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Are your company values important enough to fire people over?

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Warning: Rant ahead.

Odds are the company you work for will fire employees for serious criminal conduct. And maybe for sexual harassment, or BSIP (Behaving Stupidly In Public).

But does your company fire people for VVs (values violations)? You know, values like respect and integrity (from Enron’s values list), or performance, innovation, progressive, and green values (from BP’s Lubricant Business).

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I got a call recently from a BWKC (Big Well Known Company); it employs many VSPs (Very Smart People). Here is what they said:

We have a group of VHPS (Very Highly Paid Salespeople). They’re mainly commission-paid and very successful. Problem is, they don’t pitch-in on corporate initiatives—recruiting, people development, internal sessions.  They prefer to focus just on making more money. 

We want to incent and motivate them to be more participative. We’re looking for ideas from other commission structure industries that have figured out how to keep the high-pay but incent and motivate team behavior.

OK. This is like meat to Pavlov’s dogs. There is such a feast of things wrong with that statement: where, oh where, to begin! 

 

1. “Incenting Values” is an Oxymoron

The call came from a staff person. Which means somewhere, there’s an RDB (Really Dumb Boss) who is thinking, “How do I motivate my employees to live the company values?” Here’s what that boss should be saying:

“It has come to my attention that y’all are not showing up to do some real basic stuff. Further, I understand this is because you’re not ‘motivated’ or ‘incented’ to do these things.

“Instead, y’all are getting rich at the corporate buffet by cutting in line. You’re eating scrambled golden eggs while you’re starving the goose that lays them. You’re suckling at the teats of the money-pig and refusing to clean up the pen. So I got some motivatin’ for you.

“First, TCSRN (This Crap Stops Right Now). Starting today, if I see any more of this, it’s LDHYWGLSY (Let the Doorknob Hit You Where the Good Lord Split You). Adios. 

“And if that’s not incentive enough for you, I can OUCOWA (Open Up a Can of Whup Ass) and show you the door.

You don’t “incent” values. Values are Jacks for openers, table stakes. If you’re not motivated to live by your company’s values, your company should tell you that you’ve got the wrong company. If you insist on incentive for living your company’s values, your company should politely suggest that your employment contract should be incentive enough.

This company basically has three choices:

1.    Exempt the salespeople from the values, and say so publicly; at least that’d be honest;

2.    Tell the salespeople this is non-negotiable, and a firing offense (fat chance); or,

3.    Just keep the values on the website where they belong, away from the money, now walk away, nothing to see here…

2. When Did We Start Calling Boneheadedness “Smart?”

This company is hardly unique—and you all know it. We have an epidemic in Corporate America of what I’ll call behavioralism, the beliefs that:

a.    nothing’s real if you can’t measure it;

b.    management consists largely of placing the correct amount of cheese in front of just the right rats at just the right points of the maze;

c.     really ‘smart’ people are the ones who can model, quantify and produce metrics with respect to cheese, rats and mazes.

Push this line of thinking far enough and you get entire BWKCs, with lots of VSPs, who don’t have the commonsense to spot a values issue when it personally insults them to their face. And yet we call them ‘smart.’

The word ‘smart’ has come to be, in the anthropological dictionary that is daily corporate usage, synonymous with high SAT scores, good colleges, spreadsheet-dexterity, quantitative skills and a belief that human-life-is-messy-but-fortunately-we’re-figuring-out-the-neuro-secrets-behind-it-all-and-we’re-nearly-there. 

How else to describe VSPs (and the companies who hire them) who have no other mental construct for management besides money-cheese-rat-metrics? Concepts like wise, commonsense, intuition, curiosity, empathy, relationships—these have no place in the world of VSPs.

Let’s all just give up on ‘smart;’ that word’s been co-opted. Let’s find something else. May I suggest we take ‘wise’ for a spin. And start by not using it lightly.

3. Tactics Are Not Management

Three years ago I wrote about The CEO vs. the Bankers. The CEO was an MBA from the late 1970s and was, as he put it, amazed at how little the newer MBAs seemed to know. He was talking about VSPs, too—from, as he put it, “Goldman Stanley, Morgan Sachs.” 

It’s a great read, I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the gist of it was: the new MBAs had been taught analytical techniques—tactics. The CEO had learned strategy: the wisdom kind, not the numbers kind. And when you read his story, you realize that in the real world, all those ‘smart’ models were dead wrong, and he was dead right.

Not only do we over-celebrate ‘smart,’ the concepts our ‘smart’ people are focusing on are not—systemically—wise. Our best and brightest are learning to do things that aren’t good.

What things? Looking at transactions, not systems. Believing that everyone only pursues their own interest. Believing that letting those who do pursue only their own interest somehow magically produces wealth and happiness for all. Believing that human emotions are most effectively dealt with through physical abstractions like chemistry and behaviors. 

Most of all: believing that values are something for which you can incent or motivate people.

What’s to be done? A good start would be to find out if anyone ever got fired for a values violation in your company. And if not, to seriously question how seriously your company takes its values. 

OK, end of rant-warning. All clear. Thanks for listening.

TrustedAdvisor Associates Workshops & Events, Fall 2010

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Join us this Fall at one or more of our 2010 TrustedAdvisor Associates events through globally accessed programs and webinars!  Topics include  the new Trusted Advisor Mastery Program!
 
We hope you’ll be able to attend and  look forward to seeing you!

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Mon. Nov. 15th        Global          Charles H. Green & Stewart Hirsch

We are launching a new program on November 15th! A three-month Trusted Advisor Mastery Program combining e-learning with one-on-one coaching, group learning, and more. Find out more by watching this video: http://bit.ly/a39Q19 and contact Stewart Hirsch, Practice Lead for TAA Coaching at 781.784.5280; [email protected].

Ava J. Abramowitz on Essentials of Negotiation (Trust Quotes #15)

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Ava J. Abramowitz is a lawyer, mediator, and author.  She is also an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects and currently is serving as the first public member of the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards. Not surprisingly, she teaches negotiation at George Washington University Law School; was in-house counsel for the American Institute of Architects; serves as a mediator in the Federal courts in Washington, DC; and lectures nationally on negotiation. 

As befits such an interesting woman, she is married to a man who is quite interesting in his own right, Neil Rackham.

But our main interest in this interview centers around a most remarkable book she has written, titled Architect’s Essentials of Negotiation (The Architect’s Essentials of Professional Practice). While it’s nominally about architects, the fact that it’s so readable outside that profession is a guarantor that she’s talking about universal truths. Let’s dig in.

CHG: Ava, thanks so much for doing this interview with us. I’m excited, because I was so taken by your book. Let me start in a very particular place. Outside of perhaps existentialist philosophers, theologians or therapists, you and I are the only ones I know who refer to the Other—in caps—when we’re talking about the protagonist in a commercial relationship. Why do you do that?

AJA: In all my writing and always in my thoughts, I refer to the "Other" and not the "other side" when talking about those with whom we negotiate. "Other side" implies the people are opponents. "Other" implies they are just not us. It is hard to build common ground with opponents, but a bit exciting, invariably challenging, and sometimes even fun to build common ground with people who, although they want a solution to a shared problem as much as we do, view that problem differently because they have different sets of eyes and experiences. A small change in mindset, but it’s an important and useful one to use and remember. Not a friend. Not an enemy. Just an Other.

CHG: Let’s take the readers right to the punch line: in your view, what is the central message of this book?

AJA: In business and in everyday life, it is far more profitable for all the parties to forge strategic alliances with each other to solve the problems facing them. You need not like the Other. In the early stages of negotiation, you need not even trust the Other. But if you and the Other collectively can solve the problem in a way that meets both of your compelling short and long term interests and needs, you should do it. Solid negotiation skills will get you there. They can be learned.

CHG: Reading your book it seems so obvious that that’s how things should work. Why doesn’t it always turn out that way?

AJA: Sometimes the way people analyze the situation leads them to believe that there is no common ground. I don’t want to get into politics, but right now the United States is so bifurcated that people forget that everyone who is running for office believes in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and in “truth, justice and the American way.” They may differ on the definitions of those values or how best to achieve them, but at the core the persons sitting across the aisle from them are not an enemy to be destroyed. They are just Others with different views of the problem and the solution.

CHG: Notwithstanding what I said above, this book was written nominally for architects. And in one way, they are unique. Unlike most other professions, there are usually three parties involved in commercial discussions: the architect, the contractor, and the owner. Does that make architecture more complicated than, say, the practice of law?

AJA: Ah, good question, but no lawyer could say yes and survive. After all, the American legal system is not routinely described as “an adversary system” for nothing.  Here lawyers represent parties who may have entered a negotiation with no desire for a settlement. For example, parties may have retained a lawyer to obstruct a solution because they figure that delay is in their interests. Architecture and construction, at least at the outset, are less conflicted. At the start of every project everyone wants the project to come in on-time, on budget, and with no claims. And everyone wants to make a profit.

Additionally, risk is handled differently in the legal setting than on the construction site. Lawyers are taught to think liability first and foremost and to figure out ways to foist liability on the Other, freeing their client to risk without responsibility. Sophisticated parties in design and construction, however, recognize that risk and reward go hand in hand. To them, the easiest way to achieve success is to assign each exposure to the party most capable of managing it, and to give that party all the responsibility and the power—both authority and fee—needed to manage that exposure well. In other words, they forge strategic alliances with and among the parties with mutual success being the overriding goal.

CHG: You know quite a bit about the psychology of sales through Neil. Are there any sales insights that fit with your sense of negotiations?

AJA:  For many a person Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Fisher and Ury was their introduction to negotiation. There Fisher and Ury set out a staged theory of negotiation that building on common ground should produce a shared solution that meets the parties’ key interests and needs, and solves the problem that brought them to the table in the first place. The book and many of its derivative works, though, are less eloquent on how precisely do you do it.

For me, Neil’s book, SPIN Selling filled in that missing blank. By asking questions, particularly Implication and Need/Payoff Questions, one can uncover the explicit needs of the Other and address them. With that knowledge common ground can be more readily identified and built.

How powerful a tool are questions? Inestimable. Questions reveal the Other’s needs, values, and priorities. They help with elegant option development. They expose problems in your own thinking. Questions are a solid alternative to saying no. They help you manage the negotiation, giving you time to process the information you hear and figure out how you want to deal with it.

Questions help you build trust. There is nothing more powerful than listening and using the information you are hearing to build common ground. Nothing convinces the Other more that you care and are worthy of their trust.

CHG: Part of why this book resonated so well with me is the fundamental stress on relationship; that’s what trust is so much about, too. I know you’ve thought about trust, presumably about trust as it relates to negotiation and mediation. Do tell us what you think about it?

AJA: Trust is a matter of choice.You can choose to trust, or not. You can choose to be trust-worthy, or not. You can negotiate with people whom you trust and with those whom you do not. Trusting appropriately just makes negotiation easier.

Clients use proxy measures when deciding whom to trust. It is clear from research that clients look for competence, candor, and concern in the professionals they retain. The more the client sees the consultant being competent, candid, and concerned about the client, the more the client tends to trust the consultant. It is easy to say, “Be candid, concerned, and competent,” but it is not always easy to do and even harder to prove that you are being candid, concerned, and competent.

Try proving you are trustworthy by saying to someone, “Candidly….” Saying that invariably puts the Other instantly on guard. Additionally, it raises an issue where none existed: Were you not being candid before? When will you deceive again? There are clearly ways to prove you are Other-focused. Asking questions helps prove to the Other that what they say, think, and feel is important to you. Disclosure of internal information helps, too, particularly when it makes your motivations and perceptions transparent.

Your book brings this all home. In one of the best books on earning and deserving trust, The Trusted Advisor, you and your colleagues, David H. Maister and Robert M. Galford, take these earlier findings one step further, developing what you called the trust equation where trust is a function of credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation. You found that the more credible, reliable, and intimate one is with and about the Other and the less self-oriented they are, the more they will be trusted by the Other. Words to live by.

CHG: Let’s get beyond architects alone here. Is there a Single Biggest Mistake people make in thinking about negotiation? Or a Big Three?  

AJA:  To answer that question, let us pin down the kind of expert negotiator I have in mind. Based on Huthwaite research I have come to classify as “expert” those negotiators who share three characteristics: They have a track record of reaching agreements, a track record of their agreements being implemented successfully, and a track record of the Other being willing to negotiate with them again. In other words, I value, as experts, people who, time after time, successfully resolve their principals’ long-term and short-term problems through negotiation and in such a way that the Other is willing to work with them again.

What do these experts have in common? They prepare and strategize for the negotiation before the negotiation so that when they sit down with the Other they have freed themselves to listen, and they listen hard and well. They use the information they hear to locate an idea they can support and build on, ultimately yielding common ground. And even as they close in on a negotiated agreement, they prod. “How will that work?” What if x happens?” “How will it play out if all things go well, and if they do not?” "Is there anything we can do to build success into the effort?"

These negotiators are committed to long-term success of the parties and the agreement. If the agreement is to fall apart, they want it to fall apart before it is signed, so that they can pick up the papers, shake them off, and try again. And that is why they and their clients succeed and the Other is willing to negotiate with them again.

CHG: Ava, this has been a delight. Thank you so much for ‘stopping by’ to chat with us, and for sharing your wisdom and insights.

Disclosure: I am an Amazon affiliate and receive a very small commission for products purchased through my Amazon links.

Stewart’s and Colbert’s Joke is On the Media

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When an institution can’t be trusted, yet cannot comprehend the message of distrust, then what you’ve got is a case of institutional denial.  Case in point: the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.  The brainchild of The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and his co-comedian Steven Colbert on cable television’s The Comedy Channel, the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’ was a 2-hour stage version of the duo’s nightly TV shows.

Jon Stewart made it clear in publicity before the event that it was not a political rally.

For example, the opening of Larry King’s interview with Stewart:

KING: Is it a political rally?

STEWART: No. It is in fact not a political rally.

But the press was having none of it.

Before the event, the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum wrote that ‘my heart sank’ when she heard the announcement because—according to her—it was a politically naïve attempt at liberals to declare themselves centrist, thus dooming both. Clearly a political rally, in her view.

Over at the New York Times, Tobin Harshaw’s Opinionator Blog wrote a post called “Jon Stewart on the Hustings,” overtly political lingo. (He gave the post three meta-tags: Jon Stewart, Politics, and Rallies).  Another disbeliever.

At Slate, Timothy Noah spoke about “Stewart-Colbertism,” and suggested “a more legitimate (and probably more successful) political impulse would be to try to persuade the unenlightened that you have a better idea.” Another media person, again insisting it was to be a political rally.

Even wry conservative David Brooks at the NYTimes said, “There’s a jump-the-shark danger here for Stewart and Colbert. After all when comedians stop being jesters they are notorious for jumping all the way over and becoming preachers, with no middle ground.” He, too, expected a political event.

Stewart Did What He Said He Would Do

Fast forward to the rally itself (and yes, I was there). More than anything, the rally was a three-hour (on-time start, on-time finish) theatrical version of the Daily Show itself, held outdoors in crisp autumn air, with what looked to me like a little over 200,000 of their fans.

At the rally itself, no candidates’ names were uttered. No legislation or causes were mentioned. Stewart and Colbert pointedly did not even call for people to vote.  In this, Stewart delivered exactly what he and Colbert had said they would: a non-political show about the theme of ‘sanity’ in our public dialogue.

What the Rally Was Really About

The rally was political in one sense—it was about meta-politics. It was about the language and the processes that we use to conduct politics. Stewart couldn’t have been more clear about this in his moving 12-minute summation: 

We can have animus and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of the main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24-hour politico-pundit-perpetual-conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder.

The press can hold its magnifying glass up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen, or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.

The press is our immune system. If it overreacts to everything, we actually get sicker…

The image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false.

We work together to get things done every damn day…the only place we don’t is here [gestures to the Capital building] or on cable TV.

I kept a running tab of the signs I saw–see my list here. I’d say maybe 2% were overtly political (e.g. pro-Obama, support Democrats); another 10% were culturally-political (“think outside the Fox”), and 10% were anarchic (“this is a sign”). The remaining 78% or so were exactly in line with what Stewart said the rally was about: sanity in public dialogue.  Prototypical signs were:

* What do we want? Incremental change for the betterment of society! When do we want it? As soon as is reasonably practical.

* Hyperbole is murdering America.

* Everyone poops (drawings of elephant and donkey pooping).

It was only four years ago that Stewart skewered CNN’s Crossfire, with Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson. His first words were, “Why do you argue, the two of you?” He went on to say, “I’m here to confront you, because we need help from the media—and they’re hurting us.”

And for 14 hilarious, painful minutes, Carlson and Begala could not believe he was serious.  But he was.

Not much has changed in those four years.  Because even after the rally, most of the press still missed the point.

The Press Still Doesn’t Get the Joke

The day after the event, the New York Times’ opening paragraph on the story called it “a political event,” and a "Democratic Rally." Fox News, which put the words “non-political” in quotes in its headline before the event, forced the political spin on it after the fact, saying “Dems Can’t Ride Stewart’s Wave.”

There are exceptions: Time Magazine got it right, saying, “The major target here was the media.”

But for the most part, the media has a hard time getting what Geoffrey Baym, a University of North Carolina at Greensboro professor, had to say about it before the rally:

"What he’s really calling for is not the election of Democrats or the defeat of Republicans; he’s calling for a rethinking of the way we talk about politics, and that has really broad appeal. People are feeling very left out by the contemporary political system."

When Jesters Tell the Truth, Smart Kings Listen 

In the Capitol building that Stewart gestured toward from his non-political podium, the once-rare filibuster has become commonplace. Parties are increasingly explicit that their sole goal is to defeat the other party. 

And the media are a huge enabler. Newspapers and magazines are dying a not-so-slow death, cutting editorial staff, desperately trying to find viability in a digital world that is cheaper and that insists on atomizing content. The slow disappearance of ‘middle of the road’ CNN between the opposing power of rightist-Fox and leftist-MSNBC in the broadcast realm is testimony to the ascendance of adversarial journalism.

The recent villification and condemnation of Shirley Sherrod for remarks taken out of context (through selective editing) is a horrific example of relying on an extended network of unverified news sources. The speed with which both government and press alike rushed to judgment is a wake-up call for how fragile credibility has become.

The ultimate irony is the inability of politicians and the media itself to hear Stewart’s message.  It is traditionally the court jester to whom we look to speak the truth; but what do you do when the object of the joke, the court itself, doesn’t get it?

I’d say the joke’s on us all–and it’s not funny. In fact–as Stewart keeps trying to insist–it’s serious.  Very serious.

Public trust in both government and media is plummeting.  A recent Gallup poll showed Congress dead last among 16 institutions, with TV news and newspapers rated little better.  As long as both institutions stay in denial and ignore the strong messages of distrust they are both sending out, expect us all to reap the social consequences of broken trust, which look like this:

  • Longer time to reach decisions–social, legal, economic
  • Lack of commitment to decisions jointly made–by states, counties, towns, and citizens
  • More lawyers, laws, lawsuits, and costly court cases
  • More broken agreements, arrests, jailings, police, prison populations
  • Less value added, more transaction costs spent arguing over the distribution of value
  • More accounting, studies, data, commissions, statistics, records
  • More pessimism, anger, psychiatric disorders, depressions, medication
  • More fragmented citizenry, more acrimony, less agreement with neighbors
  • Less commitment to group initiatives–infrastructure, education, transportation
  • A gradual withdrawal into narrower and narrower sectarian interest groups.

The court jester is the canary in the cage, giving us all fair warning of what could be.

How To Prove You’re Reliable

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Trust takes time. It’s one of those things we say without examination. Turns out it’s largely a myth.

Credibility. Reliability. Intimacy. Self-orientation. These are the four factors in the Trust Equation. Of these, we usually say that only Reliability takes time. Reliability lives in the realm of action, and because of that, repeated, consistent, predictable actions over the passage of time are required to show reliability.

But even that, on closer examination, isn’t always true.

On a recent trip I had a chance to see that Reliability can be demonstrated in a moment or two and needn’t always take time to prove. It was a taxi driver (why is it always taxi drivers who teach us so much?) who brought this point home.

A colleague and I were in Washington delivering a workshop and staying at a hotel “just across the parking lot” from the corporate center where the training was being held. Unfortunately, it was pouring rain, the parking lot was several football fields across and there were half a dozen different buildings to choose from. We knocked on the window of a waiting cab and asked if the driver would take us such a short distance, got an affirmative yes, and jumped in. And given the address, he knew exactly which building was our destination.

During the few minutes it took to get to the other building, the driver had a (hands-free) cell conversation with someone who had clearly ridden with him often and was booking an airport trip for the following day. When we got out and offered to pay, he wouldn’t take any fare but gave us his business card instead and suggested that we call him for our return trips out of Washington.

When we walked in the door, it turned out we had to go to yet another nearby address; this time an employee gave us a lift. To top it off, getting home had gotten a little more complicated: one of us was going to the airport, another to Union Station, both at different times and we weren’t 100% sure just where we needed to be picked up.

But when we were ready to organize our trips home, of course we called this driver. He’d already demonstrated his reliability. How?

It didn’t hurt that we were predisposed to like thim when he volunteered to run us across the football fields. It proved he wasn’t hungry for money or trying to take advantage of a couple of people who would have paid plenty to stay dry.

We heard him talking to someone who was clearly a long-time client. Must be reliable if a frequent traveler from the Washington area counted on him to help her make her flights on time. A big "R" there.

Finally, the business card. It suggested that he was serious about his work and made it easy for us to find him when we were ready to go.

Indeed, he found us at the new building at the right time, took my colleague to the airport and made it back in plenty of time to pick me up and get me to my train. 

All of which reminded me: even Reliability doesn’t always take time.

Becoming trusted is less about logging more hours—and more about the quality of our relationships.

Are Your Business Processes Destroying Trust in Your Business?

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“Automation is sand in the social gearbox.” 

So says Axel Schultz at the end of a provocative blog on Customer Think called When the Social Media Bubble Burst. I think he’s more right on his ending line than he is on his title. Automation does have a way of gumming up the social works.

I wrote a week ago about a large-scale example of this in the mortgage banking industry. Let’s go micro now, and have a look at small-scale automation.

Let’s have a look at the nuts and bolts of creating ‘friends’ on YouTube. The more friends you get, the more people look at you, the higher your ratings go on YouTube.

Here is a transcription of a video from TubeToolBox.com.

So you’re looking for an automated way to get more views to your YouTube videos; but you don’t want to risk losing your YouTube account by using tools that could get you flagged or banned. So you lead a lot of subscribers, and actual views, ratings and comments from other YouTubers so your videos get traffic. But you don’t have the time or the money to spend marketing them.

So you run Tube Toolbox, and you collect a few thousand users in just a few minutes who have watched and commented on videos similar to yours. You know that they’re the best friends and subscribers to have, because they watch videos in your niche, and leave comments on them.

So now that you have your list of targeted YouTube users, you start sending automated friend request and auto-subscribe to their channels. This software runs in the background, which means you’re free to do other work while Tube ToolBox is hard at work. You can even let it run overnight, and pick up friends and subscribers while you sleep.

Then when you come out with your next video, you just send your video to all your friends with a friendly message letting them know about your new video, asking them to rate and comment on it.

As comments on videos increase, you will start to notice your videos making it to he the most discussed, most viewed and top-rated sections in addition to others where the bulk of YouTubers watch videos.

Now your videos will get thousands of views with people subscribing to your channel, and adding you as a friend on auto-pilot. As you build momentum, your reach increases, and your videos have their best shot at going viral.

Before you know it, you’ll add thousands of friends, subscribers and views to your YouTube videos.

TubeToolbox is hardly unique. Nor are they doing anything wrong or illegal. But what they are doing is yet another version of “sand in the social gearbox.”

Take the germ of a social idea: a video, together with a way for people to “like” it and pass on their likes to others. Now automate it. Va-voom. Instant increases in friends, followers, statistics, etc.

As long as there remains a glimmer of personal connection, the automation of a function, driven to the limits of scale, will drive it further down the road of impersonality.

This is the story of spam. It is the story of customer ‘loyalty,’ as an emotional feeling got re-born as a statistical movement. It is what happened in the mortgage business, as mentioned previously.

It isn’t automation per se that is the villain. It is the substitution of process for interaction; the substitution of transactions for relationships. 

Much of our time is spent designing businesses that are by bots, of bots and for bots. If management equals measurement—the dominant managerial philosophy of the day—then all we need are sensors and calculators. We can manage in our sleep.

And when we can create ‘friends’ in our sleep, on auto-pilot, we are nearly there. He who gains the most friends wins, so everyone tries to gain more friends. The usual end is either a monopoly or scorched earth. Certainly there aren’t many friends left.

Unlike Axel Schultz, I think we’ll evolve an answer. It will have to look like opting out of the mechanical arms race, because Schultz is right about the sand and the gearbox.

RapLeaf: A Tale of Naivete? Or Cynicism?

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You may have noticed a bit of a kerfuffle in the press recently around a company called RapLeaf, and their relationship to personal data on the internet. Briefly, they are one of the few data collectors who identify names. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on them under the title “A Web Pioneer Profiles Users by Name.” A later article, "How Rapleaf Mines Data Online" followed shortly.

The response was pretty broad, as thousands of people opted to delete their profiles. Too bad for the venture capitalists who had just sunk money into Rapleaf.   

Rapleaf has responded by saying it has fixed a number of the ‘leaks’ that were sharing Facebook and MySpace user info with advertisers. 

So that’s the mainstream story: another predatory foray into your personal information, this one caught by a vigilant media. But how many more clandestine data-suckers are out there lying in wait?

The Rapleaf Story Behind the Rapleaf Story

That’s the official story. Of course, I wondered what was behind it. Turns out there are at least two levels.

One comes from Eric Goldman, at the Technology and Marketing Law Blog. Eric suggests that his personal data on Rapleaf is less extensive than that on Google and Facebook. He’s more concerned about the sloppy mistakes.

On the other hand is CNNMoney, which reports:

This isn’t the first time Rapleaf has been accused of privacy violations. In 2007, CNET reported that the company operated two other subsidiaries that secretly shared information with one another to create extremely detailed profiles about users — including their social network affiliations. Rapleaf quickly responded by merging all of its businesses under one brand.

Way Behind the RapLeaf Story

You might be wondering why I’m writing about this. Well, in my 21st blogpost (we’re now over 800), I wrote about Rapleaf. This was four years ago, in November 2006. 

At that time, I quoted Rapleaf from their website:

Rapleaf is a portable ratings system for commerce. Buyers, sellers and swappers can rate one another—thereby encouraging more trust and honesty. We hope Rapleaf can make it more profitable to be ethical.

At the time, I suggested this model was a good one to short, as it appeared hopelessly naïve. 

My understanding of his 2006 model (the company was founded in April of that year) was underscored by an article that month in Mercury News, which described Rapleaf as follows:

For now, here’s how it will work: If Auren buys five U2 tickets from Matt for tomorrow’s show for $150, he can go to Rapleaf after the show and say "Matt is good at selling tickets, he sold me five tickets, they were great, and even threw in a free parking pass." Matt then gets an email saying he was rated positively, and which asks him he wants to rate Auren, the buyer. Matt says: "Auren, he wasn’t very courteous."

Rapleaf wants to avoid letting people trash others without cause, and so it is building in community features which allow members to flag things if they appear wrong. For example, Auren or someone else can protest Matt’s rating, and appeal to Rapleaf to take down the negative comment. Rapleaf then relies on the reputation it has already built up about Matt. If Matt doesn’t have a reputation, and he is trashing someone with a good reputation, then Matt doesn’t carry any weight, and the comment is removed.

Naïve to be sure. Sort of sweet, in a four-decades-ago San Francisco kind of way (Rapleaf is also in SF).

But then how did Rapleaf get from everyone-rates-everyone-and-we-all-live-happily-ever-after to a model built on data-scraping?

I have no data myself. But I suspect therein lies a tale of corrupted innocence, of selling out unconsciously, of turning beliefs inside out, not unlike the way the frog supposedly boils to death in slowly increasingly-hot water.

Hmmm… now that I write that paragraph, it sounds surprisingly like the plot line of a currently high-grossing movie out there…

TrustedAdvisor Associates Workshops & Events, Fall 2010

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Join us this Fall at one or more of our 2010 TrustedAdvisor Associates events in Livingston, NJ and through globally accessed programs and webinars!  Topics include "How Smart Companies Make the Sale," " No Trust, No Team: Building Trust in a Virtual Setting," and the new Trusted Advisor Mastery Program!
 
We hope you’ll be able to attend and  look forward to seeing you!

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Tues. Oct. 26th        Livingston, NJ          Charles H. Green

For Sobel & Co’s 5th Annual Business Symposium for Privately-Owned Companies, Charlie will speak on "How Smart Companies Make the Sale." Presentation 4-6PM, cocktail reception following. Westminister Hotel, 550 West Mount Pleasant Avenue, Livingston, New Jersey. Limited seating, RSVP only to Sally Glick at 973.994.9494 or [email protected]

Mon. Nov. 1st        Global          Charles H. Green & Rick Lepsinger

In conjunction with OnPoint Consulting, Charlie will be hosting a free webinar entitled "No Trust, No Team: Building Trust in a Virtual Setting," with Rick Lepsinger, President of OnPoint Consuting, focusing on virtual team collaboration and effectiveness through trust. 12:00pm EST, 9:00am PST. System requirements: PC based attendees–Windows(r) 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server. Macintosh(r) based attendees: Mac OS(r) X 10.4.11 (Tiger(r)) or newer. Click here for more information and to register.

Mon. Nov. 15th        Global          Charles H. Green & Stewart Hirsch

We are launching a new program on November 15th! A three-month Trusted Advisor Mastery Program combining e-learning with one-on-one coaching, group learning, and more. Find out more by watching this video: http://bit.ly/a39Q19 and contact Stewart Hirsch, Practice Lead for TAA Coaching at 781.784.5280; [email protected].

Conversations with MBAs

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The other night, I had a chance to speak (along with Rich Sternhell and Laura Rittenhouse) with a small, intimate group of about 20 students from Columbia’s Business School. They were a great group, and we all had a delightful time.

One impression stayed with me because it somewhat surprised me. I was struck at what I think was a general skepticism about the level of impact that they, as individuals, could have.

They seemed to feel that the world of business is dominated by systems, analyses, structures, institutions, and that the role of the individual is rather limited.

I do not think this is true, nor did my fellow-oldsters there that evening. So my question is:

a. Were the 3 of us just a trio of old-timers, dinosaurs from the days of white-out (dare I say mimeograph?), oblivious to the encroachment of powers well beyond individual control which have come to shape our business destinies?

or

b. Have these young people become disillusioned, depressed, and generally disinclined to believe in the role of the individual because our MBA programs have stopped teaching managers about managerial decision-making, replacing that with analyses of industry structures and mathematical risk models?

or

c. Is this just how it looks from the front end of a career as an MBA?

Me, no surprise, I’m with option b. But what do you think?

Doing the Right Thing May Be Easier Than You Think

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We all know the hard stories of corporate whistleblowers. Sharon Watkins at Enron, Cynthia Cooper at Worldcom, for example. We view such people—quite rightly—as having not just the courage of their convictions, but courage enough to put their social and economic lives at risk for the sake of what they see as right. We all live in a better world because of the risks taken by such people.

Most of us think that such whistleblowers are rare, and perhaps they are. But we also think the cards are stacked against them—that the reason they are so rare is the likelihood of retaliation against someone going up against ‘the system.’

What if that’s not true? What if the risk of doing the right thing is in fact vastly overstated? That virtue is in fact appreciated more than we think? If that’s true, then what excuse do we all have for not doing the right thing more often?

Examples of Ethical Behavior that Evoke Admiration

Twice in the past two weeks I have heard stories that make me think we underestimate the power of good behavior. Briefly:

Story One. I was brought in to manage a main stream of a major contract we had with the government. To my horror, I quickly realized it was over budget, behind schedule, and we were not in a position to attest otherwise. Yet we had a major meeting upcoming at which I would be asked to do just that.

My boss and my boss’s boss had a lot riding on this. The government client had a lot riding on this. It was clear everyone wanted me to sign off and just deal with it, somehow, later. As I entered the headquarters building that day, I had this horrible feeling I was about to lose my job.

The moment came, and I was asked to publicly attest to our progress against milestones. “I simply cannot do that,” I said. “We are not in compliance on a number of those items, and I can’t claim otherwise.” I went home that night prepared to clear out my desk the next day.

But when I went to work the following day, it was as if little had happened. “Good job,” said one superior, “we had no business signing off.” The client appeared relieved too. I later was promoted; we also got more client work. In both cases, this moment was cited as a positive example of my performance.

Story Two. I was a manager of a large client project, which involved a presentation to the client’s Board of Directors. The CEO suggested that if our work turned out a certain way, we would receive a lot of business. I said I could not in good conscience bend the work the way he wanted it.

The next day, in front of the Board, the CEO put me on the spot, saying I was prepared to comment on my findings in a way that would have favored his request. I gulped. I didn’t confront him head on; but I did say that the data and analysis that we had performed unfortunately did not, in fact, support the CEO’s hoped-for outcome, but rather another.

I thought I would be in serious trouble with my boss. Instead, he told me that’s why they hired me in the first place, to stand up to tough situations. A few weeks later, a board member—a director in half a dozen other, larger companies—came to me with invitations to present at those companies. He said he did so because he could read between the lines and knew what I had done.

We Underestimate the Attraction of Ethical Behavior

I have no idea how common these stories are. They could be the exception rather than the rule (though I rather think there are more than we hear about).

The real point, however, is how easily the two organizations fell in behind these two people to support them in doing the right thing. As it turned out, their fears were unfounded. 

This I suspect is true: that we overstate the threat posed by ‘them.’ We overestimate the likelihood that no one would stand behind us, and that there is no support in our organizations for doing the right thing.

I suspect this too is true: that we understate the ability of people to appreciate the obviousness of the right thing. We under-state their hunger and willingness to follow someone who does the right thing, that there is in fact a reservoir of great good will and support.

Believing this doesn’t take anything away from the true courage it takes to be a whistleblower. On the contrary, it may suggest that the truly unethical and anti-social organizations are fewer than we think.

The bigger problem may lie not in unethical leaders, but in managers and future leaders who are too afraid to try on ethical leadership for size.

Where’s your whistle? What are you waiting for?