Real World

book review: Be A Free Range Human

psst. Hey you. Want to know a secret?free range human

Don’t tell anyone, but the world has changed in the past few years. Massively. Technology has made us all interconnected, made location irrelevant, and costs almost nothing.

This thing called the Internet connects us all email, social media, Skype, and online commerce. Computers, tablets, and smart phones hook us to it 24/7. Work is more about processing information than making widgets so we can live anywhere and work everywhere. It’s amazing!

What’s that? You knew that already? Everyone knows that? Really, then why do we still organize our work and structure businesses as though carbon paper is the latest innovation? Why do we keep the way we do work stuck in the forgotten past? What if much of what we’ve been told about career and business success is now irrelevant (or even wrong)?

If we really got how much the world has changed, we’d realize the dream of just a few years ago is now a distinct possibility: Freedom! No office, no schedule. Working from bookstores, coffee shops, and tropical beaches. Your office – your entire business – packed into a laptop bag; all you need is an outlet and a Wifi connection. Live anywhere, work everywhere. That’s the dream, right?

Timothy Ferriss popularized the idea with his book The 4-Hour Workweek and Marianne Cantwell now gives us a practical how-to guide with Be a Free Range Human: Escape the 9 to 5, Create a Life You Love and Still Pay the Bills.

Let me say this up front: even if you’re not looking to drop out of the corporate world, there’s still quite a bit of great information here. Many of the skills that let you be an independent consultant, contractor, or solopreneur translate well to any career. Even if you are not wanting to leave your current role, Marianne underscores how much work has changed so quickly, and how career-savvy employees can take advantages of those changes.

When we consider how different the world is, we realize we can do business differently. Networking and relationships replace advertising, credibility replaces business cards and letterhead, and an internet connection replaces expensive office space. Location has become irrelevant for many jobs and businesses. Results count for more than prestige and purchased impressiveness. Why spend money on the trappings of a “business” when you can simply bypass all that and provide value?

The author shares what she has learned both in her own transition and in coaching and helping other make the leap to the free range life. Refreshingly, it’s not a call to quit today and figure it out tomorrow. Rather, she advocates a much lower risk approach of doing small experiments and starting off with as little expense and overhead as possible. She advocates playing and experimenting and testing, starting small and finding what will scale to a larger business and what you’ll actually enjoy doing. The book has plenty of examples and case studies, exercises to help you think it all through, and links to additional information.

The author clearly takes to heart the idea of standing out and being true to self as a competitive advantage. Not a new message, but well delivered. She reminds us that being all things to all people is a tried and tested formula for grey mediocrity. Standing apart creates people who don’t understand us and don’t like us AND creates excitement and loyalty for those who do appreciate it. It’s not being average at everything for everyone, it’s being great at a few things for a specific audience. The “beige army” (as she calls them) strongly wants you to join them in mediocrity. They hate to see anyone stand out, be different, or succeed uniquely (remember Puttnam’s Law?). They want you to fit in and be average and do things the way they think everybody does things.  They will bully and push and complain and criticize, but aligning yourself with them only ensures conformity, not success. She highlights how there’s little point in reducing your strengths to appease them – they weren’t going to buy from you anyway. Far better to cultivate a small group of diehard customers that love you than pandering to a large group of potential customers that don’t hate you.

Without giving it all away, here are some topics to look forward to:

  • A great section on networking that works. She never refers to her approach as networking because it’s not done as an add-on or a separate activity, rather it’s done authentically as a natural course of the day. How to grow your business without advertising.
  • Creating status and credibility without the overhead of unnecessary business trappings such as nice offices, business cards, brochures, etc.
  • The four (plus one) free range business types.
  • How to test your idea in a week to see if it will work.
  • Why you don’t need a business plan.
  • Why it’s a business-killing idea to try to make everyone your customer. The paradox is you will actually reach more customers by concentrating on fewer customers.
  • The do’s and don’t’s of getting press.
  • Communicating like a human, not a business drone.

A few quick gems from the author:

  • If you can’t see the woods for the trees, the answer isn’t to add more trees.
  • … don’t use the fact that you’re not world class in two hours as an excuse not to keep going.
  • For every person who laughs at you when you are at your brightest, someone else loves you for exactly the same reason.
  • The middle of the road is the most dangerous place to be (that’s where you get run over by fast-moving traffic).
  • Be the person who does it differently; be the example you’re looking for.

That should have you covered. Again, whether you’re looking to set up shop from the world’s beaches or just want to bolster your career, there is a lot of great information offered up. Practical, straightforward, easy to read. Good stuff and worth a read.

Live anywhere, work anywhere. What thinks you?

 

 

 

 

In the spirit of transparency: a while back, the publisher asked me if I’d like them to send me their catalog to see if there were any books I’d like to read and review. [YES! Now, please!] This was one of the books that caught my eye so they kindly shipped me a copy.

 

 

inconceivable

pedalsHow many things completely inconceivable just 10 years ago, very expensive or difficult even five years back, are ho-hum (yawn) commonplace today?

I bought a new set of pedals for my mountain bike from the UK. A great set of pedals – a brand that’s hard to find in the US – at a competitive price, $10 shipping, eight business days later and they’re waiting for me in the mail.

A quick photo from my phone and I’ve shared my excitement with friends. An hour or two later and I’m interacting and discussing the pedals with people across timezones, countries, and continents. And I’m doing it essentially for free.

Count the inconceivable impossibilities in the two previous paragraphs. Not only is it hard to grasp all the advances that had to come together to make all of that possible, but it’s even more startling how quickly such an impossibilities became just another Thursday night.

 

Pedals? Who cares? What about work?

This kind of cross-continent coordination, collaboration, and communication is mundane in our private lives, but how much has work kept up?

  • How many policies do we have that are so out of date they might as well be written on papyrus scrolls?
  • How much energy is spent blocking technology and ensuring work gets done in a certain way vs embracing how work might be different?
  • If your job were invented today, would it look the way it does now? How different would your office/workspace be? What technology would you use if you could select it (what technology do you use to get things done in your personal life that you can’t use at work)? Who would you communicate with that you don’t now?
  • How different would recruiting, hiring, and onboarding employees be if we started from scratch today? How would HR workflow be different?
  • What policies would immediately be nuked and what would they be replaced with (if at all) if we were told reinvent the business?
  • How much of an advantage does the lack of legacy give a new business over an established one right now in terms of creating more efficient work?

What are the inconceivable things at work that are completely possible right now? What are we not doing because it was impossible five years ago, but would be cheap and easy to do today?

What thinks you?

 

linearity is a lie

Us humans so want certainty and security in an uncertain and insecure world that we’ve created this myth – a lie – of the importance of living a linear life. Life in a straight line, always stepping forward, never getting sidetracked, each movement building on the past – it sounds so great.

We created the lie and we’re suckers for believing it. Buy into the lie and we’ve undermined our own success and fulfillment. Believing in the Myth of Straight Lines leaves us asking why our life isn’t that way; it leaves us unhappy and wondering what we’re doing wrong. The reality is simply LIFE IS NOT LINEAR. It rarely moves in straight lines. It leaps forward, sideways, backwards. It zigs, it zags. Sometimes it does nothing at all. Dumb luck, random events, accidents, disease, decisions that made sense at the time, poor choices, and timing conspire to ensure life is not straightedge precise.

Life is sloppymessy. Zig Ziglar once advised us to: Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and capitalize on what comes. It appears that those who play big and make a difference understand this and can work with it. They have the end destination in mind but are flexible about how to get there and even willing to accept a different destination if a better one reveals itself along the way.

Consider the possibility that when we buy into the lie of linearity and are unwilling to deviate from the straight line, we are generally unable to accept setbacks and failure as a part of the process. Unable to risk creativity or innovation or simply trying something different. Perhaps even unable to recognize how strong, how unique, and resourceful we actually are. We might miss how much we’ve actually done, the difference we’ve made, and the success we’ve had.

What thinks you?

 

the shop is no longer around the corner

I recently re-watched You’ve Got Mail with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks (to be clear: I didn’t watch it with them, they were in the movie). It came out in 1997 at the cusp of three pivotal shifts and is an interesting look at people dealing with FutureNow and trying to find their way forward without a map.

Email was new and quaint and exciting, big box retailers were driving the small independent shops out of business, and – although the movie doesn’t address it – people and businesses were trying to figure out the whole internet thing by applying old business models to a new medium.

In one scene, Meg Ryan’s character wishes she could ask her deceased mom for advice on how her small bookstore can compete with the mega-store going in just down the street. A friend makes a show out of asking her mom’s picture what to do, holding it to her ear for the answer. The friend puts the photo down and says, “She doesn’t know what to do either.” There was no map, no established answer, no tried and true success model.

Fifteen years later and the big box stores are in the same position Meg Ryan’s cute little shop was in. The internet has evolved into a reliable commerce channel, creating enormous economies of scale AND a level of service that physical stores wouldn’t / couldn’t provide. No store can have enough staff to be familiar with every book, yet the online stores have ratings and comments available from people who have read the book. Online, there is no snobbery from the clerk at the CD store looking upon your musical taste with distain. Prices are low and the option to buy used pushes them even lower.

The bad guy of a decade and a half ago is now the victim. The world changed and no one told them. There is no map, no established answer, no tried and true success model for them to follow.

For better or worse, the world is changing and evolving and moving in faster and faster cycles. We’ve got email figured out and now we’re wrestling with social media. Higher education and banking are likely to take the same sort of leap the music and publishing industries did and others will follow. It doesn’t take much of a futurist to predict that there is another big shift about to happen just a few years down the road.

Here’s the HR / world of work spin: technology is driving massive changes at a societal level, allowing us to do so much more with so much less, eliminating old jobs and creating new opportunities. That’s not going away. It’s scaryexcitingterrifyingthrilling. It requires perpetual learning and thinking and changing and an ability to adapt at an ongoing level that’s never been asked of us before.

Hope, fear, uncertainty, confidence, desire for success, terror of failure are all very real and very human issues. I wonder how Human Resources and Learning & Development will best help individuals and organizations cope-survive-thrive.

Your thoughts?

 

disengaging the engaged

Last post, I talked about the difficulty of creating employee engagement for “zombies” – people disengaged from their own lives and just going through the motions. If it’s highly unlikely to engage them, where does that leave us? Are engagement efforts all for naught? Not a bit, but I suggest looking at our efforts differently.

If engaging the disengaged is a wasted effort, consider the possibility that our real engagement risks are disengaging the engaged. “Fink” commented on the previous post:

Sometimes “giving a hoot” also includes wanting to change a process or start a conversation to take away a pain point in the workplace. Those pain points push me towards the “zombie state.”

This is a committed, passionate person – fully engaged – sharing a warning and putting us on notice. They aren’t asking for more “employee engagement programs”, they’re telling us to stop making it so difficult to do great work. (If it sounds like I’m overstating or reading too much into a simple comment, I’m not. I know this person and can say that you would move heaven and earth to have them on your team. It pains me to think there are idiots leaders idiots blocking them from doing the great work they love to do.)

I’m not convinced we can engage the disengaged, but am confident that we can destroy the engagement of the people we need most.

What if the easiest way to harm engagement is to treat it as a separate program – a Human Resources initiative – instead of being every leader’s responsibility? It almost seems that treating it as a program makes it someone else’s problem and excuses poor leadership. I can almost hear it, “Of course my people are disengaged, HR needs to create better engagement programs.”

But engagement is never a separate event or program, it’s how we do daily business. Engagement is very difficult to create, yet so easy to tear down and destroy.

Your thoughts?

easy to get right, easy to get wrong

A simple question: When is 2/5/13?

It’s not a trick question and the answer is more significant than it seems. Hold that thought, we’re going to come back to it.

Jim Rohn used to say that when something is easy to do, it’s also easy not to do. And that’s the problem. He’d point out that it’s easy to “eat an apple a day” for your health, yet  many people don’t because it’s so easy not to. It’s easy to put off until tomorrow and tomorrow often becomes never.

Likewise, you may have noticed that when something is easy to get right, it’s generally easy to get wrong. We put all kinds of processes and instructions and safeguards around the things that are hard to get right, but assume that the easy stuff will be done perfectly because, well, it’s easy.

So when is 2/5/13? It looks so cut at dried, but the answer is: it depends. If you’re sitting in Frankfurt 2/5/13 is May 2, 2013, but if you’re in Dallas it’s February 5, 2013. In an isolated world that’s ok, but in a globally connected world it matters.

I was watching a video from a Swedish band on YouTube the other day and noticed that there was a link announcing the band was playing at a local(ish) venue on February 5. How cool is that? Truly, if the whole tour schedule had been posted, I wouldn’t have paid it much mind, but as a snippet of the information most pertinent to me, it caught my attention. As I was marvelling at the wonders of this modern age and debating going to the show, I went to the band’s website and noticed that, yes they are playing that venue. On May 2.

Details matter. So easy to get right and so easy to get wrong.

Yesterday, I was digging into the data in our Learning Management System and was having trouble sorting it because some of the items were inconsistently entered. If someone signed up for but didn’t attend a class, the “Post-Status” field was either left blank, marked “incomplete”, or marked “no show”. All mean essentially the same thing, yet aren’t. Data consistency is so easy to get right and so easy to get wrong.

A friend works at a company that just switched payroll providers. Many employees discovered that their expense reimbursements were processed (and taxed) as income. The company that messed it up is a well-known and experienced payroll company who should never make such a simple mistake. It seems so easy to denote income and expense reimbursement differently. So easy to get right and so easy to get wrong.

Or what about the interviewer who swears they will call you with a decision by the end of next week, but never do. Or… or… or… How many examples of great / terrible customer service, HR, leadership, etc. come down to getting the little, simple details right?

So when is 2/5/13?

Your thoughts?

control freakout

Times of great change (now), times of uncertainty (now), and times when yesterday’s formula for success is tomorrow’s expressway to failure (now) cause us humans to feel out of control, insecure, and stressed. It’s hard to know what to do next or move forward with certainty in a world where there aren’t templates and formulas; where you can’t get to where you want to go by just checking the boxes along the way; where the new maps haven’t been created yet.

Disruption is what is. The music, book publishing, and movie industries have changed in ways barely imaginable less than five years ago. Stable, conservative, aeon old industries with long histories are being taken to their foundations, blown up, and rebuilt in amazing ways – even if the practitioners don’t realize it yet. My humble, supersecret prediction is that the industries that have changed the least in the last 50 years will change the most in the next five. The FutureNow is here.

When your business is caught in the maelstrom of change you can choose one of three paths: 1) focus on what you can control; 2) focus on what you can influence; or 3) become the disruptor that creates the change others have to deal with.

The third path is really hard to do because there is a very, very fine line between being the company that goes against the grain and changes the industry and the company that goes against the grain and becomes irrelevant. I really want to focus on the first two choices.

In the past, industries drove change and the pace of change. Now, the ability to access and transmit information faster and faster and cheaper and cheaper means technology, customer demands, and off the radar upstarts are fueling change. There is less and less that we can actually control and more and more we can only influence. I assume it’s like sailing – we can’t control the waves or the wind, only anticipate and ride them. In fact, the more we try to control, the more out of control we get. Paradoxically, the more we go with the flow and focus on influence, the more control we actually have.

But us humans really like to feel in control. We like the feeling of security and certainty that control brings. If we can control it, we can prevent it from harming us. So, in a time of change (read as: time of FEAR) it’s tempting to concentrate on the unimportant things we can control instead of the big, important, and uncertain things we can only influence. Caught in the storm of change we seem to focus on polishing the ship’s brass and mopping the deck rather than anticipating the wind and the waves. Cleaning the ship is completely within our control and makes us feel successful right now, but the ship is adrift and about to sink. The painful paradox is that the more out of control we feel, the more we often try to control, which means we focus more and more on things that matter less and less. It’s an ugly downward spiral

Here are a  few simple questions to help determine whether your company is trying its hardest to influence a new path through the storm or headed for the rocks with the cleanest ship around:

Are you spending your time on principles and experimentation or policy and tradition?

Are you most concerned with finding ways to delight customers or ways to minimize change and disruption?

Are your most passionate and creative people at the helm, relishing the challenge or are they preparing their life rafts while you hand out mops and tins of polish?

There are no guarantees to success and every path is uncertain, but there are no awards for having the cleanest ship at the bottom of the ocean.

Your thoughts?

 

flashback friday: committed? are you sure?

How committed are you? To your job? To your personal mission? To the things you must accomplish in this life? How committed are you really?

We’re told we should choose a career that we love so much we’d do it even if we didn’t get paid. That’s a pretty high level of commitment and passion right there. We all want to do something we love, something that has meaning for us. But what if what you loved required you to risk incarceration? Death? That necessitated carrying firearms just to get to the job? That still paid almost nothing, if anything at all? That was so outside the norm that you were the only one in the entire country doing it and you were blazing the trail with almost every action?

That’s pretty rough. Let’s up it a little: would you go into exile for your passion? Would you leave friends, family, and everything you knew behind to go be a second-class citizen in another country just so you could “follow your bliss”?

This weekend I watched the 2007 documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad about Iraq’s first (only?) metal band Acrassicauda and saw a glimpse into what relentless obsession looks like. The movie is a fascinating look at Baghdad in 2005/06. It’s not about soldiers, politicians, ideologies, right, or wrong. It’s not even really about heavy metal. It’s about the struggle of a group of 20-somethings just trying to have a band and make some music against the backdrop of daily life in Baghdad. What would be a normal – mundane, even – activity for college-aged youth in the US becomes a hero’s quest where hopes and dreams wrestle against the hopelessness of daily violence and chaos. They suffer more for their dreams than I could ever go through here.

After watching, I came away wondering how I could up my passion to that level. How can I tap into the human need that’s fueling them to carry on? How can I bring the noise like they do? How can I play that big with the things that are important in my life? How much would I, could I, truly risk?

[This was originally posted July 30, 2012. I just watched the movie again last night and was affected even more strongly than the first time. It’s easy to talk about following my dreams when I am my own biggest roadblock and easy to complain about all my problems and setbacks when I don’t really have any. Time to play bigger.]

flashback friday: why hierarchies? the pizza and beer syndrome

[this was my most popular post of 2012. enjoy!]

Why do organizations look the way they do? Why are command and control hierarchies so popular? They seem like relics from days gone past. We spend a lot of time complaining about all their sins and proposing alternatives so why don’t we see flatter, collaborative, and self-directed organizations? They should be more adaptable, create more engagement, and be higher performing. Yet we keep perpetuating the command and control hierarchies that we spend so much time railing against. Why do we say we want one thing and make the choices and actions that lead to another?

Good questions and here’s the answer (you might want to write this down):pizza and beer.

No, really. Call it the “Pizza and Beer Syndrome” if you like. We can learn a lot about organizations by looking at human behavior. After all, organizations are a reflection of the philosophies, strategies, and approaches of individuals.

As much as we might wish otherwise, us humans are pretty good at choosing what’s easy and pleasurable over what’s best. Consider what most people choose when given the long-term, day after day after day choice between:

1. Eating super lean and healthy, drinking only water, exercising vigorously every day, having regular tests and check-ups at the doctor’s office, getting the proper amount of sleep, etc.

OR

2. Staying up too late, sitting on the couch, watching movies, and eating pizza and drinking beer.

It doesn’t take a 10-year study or deep statistical analysis  to figure out what most people choose. Look around: people are getting heavier by the day. That’s the Pizza and Beer Syndrome: we know what we need to do to create the results we want yet we choose the opposite. When given the choice we tend to choose easy and good enough over best; the ok over the exceptional (Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, you’re a superstar. Keep it up. I’m talking about the other 95%.)

Oh man, that answer chafes. I hate that answer. But when it comes down to it, we can argue all day why open, flatter, collaborative, and self-directed approaches are better. We can loudly proclaim that we hate hierarchies and we want – must have – flat, collaborative, and self-directed organizations. Then we choose hierarchies. Perhaps because hierarchies are easy and good enough rather than the best. Consider:

1. Command and control hierarchies work ok across a wide range of situations.

2. Effectively creating open, flat, collaborative, and self-directed organizations is really, really hard.

3. Us humans like to stick with what we know works, even in situations when what we know doesn’t really work.

Wait a minute. Am I actually saying that command and control hierarchies are the best solution? Nope. I don’t think they are any more than I think pizza and beer are the cornerstone of a high performance diet. I’m saying that to most people, in most situations, hierarchies are good enough compared to the effort required to create and maintain a flatter organization. I personally prefer the open, self-directed organizations, but I get why companies are slow (resistant?) to adopt a different structure. Let’s take a look at these three reasons in a bit more detail.

1. Command and control hierarchies work ok across a wide range of situations.

We want and seek the one universally perfect solution, but it doesn’t exist. Different situations and problems call for different answers and solutions. All organizational structures have their advantages and disadvantages and, like it or not, hierarchies are a valid option. Hierarchies have limitations, yet can (and do) work.

Hierarchies have a built-in organization and structure that is easy to set up and understand: do what your boss says and tell your employees what to do. Simple. This simplicity makes hierarchical structures robust and durable in most situations. They may not always be the best answer, but tend to work good enough. Hierarchies are very tolerant of dysfunctional culture, poor leadership and disengaged employees (truly – just look around).

Also, I suspect that most of the complaints about hierarchies are more about lousy companies than the organizational structure. Quick question: when we look at the alternatives, would you rather work in a hierarchy with great leadership and top notch peers or a flat, collaborative organization with dysfunctional relationships, mutually exclusive and competing goals, no feedback, and no support? A poor idea done well is often superior to a great idea done poorly.

 

2. Effectively creating and maintaining an open, flat, collaborative, and self-directed organization is really, really hard.

Creating and maintaining open, self-directed organizations is difficult. Hierarchies are a known model. We know how they work and how to think about them. Effectively using alternative structures requires thinking about leadership, direction, structure, and work differently and playing by a different set of rules. That’s not a bad thing, but it is more challenging.

Whereas a hierarchy will survive dysfunction with little effort needed to maintain the structure an open organization requires much, much more of the leadership, people, culture. It also requires diligent and ongoing maintenance.

Valve is a software company that caught several bloggers attention when its employee handbook surfaced a little while back. I discussed it here, but the gist is that it is a completely flat and collaborative organization. How collaborative? Check out their current job openings and you’ll see one of the options is: “Have a better idea?” Asking candidates to suggest a new job doesn’t work in a check-the-box organization with a rigid structure and top-down-the-boss-is-always-right management. Read their employee handbook and you’ll either get excited by the possibilities it suggests or completely freak out and declare it an impossibility.

To go flat is hard because it creates ambiguity. It requires people who are self-managing and self-driven AND who are able to work with others, accepting of different perspectives and styles, and willing to design the future instead of waiting for the boss to define it for them. In my experience that’s a relatively scarce combination. There are a lot of exceptional people out there who would not do well in that kind of environment.

Also, I hate to say it, but I suspect that the average person would prefer a hierarchy if given the choice. Going flatter requires more individual responsibility and results focus while hierarchies often allow individuals to give up their personal responsibility and let others direct and control them. Many (most?) people don’t like or want responsibility, are not driven, and just want to do a consistent and certain job and then go home. They want to know EXACTLY what is expected, do it, and get on with their lives. They want a clear, visible career path and routine (mundane) expectations. It sounds like a private hell to me, BUT it is a common attitude. Flatten an organization containing a large number of those folks and you’ll see frustration, mayhem, and chaos. Or maybe just bewilderment and complete inaction as they sit down and wait for someone to tell them what to do.

Likewise, a flat organization creates places additional demands on leadership. It requires people who can lead but don’t want or need the glory, status, and control that is so natural in a hierarchy. It requires more influence and less command and control. Someone who can and wants to lead and influence others without making it about themselves is a rarity. Collaborative and self-directed requires giving up a lot of certainty and control for the possibilities that the group can create. That’s far beyond scary for many, many people. They’ll stick with the known, thank you very much.

Further, we just don’t do a good job training people to be collaborative and self-directed, to thrive in ambiguity, give and receive feedback, to be autonomous and self-directed, etc. We don’t yet develop the skills required to move away from hierarchies. That doesn’t mean we can’t, just that it’s one more step.

So a flat organization requires exceptional people, leaders who think bigger than themselves, and an organizational tolerance for ambiguity. We can forget bureaucratic box checking and that right there will prevent many HR groups from ever getting behind changing the organization. Easy and good enough trounces best. Known evil is welcomed over unfamiliar good.

 

3. Us humans like to stick with what we know works, even in situations when what we know doesn’t really work.

We have very few examples and role models of flat, collaborate, etc. organizations and there is tremendous comfort and safety in doing something the way everyone else does it – even when it’s not the best way. There’s the old trader’s saying: “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” It may not be the best possible choice, but it gets the job done and no one will fault you for sticking with the tried and true even when it underperforms. They will, however, dismiss the unconventional success as a fluke and absolutely nail you to the wall for trying something unusual if it doesn’t work out. Better to fail with the known than risk success with the unknown.

Also, thinking back to pizza and beer, when faced with a change that requires effort, discipline, and a different way of doing things, we tend to quit when it gets difficult OR we go back to our old habits after initial success. For example, a new exercise and diet program is painful and we often give up before we start seeing results OR we lose some weight but then slack on the discipline and drift back toward our old habits.

*           *           *

In many ways, I think that the majority of folks ultimately want hierarchies. Sure, we say we don’t. We gripe and complain about them. But it’s like diet and exercise. We say we don’t want to be overweight and out of shape. We complain and talk about alternatives. But, we don’t make the choices and take the actions that would create a different outcome. Flatter orgs, like being in shape, appear to require higher levels of commitment, diligence, and discipline. AND, I suspect that, like being in shape, the perceived benefits far exceed the perceived cost of the effort required.

That said, the difficulty in getting it right leads me to believe that those organizations that do get it figured out have a distinct and difficult to copy advantage. If you truly want to win, if you’re willing to risk being different to be the best, take note. If you’re ok with the status quo then carry on.

The Pizza and Beer Syndrome. We know what we need to do to create the results we want yet we choose the opposite. Sure, I’ll exercise in the morning. Or maybe tomorrow afternoon. Wonder what’s on TV tonight?