A friend of mine recently sent me this quote heard on NPR in an interview with a Venture Capitalist:
"It's a bit like not getting dessert until you've had your vegetables. Maybe this all sounds incredibly simplistic, but venture capitalists say one of the trickiest things about this new world of investing is that their returns, in many cases, hinge on humans changing their behavior. And that's a lot harder than building a robot."
"It's a bit like not getting dessert until you've had your vegetables. Maybe this all sounds incredibly simplistic, but venture capitalists say one of the trickiest things about this new world of investing is that their returns, in many cases, hinge on humans changing their behavior. And that's a lot harder than building a robot."
Probably one of the most popular sayings in business is "Its about people". Another is "Its a people business". Both are true statements about any business, even those that are online. Think about every time Facebook changes something on its site, the uproar of users follows. Its all about people.
But these statements always fall short of the truth about people. People's behavior are the main obstacle to achieving full potential. People get in the way because human nature doesn't respond well to change. One of the basic human needs I have discussed previously on this blog is the need for certainty. When you ask someone to change something, fear and uncertainty sets in and they clam up like a bad oyster. This happens every day in every business deep in the halls of your operations.
No where is this more true than in operations. I work with operations people every day with my clients and the amount of resource, effort and time that goes into instituting change is criminal. What we are talking about is behavior. If a person is asked to change, they go into survival mode. Is this change going to cost me my job? Is this change going to take away from my (perceived) power and influence? Is this change going to mean I become less relevant? Few people ask the question is this change going to be better for the company? And therefore me?
Somewhere along the line management adopted the belief that you cannot mandate change in a company, you have to get consensus and slowly drive change. This is avoiding the issue. Change is about behavior, and that means making it about people. So add this management mantra to the human nature factor and you get the inefficiency that moves manufacturing and production offshore.
The question is how do you solve this problem? The answer isn't simple, there is no silver bullet, but you have to start with recognizing the problem. Only then you can address it. If you ask the CEO of any Fortune 500 company about the performance of their people, they will tell you how great they are, how important they are etc. They are either politically correct or ignorant. People are the key to delivering performance, if you don't manage people behavior, you will never achieve true change and improvement.
The Germans have understood this better than any culture I know. They start every major initiative with the question: what investment do we need to make in our people in order to... It sounds so simple but its a massive paradigm shift that the rest of us have not understood yet. Buzz terms like "empowerment" and "enablement" are still only aesthetics. Enabling people takes understanding, training and skills building, in conjunction with integrating this "change" with the strategy and goals of a company. The guy in the back office has to know that his work and effort is a direct contribution to the overall performance of the company.
No where is this is more evident than in an Emergency Room. From the Administrators to the Doctors to the Nurses to the Nurses' Assistants, everyone is focused on simple goal: saving lives. You can't achieve that goal if everyone isn't in synch, performing their tasks in a complete and timely manner. The consequence is someone dies.
This mindset can be replicated and instilled in every business, small or large. But you have to tackle the behavior issue first. And the best company that has achieved this in a very short period (since 2001) happens to be the largest company in the world by market value, Apple. See these stats and compare the numbers to businesses who are bigger, more inefficient and less profitable.
But these statements always fall short of the truth about people. People's behavior are the main obstacle to achieving full potential. People get in the way because human nature doesn't respond well to change. One of the basic human needs I have discussed previously on this blog is the need for certainty. When you ask someone to change something, fear and uncertainty sets in and they clam up like a bad oyster. This happens every day in every business deep in the halls of your operations.
No where is this more true than in operations. I work with operations people every day with my clients and the amount of resource, effort and time that goes into instituting change is criminal. What we are talking about is behavior. If a person is asked to change, they go into survival mode. Is this change going to cost me my job? Is this change going to take away from my (perceived) power and influence? Is this change going to mean I become less relevant? Few people ask the question is this change going to be better for the company? And therefore me?
Somewhere along the line management adopted the belief that you cannot mandate change in a company, you have to get consensus and slowly drive change. This is avoiding the issue. Change is about behavior, and that means making it about people. So add this management mantra to the human nature factor and you get the inefficiency that moves manufacturing and production offshore.
The question is how do you solve this problem? The answer isn't simple, there is no silver bullet, but you have to start with recognizing the problem. Only then you can address it. If you ask the CEO of any Fortune 500 company about the performance of their people, they will tell you how great they are, how important they are etc. They are either politically correct or ignorant. People are the key to delivering performance, if you don't manage people behavior, you will never achieve true change and improvement.
The Germans have understood this better than any culture I know. They start every major initiative with the question: what investment do we need to make in our people in order to... It sounds so simple but its a massive paradigm shift that the rest of us have not understood yet. Buzz terms like "empowerment" and "enablement" are still only aesthetics. Enabling people takes understanding, training and skills building, in conjunction with integrating this "change" with the strategy and goals of a company. The guy in the back office has to know that his work and effort is a direct contribution to the overall performance of the company.
No where is this is more evident than in an Emergency Room. From the Administrators to the Doctors to the Nurses to the Nurses' Assistants, everyone is focused on simple goal: saving lives. You can't achieve that goal if everyone isn't in synch, performing their tasks in a complete and timely manner. The consequence is someone dies.
This mindset can be replicated and instilled in every business, small or large. But you have to tackle the behavior issue first. And the best company that has achieved this in a very short period (since 2001) happens to be the largest company in the world by market value, Apple. See these stats and compare the numbers to businesses who are bigger, more inefficient and less profitable.
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