GET REAL.GET REAL.
Morris Shechtman is not the Pillsbury Doughboy. If you poke your finger in the Doughboy’s tummy, it will giggle and wince -- Minnesota nice. Do that to Morris Shechtman, and he will "probably say, "Hey, get real."
Shechtman is in the getting-real business. His consultancy, he stressed, is not out to entertain people with elegant phrases and fashionable concepts, but to intervene in the lives of organizations that have forgotten how to tell the truth, and lead them through the painful regimen of unflinching directness.
If companies aren’t willing to take Shechtman’s advice, if they just invited him in for entertainment value, he’s outta there. In a world of CEOs discovering their inner child and New Age organizations getting in tune with their inner rhythms, Morris Shechtman is an adult, talking about the dread adult themes of risk, accountability, and profit.
The paradox in all this is that Shechtman believes that bottom-line success does ultimately derive from a category usually ceded to New Age management -- the feelings and perceptions of the people who make up the organization.
There probably never was a good old days when companies paid employees an honest dollar for an honest day’s work. But over the past 20 or so years, things have gotten even less honest. As the world has been pulled toward an information-based economy and the environment of risk that goes with it, the workplace has remained fixed in an attitude of artificial safety.
That statement needs amplification. Shechtman, like many others, says we are in the midst of an information revolution. We no longer drift through each day, performing the same rote task over and over, in isolation. Instead we are bombarded continuously with new input -- feedback from co-workers, from customers, from management, from the world outside. Communication has sped everything up.
As an example, Shechtman had fun with a description of his typical day: he attends several meetings, and after each one his mood changes according to the information he has just gleaned. At the end of the day he could draw a chart of his changing moods, as the information presented to him changed: up, way down, middle, way up, and down again, then up. That graph, he suggested to us, matches what we used to call manic-depressive episodes. But for the avant-garde today, who live the information-driven life, it’s normal or, as Shechtman would say, "real."
The information-driven life is a little nutty, and people like Shechtman, out in the marketplace, failing and succeeding many times a day, understand its rhythms. They understand that the new world offers many interesting opportunities, but their price is substantially greater uncertainty, unpredictability, and vulnerability.
But people in the belly of large organizations, protected by layers of what Shechtman calls "caretaking," are not getting hip to the new rhythms as fast. By the time they wake up to the new realities, it’s generally too late, as the pink slip slides under their doors.
Many people who used to be oblivious to the information that ran their businesses ("Just let me do my job") wish they could turn the clock back to the good old days. But they can’t do that. No one wants the discomfort the information revolution is foisting upon us all. But neither can any of us make it go away. It’s inexorable, Shechtman said. It’s real.
Shechtman’s mission is to explain to workers and management alike that this caretaking, built into our organizations long ago as an expression of institutional benevolence, is killing us. We’ve got to wake up soon and get real.
The heart of caretaking was that it externalized security. In the wild-dog days of prehistory, there were no guarantees of success, prosperity, long-term employment, good dental care, or insurance against woolly mammoths.
Conditions have gradually improved since those days, as the societies of the world took steps to create some sort of safety net for people. Children and the old and infirm obviously needed protection. Workers needed some fundamental protections against loss of life and limb. As the industrial age deepened and the skills of workers became more valuable, a shift occurred and workers were no longer merely protected against negative things like cave-ins and capricious pay cuts; they were also guaranteed positive things like job security and Mr. Coffee machines.
The problem wasn’t just in the capitalist world, either. Communist countries like the Soviet Union were based on an extended contract with workers. Socialist democracies like Sweden and, during the 1970s, Great Britain also made deep caretaking contracts with citizens.
But caretaking is a much broader concept than worker protections and employee benefits. It is an attitude about people, that they can handle only so much responsibility and stress, and that the organization must take on everything else. It is double-edged: insulting to the individual being taken care of, and a drag on the organization doing the caretaking.
The mystery is why, with the reality of the world shifting to information, high speed, and high risk, organizations haven’t been more forthright with employees. Instead of breaking the bad news to them, many organizations have taken the exact opposite tack, denying that the changes are occurring and insisting that the old familiars of steady employment, high pay, and low accountability will be there for the foreseeable future. Sooner or later, reality wins and the wall of denial crumbles, and the loser is the employee who couldn’t see, and wasn’t told, what was coming down.
A lot of caretaking is done under the aegis of "kindness." It’s considered kind to withhold painful truths from workers; kind not to tell them where they are coming up short and where they might improve; kind to create an aura of comfort for as long as possible -- until the wrecking ball bursts into the room.
"Instead of teaching people how to deal with their fears of increasing levels of change," Shechtman said, "we did the worst possible thing: we placated them by attempting to guarantee outcomes."
The information world we are forced to pitch our tents in is a cruel place for people accustomed to caretaking. Everywhere you look, the factors companies used to take solace from are being pulled away. There are no cash cows anymore, because anyone can imitate what any other company can do. Every industry is waking up to the unpleasant reality that financial services became aware of ten years ago -- that no one is doing anything proprietary any more.
With the unstoppable migration of information from organization to organization, all products are "value-neutral" commodities with shelf lives that are momentary at best.
Some companies are doing what would have been unthinkable a short time ago: they have set up research sales units to try to sell their proprietary information to head-to-head competitors. Why? Because the information can’t be kept in a jar anyway, so they might as well make a few bucks off it.
In a sand-castle world of instant replicability, in which value melts away as rapidly as it is piled up, how can people cling to illusions that everything is going to be all right, that the company will always take care of me, that I can afford the luxury of a bad attitude with other workers and customers, that I don’t need to be as responsive as possible to change?
In the face of such impermanence and danger -- "working without a net" -- Shechtman has created a set of six paradigms to help us make necessary adjustments.
Caring about people is not synonymous with taking care of people.
People don’t stretch if they are unwilling to reach, and by taking perpetual "care" of people we are stunting them, like bonsai trees, destroying their ability to grow.
One of Shechtman’s slides showed this comparison:
Old Model: Caretaking New Model: Caring For
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Transactional Relational
Consensus Challenge
Commonalities Confrontation
Conflict avoidance Conflict management
The basic event of the caretaking business is the transaction. The focus of the transaction is the price. The general idea is to sell products to anyone who "fogs up a mirror." But as the information age tightens around us and process redesign milks the cost out of products and services, individual transactions become less meaningful. Profitable business must look instead toward building relationships, not with comatose bozos but with thinking parties with reciprocal interests.
In the caretaking days great stock was put in consensus building, soliciting everyone’s input and assent to decisions. Shechtman is not a believer in consensus: "It takes forever and it dilutes to meaninglessness." All you really need to build support for decisions is buy-in, he said. The information age requires something sterner, an atmosphere of continuous challenge and performance feedback that is less interested in happiness than in growth, development, and productivity.
Caretaking focused on emphasizing commonalities: the organization as one big happy family, with shared backgrounds and values. The caring organization may not come across as caring because it fosters a climate of confrontation and difference. But it is caring, Shechtman insisted, because the friction it engenders brings out the best in us and equips us for survival in the swift currents of change.
This paradox of caring is most apparent in the final contrast, between conflict avoidance and conflict management. The organization that won’t disturb you by bringing up unpleasant truths, such as the fact that you are rapidly heading for termination, uses the excuse that it doesn’t want to offend you. Shechtman reserves his greatest contempt for this version of "caring." A better version of caring is letting people know what’s what, he said, and at least giving them a chance to change.
Our ability to change is a function of choice, not capacity.
Borrowing a page from psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, Shechtman says that our ultimate leverage is our ability to choose what attitude we will have about our work and our life.
Surprisingly, given his get-real dictum, Shechtman is an optimist about our fate. Everyone is capable of change, he says. None of us is marked for early harvest. This puts him at odds with no less than Peter Drucker, who asserted long ago that people don’t have a lot of change in them.
The trick is knowing how to change. Shechtman brought only one funny-looking graph with him, which represents his change dynamic. We reproduce it thus:
You start with functional behaviors -- behaviors that still succeed in doing what they set out to do. Eventually those behaviors are no longer enough to ensure success. This is a crucial crossroads; many organizations, feeling the discomfort and pain of dysfunctional behaviors, allow them to become even more dysfunctional through denial and papering-over.
Organizations that are up to changing recognize that something as comfortable as an old shoe is about to be given the boot, and a grieving process begins. This process, lifted whole from the paradigm set forth a generation ago by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, involves five necessary stages:
Once the business of grieving is set aside, people can move forward to the task of integrating the new organizational behaviors and self-image.
It looks easy on the diagram, but Shechtman assures us it’s not. Management has to lead from beginning to end, taking people from one challenge point to the next. Change is a military drill in its early phases. Shechtman cautions against offering positive reinforcement until the hard work is behind you.
Who we are personally and professionally are inexorably connected.
The goal is to lead blended, not balanced, lives. People in business today treat their careers and home lives as if they were separate saucers they have to keep spinning on some nightmarish variety hour. "Balancing" doesn’t work, in Shechtman’s view. People striving to balance are generally off balance, tormented by second-guessing and guilt.
"Blending" acknowledges that you are one person, not two, and tries to integrate the parts of your life into a single life. It may be the hardest challenge Shechtman brought to Minneapolis. People in our society are frustrated and angry and feel ripped off by our partitioning system, and one day it’s going to blow and set off an enormous social debate: whose life counts and whose doesn’t.
It may help to realize that our balancing acts neither succeed nor fool anyone. Our spouses and kids see right through our attempts at "quality time."
We need to change our attitudes toward change.
Despite Spandex and talking cars, people have not really evolved much in the last 40,000 years. Our brains are still wired the way they were the day Thag first stepped on sharp pebbles and howled. The central observation our brains seem equipped to provide us with is this: something is familiar (good), or unfamiliar (bad).
Obviously, these ancient fears and instincts do not serve us well in the age of transformation. Since people react primitively to news of unfamiliarity, it is imperative that they be informed the instant a change initiative is hatched.
Communication is like butter on the jagged English muffin of change. But don’t let consistency be the hobgoblin of your small mind, Shechtman said. If your plan needs to change because it has problems, change it and tell people so: "What’s the alternative, saying screw the company and sticking with a stupid idea?"
We must define our concept of acceptable work.
Shechtman describes this paradigm as a contrast between "good soldiers" and "peak performers." The good solider is the worker who does what he is told, puts in his time, keeps his nose clean, but may spend upward of 30 years on the job without ever engaging his brain. This is the person who feels most betrayed when a change is suggested, who may even actively sabotage it, and then cry murder most foul when he is given the pink slip.
The good soldier was the heart and soul of the industrial era preceding the information age. He provided the muscle that drove a mighty enterprise in which people were pretty much cogs in a great machine. His reward was the atmosphere of entitlement and caretaking that his hard work helped create.
But that age is over. Adequacy doesn’t cut it anymore. The "great machine" is sitting in the scrapyard, and one by one the good soldiers are filing that way to join it. The information-driven enterprise wants people willing to dwell in a high-risk environment -- peak performers who can cope with project orientation in place of cradle-to-grave employment, and who can put their whole selves to work pursuing growth and development for both the organization and themselves.
We need to create value-driven personal and work lives.
Shechtman uses the phrase "value confluence" to describe an ordering principle for the new work world. Just as James Collins talked in February about the things even a change-crazy organization dare not change, Shechtman reminded us that some things are too important to change -- the core values that we believe in as people, and that our organizations should also be committed to.
He lamented the fact that so few companies even try to resolve the apparent contradictions in their values. He called for all our organizations to drive the gray value areas out of our business, and to replace them with clear, unambiguous blacks and whites.
We should know what we stand for, and they should be the same things we stand for in our non-work lives, which of course are not balanced but blended. A marriage cannot survive a severe value mismatch, and neither can a company.
Get real -- or get lost.