it wisely. Training in brainstorming, problem solving, evaluating experiments, and other core learning skills is therefore essential."

de Geus, Arie P. (1988). Planning as Learning. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on February 19, 2017 from https://hbr.org/1988/03/planning-as-learning

Garvin, David A. (1993). Building a Learning Organization. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on February 19, 2017 from https://hbr.org/1993/07/building-a-learning-organization

Knowledge-based View (KBV) of the Firm

The essential elements of the KBV can be summarized as follows:

• Knowledge is the most important resource and factor of production.
• Performance differences between firms exist because of differences in firms’ stock of knowledge and capabilities in using and developing knowledge.
• Organizations exist to create, transfer, and transform knowledge into competitive advantage.
• Knowledge is related to humans.
• Individuals are intentional and intelligent agents.
• Humans are bounded by cognitive limitations; how much and what they can know have cognitive limits, and therefore they have to specialize.
• Especially in complex issues which cannot be understood by any single individual, there is a need for integration and coordination of knowledge.
• Cognition and action are related: knowledge is both acquired by and demonstrated in action.
• Knowledge is demonstrated in many forms and located on many levels: it is situated in the minds and bodies of individuals, embedded in organizational routines and processes, as well as codified in databases and books etc.
• Some knowledge can be externalized into explicit form, while some knowledge will always remain tacit.
• The form of knowledge influences how it can be leveraged and transferred. 
• Shared tacit knowledge, demonstrated for example in capabilities, is the most important type of knowledge from the value creation point of view.
• Knowledge cannot be fully managed in the same sense as other types of resources; its management more resembles the creation of suitable contexts and cultivation.
• Knowledge is dynamic: it is continuously re-interpreted and modified, and related to learning and change. 

Blomqvist, Kirsimarja and Kianto, Aino. (2015).  Knowledge-based View of the Firm - Theoretical Notions and Implications for Management. Retrieved on February 1, 2017 from http://www.lut.fi/documents/10633/109602/tijo-valintakoeartikkeli-2015.pdf

The Myth of the Bell Curve: Look for Hyper The Hyper-Performers

"Think about how people perform in creative, service, and intellectual property businesses (where all businesses are going). There are superstars in every group. Some software engineers are 10X more productive than the average; some sales people deliver 2-3X their peers; certain athletes far outperform their peers; musicians, artists, and even leaders are the same.

These "hyper performers" are people you want to attract, retain, and empower. These are the people who start companies, develop new products, create amazing advertising copy, write award winning books and articles, or set an example for your sales force. They are often gifted in a certain way (often a combination of skill, passion, drive, and energy) and they actually do drive orders of magnitude more value than many of their peers.

If we're lucky we can attract a lot of these people - and when we do we should pay them very well, give them freedom to perform and help others, and take advantage of the work they do. Investment banks understand this - that's why certain people earn 10-fold more than others."

"People often believe the bell curve is "fair." There are an equal number of people above and below the average. And fairness is very important. But fairness does not mean "equality" or "equivalent rewards for all." High performing companies have very wide variations in compensation, reflecting the fact that some people really do drive far more value than others. In a true meritocracy this is a good thing, as long as everyone has an opportunity to improve, information is transparent, and management is open and provides feedback."

Bersin, Josh. (2014). The Myth of the Bell Curve: Look for Hyper The Hyper-Performers. Retrieved on January 19, 2017 from http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-of-the-bell-curve-look-for-the-hyper-performers/#2e6acad613fc 

The Case for Expert Leaders

"[O]rganizations perform more effectively when led by individuals who have a deep understanding of the core business of their organization. Being a capable general manager is not sufficient. Expert leaders are those with (1) inherent knowledge, acquired through technical expertise combined with high ability in the core business activity; (2) industry experience, which stems from time and practice within the core business industry; and (3) leadership capabilities, which include management skills and a leader’s innate characteristics."

"[T]o lead creative individuals requires both ‘technical and creative problem-solving skills’ since . . . ‘they provide a basis for structuring an inherently ill-defined task and because they provide the credibility needed to exercise influence’."

"[F]irst, that the evaluation of creative people and their ideas can only be done by individuals who share their competencies; in short, it takes one to know one (or competently assess one). Second, leaders who share the same creative and technical perspective and motivation as their followers can communicate more clearly; finally, in relation to performance, they can better articulate the needs and goals of the organization."

Godall, Amanda H. (2012). A Theory of Expert Leadership. Retrieved on January 9, 2017 from http://ftp.iza.org/dp6566.pdf

Why Not Include IQ Tests in Our Hiring Process?

"No method of hiring is perfect, or even close to perfect, at picking the best workers—for instance, the relationship between IQ scores and eventual worker performance is modest to strong at best. But IQ tests are as good as anything that exists in the real world. And here’s one useful finding: you’re much better off forming your opinion of a worker based on her IQ score than basing it on a check of her references or (worst of all) a handwriting analysis.

In addition, it appears that IQ tests are even better at predicting outcomes when the job requires higher skills. Back in the 1960s, the Bell Telephone System gave its entry-level management trainees an IQ-type test along with a number of personality tests. Bell’s human resources division kept the test results a secret for two decades, even from other employees in the firm. When, after two decades, the company looked back to see which tests did the best job of predicting which trainees eventually rose the highest in the company hierarchy, the IQ-type test did the best job, beating out the personality tests. Looking across many studies of IQ in the elite workforce, one review says,

[G]eneral cognitive ability is the best single predictor of executive/professional-level performance, just as it is of performance in the middle to high-end range of the general workforce."

"In most of these studies that look at the relationship between IQ and worker quality, the quality measure is subjective: you ask the worker’s boss how well the worker did, and compare that judgment against the worker’s IQ score. Some studies can look at somewhat more objective measures, such as sales per year for a salesperson, or successful sorties for a military pilot. The more objective the measure, the stronger the relationship usually is between IQ and the measure of worker quality."

Jones, Garret. (2015). Just a Test Score?. Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own. Retrieved on January 2, 2017 from http://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=23082&i=Chapter%201.html