I’m a big believer in employee engagement and have discussed related topics in a few blog posts (see www.granadaadvisors.com/blog). A few thoughts:

1. IDENTIFYING THE “WHY”: Engagement is a function of the passion they feel towards their work. They are passionate if they are working towards a purpose they believe in. Getting collective buy-in around this is no small trick. Apple seems to have done it with their “Challenge the Status Quo” / “Think Different” mantra. People within the organization really believe this. At the beginning a recent interview, Steve Jobs mentioned that staying focused on why they do what they do at Apple is of primary importance (see: D8 Conference interview http://bit.ly/bPGust ). Dave Ulrich from the RBL group has written a book on this as well (see Video 1 on “The Why of Work” at http://bit.ly/drP9HT ). Simon Sinek has a great video on Ted.com that talks about this.

2. MOTIVATING THE COGNITIVE ELITE: Dan Pink boils down the science of motivation in a really great video at Ted.com into three main concepts: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose. Millennials, in particular, are very interested in finding purpose through their work. A sense of “Why” the business exists can give them that. Millennials also do not want to be micromanaged, but want to work the way they have grown accustomed to working — anywhere, anytime, using the tools they like to use. In our organization, we call this the ROWE — Results Only Work Environment — (as per Dan Pink). Throw out the schedules and “office hours,” give them access to the tools they want to use, and recognize that their unconventional methods of getting things done may be a driver for innovation within your organization.

3. RECOGNITION — DOING IT RIGHT: Finally, providing recognition the right way is really important. Recognition should be reward behavior that is in line with the interests of the organization (its strategic plan), be immediate, and be public. For more info on how to impactfully utilize employee recognition, I would recommend a book called The Carrot Principle ( http://carrots.com/books/carrot_principle ).

I hope that helps!

Brad Heitmann
Chief Executive Officer
Granada Advisors | Crux & Gage
Mobile: +1.801.824.4168 | Skype / Twitter: bradheitmann
bradheitmann@granadaadvisors.com | brad@cruxandgage.com

We believe a company’s Organizational DNA can be determined by artfully exploring the questions “Who?”, “Why?”, and “How?” Specifically, we start by answering the question “Who are we as an organization?” as well as by creating collective self-awareness around the current state of affairs at the organization. We then broach the subject of “Why do we do what we do?” — the underlying emotional, pyschological, or conceptual impetus for action — we look to discover the unlimited source of passion and energy that drives the organization to do what it does. We then follow with “How do we do what we do?” — in other words, what are the unique set of characteristics or activities that enable the organization to create value. This drives to the core of a company’s value proposition and brings it front and center into the minds of stakeholders. We approach these topics through activities focused on bringing some the raw subconscious of the collective to the surface — our approach is not dissimilar to the creative / visual approach a design firm would take to a design problem.

The last question, “What should we do?” is part of a follow-on process and gets into the realm of strategy. We precede answering this question with industry research, financial analysis, and review of the current business plan and strategy. We then answer the question by following with a process to create stakeholder alignment and commitment in the context of a strategic plan, resulting in KPI’s, milestones, deliverables, etc.

There are some noticeably parallel concepts between what we do and some of Simon Sinek’s ideas — I’ve actually borrowed some of his language as it is more concise than previous iterations I had explored. He definitely has more of a marketing flavor to his presentation, but I like many of his ideas. Enjoy!

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

The parallelism between our value creation process and the Simon Sinek video lies in is his framework of WHY, HOW, and WHAT. The Granada translation of this is SELF AWARENESS / VALUE PROPOSITION, STRATEGY, and TACTICS. As I bumped into this video, it reminded me of what a powerful paradigm this can be and how it has enabled the businesses and other organizations that espouse it to greatly enhance their performance.

In our firm, we start with succinctly identifying an organization’s Value Proposition (defined as how an organization uniquely creates value in the world). For our consulting business, Granada Advisors, our value proposition statement states: “We provide our clients the CLARITY they need to be decisive, provide RESOURCES needed for their ideas to gain traction, and do all this in efficient way that SPARKS PERFORMANCE and CREATES VALUE.”

In essence, there are four key elements: CLARITY, RESOURCES, CHEMISTRY, and VALUE ADD. In our corporate philosophical framework, these elements comprise the supporting “Benefits” which undergird the combined value proposition statement. Each of these concepts have a benefit statement associated with them — I could talk for hours regarding what these four concepts mean to us as an organization, but suffice it to say they are not haphazardly put together but are the result of extensive work in figuring our what exactly our secret sauce is as a firm. Going through a process to identify and succinctly state an organization’s value proposition is a critical precursor to STRATEGY and TACTICS.

Your ability to identify your organization’s value proposition is a function of the collective SELF AWARENESS (the “WHY”) you have as a group. I believe it is the role of the business leader to inspire individual and group introspection within an organization to the point where collective SELF AWARENESS is possible. In a state of SELF AWARENESS, you are best able to tease out your unique VALUE PROPOSITION and then get on to the business of strategy and tactics. So, to sum up….

Within a CONTEXT of COLLECTIVE SELF AWARENESS you should,

1. Identify your organization’s VALUE PROPOSITION, defined as the unique way in which you create value in the world.

2. Formulate STRATEGY, drawing upon your unique strengths as an organization which create value as indicated by your value proposition.

3. Generate TACTICS that put your strategy into play in the real world, with real situations and real customers.

This framework of VALUE PROP —-> STRATEGY —-> TACTICS all in the context of SELF AWARENESS will enable you to inspire your customers / stakeholders and powerfully lead your organization.

So I’m fascinated by this concept of DESIGN THINKING and how it can apply to STRATEGY GENERATION. In particular, I think a really good strategist cannot be satisfied with just following the old models, however useful (e.g. Porters Five Forces). A strategist cannot be an automaton, who simply gathers data and plugs it into a framework of analysis which they are comfortable using. A true strategist must enter the realm of META-FRAMEWORKS. In other words, design a process-oriented context that facilitates the creation of analytical frameworks.

To take the “frame” analogy even further, a typical strategist is like an optometrist. They provide many different lenses through which to look at the world — to look at data and turn data into actionable intelligence. Maybe they provide lenses of various colors, shapes, sizes. This is pretty good.

But think about taking it a step further. What if you could design lenses for the specific scenarios, customize them for each situation, or come up with a complete new way of “seeing” the world that doesnt even involve a “lens” per se. Maybe you could get really crazy and figure out how to create night vision lenses, or lenses that turn dark in the sun, or ways to see into space using radio telescopes. What can you see? Stars, nebulae, galaxies? What about dark matter? What about extra-solar planets or “exoplanets?” Some of the latest advances in astronomy involve advanced techniques for identifying planets in solar systems outside of our own. This is really exciting stuff! These new techniques can not only identify the existence of these planets, but also their chemical composition, temperature, and if it’s possible that life could be sustained there. The INSIGHTS these new techniques are able to produce are very material. And they are, in degree and kind, drastically different from the “insights” a typical optometrist can produce by setting you up with a new pair of shades.

So where am I going with all this (at 2:01 AM)? As business leaders, we must always try to see with new eyes. We can do this through constantly designing new frameworks, new lenses through which to look at the world. And this goes to the point of the matter: a healthy dose of self awareness, design thinking, and commitment to process will result in a context in which new frameworks of analysis can come into view. And these new frameworks will reveal things we may never have imagined were even there.

So I recently ended up weighing in on a LinkedIn Group on a topic having to do with social media appliances in the workplace. For what it’s worth (and realizing we aren’t showing you the full string of messages that preceded my post), here is a response I sent to a woman at a large biotechnology firm regarding the pros/cons of using a micro-blogging / instant messaging platform such as Yammer in the workplace:

“Hi Laraine,

All of our systems are cloud based. We don’t really have any interest in maintaining our own IT infrastructure — it’s too costly and frankly is a distraction from our core business. Cloud-based services, such as yammer, are very inexpensive, highly scalable, and easy/fast to deploy. They also allow us to keep an IT staff of essentially zero and employ an almost entirely variable cost / very low fixed cost business model. We are very nimble.

Yammers in our organization are ideal — they hit our people no matter where they are (like, say, at a beach) via SMS, instant msging, e-mail, iphone app, and on the yammer website… all potentially simultaneously (depending upon notification settings) = no place to hide, and no excuses for slow response time.

You can only Yammer within your organization unless you specifically set up a sub-group for parties outside of your e-mail domain names. Frankly, I would think a service like Yammer would absolutely crush anything a corporate tried to develop internally. Yammer has every incentive to provide the very best solution possible, innovate, and provide a high level of service. I guess it could be true that they have no particular obligations to their customers, unless, of course, they want to be in business a year from now.

I would agree with the comment above, that Yammer is about communication (not project management) — hitting people when, where, and how they like with concise, “need-to-know” only messages. It’s about getting all of the superfluous crap out of internal messaging. Goldman Sachs is famous for it’s internal phone message policies: no pleasantries, essential information only. Yammer forces this thinking upon users. If you’re looking for project management or collaboration, try basecamp et al or a free wiki service (google has a wiki platform that is super easy to use).

Finally, and it’s clear I’m a bit on a rant this evening, I feel pretty strongly that this country needs a very heavy dose of innovation if we are going to survive and thrive amidst the onslaught of innovation occurring in emerging economies with better demographics and the type of work ethic that originally got this country where it is today. Old ways of thinking are not going to drive ROIC / ROE / EVA going forward. Embracing radical changes in the way we think about business just might, however, give us a fighting chance.

Cheers,

Brad Heitmann
Founder & CEO
Granada Advisors”

In a data driven world we often want to present our arguments with numeric support.  This article by Jane E. Miller, How To Communicate Statistical Findings: an Expository Writing Approach,  goes step by step on how to interpret and communicate graphs and tables, giving examples of both good and bad along the way.

http://bit.ly/c45T5k

OK, so I rant and rave about this video: Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation. Admittedly, I am a fan of all things TED.com, but I think Dan Pink particularly has touched on a topic that everyone in our organization feels strongly about. We are increasingly moving towards a world that is defined by right brained thinking. The bulk of my work revolves around finance and strategy. It’s all left brained stuff, right? WRONG. The VAST majority of what I do as a business leader is creative, visual, associative, and non-linear. Even the more left-brained projects we take on as a firm start as right-brained, creative project design sessions.

So, this begs the question: how do you motivate people in your organization who are increasingly being required to produce cognitively demanding work? I’ll let Dan Pink fill in the details, but suffice it to say that we believe you have to create a culture in which people feel passionate about what they do and naturally produce results.

For us this means massive amounts of autonomy — we let people work whenever, however, and from wherever they like so long as they are producing results. This is what Dan Pink refers to as the Results Only Work Environment (“ROWE”). We make sure we have strong processes in place on the project design and management front and that these are tracked and executed upon. But aside from that, we don’t want to meddle too much with our project teams, only encourage them to push the limits of their creativity, taking risks and often oblique approaches to projects where the very best result is a new lens through which to view and understand what is going on.

I’ve gone on long enough, but check out the video and let us know what you think!

This week I attended the Pushbutton Summit, a digital media conference in Salt Lake City. One of the presenters, Andrew Braccia from Accel Partners, gave a great overview of the evolution of the world of digital media. Essentially, we have seen the digital media world evolve along a few lines: 1. Portal (AOL, Yahoo) 2. Search (Google) 3. Social Media (Facebook, Twitter) 4. Mobile (Apple, Android)…………..

The mobile phase is where things are going to get really interesting (as if they weren’t interesting already). As a company we have moved to a mobile communications platform called Yammer which in many ways is replacing e-mail as the primary communication protocol within our business. It’s essentially a targeted, twitter-like application that uses microblogging to message specific individuals or groups within an organization.

I would recommend taking a look at Yammer for any organization that feels it is drowning in e-mail as it essentially forces users to limit the amount of information they include in a message. We have a 3 hour response time rule for any Yammer msg that requires a response from the person receiving the message. We call this the “High Velocity Communication Environment” or “HVCE”.

Also, strategically, businesses must start to consider what happens in a world where mobile applications form the foundation of how we operate and interact with our clients and colleagues.

As a postscript, here is an interesting research report from Morgan Stanley on there views of where mobile is going: Morgan Stanley says Mobile Internet Market Will Be 2X The Size of Desktop Internet — http://bit.ly/6Q6nsG

http://bit.ly/c3yFvt

Microsoft’s Pivot is an awesome way to look at visual data and to sort and comb through it.  Check out their website’s video to get some ideas on how to harness this new tool.