Command vs. Persuade

Jeff Atwood wrote a compelling piece about the value of persuasion. I especially like his assertion that leading should be "leading by example," something far few graduates of "leadership courses" seem to learn. It probably seems far more efficient to just tell someone what to do than to show them.

Why Must We Be Busy?

The Busy Trap from the New York Times.

I find it amazing if I get 4 or even 5 good creative hours in a day. The rest of the time seems to become an inner struggle, attempting to get more stuff done. I try to figure out non-writey, non-programmy things I can do with myself to be productive in some other way. Sometimes I can clean up the house; a baseline, physical activity without too much thinking. Sometimes even that seems too much. I have this persistent compulsion to try, probably because it feels good to accomplish something. Or perhaps it's just the Puritan work ethic whispering in my ear.

The hardest thing seems to be just to let go and do nothing. I've had some days where I've practiced doing nothing, and it feels like the same struggle as meditation: Every time your mind wanders off and tries to be productive, you have to bring it back and remind it that today we do nothing.

Weirdly, it seems like once you are actually successful at letting go of trying to get anything done, that's when the really great idea pops up. As if it needs the space in your mind that's only liberated when you release and drift.

It's More Than an Idea, More Than a Plan

Here's an interesting blog post. He's a compelling writer and his arguments seem so convincing.

But partway down, he says: "Your success is a battle plan for your competition. Your success is a public acknowledgement of a strategy that works..." Thus, once someone sees what you've done and how successful it is, they will naturally imitate you. It seems so logical, so sensible.

And yet, most of the examples I can think of seem to show that the opposite is true. You can lay out a really good way to do something in great detail, show that it's very successful, and still, no one will pay attention, much less imitate you in any way. In fact, companies like Zappos and Zingerman's have divisions devoted to showing other companies how to do what they do, and still the uptake is remarkably small.

The blog post author unwittingly gives a counterexample to his own argument: the success of the iPod should have produced lots of competitors, and that's what he said Apple was preemptively preventing. But it didn't! Sure there were crappy MP3 players both before and after Apple showed how to do it right, but no one actually followed Apple's example and built an ecosystem for music, of which the iPod is only a part.

W.L. Gore has had a really successful innovation model since 1958, but few if any companies seem to want to imitate it, instead whining about how America has lost its innovative edge.

Microsoft has certainly had the money and people to pay attention to what companies like Google and Apple have done, but did it use those companies as a "battle plan?" Did RIM use Apple's model as a "battle plan?"

Seriously, how many counterexamples can you think of for this author's statement? Counterexamples are all I seem to be able to think of. Now how many examples can you think of where one company showed success and was then eclipsed by another company that used the first company's example as a "battle plan?" I have a hard time thinking of any (please, people on the discussion group, point out some examples). I think the eclipsing happened when the new company did something different rather than imitating the first.

On the face of it, the author's reasoning seems incontrovertible: Once you demonstrate how to be successful, others will follow your example. And this is the kind of thing that is so problematic about "business book reasoning." You can easily make an argument that appeals to the common sense of the reader, that makes you a successful book author, presenter and consultant. But your argument can produce a completely wrong conclusion. The reason it's wrong might be convoluted and not appeal to the "common sense" of the reader. It's certainly easier to tell the reader what they already believe. Or consider Drive, where he talks about all the evidence showing that money as an incentive is often counterproductive. People listen to and believe these studies, but then go back to using money as incentive (perhaps it's just easier to think about; also we've been trained from birth to believe that money is the reason to do anything at all).

No one seems to remember that the self-titled "Father of Scientific Management," Frederick Winslow Taylor, was fired for incompetence from the consulting job where his most famous "study" came from, because his employers could see that he was just making things up to fit the conclusions he wanted. He went on to have a lucrative career, heavily based on this "study," by selling managers on things they wanted to hear -- in the process creating the model for management consulting firms. And that might actually be the example of "success as a battle plan for the competition:" The management consulting firm. I think it's safe to argue that this is the exception that proves the rule.

The blog post author happens to be a good writer. He presents ideas in a very motivating fashion, and with lots of confidence. But he doesn't seem to be a good thinker because you can take this one argument and quickly discount it by thinking of lots of counterexamples and few examples, and pretty soon you start wondering how he came to that conclusion. And you'll notice that (sigh) all it took was the good writing for him to put out some business books. Maybe they contain lots of good ideas, but the evidence of this one blog post makes it hard for me to consider taking those books seriously.

It would be so much more interesting if he had thought a little harder. If he noticed that although it seems like imitators would abound once you demonstrated a successful plan, in fact this isn't true. And if he then asked and answered the question, "Why is this?" That kind of thinking would produce a business book I want to read.

Follow-Up

Andrew Frances commented:

"I have two explanations for why it is hard for companies to simply emulate a good company. The second explanation is not original.

"1) Managerial preferences (A part of the Diamond-E Framework of Fry and Killings). Management has preferences about how they like to make money. These preferences are not all rational. Some companies for ideological reasons will not duplicate a competitor.

"2) Orthodoxies and Activity Sets (Gary Hamel / Blue Ocean Strategy/ Christiansen(?) of Innovator's Dilemma)

"Companies in a given industry tend to adopt very similar set of assumptions - or orthodoxies. In turn the companies organise themselves around these orthodoxies - for instance "activity sets." (resources, skills, capital).  As a result, companies look very similar and it is actually very difficult to get an upper hand.

"Now the good company challenges a few orthodoxies and re-organises itself appropriately. Barriers to exit (i.e., capital costs) makes it very difficult for the orthodox company to compete. Sometime the orthodox companies fail to even realise they are competitors (Blue Ocean argues that the good company creates a new market - hence a blue ocean the company has to itself)."

Why Do Companies Die?

It might be as simple as this: Products have lifetimes. In the industrial age, starting a product was a big, expensive proposition. The easiest thing to do was to conflate the product with the company. Once the two were inexorably tied together, when the product lifetime came to an end, so eventually would the company. It would live for awhile on stored resources and thrash around trying to suddenly become innovative, but because that company's essential structure was built around that one product, eventually it would die.

Industrial age organizations can't untie themselves from their one successful product/product group, so they die.

If we can figure out how to decouple product from organization then all that collective knowledge won't get lost.