What Morgan Spurlock Can Teach Us About Brave Business

I recently watched this Ted Talk by Morgan Spurlock that is an oldie but a goodie (released in 2013). For those of you that may not be familiar with Morgan he came to fame with his documentaries the most famous of which is Super Size Me. He parlayed that success into a series on A&E entitled 30 Days in which he walked in other people's shoes to provide a perspective on issues that were controversial at the moment.

What I like so much about his Ted Talk is how he exposed the fearful decision making in the Advertising industry. But this isn't a hit piece on that industry and the same decision making processes and cultures exist in any industry and in most organizations.

One of my favorite moments in the talk involves a clip at the 10 minute mark where he is meeting with the Ban deodorant marketing execs and asks them what the one word they would use to describe Ban and there is silence. Then the first answer is superior technology... for deodorant!

Some of the takeaways from the talk include:
1. The brands that were obviously brave and took a risk with Spurlock's movie were ones that cut out the middle man (advertising agency) because they understood that they may not have the brand's best interests at mind. This is a theme covered in my book Corporate Bravery.
2. Spurlock's summation of what he experienced with trying to make the movie was, "When you train your employees to be risk averse, then you train your whole company to be reward challenged."
3. It is remarkable that EMC won the rights for his Ted Talk with just over $7K. A small sum for the millions of views that this clip has experienced.

GE's Sad Recruiting Campaign Lacks Bravery

I was listening to the radio this past when I heard a recruiting ad for one of the largest companies on planet earth - General Electric. This particular recruiting ad is part of a much broader campaign to recruit younger high tech workers into their company and for a full recap of the campaign I suggest you read this post from the blog Marn's Market.

Suffice it to say, I believe this campaign is a giant dud. The particular radio spot I heard was actually offensive to me - because it communicated something about the culture at GE and the people that this spot will undoubtedly attract.

In this particular radio spot that I heard a newly hired GE employee is talking with his girlfriend about an upcoming family gathering. The girlfriend proceeds to coach him about what to say about GE and what he is doing for them. She repeatedly suggest that he portray his new job as “working on a trendy app” and insists he leave out the “machines” and the “GE” part when they meet her parents that evening. In other words - at best misrepresent what he does and at worse lie about his job.

My guess is the only people this message resonates with are potential employees that don't have a strong sense of who they are, can be easily influenced (manipulated) to meet an outcome and lack integrity.

According to GE's website they have the following mission for their culture:

Our culture is about providing everyone who works here with opportunities to exercise their responsibility, integrity, and creativity while growing themselves, their careers, and our business.

The word integrity sticks out to me in this statement and appears to be opposed to the person I hear in the radio spots.

You may be wondering, 'why does it matter?' - because it is incredibly important to GE's future. I am guessing that GE is spending millions of dollars on this campaign because they are having difficulty attracting millennials. Anyone that has studied millennials or that is a millennial will tell you one of the things they value the most is authenticity. Neither of the people in the ad are authentic. If they can't be authentic with their own family their is no way they can be authentic in the GE culture.

Which is exactly the problem with most traditional large corporations. I write extensively about this in my book Corporate Bravery - available on Amazon.com and iTunes. In chapter 11, I talk about communications and how effective cultures (and hiring strategies) start with an alignment of values, people and communication (internal & external) - depicted by the graph below.

Brave companies are tightly aligned and fearful companies have little alignment between the three. Put another way, 

The totality of our communications is the external manifestation of who we are — and it’s bigger than just what we say. Throughout Corporate Bravery, we have talked often about core values and about how hiring and management practices should reinforce those core values. Any misalignment between these elements lets fear creep into your organizational culture.

Given this circumstance - how effective do you think this campaign will be for GE and what type of culture are they likely to create?


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The Point of the Amazon NY Times Article

There has been a lot of conversation about the recent New York Times piece on Amazon.com. While there has been some negative backlash from Bezos and insiders at Amazon, it appears, based on other accounts that the author's perspective on the culture at Amazon is closer to reality than fiction.

But as this Fast Company article points out, why has this article about work culture in the tech industry created so much buzz? Isn't it true that Amazon's culture just mirrors that of silicon valley or other great technology centers in the United States?

For many in the business press it is seen as yet another example of a 'win at all costs' culture that typically drives disengagement and an unhappy workforce. Typically I would decry the kind of behavior and attitudes embodied in the Amazon culture. For example, take a look at this early quote in the article:

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others.

This is the kind of fear inducing behavior that creates corporate politics run amok - similar to what I discuss in this my Slideshare on corporate politics.

However, I have a different perspective on this particular story. Understand that I am not condoning this type of behavior or even the culture that has been created but it can make sense for a company like Amazon. Take a look at this quote from the story about the conflict that employees feel about the culture:

However, more than 100 current and former Amazonians described how they tried to reconcile the sometimes-punishing aspects of their workplace with what many called its thrilling power to create.

I contend that Amazon has actually done a wonderful job of creating alignment with the culture, hiring & people practices and the brand they are creating in the eyes of their customers.

In my forthcoming book, Corporate Bravery, I argue that one of the hallmarks of fearful vs brave organizations is alignment of these three aspects of culture.

According to the article Amazon has very clearly defined core values (of which they are quizzed and expected to be able to recite and they have a clearly aligned hiring process as shown in the following two quotes:

To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.

The process begins when Amazon’s legions of recruiters identify thousands of job prospects each year, who face extra screening by “bar raisers,” star employees and part-time interviewers charged with ensuring that only the best are hired.

Which leads to a process where employees begin to internalize the culture. According to one person interviewed for the article "she and other workers had no shortage of career options but said they had internalized Amazon’s priorities."
Again, I am not advocating Amazon's culture or the individual aspects of the culture that has made it what it is today. I am just saying that the article paints the picture of a company that has one of the most aligned core values, hiring practices and communications that I have ever seen.

Where Amazon runs into criticism (and the article chronicles), is in the moral / human cost of this culture.  If you could only have this type of alignment that values the employee as a human and recognizes their own individuality (coincidentally another fear factor chronicled in Corporate Bravery) then you have a great example of building a corporate culture.

Corporate Politics - Good or Bad?

Often the phrase corporate politics leads to emotional reactions. It could be greeted with eye rolls or a sinking feeling inside your gut.

In the forthcoming book Corporate Bravery we spend a chapter on corporate politics and its role in creating a fear based culture. While there are many examples where corporate politics has gone wrong, I have created the embedded slide share to talk about how corporate politics doesn't have to be a culture killing practice.


I have embedded a slideshare below and I would love to hear your personal stories, feedback on the approach or other ways you have seen corporate politics play out in a good way. The comments section is below.

Corporate Politics - Turning a Negative Into a Positive from Darrin Murriner

Lessons from 40 Years of SNL

Like 23 million other people, I watched the 40th anniversary special of Saturday Night Live this past weekend. I laughed at the latest installment of Jeopardy, mourned Chris Farley all over again and enjoyed the comedy of Louis CK and Jerry Seinfeld.

There were a lot of laughs but also some awkward moments, such as Eddie Murphy's return. It was like he hadn't been on a stage in 35 years. As uneven as the show was, it still produced a lot of laughs and it also was a reminder about an important business / life lesson. Life is uneven.

I read an article in the Hollywood reporter about Lorne Michaels, the genius of SNL that has been a mainstay of the show for 40 years. He created and continues to lead SNL and put together what was the spectacle of the 40th anniversary special. He had this to say about SNL, specifically as a response to the question of whether he has ever felt satisfied with the show.

I used to say that on my tombstone would be the word 'uneven' because [the show has] never been described any other way in a review. It's only cumulatively that you sort of go, "Oh yeah, that." You can't be perfect for 90 minutes. We don't do spectacle and don't have much of a wide shot, so when you see somebody going into lens and taking it to some level that you hadn't seen even at dress rehearsal, it's a magical thing. I believe there's at least one or two of those in almost every show.

This quote made me think about the unevenness of life and specifically business. You can't 'bat a thousand' yet the cultures in many of our organizations expect or even demand perfection. Co-workers use your stumbles as opportunities to score political points and managers lose their ability to allow mistakes as a result of having previous decisions second guessed.

You Can't Regulate Culture

Reading this article from the Wall Street Journal from January 2015 entitled As Regulators Focus on Culture, Wall Street Struggles to Define It I was struck by how out of touch management and regulators are in defining and creating a positive and effective work culture within the banking industry.

The problem with this focus and struggle with culture is that it is driven by a desire to avoid future regulatory problems rather than a real interest in creating an environment that is engaging for employees where they might actually enjoy spending a significant part of their daily lives.

Some of the typical things that have characterized bank cultures include being one of the last industries to have a strict dress code, oftentimes requiring a logo lapel pin to be worn at all times. Banks have typically had very hierarchical organizational structures where the running joke is everyone has a Vice President title. Banks have typically lacked flexibility in working time and location and have been rigid with other aspects of work environment.

Other things about typical bank culture is bank hopping. It is not uncommon for many in management at banks to have worked at several different banks within a 5 or 10 year span as that was the path to greater financial rewards. Taking a book of business to another bank is rewarded.

These aspects and more show up in turnover numbers. When I worked for a large regional bank in the 2000's the turnover rate for the entire bank of 20,000 employees consistently ran in the high 20% to low 30% range. This study on turnover rates in late 2012 showed that the banking industry as a whole had one of the highest turnover rates of all industries.

One of my favorite lines from this article says "regulators acknowledge that culture is a difficult thing to measure". This led banks to measure things like how often employees go to happy hour or how they score on a happy to grumpy ratio. This is measured by defining happy employees as those who say they are satisfied and are more likely to act ethically. Satisfaction is way different than engagement and being happy may just mean they are well paid - again incentivizing the very behavior they are trying to root out.

The article also mentions that the industry is spending millions on workplace consultants specializing in how to measure culture including the use of surveys to tease out attitudes around pay being the best measure of success. When I asked a friend in the banking industry, specifically branch management, about this he indicated that no one answered these surveys honestly because no one wants district and regional managers in the branch. The fear of additional scrutiny and oversight invalidated the results but made management feel better about how well they are doing with culture when in fact fear was driving the behavior.

According to the article, one consulting firm hired by a bank determined it was a red flag when employees used the term 'workaround' in internal communications because it indicated a willingness to bypass set rules or policies. If you have ever worked in a bank you would know it requires work arounds of large and unwieldy systems and bureaucracies just to serve the customer. Well intentioned employees now flagged as possible threats - sounds like a good culture inducing policy to me.

Book Recommendation - Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte

 
I recently had an opportunity to interview Brigid Schulte, author of the new book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time.  Author Brigid Schulte, an award-winning journalist for the Washington Post -and harried mother of two - began the journey quite by accident, after a time-use researcher insisted that she, like all American women, had 30hours of leisure each week. Stunned, she accepted his challenge to keep time diary and began a journey that would take her from the depths of what she described as the Time Confetti of her days to a conference in Paris with time researchers from around the world, to North Dakota, of all places, where academics are studying the modern love affair with busyness, to Yale, where neuroscientists are finding that feeling overwhelmed is actually shrinking our brains, to exploring new lawsuits uncovering unconscious bias in the workplace, why the US has no real family policy, and where states and cities are filling the federal vacuum.

In our discussion we covered a few topics that you will likely find interesting - take a listen to the following excerpts of our conversion.

We talked about the current dysfunctions of corporate culture - specifically automatic assumptions about our roles in business that create this culture of becoming face time warriors.

In her book Brigid gives the example of what the Department of Defense did to change this face time warrior mentality.  She describes this in further detail:

Work has become a religion - that is the conclusion she comes to in this excerpt regarding poor leadership across the board and the role that fear has played in getting us to this place.

Our discussion about what men can learn from this book takes us to a place that concludes that "our workplaces are trapping us in lifestyles we don't want to live."

TedX Talk on Fear by Karen Thompson

I ran across this TedX Talk by Karen Thompson recently and I wanted to share it with you.  Karen Thompson is the author of 2012 book The Age of Miracles, a young girl and her family awake one morning to discover that the rotation of the Earth has suddenly begun to slow, stretching the length of the 24-hour day and throwing the natural world into disarray.




Karen's talk focuses on a story of American sailors with a troubled boat that eventually became the basis for the story Moby Dick.  With a broken boat in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean they are faced with a choice between 3 options to survive.  The first is take the closest route to land and end-up somewhere near modern day Tahiti where they have heard stories of cannibals.  The second option is a more intermediate route to modern day Hawaii which in the current season will face certain storms and rough seas.  The third is the longest route towards South America where it is certain they will run out of food and face likely starvation.

Like any good story, her story of the men of the Essex can teach us some important lessons about the impact of fear in a corporate context - specifically its impact on decision making.  The basic premise of her talk boils down to three things:

1. Fear can be profound and imaginative and that some of the best minds in history were haunted by intense fears
2. We should think about fears as stories with characters and plots that make us think of the future
3. By thinking of fears in this way we can apply a filter of better reason to our fears and improve our decision making

While not necessarily wrong, Karen points out the benefits of fears but almost seems to glorify fears as a motivator above the negative realities of our fears.  She references a study of fears in entrepreneurs and glorifies how they study fears and put plans in place for the fears which they think are most likely to come true.  But how much time, effort, resources, and emotional energy go into this process?  These are resources that could have been used to move their business forward and in some cases could even be preventing them from being successful, much like the men of the Essex.

She mentions that sometimes fears do come true but they are statistical anomalies.  Take a look at the picture below that outlines the chances of dying in the following ways.  Notice the paradox that exists between the chances of dying in a horrific way that fuels our fears versus those that are the result of everyday habits.

Much like the men of the Essex, corporations must pay attention to the more subtle and realistic problems facing them and that starts with the components of culture that create a fear mentality so that when faced with a possibly life threatening problem (a manifestation of a fear) you are not distracted by all the other possibilities (that are oftentimes more remote in likelihood) and you stay focused on the task at hand for the best possible outcome.

The Cargill Approach to Fear

This Cargill article from Fortune magazine is an oldie but a goodie and focuses on a few elements of the Cargill culture that keeps them thinking about the long-term and away from fear-based decision making.

First about their organizational structure - they are still a family-controlled private company.  It is not led by a family member and they have nearly equal 1/3 representation on the board which keeps the family from running amok:

Cargill introduced a limited employee stock ownership plan in the '90s that allowed some family members to cash out. However, roughly 100 descendants of the founders still own around 90% of the stock, worth some $52 billion as of the last official tally. Generally, they've been content to plow profits back into the business and watch the value of their asset grow. Dividends are calculated on a rolling two-year cycle and paid at a rate that Page describes as de minimis. "The capital's not only private," he says, "it's patient and permanent."

I love the CEO's comment at the end of this quote about the capital being patient and permanent.  A common theme for those organizations that are brave in the face of fear.

So how does this patient capital have an impact on business strategy?

"As far as how our corporate strategy works," says Conway, "we don't say, 'We think the world's going to look like this, let's define our strategy for that world.' We say, 'We don't know what the world's going to look like. We need a strategy or a set of strategies that can be successful almost irrespective of what the world looks like.'"

The article goes on to describe how this has played out with a few examples including taking a leading role in converting Vietnam's agriculture economy and introducing new cash crops that can grow well in that environment.  This effort not only provided Vietnam with a new export option (a byproduct was taking them from a largely net importer to primarily net exporter) but solved a big issue for the world supply chain for cocoa.

How does the play out in the face of adversity?

As mighty as Cargill may be, it is not immune to setbacks. In fact, the company's fiscal 2012 is off to a dismal start. Revenues rose 34% in the quarter ended Aug. 31, but earnings were down 66%. That after earnings rose more than 60% in the first quarter of fiscal 2011.  Page blames a perfect storm of unforeseen events: spring flooding in the Midwest (Cargill spent $20 million to prevent the Missouri River from washing out its corn-milling plant in Blair, Neb.); the salmonella outbreak in its turkey plant, which led to a partial shutdown and layoffs ("instead of a business that was making money, we have one absorbing the costs of the recall"); a significant wrong bet on a single, unnamed commodity; a "risk-on, risk-off" market environment that otherwise neutralized Cargill's vaunted trading expertise; and, above all, the global recovery that wasn't. "We underestimated the degree to which the world was gonna back up," says Page.  Remarkably, though, Cargill didn't slow down. The company maintained what Page calls a "big acquisition agenda,"

Even with a culture that eschews fear it doesn't mean that their management team is immune from fear-based decision making or contributing other factors to a culture of fear:

Page may not be under pressure from the family shareholders, but that doesn't mean that he is unworried about the future. The real threat to Cargill's long-term prosperity, Page says, is that forces beyond the company's control will infringe on its freedom to operate across markets. Cargill is clearly concerned with the way the global conversation is bending on food security. "You don't want to end up with policies that are counterproductive to feeding everyone," says Page, "and we don't want to end up with a business model that doesn't have any freedom to operate."

Nancy Dubuc - A&E Networks

Our first business leader profile comes from the June 20th issue of BusinessWeek chronicling the amazing business success of A+E Networks.  It is a great read on a business that has had fantastic success the past few years but also profiles Nancy Dubuc, the CEO of A+E Networks, parent company of A&E, History Channel, and Lifetime.  The article gives us some great quotes about the place fear has in the corporate culture of A+E as well as the role fear has played in Nancy's success:

While on maternity leave in 2007, Dubuc got a call from her mentor, Abbe Raven, then-CEO of A+E Networks. Raven asked Dubuc to return to History to run the channel. Turning around a struggling cable brand takes a willingness to experiment and a capacity to survive public flops and inevitable criticism. “Nancy is willing to take chances,” Raven says. “You either have that or you don’t.”  Dubuc says her fearlessness is a result of the years she’d spent at A+E, where executives could take programming risks without worrying about losing their jobs if a new series tanked. It was timidity, she says, that was frowned upon. 

Additionally, there is a great quote about what makes A+E successful when compared to the industry and the role fear plays in that success:

When Vikings was in production, he says, Dubuc did what too few TV executives are willing to do—she left him alone. “Normally on a show, the networks send a lot of executives to try and control, spy on, and influence what’s being made,” Hirst says. “There was never a question about that with Nancy.” He adds, “The industry is driven by fear. People don’t want to fail. They have huge ambitions, but they’re afraid that the show won’t work. That’s why they start interfering. It’s their fear that starts screwing everything up. By not being afraid, by trusting people, you get the best work back. Nancy isn’t afraid of anything.”