Fort Myers Florida Weekly

DOES YOUR CORPORATE CULTURE REWARD THE LAZY BRAIN?




 

 

Humans are lazy thinkers. Although the brain comprises only about 2.5 percent of our body weight, it generally uses 20 percent of the body’s energy. That’s why the human learning machine prefers to operate in a low gear — on autopilot — as much as possible: It’s a conservation thing. So (your slothful brain is probably thinking) what’s wrong with that? According to Edward Hess, the big problem is that business has taken the “laziness model” — aka operational excellence — as far as it can go.

“The lazy brain is why the operational excellence model — in which companies fight for dominance by being faster, better and cheaper — rose to dominance in the first place,” says Mr. Hess, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business. He’s also the author of “Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization.”

HESS

HESS

“We take what we already know, replicate it, improve it and repeat,” he says. “This is much easier than thinking innovatively.”

Unfortunately, many of the jobs this old model created can now be done by machine.

Today, Mr. Hess says, “The only real competitive advantage is an ability to learn and innovate. And if your business is set up on the old model, it just doesn’t lend itself to learning and innovating.”

Fact is, the old operational excellence model provides too many reasons NOT to learn — too many reasons to remain lazy, complacent, robotic. Steeped in the “command-and-control” paradigm of operational excellence, leaders (and employees) see learning as a high-risk activity. Combine a deeply entrenched attitude that risk-taking is a no-no with the brain’s inherent laziness, and you get a company that can’t innovate its way out of the proverbial wet paper bag.

 

 

The implication is clear: If you want to survive the coming Digital Age of Machines (aka the 21st century), you must engage and reward people so strongly that they’re willing to override their natural tendency toward laziness and continuously generate and share new ideas.

Here are some of Mr. Hess’ tips from his new book on how you and your employees can energize your lazy brains and revitalize your culture in the process:

Empower fast, cheap, customercentric experimentation – Intuit is a very successful and highly profitable company. (Quicken, TurboTax and Quick- Books are a few of its products.) About eight years ago, after becoming concerned that it was losing its edge, Intuit created a new culture and installed new processes, all designed to create an idea meritocracy. One of its primary goals was to galvanize product development by discovering often-unstated customer needs and creating solutions for them.

Intuit founder Scott Cook declared that decisions would no longer be made based on PowerPoints and politics, but by customers themselves, who would “‘vote with their feet” for the ideas they like best.

“They designed experiments to first test key customer needs or value assumptions so that they could move quickly on critical ‘must-have’ data,” Mr. Hess explains. Also — “and here’s the ‘cheap’ part,” he adds — they decided to start small in scope until innovators had more and better data to justify a larger investment.

In India, young Intuit innovators conducted an experiment on helping farmers get the best price for their products — even though management initially wasn’t interested in the idea. Operating under the company’s new “Caesar-is-dead” principle, they forged ahead with their research and spent time with farmers to understand their business challenges. They found the farmers didn’t know what price wholesalers would pay on any given day in any geographical market for their crops. So they created an app for mobile phones that provided farmers with daily prices from various markets. As a result, the farmers could choose to travel to the market that would pay them the highest price.

Mr. Hess says 1.6 million Indian farmers now use the successful program.

The Intuit story is a prime example of how empowered employees can quickly and cheaply transform new ideas into products that materially improve people’s lives, Mr. Hess says. “Allowing employees to pursue their own ideas is a great cure for lazy thinking … If an idea succeeds, the company reaps the benefits. And if it doesn’t, the company still has energized, engaged employees who are motivated to try again.”

Turn mistakes into “surprises” – Another major change was needed at Intuit to fully engage the workforce in this new culture of innovation and learning. They needed a new mental model about mistakes.

“In an idea meritocracy, mistakes are not punished so long as financial risk parameters are respected,” Mr. Hess says. “There is no mistake so long as you learn. Intuit even calls mistakes or experimental failures ‘surprises.’”

Surprises don’t elicit the same amount of fear and anxiety that mistakes do, he explains. “And when we aren’t afraid, we’re more likely to take risks that have the potential to lead to big wins.”

Let employees “pull the cord” – Sometimes employees see big problems and mistakes but feel powerless to make a change. They figure bringing mistakes to the attention of higher-ups is above their pay grade and not a part of their job description, or they fear ending up being the proverbial messenger who gets shot. Such feelings are terrible for morale and just encourage employees to keep going on autopilot.

The solution is to make it very clear to employees that they are able not just to point out problems, but also to take bold action to correct them. At Toyota, an idea meritocracy was created by giving every employee in the factory the ability to “pull the cord” at any time to stop production. In other words, all employees were empowered to take ownership of preventing defects and mistakes.

Empowering line employees to take responsibility for continuously improving processes using root cause analysis helped Toyota keep employees engaged and was Toyota’s quality differentiator for years,” Mr. Hess says. (Unfortunately, however, Toyota diluted that system in its drive for global expansion and global sales leadership, he adds.)

Make it a duty to dissent (even when you have to shoot down a HiPPO) – Google’s culture is built on trying new things. To support this culture, pay level is irrelevant in decision-making, and so is experience or tenure — unless the experience provides data used to frame good arguments. In fact, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, stated in the book “How Google Works” that Google employees are told not to listen to “HiPPOs,” or the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

At Google, Mr. Hess says, one has a duty to dissent. This means that relative “rookies” can — and do — raise objections and present alternate ideas when they disagree with their bosses. A similar duty to dissent can be found at UPS, which has an employee-centric culture of “constructive dissatisfaction,” meaning that everyone has the duty to find ways to improve.

“Allowing dissent is yet another way to combat lazy thinking,” Mr. Hess says.

No matter what product or service you sell, he concludes, in order to compete in a technologically advancing, highly globalized competitive environment, you must build a culture where lazy thinking is snuffed out and big thinking is encouraged and rewarded.”


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *