The Ten Golden Rules Of Leadership

A few months ago brought the release of the new book, The Ten Golden Rules of Leadership:  Classical Wisdom for Modern Leaders.

As you dig in, you'll step back in time to learn philosophies of the past and how to apply them today.

Authors M. A. Soupios and Panos Mourdoukoutas offer a fresh approach to becoming a great leader by learning from antiquity's great thinkers, such as Aristotle, Hesiod, Sophocles, Heraclitus, and others.

Each chapter in the book is devoted to one philosophy of leadership that equate to ten simple rules:

1. Know Thyself
2. Office Shows the Person
3. Nurture Community at the Workplace
4. Do Not Waste Energy on things You Cannot Change
5. Always Embrace the Truth
6. Live Life by a Higher Code
7. Always Evaluate Information with a Critical Eye
8. Never Underestimate the Power of Personal Integrity
9. Character is Destiny

You'll learn how to take each idea and apply it to the challenges of the modern workplace.

According to the authors, the key distinguishing features of an authentic leader is traceable to a philosophically informed worldview and that the ancient classical tradition is a rich and valuable source of such insights.

My Career Insights Into How To Create An Effective Corporate Culture

Fortunately, most of my career I’ve worked in effective corporate cultures. If I put together the best of each, here is what made those environments effective:

• Leaders led by example on a consistent basis and were willing to roll up their sleeves, particularly during tight deadlines or challenging times.

• Employees clearly understood how what they did made a difference and how their contributions made the organization either more profitable or more effective.

• The workforce included a blend of long-term employees with a rich company, product/service and customer history, employees who had been at the company for five to seven years, and then new hires with a fresh perspective and keen sense of new technologies and techniques. That blend worked best when the mix included virtually all A-players.

• Top managers had a clear, realistic and strategic vision for how the company would grow and compete in the marketplace.

• Employees were challenged and rewarded through growth opportunities, education and training and pay increases.

• Leaders provided opportunities for the company and its employees to give back to the community. Sometimes it was through company organized volunteer projects. Other times it was by encouraging (and rewarding) employees to volunteer on their own.

• A group of employees served on an activities committee with as little top management influence as possible, to plan at least monthly team-building, networking, education and charitable activities. This grass-roots approach helped ensure that the culture was shaped and influenced by employees and not only by top management. In this way, employees owned the culture as much as the management did.

How To Use The Friendship Factor To Motivate Employees

All you need is one hour to read Brian Tracy's newest, pocket-sized guide for managers, Motivation.

"You cannot motivate other people," explains Tracy, "but you can remove the obstacles that stop them from motivating themselves.  All motivation is self-motivation.  As a manager, you can create an environment where this potential for self-motivation is released naturally and spontaneously."

In the book, Tracy presents chapter-by-chapter his 21 most reliable and powerful methods for increasing the effectiveness of any individual or group.

Each chapter includes a couple different action exercises.

Toward the end of the book, Tracy explains the importance of the Friendship Factor in motivating employees.  "Every manager can tap into the power of friendship in everyday employee interactions by remembering the three Cs:  Consideration, Caring and Courtesy.

• Practice consideration by expressing an interest in your employees as individuals.
• Express caring for your staff members by listening attentively and with compassion.
• Express courtesy toward employees by showing personal regard and respect for each person -- especially under stress, when a situation goes wrong, or when a worker makes a mistake.

"Your job as a manager is to make sure that you are getting along well with all of your employees and they are all getting along well with you," stresses Tracy.

Six Universal Drivers That Maximize Employee Engagement

Overland Park, Kansas-based author Leigh Branham, along with Mark Hirschfeld, awhile back completed a survey of 10,000 employees in 43 states to better understand what separates a "best places to work" company from other companies.

What Branham and Hirschfeld discovered is that the best companies use six "universal drivers" that maximize employee engagement:

1. Caring, Competent, and Engaging Senior Leaders
2. Effective Managers Who Keep Employees Aligned and Engaged
3. Effective Teamwork at All Levels
4. Job Enrichment and Professional Growth
5. Valuing Employee Contributions
6. Concern for Employee Well-Being

Branham also explains that to get the best from your employees you need to re-engage them. You can learn more about how to do that in his book, Re-Engage.

Why Learning Beats Knowing

Liz Wiseman's book, Rookie Smarts, is all about living and working perpetually on a learning curve.

She contends that we do our best work when we are new to something.  And, she teaches us how to reclaim and cultivate the curious, flexible and youthful mindset called "rookie smarts."

"Something magical happens when a skilled veteran successfully re-learns his rookie smarts and is still able to retain his veteran acumen," explains Wiseman.

Wondering if you are ready for a new challenge?  Take a look at this list from Wiseman of the 10 signs that indicate you are ready for a new challenge:

1. Things are running smoothly.
2. You are consistently getting positive feedback.
3. Your brain doesn't have to work hard to be successful.
4. You don't prepare for meetings because you already know the answers.
5. You've stopped learning something new every day.
6. You are busy but bored.
7. You're taking longer showers in the morning and you take your time getting to work.
8. It makes you tired to think you could be doing the same job a year from now.
9. You've become increasingly negative and can't identify why.
10. You're spending a lot of time trying to fix other people's problems.

Wizeman is a researcher, executive advisor, and speaker who teaches leaders around the world.  One of her earlier books is, Multipliers:  How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.

The Secret Science Of Brilliant Leadership

Coherence:  The Secret Science of Brilliant Leadership is the book by author Dr. Alan Watkins.

Trained as a medical doctor, Watkins is now an honorary senior lecturer in neuroscience and psychological medicine at Imperial College, London and an affiliate professor of leadership at the European School of Management, London.

• According to Watkins, coherence is the biological state achieved when elite performers experience maximum efficiency and super effectiveness, where body and mind are one.

Coherence provides one of the most unique approaches to showing leaders how to be younger, smarter, healthier and happier -- which gives them the power to make decisions under pressure and achieve sustainable success.

Prepare to spend quality time reading Coherence. It's not light reading.  Kind of feels like a medical text book in parts.  But, it's worth your commitment to it.

I particularly found useful Watkin's discussion on culture, where he wrote:

Culture is the collective attitudes within a group, team or organization, and they manifest in:

• Customs:  traditional practices that may be honored, not necessarily repetitive.
• Rituals:  stylized conceptual totems representing an aspect of culture.
• Symbols:  stylized conceptual totems representing an aspect of culture.
• Dogmas, myths:  unchallenged and unspoken beliefs within a system.
• Metaphors:  stylized stories used to reflect culture.
• Stories:  key bind narrative of culture.

What The Most Successful CEOs Know About Internal Communication

Communications expert David Grossman of Your Thought Partner awhile back published a white paper – What the most successful CEOs know: how internal CEO communications shapes financial performance.


"CEOs who communicate often and well inside their organizations have better reputations – and that leads directly to better business results," explains David. "They’ve also got more engaged employees – another strong, measurable driver of positive financial outcomes."

David's white paper incorporates research compiled from a number of leading sources and points to some critical key headlines, including:

• Internal communications helps drive organizational financial performance and other key business results, and enhances organizational reputation.
• There’s a correlation between effective internal communications on topics the CEO is best prepared to address, such as explaining business conditions and challenges, providing information on organizational performance and financial objectives, superior financial performance and employee engagement.
• Belief in senior leadership is one of the strongest drivers of employee engagement in multiple studies (and the very top driver in at least one), and there’s a correlation between confidence in senior leadership and employee agreement that senior leaders communicate well.
• Trust in senior leadership is a significant variable in employee engagement – and there’s much ground to be regained by CEOs on this front (especially since they are not seen as the most trustworthy information source on almost any of the topics most important to employees).

The Orbital Perspective

Astronaut Ron Garan

How can you not read a book that starts out, "I have wanted to write this book since returning to Earth from my first space mission in 2008"?

Well, that's exactly how astronaut Ron Garan's new book, The Orbital Perspective, starts.

Garan is a retired NASA astronaut who has traveled 71,075,867 miles in 2,842 orbits of our planet during more than 178 days in space and 27 hours and 3 minutes of EVA (extravehicular activity) during four spacewalks.

For Garan, living on the International Space Station (ISS) was a transformative experience – one he believes that can help us solve the world’s toughest crises. Though exploration in space led Garan to many new frontiers; perhaps his most important discovery came in the form of a parallel reality. On Earth, the former US fighter pilot during the Cold War fought the Russians; in space, the US and Russia worked as allies.

As he took in a spectacular view of the planet from the ISS, Garan’s “Orbital Perspective” took shape. If fifteen nationalities could collaborate on one of the most ambitious missions in history, then surely, we could apply that level of cooperation and innovation to creating a better world.

Garan wrote this book to communicate a call to action. To help create a global movement -- a movement of inhabitants of planet Earth who are willing to set aside their differences and work together toward our common goals.

"I am asking everyone to look for ways to create exponential, disruptive, positive action -- action that leads to exponential advancement toward solving the challenges facing our world," says Garan.

"I hope that after reading this book you will agree that we're on to something big that can potentially change the present trajectory of our global society and put it on a profoundly more positive path," he adds.

Garan explains that hovering above Earth he came to believe that the problem we face lies primarily in our inability to collaborate effectively on a global scale.

"There are millions of organizations around the world working to improve life on Earth, but for the most part these organizations are not engaged in a unified, coordinated effort. There is a great deal of duplication of effort, loss of efficiency, and unfortunately, in many cases, destructive competition that does not lead to better products or services," explains Garan.

• In addition to being a fascinating read, for me, The Orbital Perspective provides a vision of hope and a time to think "what if" and to dream. And, a compelling reason to act more broadly and collaboratively.

 "If there's one thing I've learned in my travels around the world, it's that people are people. There are more things that we share in common than things that separate us," says Garan.

Fun Space Facts (from the book)

• It took Garan three years and many weeks in space before his neck muscles really adjusted to sleeping without gravity.
• On Earth, the ISS, which is bigger than a football field, would weigh over one million pounds.
• Every night, Garan and his crew mate had a ritual of listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while they set up their equipment for the next day, and Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” before heading out to space.
• The temperature in the shade in space falls to –250ºF, and 250ºF in the sunlight.

Thanks to the book's publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

How To Reduce Your Employee Turnover Rate

Knowing why an employee leaves your company can help you to reduce your employee turnover rate.

That's because you can use the reasons a departing employee provides to gather information about processes, people and departments that might need some redirection to correct situations that may have contributed to the employee's reasons for leaving.

So, do an exit interview whenever possible with each departing employee. Ask each person:

• Why they are leaving
• What they liked about their job
• What they would have changed about their job
• How they felt about the cooperation level among co-workers
• How they felt about communication and interaction with co-workers
• Whether they received the necessary training to do their job
• Whether they received frequent coaching and balanced feedback from their supervisor
• Would they recommend a friend apply for work at your company
• How they felt about their pay
• How they would describe the morale in the company and in their department
• What they would change about their department and the company
• Whether they received the necessary information to perform their job effectively

You can find other great advice about exit interviews in the book, The Essential HR Handbook, written by Sharon Armstrong and Barbara Mitchell. The book is a quick and handy resource for any leader, manager or Human Resource professional.

How To Handle Conflict In The Workplace

Handling conflict is one of the most difficult things a leader has to deal with.  Unfortunately, conflict in the workplace is inevitable.

• In fact, research shows that 42 percent of a manager's time is spent addressing conflict.  And, over 65 percent of performance problems are caused by employee conflicts.

Managers new in their leadership role typically have had little to no training on how to deal with conflict.

Fortunately, in Susan H. Shearouse's book, Conflict 101, you can learn:

• How conflict is created
• How we respond to conflict
• How to management conflict more effectively

Shearouse explains that even though conflict is inevitable, it can lead to both growth and progress.  "There is little progress that is not preceded by some kind of conflict," says Shearouse.

I found particularly helpful in the book the definitions of the following five different types of conflict and then how best to deal with each:

1. Problems to solve
2. Disagreement
3. Contest
4. Fight
5. Intractable situation

Also helpful are the "consider this" questions asked of the reader in at the end of each chapter, along with the list of "homework" to do's.

Shearouse does a good job of teaching effective ways to:

• Confronting conflict at the earliest possible level when it's easiest to resolve
• Become more aware of how different people deal with conflict
• Have the courage to admit mistakes
• Rethink anger
• Foster compromises and collaborations
• Keep a sense of humor and sense of empathy
• Build trust among coworkers
• Harness negative emotions
• Encourage apologies and forgiveness
• Use a solution-seeking approach
• Say what needs to be said   

Shearouse has served as Executive Director of the National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution and on the Advisory Board of the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George     Mason University. Her clients have included the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Moments That Significantly Impact Company Culture

In his new book, The Responsible Leader, Tim Richardson explains that to create a high-performance culture, you need to plan and prepare for the following moments to ensure the conversations surrounding them are both meaningful and intentional:

• recruitment and induction of new team members
• performance management discussions
• promotion interviews and talent management discussions
• coaching discussions
• customer sales presentations
• handling customer complaints and problems
• briefings to the press, analysts and wider market
• senior leaders' contact with, and briefings to, teams across the organization
• internal presentations with executive committees
• team meetings and management meetings

Richardson's advice to improve the quality of these conversations is to consider:

• How clear is the principal message for the conversation? 
• How can you ensure that the content of the discussion is focused on the key message(s)?
• How can you ensure the quality of the listening by all parties?
• How can you set a pace that is both focused and allows for real thinking?
• What can you do to make the conversation a generative one that moves things forward?
• How can you be responsible for holding parties accountable for responses and actions?
• How will you ensure that decisions taken are mindful of the wider system and longer term as well as short term?
• How will the organization's values be demonstrated openly and authentically in the conversation?

Richardson is a Director of Waverly Learning and Director of Its Original Ltd. Previously Head of Leadership Development and Talent Management at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he has worked with corporate clients, such as HSBC, BBC, BOC, Zurich, Centrica, Llloyds TSB, Barclays and Uniliver amongst others.

Thanks to the book's publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

How To Write Effective Performance Appraisals

Today's guest post is by:

Peggy Pedwano

Solutions Specialist at Halogen Software

As performance appraisal time draws near, managers are all too likely to be dreading the exercise.  According to a  report by the Wharton School, although 91% of companies worldwide have a performance review process, only 35 to 40% do it well, often because managers lack the training to write effective performance appraisals. 

Here are some ideas to help you write effective performance appraisals that can form the basis for a discussion that will actually add value to employee performance reviews.  

• Begin with a clear understanding of what is important. If you and your employees have set performance goals or established other performance measurement criteria, this should be a relatively easy process. But even if you haven’t, taking the time to think through the year’s priorities and projects will help you focus your appraisal on what matters most. Consider projects where you have been able to observe or can collect objective performance data and identify the core competencies that are critical to success.
• Keep notes throughout the year.  This simple tool makes writing effective performance appraisals much easier. Whenever you observe employees or have a performance discussion throughout the year, make notes of specific and objective examples to which you can refer. If you haven’t kept notes, think back to observations and prior performance discussions you may have had to identify specific examples. Identify enough examples to be able to document what the employee is doing well as well as what needs to improve.

• Collect input from employees. Ask your employees to send you their own written thoughts about their performance. Be clear that you will be using their input as one of many sources in compiling an effective performance appraisal. If they do not already have them, supply employees with a list of the goals, competencies or other performance criteria that are the basis for their evaluation. But, by all means, resist the temptation to simply take employees’ self-evaluation, change a few words and adopt it as your own.

• Collect input from other sources. It is likely that there are others who have worked closely with your employee throughout the course of the year. Ask for their assessment on the goals, competencies and other criteria you have identified as the basis for your appraisal. Weigh all these sources of input carefully to determine as accurate and complete a picture as possible. 

• Watch out for subtle biases as you formulate your opinions of the employee’s performance. Factors such as personality compatibility can impact your attitude without your knowledge – guard against them. 

• Consider employee career aspirations and include development plans. If the employee’s performance is generally good, include some elements that will help them progress toward the next step in their career. 

• Be specific. Include descriptions of what went well and what could have been done better. Base your statements on the examples you have collected. 

• Gauge the potential impact on the employee. Do not sugarcoat bad news, but be sure that you can support your opinions and choose language that will avoid triggering a defensive response.

Writing an effective performance appraisal is an essential part of a manager’s responsibility and has a significant impact on an employee’s performance, attitude and future. You owe it to them, the organization and your future relationship with the employee to take your time and create an objective, constructive and effective performance appraisal. 

Halogen Software offers an organically built cloud-based talent management suite that reinforces and drives higher employee performance across all talent programs – whether that’s recruiting, performance management, learning and development, succession planning or compensation.

Thanks Peggy for these great tips!

Trust-Building Tips

You can't lead if your employees, team or followers don't trust you.

Building trust takes energy, effort and constant attention to how you act.

To help build trust, follow these 16 tips, recommended by author Susan H. Shearouse:

1. Be honest
2. Keep commitments and keep your word
3. Avoid surprises
4. Be consistent with your mood
5. Be your best
6. Demonstrate respect
7. Listen
8. Communicate
9. Speak with a positive intent
10. Admit mistakes
11. Be willing to hear feedback
12. Maintain confidences
13. Get to know others
14. Practice empathy
15. Seek input from others
16. Say "thank you"

Six Ways To Jump-Start Your Business

As a leader in your business, try these six ideas to give your business a jump-start:

1. Ask for ideas from employees in all parts of your business. Don't ask for ideas only from your product development or marketing departments.
2. Be sure all employees clearly understand your vision and the mission of your business.
3. Brainstorm ways to take advantage of your strengths.
4. Determine how to overcome your business' weaknesses.
5. Choose which opportunities you will prioritize to help keep everyone focused on a common goal.
6. Celebrate your successes regularly and encourage learning from your mistakes.

Don't Be This Type Of Boss

A former co-worker shared a great blog post with me about the most common complaints about the annoying things bosses do without even realizing it. 

Here are the highlights:

1. Making social events unofficially required.

2. Pressuring employees to donate to charity.

3. Calling employees who are on vacation.

4. Holding endless meetings.

5. Not making hard decisions.

6. Delegating without truly delegating.

7. Hinting, rather than speaking straightforwardly.

Read on for the details behind each of the above statements.

Thought For The Day

"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in a world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it." -- David Beckahm

Don't Hog All The Credit

Insecure managers hog the credit for a job well done. Or, they hide the credit and don't give credit where credit is due. These managers are afraid to let their employees be in the limelight.

Secure and successful managers talk up their employees, highlighting the good performance they've done, and are eager to give credit where credit is due. They promote their staff to their supervisor and to others within their organization.

Successful managers know that they look good when their employees look good.

Giving credit where credit is due is a sign of a manager who is wise and confident. It's a sign of a manager who demonstrates good leadership skills. So, when your employees excel, allow them to take the spotlight.

Why Giving Positive Feedback Is Better Than Giving Praise

There is an important difference between giving your employees positive feedback and giving them praise.

• Positive feedback focuses on the specifics of job performance.
• Praise, often one-or two-sentence statements, such as “Keep up the good work,” without positive feedback leaves employees with empty feelings.

Worse yet, without positive feedback, employees feel no sense that they are appreciated as individual talents with specific desires to learn and grow on the job and in their careers, reports Nicholas Nigro, author of, The Everything Coaching and Mentoring Book.

• So, skip the praise and give positive feedback that is more uplifting to your employees because it goes to the heart of their job performance and what they actually do.

An example of positive feedback is:

“Bob, your communications skills have dramatically improved over the past couple of months. The report that you just prepared for me was thorough and concise. I appreciate all the work you’ve put into it, as do your team members.”

Leadership And Life Quotes

These quotes truly inspire me:

“The three common characteristics of best companies -- they care, they have fun, they have high performance expectations.” -- Brad Hams

“The one thing that's common to all successful people: They make a habit of doing things that unsuccessful people don't like to do.” -- Michael Phelps

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." -- Harry S. Truman

“The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.” -- Peter Drucker

“Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” -- Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Good leadership isn't about advancing yourself.  It's about advancing your team.” -- John C. Maxwell

"People buy into the leader, then the vision.” -- John C. Maxwell

“Great leaders have courage, tenacity and patience.” -- Bill McBean

"People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves." -- Paulo Coelho

"We live in a time where brands are people and people are brands." -- Brian Solis

"In real life, the most practical advice for leaders is not to treat pawns like pawns, nor princes like princes, but all persons like persons." -- James MacGregor Burns

"The only source of knowledge is experience." -- Albert Einstein

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely." -- Auguste Rodin

"Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending." -- Maria Robinson

“A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.” -- Arnold H. Glasgow

“I praise loudly, I blame softly.” -- Catherine II of Russia

“Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” -- Mohandas Gandhi

“A long dispute means that both parties are wrong.” -- Voltaire

“The least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable.” -- Paul Broca

"One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency." -- Arnold Glasow

“Managers assert drive and control to get things done; leaders pause to discover new ways of being and achieving .”-- Kevin Cashman

“It doesn't matter where you're coming from. All that matters is where you are going to.” -- Stephen Covey

“Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance.” -- Samuel Johnson

“Strength doesn't come from what we can do. It comes from overcoming what we once thought we couldn't.” -- Rikki Roberts

“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” -- Alfred North Whitehead

“The most powerful predictable people builders are praise and encouragement.” -- Brian Tracy

“Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon them and to let them know that and trust them.” -- Booker T. Washington

“Ask because you want to know. Listen because you want to grow.” -- Mark Scharenbroich

“If you want execution, hail only success. If you want creativity, hail risk, and remain neutral about success.” -- Marcus Buckingham

“To get the best coaching outcomes, always have your 1-on-1's on your employee's turf not yours. In your office the truth hides.” -- Marcus Buckingham

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” -- Alan Kay

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” -- Winston Churchill

“I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” -- Bill Cosby

“The greatest accomplishment is not in never failing, but in rising again after you fall.” -- Vince Lombardi

The Three Rules of the DevOps Game

“Of course we do agile development,” she told me. “That’s just table stakes. What we need to do now is learn how to play the DevOps game. We need to know how to construct a deployment pipeline, how to keep test automation from turning into a big ball of mud, whether micro-services are just another fad, what containers are all about. We need to know if outsourcing our infrastructure is a good long term strategy and what happens to DevOps if we move to the cloud.”

Ask the right questions

Imagine something we will call the IT stack. At one end of the stack is hardware and at the other end customers get useful products and services. The game is to move things through the stack in a manner that is responsive, reliable, and sustainable. The first order of business is to understand what responsive, reliable, and sustainable mean in your world. Then you need to be the best in your field at providing products and services that strike the right balance between responsiveness, reliability and sustainability.

1. What does it mean to be Responsive?

In many industries, responsive has come to mean devising and delivering features through the entire IT stack in a matter of minutes or hours. From hosted services to bank trading desks, the ability to change software on demand has become an expected practice. In these environments, a deployment pipeline is essential. Teams have members from every part of the IT stack. Automation moves features from idea, to code, to tested feature, to integrated capability, to deployed service very quickly.

Companies that live in this fast-moving world invest in tools to manage, test, and deploy code, tools to maintain infrastructure, and tools to monitor production environments. In this world, automation is essential for rapid delivery, comprehensive testing, and automated recovery when (not if, but when) things go wrong.

On the other end of the spectrum are industries where responsiveness is a distant second to safety: avionics, medical devices, chemical plant control systems. Even here, software is expected to evolve, just more slowly. Consider Saab’s Gripen, a small reconnaissance and fighter jet with a purchase and operational cost many times lower than any comparable fighter. Over the past decade, the core avionics systems of the Gripen have been updated at approximately the same rate as major releases of the android operating system. Moreover, Gripen customers can swap out tactical modules and put in new ones at any time, with no impact on the flight systems. This “smartphone architecture” extends the useful life of the Gripen fighter by creating subsystems that use well-proven technology and are able to change independently over time. In the slow-moving aircraft world, the Gripen is a remarkably responsive system.

2. What does it mean to be Reliable?

There are two kinds of people in the world – optimists and pessimists – the risk takers and the risk adverse – those who chase gains and those who fear loss. Researcher Troy Higgins calls the two world views “promotion-focus” and “prevention-focus”. If we look at the IT stack, one end tends to be populated with promotion-focus people who enjoy creating an endless flow of new capabilities. [Look! It works!] As you move toward the other end of the stack, you find an increasing number of prevention-focused people who worry about safety and pay a lot of attention to the ways things could go wrong. They are sure that anything which CAN go wrong eventually WILL go wrong.

These cautious testers and operations people create friction, which slows things down. The slower pace tends to frustrate promotion-focused developers. To resolve this tension, a simple but challenging question must be answered: What is the appropriate trade-off between responsiveness and safety FOR OUR CUSTOMERS AT THIS TIME? Depending on the answer, the scale may tip toward a promotion-focused mindset or a prevention-focused mindset, but it is never appropriate to completely dismiss either mindset.

Consider Jack, whose team members were so frustrated with the slow pace of obtaining infrastructure that they decided to deploy their latest update in the cloud. Of course they used an automated test harness, and they appreciated how fast their tests ran in the cloud. Once all of the tests passed, the team deployed a cloud-based solution to a tough tax calculation problem. One evening a couple nights later, Jack had just put his children to bed when the call came: “A lot of customers are complaining that the system is down.” He got on his laptop and rebooted the system, praying that no one had lost data in the process. Around midnight another call came: “The complaints are coming in again. Maybe you had better check on things regularly until we can look at it in the morning.” It was a sleepless night – something Jack was not familiar with. These were the kinds of problems that operations used to handle, but since operations had been bypassed, it fell to the development team to monitor the site and keep the service working. This was a new and unpleasant experience. First thing in the morning, the team members asked an operations expert to join them. They needed help discovering and dealing with all of the ways that their “tested, integrated, working” cloud-based service could fail in actual use.

The cause of the problem turned out to be a bit of code that expected the environment to behave in a particular way, and in certain situations the cloud environment behaved differently. The team decided to use containers to ensure a stable environment. They also set up a monitoring system so they could see how the system was operating and get early warnings of unusual behavior. They discovered that their code had more dependencies on outside systems than they knew about, and they hoped that monitoring would alert them to the next problem before it impacted customers. The team learned that all of this extra work brought its own friction, so they asked operations to give them a permanent team member to advise them and help them deploy safely – whether to internal infrastructure or to the cloud.

Of course no one was in mortal danger when Jack’s system locked up – because it wasn’t guiding an aircraft or pacing a heartbeat. So it was fine for his team to learn the hard way that a good dose of prevention-focus is useful for any system, even one running in the cloud. But you do not want to put naive teams in a position where they can generate catastrophic results.

It is essential to understand the risk of any system in terms of: 1) probability of failure, 2) ability to detect failure, 3) resilience in recovering from failure, 4) level of risk that can be tolerated, and 5) remediation required to keep the risk acceptable. Note that you do not want this understanding to come solely from people with a prevention-focused mindset (eg. auditors) nor solely from people with a promotion-focused mindset. Your best bet is to assemble a mixed team that can strike the right balance – for your world – between responsiveness and reliability.

3. What does it mean to be Sustainable?

We know that technology does not stand still; in fact, most technology grows obsolete relatively quickly. We know that the reason our systems have software is so that they can evolve and remain relevant as technology changes. But what does it take to create a system in which evolution is easy, inexpensive and safe? A software-intensive system that readily accepts change has two core characteristics – it is understandable and it is testable.

a. What does it mean to be understandable?

If a system is going to be safely changed, then members of a modest sized team[1] must be able to wrap their minds around the way the system works. In order to understand the implications of a change, this team should have a clear understanding of the details of how the system works, what dependencies exist, and how each dependency will be impacted by the change.

An understandable system is bounded. Within the boundaries, clarity and simplicity are essential because the bounded system must never outgrow the team’s capacity to understand it, even as the team members change over time. The boundaries must be hardened and communication through the boundaries must be limited and free of hidden dependencies.

Finally, the need for understanding is fractal. As bounded sub-systems are wired together, the resulting system must also be understandable. As we create small, independently deployable micro-services, we must remember that these small services will eventually get wired together into a system, and a lot of micro-things with multiple dependencies can rapidly add up to a complex, unintelligible system. If a system – at any level – is too complex to be understood by a modest sized team, it cannot be safely modified or replaced; it is not renewable.

b. What does it mean to be testable?

A testable system, sub-system, or service is one that is testable both within its boundaries and at each interface with outside systems. For example, consider Service A which runs numbers through a complex algorithm and returns a result. The team responsible for this service develops a test harness along with their code which assures that the service returns the correct answer given expected inputs. It also creates a contract which clearly defines acceptable inputs, the rate it can accept inputs, and the format and meaning of the results it returns. The team documents this by writing contract tests which are made available to any team that wishes to invoke the service. Assume that service B would like to use service A. Then the team responsible for service B must place the contract tests from service A in its automated test suite and run the tests any time a change is made. If the contract tests for service A are comprehensive and the testing of service B always includes the latest version of these tests, then the dependency between the services is relatively safe.

Of course it’s not that simple. What if service A wants to change its interface? Then it is expected to maintain two interfaces, an old version and a new version, until service B gets around to upgrading to the new interface. And every service invoking service A is expected to keep track of which version it is certified to use.

Then again, service A might want to call another service – let’s say service X – and so service A must pass all of the contract tests for service X every time it makes a change. And since service X might branch off a new version, service A has to deal with multi-versioning on both its input and its output boundaries.

If you have trouble wrapping your head around the last three paragraphs, you probably appreciate why it is extremely difficult to keep an overall system with multiple services in an understandable, testable state at all times. Complexity tends to explode as a system grows, so the battle to keep systems understandable and testable must be fought constantly over the lifetime of any product or service.

A Reference Architecture

Over the last couple of decades, the most responsive, reliable, renewable systems seem to have platform-application architectures. (The smartphone is the most ubiquitous example.) Platforms such as Linux, android, and Gripen avionics focus on simplicity, low dependency, reliability, and slow evolution. They become the base for swappable applications which are required to operate in isolation, with minimum dependencies. Applications are small (members of a modest sized team can get their heads around a phone app), self-sufficient (apps generally contain their own data or retrieve it through a hardened interface), and easy to change (but every change has to be certified). If an app becomes unwieldy or obsolete, it is often easiest to discard it and create a new one. While this may appear to be a bit wasteful, it is the ability of a platform-app architecture to easily throw out old apps and safely add new ones that keeps the overall ecosystem responsive, fault tolerant, and capable of evolving over time.  

So these are the three rules of the DevOps game: Be responsive. Be reliable. Be sure your work is sustainable.

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[1] What is a modest sized team? We have found that in hardware-software environments, a team the size of a military platoon (three squads) is often a good size for major sub-systems. Robert Dunbar found in his research that a hunting group (30-40 people) brings the diversity of sills necessary to achieve a major objective.  See the essays “Before there was Management and "The Scaling Dilemma."

Fail Fast Or Win Big

In his new book, Fail Fast or Win Big: The Start-up Plan for Starting Now, author Bernhard Schroeder gives you the edge he believes you'll need to be an entrepreneur who can launch a profitable business—in 90 days or less.

He draws on his work with many talented entrepreneurs (the founders of Yahoo! and Amazon included), and presents a proven expedient route to start-up success. That expedited route includes fostering entrepreneurship by facilitating the introduction of product and service “rough drafts” to customers, and then, based on feedback, swiftly adjusting—or dumping—them. Schroeder calls this The LeanModel Framework.

Readers will quickly become adept at:

• Leveraging all the lean resources around them, from their own skill set, local community, and personal circles to professional networks, online resources, and technology tools.

• Developing and evolving a solid business model, rather than agonizing over writing a formal business plan, with attention to their venture’s unique value, target segments, key partners, and creating a customer relationship “feeling.”

• Rapid prototyping—developing a rapid prototype sample product or service and getting it out there quickly to test customer response, then seizing on that feedback to tweak, overhaul, or completely abandon their breakout offering.

• Seeking out and trusting customer truth, which demands never assuming that they know what a customer wants or needs, relentlessly researching the marketplace and trends, and frequently talking with and always listening to real customers.

• Getting their start-up off the ground with alternative sources of funding, with particular attention the payoff of crowdfunding and pointers on preparing an effective reward or equity campaign...and more

Schroeder is the Director of Programs at the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center at San Diego State University. He also teaches entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity courses.

Schroeder helped to create a $1 billion company CKS|Partners, the world’s largest integrated marketing communications agency. He has worked with American Express, Apple, Mazda, GM, Kellogg’s, Levi’s, Nikon, and Visa, among many outstanding firms and brands. He was also involved in the initial branding and marketing launches for Amazon, ESPN Online, Travelocity, and Yahoo! 

Thanks to AMACOM, the book publisher, for sending me an advance copy of the book.

Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader

This week, Herminia Ibarra will release her latest book, Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader.

Contrary to popular opinion, Ibarra argues that you have to act your way into a new type of leadership thinking instead of thinking your way into it. And to do this, you need to develop and practice outsight (versus insight).

To do that, you should:

1. Redefine your job to make time for more strategic work and more work outside your function, unit and even organization.
2. Diversify your network so that you connect to and learn from a bigger range of stakeholders.
3. Get more playful with your sense of self so that you allow yourself to experiment with styles of behaving that go against your nature.

"Doing things -- rather than simply thinking about them -- will increase your outsight on what leadership is all about," explains Ibarra.

Here are three ways to do things at your office tomorrow:

1. Sign up for one new project, task-force, professional association or extracurricular professional activity that takes you a bit outside your usual area of expertise.
2. Reach out to three people in your company you always wanted to get to know and ask them for lunch or coffee.
3. Identify two people whose leadership you admire and start watching them closely. What do they do especially well? Try to adopt some of what they do.

And, when you diversify your network, Ibarra explains that you will be using networking as an essential leadership tool by:

• Sensing trends and seeing opportunities
• Building ties to opinion leaders and talent in diverse areas
• Working collaboratively across boundaries to create more value
• Avoiding groupthink
• Generating breakthrough ideas
• Obtaining career opportunities

Finally, to act like a leader, Ibarra recommends you:

• Let go of performance goals that can diminish how much we're willing to risk in the service of learning.
• Allocate less time to what you do best to devote more time to learning other things that are also important.

Ibarra's book includes many useful self-assessments.

Ibarra is the Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning at INSEAD, and author of, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career.

Thanks to the book's publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

Promote Excellent Internal Customer Service

Too often, we think of only external customer service, and forget about the need for excellent internal customer service.

No matter what type of business, organization or team you lead, remind your team members/employees of the need for and importance of internal customer service.

Similar to external customer service, that means employees/team members should:

1. Return phone calls on a timely basis.
2. Answer e-mails.
3. Be polite.
4. Probe to discover how else he/she can be helpful to a co-worker.
5. Be respectful of co-workers.

Lead your team in providing excellent internal customer service. If need be, make internal customer service a discussion topic at your next group meeting.

How You Make Them Feel

"I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."  - Maya Angelou

Thank You

Thank you for helping me be No. 64 on this list!

Never Say These Words To A Customer

Author Harvey MacKay wrote the following spot-on advice in his column in the Kansas City Business Journal a few years ago.  He wisely points out that all employees at every level should never use these four words in front of a client/customer for both obvious and perhaps not so obvious reasons:

• Can't -- As in, "We can't do that."  "We can't meet that deadline."  Unless you honestly cannot produce and then be honest and help them find another vendor.
• Busy -- As in, "I'll call you when I'm not so busy."  "I'm really busy right now." The word "busy" gives your customer the impression they are a low priority.
• Safe -- As in, "Let's play it safe."  Customers typically want to engage in calculated risks versus playing it safe.
• Fear -- As in, "I fear that we may be moving too fast."  That tells your customer you haven't done your homework. MacKay writes, "Common sense, thorough research and sound advice should allay your fears to a reasonable level."

Take a moment.  Are you absolutely sure every employee in sales, production, operations, marketing, etc., is not using these words, even inadvertently, in front of your customers?

Thanks for the important reminder, Harvey MacKay!

How Do You Answer These "Open Leadership" Questions?

Open Leadership author Charlene Li reminds leaders to periodically ask themselves these "open leadership skills assessment" questions:

• Do I seek out and listen to different points of view?
• Do I make myself available to people at all levels of the organization?
• Do I actively manage how I am authentic?
• Do I encourage people to share information?
• Do I publicly admit when I am wrong?
• Do I update people regularly?
• Do I take the time to explain how decisions are being made?

Thanks for these great questions, Charlene!

How To Check Your Grammar

Grammarly is an online grammar checker. It's an online spell and grammar checking application that helps users find and correct English writing issues. It provides context and correction suggestions about grammar, spelling, vocabulary usage and plagiarism.

In fact, Grammarly scans your text for proper use of more than 250 advanced grammar rules, spanning everything from subject-verb agreement to article use to modifier placement.

It’s also easy to use. Simply copy and paste any English writing into Grammarly’s grammar checker.

Grammarly’s algorithms then flag potential issues in the text and provide context and suggested corrections, enabling you to make informed decisions about whether, and how, to correct the issue.

Grammarly is used by over four million people.

Recently, the company conducted a study with over 400 freelancers to determine what impact writing skills have on one's career opportunities.

The company proofread the 400 freelancer profiles and checked for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. They then looked at the correlation between earnings and number of mistakes. The findings are in this infographic.