A630.8.4.RB_HallMike

After watching the video, I think that Mr. Wujec’s analysis is accurate.  The MBA students spend their entire time developing a single plan and put all of their proverbial eggs into one basket.  They do not know if it will or will not work out until the end of the allotted time period when they cap off their tower with the marshmallow – it is only as time is expiring that their plan comes to (or does not come to) fruition.  On the other hand, the kindergarteners go with the trial and error approach – they try something out and see if it works.  If it fails, they move on to something else, but they get instant feedback on the design and can move on to better ones in the event the current design doesn’t work.  Now I understand what he is saying here with the prototype argument, however what is lost is that in the real world, prototypes can often be very expensive, can take long periods to build (especially if fine machining is involved), and often does not lead to full solutions to problems.  I would argue that physical prototypes in real business environments employed in the manner he is insinuating is nowhere near the cost effective approach that most employers are looking for.  With that being said, today’s technology allows for different forms of design plans.  For example, 3D CAD programs can lead to outstanding simulations of new equipment that is much less costly than a physical prototype.  Further, there is technology that allows you to extrude a plastic replica of your design – this would cover the physical prototype (albeit non-functioning) while minimizing cost.   

Another possible reason why kindergartners outperform MBA students is that group dynamics are probably much more prevalent in a group of MBA students compared to a group of kindergartners.  Mr. Wujec specifically mentioned that a decent amount of time is spent jockeying for power and talking about how to start the design in many groups.  I would imagine this is not the case with kindergartners where their egos haven’t had the opportunity to fully develop yet.  Essentially, having a group full of leader type personalities can lead to inefficiencies in time usage that a group without a strong leadership dynamic wouldn’t experience.  I think this is the main reason why a group with executive assistants and CEOs together do better than a group of just CEOs.  Executive assistants spend all day communicating between different power hunger people and as a result are able to maintain the power struggle at lower levels than what would occur without them.  Essentially, they keep their CEOs’ egos in check, allowing them to communicate for effectively and thus resulting in better solutions.  If I had to relate this to a process intervention workshop, I would break out and refer to table 8.1 in the book.  Going back to the CEOs, I would imagine that many of them would attempt to dominate, seek recognition, or would block ideas they didn’t like.  On the other hand, kindergartners would probably not have any of those things going on within their group dynamics.  Seeking opinions, asking questions, elaborating, and summarizing are all great communication skills that would at the very least allow you to more efficiently develop your solution if not a correct one.  Ultimately, the video further proves that the current trend in business towards a flatter command structure is probably a good one – positional power often breeds egos that tend to get in the way of group tasks.  If, on the other hand, people can put their egos aside, group dynamics and efficiency only goes up.

A630.7.4.RB_HallMike

First off, it is cool to see Raleigh-Durham getting represented in the video.  The research triangle of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill combine to provide companies with a fertile ground for developing future technologies.  Secondly, it’s also cool to discuss the workings of 2 former Navy men.  Now for the questions: I am not sure that punishing people for not coming up with new practices will be effective.  If the person failing to come up with the culture change was getting paid to do so, that is one thing, but in my opinion, that is exactly what leadership should be doing – dissecting the two different companies, analyzing the parts, and deciding which piece was doing better to move forward with.  Additionally, this type of reward/punishment system might create an atmosphere of competition between the merging companies – something that I would imagine would be the exact opposite of what you would want (I would think you would want to concentrate on brining the companies and the people together to form 1 as opposed to creating a rift between them by having them argue over who is doing what better).  Ultimately, if I was working on the merger, I would bring in outside personnel to analyze the two companies in an objective manner that way whatever was decided; someone would have very little credible complaints as to which one was selected or not selected.  Considering that this video is 11 years old and the merger went down in 1999, one could argue that it was and was not successful.  As mentioned in the video, Honeywell missed its earning in the summer of 2001, sending the shares of the company falling.  They fell so much that it took up until 2007 for the company to reach its pre-merger price – I would say this was an indication that the merger did not go as well as it could have.  Additionally, the CEO during the merger stayed on with the company for another year following the merger, another indication that his policies might not have been well liked (purely speculation though).  On the other hand, the company did survive and is now valued at $39bil so the system he used during the merger has to be considered somewhat successful.

There are a couple lessons learned from this video, however they are not breakthrough thoughts.  First, both CEOs mentioned that communication was the key.  Specifically, Honeywell’s CEO stated that he met with employees for lunch and other meetings like that so that he could hear what was going on in the lower levels of the organization in an unfiltered manner.  I can understand this – often critical feedback that is fed up the chain of command tends to get filtered/watered down a bit so that by the time the information reaches the top, it is just a shell of what it used to say/mean.  Secondly, punishment and reward systems are not the only thing that motivates people.  There are many things other than explicit items that can make people work harder – establishing a sense of teamwork, working for a higher goal, for the better of mankind – all things you can spin other than the carrot/whip routine.  Finally, greed can only take you so far in life, and don’t ever forget that whatever you make in this world monetarily speaking will not carry on to the next.  Honeywell has seen its upper executives increase their pay up to $50mil for the top 15 people in the company whereas they have laid off thousands of people during the same time span.  

A630.6.4.RB_HallMike

Change.  It can be both a great thing for people and a bad thing.  I have seen at least 40 out of the 50 reasons not to change on the list from the presentation and I do not work in the business sector.  Instead I work in a very stable government organization where very little changes aside from technology.  That doesn’t mean that no change occurs however.  I have described several different changes that occurred on my boat in my time on her, and every change event was prefaced with statements like, “it’s not possible,” or “the CO isn’t going to like that,” or the best answer, “but that’s the way we have always done it.”  Every one of those answers is comprised of different words yet they all have the same meaning – I see that you want to change things and I’m not willing/ready for it.  As someone who tends to look for better ways to do things, nothing irritates me more than to hear one of those excuses as soon as I finish talking about the proposed change.  If you have a logical reason why something might work, by all means, express that; if however you have no real reason against the change other than that it is going to take you out of your norm, please keep it to yourself!

Knowing that these statements irritate me as much as they do, I try very hard to not give them myself.  As I said above, I am always looking at ways to improve efficiency and am often willing to go to great lengths to give things a try.  If a proposed change passes my logic test (i.e. I do not have a factual reason why it won’t work, for example it is against written procedure), then I will be more than happy to allow that to get passed up the chain of command.  If the idea doesn’t pass the logic test, I will explicitly state why it won’t work.  I think that you must have an attitude similar to my own in order to not put up road blocks to change.  Keep an open mind and look out for factual reasons why something might work.

I completely agree with Seth’s point on change being driven by tribes.  So much of our existence is associated with our desire to be part of a group, and the internet has drastically increased our ability to do so.  As part of that, people often do not want to go against what the group wants; additionally so much of our actions are based on how we think we will be perceived by the group.  As a result, change can be a taboo topic with many people.  One must be willing to break away from the group sometimes in order to make change occur.

The big take away from this week’s discussion is that you must facilitate change in order to be an effective leader.  Sometimes there will be hard decisions to be made, and often change will be viewed as highly undesirable, however as the leader of the organization, you must have the future vision of where you want your organization to go – people can either change with you or get left behind.

A630.5.5.RB_HallMike

After reading the Assessment and Plan for Organizational Culture Change at NASA and watching the video, I must admit I am surprised that some of the shortfalls in the program existed.  For safety to not be the number one concern at an organization, none-the-less an organization that puts people into space strapped to several million pounds of rocket fuel with several hundred million dollar payloads, is quite shocking.  With that being said, communication was the underlying problem at NASA.  People did not communicate safety concerns because they thought that deadlines were the only thing important to their managers (i.e. managers communicated neither their priorities nor their culture norms).  As a result, Columbia was lost upon reentry over the Southeast US in 2003.  All of the shortfalls within NASA’s culture were identified during the investigation, during which lack of communication was specifically cited.  It was exactly this lack of communication that resulted in the NASA director going on TV to talk about the changes that were being made.  He had to make a personal showing - communication was going to be very important to the new NASA and to prove it he was communciating the new ideas.

Watching the clip, I would say that he was believable during his discussion and he absolutely had to be.  The shortcomings identified were almost inexcusable and it was up to him to fix them.  For him to address his employees and to come across as not genuine would have been a disaster.  If he ended up not being believable, I can almost see the eyes rolling of the NASA employees as he talks about the proposed change (I have seen eyes rolled in many culture change discussions).

He chose to discuss NASA values because it was NASA not following the values that led to the disaster.  Had they strictly followed their own values, perhaps none of the problems that occurred would have happened.  He needed to stress that the values were how NASA was going to do business in the future and that everyone within the company would uphold them.

Ultimately, there are several lessons that can be learned from this scenario.  First, communication in both directions is paramount in any organization.  Talking down but not listening to what is coming up has just as many bad outcomes as the opposite.  You must be able to talk to your employees just as easily as they can talk to you.  This not only aids in the flow of information, but it establishes trust, cohesion, and maintains morale.  Secondly, many organizations have values that are specifically listed out as the way that company does business.  If you fail to uphold them, you are letting your employees know that certain things that you do or say are nothing more than lip service.  You must have your employees understand that everything that is said or done is done for a purpose and is expected to be followed.  Values, like integrity, is an “all or none” situation – you either have the values that you espouse or you do not.  Finally, safety is something that must always be on the forefront of everyone’s mind.  The CEO all the way down to the entry level worker must know and push for safety – there are very few reasons why it shouldn’t be the number one priority.

A630.4.4.RB_HallMike

After watching the video, I can’t help but think of a common Navy nuke term – MOTO.  MOTO stands for Master of the Obvious, which is somewhat how I think about this video.  I was not shocked to hear that there is a positive correlation between decision effectiveness and organizational effectiveness.  Unless I am misinterpreting what effectiveness means, I took that statement to say good decisions makes good companies.  I would not have thought that a statement like that needed research, but the research was conducted just to make sure.  Something that was not surprising but at least not a “no kidding” moment was the statement that employee engagement leads to better decision effectiveness.  When employees are engaged by upper management, their satisfaction with their job goes up, which means a more effective employee.  This not only leads to more production but more importantly it leads to more/better information getting up to the right people.  When making decisions, having the right information is key to ensuring you make the right decision – and getting this information can only occur if the support structure is operating properly. 

Good information is a necessity when making decisions, however it can also be an impediment to decision making.  Information overload is something that people must constantly guard against in both the civilian and military world.  This is especially the case now that the internet –and all of the information that is available on it - is accessible from literally anywhere.  One can quickly be overloaded with too much information very quickly, and this will certainly bog down the decision making process.  Complexity can also lead to challenges in decision making.  If you are middle management, you might feel like you are not the right guy to make a certain decision due to the implications of the question at hand.  Luckily, the military does not have a very complex chain of command and everyone knows exactly who should make the majority of the decisions.  This is not always the case in the public sector, especially in the huge multinational corporation.  Going back to the statement on employee engagement, if your employees are not supporting their leaders, decision making can quickly become fouled due to lack of information or bad information.  Finally, Clausewitz’s Fog of War is a hindrance to all decision making, whether it be in battle or in business.  No matter how much information you try to collect, there will always be unknowns in the equation.  You can try to mitigate the unknown’s effect in your problem, but in the end, the unknown is there.  This creates a “fog” on the periphery of your knowledge that shields what the correct solution is.

The four elements addressed in the video with respect to decision making make sense.  Quality, speed, yield, and effort (as described in the video) all play a part in ensuring that you are make the best decision (quality) in the correct amount of time(speed) with the correct amount of preparation(effort) and the proper amount of execution (yield).

The major point I took away from this video is the emphasis on how your employees play a huge role in the decision processes.  They might not be the ones making the decisions, however they are the ones that have to live with them.  If you can get them more involved, you will get a better product from them which means you can make a better decision for them.  Additionally, I did like the fact that she discussed breaking down the command chain into a series of who makes what decision.  Thinking about my CoC on a ship, that is pretty much how the command chain is already structured, however I do intend to keep that in mind when I hit the business world several years down the road.