Your staff is well-aware that you are imperfect. So are your customers.

So stop trying to perpetuate the idea that you don’t make mistakes. Nobody thinks that about you. And stop trying to be perfect. You’re not going to pull it off.

Instead, figure out how good you need to be, and shoot for being that good and a little bit better. Ask your staff and your customers to help you be better — by providing you with feedback on how well (or how poorly) you’ve done, and for providing suggestions on how you can do better. If you get good at this, you’ll find that life is much less stressful.*

Remember that being “good enough” isn’t always about scoring 90% every time you try. Sometimes it’s about scoring 100% nine times out of ten, and getting a goose egg on the last one. Learning to identify, acknowledge, and make amends for mistakes is a skill worth developing. And learning that skill is a much better use of your energy than trying to be perfect.

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*Especially if you’re a business owner.  People who own their own stores have a particularly hard time with this kind of thing.

“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game — it is the game.”– Louis Gerstner, Jr., in Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?

Corporate Culture isn’t a new idea any more.  But I think that its importance is on the comeback.  In 2008, many people are observing that “how we look at the world” is one of the most important things that shape how our lives go.  Add to that two other observations: (1) “how we see the world to be” is something we have to work hard to perceive, since it is so fundamental that we can have a hard time starting to grasp it and (2) “how we look at the world” is something we can change, if not easily.

Same goes for businesses.  “How your company sees the world to be” is a fundamental part of a business’s corporate culture.  It’s hard to grasp, and it is something that can be changed, if it needs to be, and if the company has people willing to do it.  This is true at every level of the corporation, and in every part of the corporation’s mind: strategy, management, and marketing.

I’ll confess. I don’t have a system for backing up my files. Sure, I do make backups (offsite and onsite) at least every few months. And when I’m working on a critical document, I make constant backups by sending copies of my files-in-progress to an offsite mailhost. But I could do better. Odds are, you could, too.

Here’s a quote from and link to a PCWorld article on online backups, Back Up Your Files Online Without Even Trying:

I’m sure that by now all of you back up critical files weekly or even daily, and religiously refresh your full-disk-image backup once every few months, right? No? Well, you’re not alone. And while there’s no substitute for a genuine backup strategy, the move toward desktop-caliber online applications has made it easier than ever to get some degree of backup protection without even trying.

Happy easier breathing to you.

Winning companies make a habit of doing things that are good for their health.  That means choosing work (whether they be projects and clients, or products and market sectors) that adds to the company’s bottom line, assets, and general happiness.

What do you need for a track record of smart choices?

1.  Knowing what works for you.

2.  Evaluating projects (or clients, or products, or market sectors) before you pursue them.

3.  Pursuing only the projects that make sense.

4.  Working the projects you win to make sure you’re doing what you intended.

5.  Measuring your results, during and afterward.

6.  Tuning the process to make it better each time.

If you don’t care where you’re going, it doesn’t matter where you go.  But I suspect you care where you’re going.  And please, remind everyone on your staff (including yourself)  — financial success is measured by net income, not gross income.  And if your staff don’t know how to tell whether their work is yielding red or black net income, think about how to change that.  Pronto.

Demarketing requires discipline: the discipline to decide what you’re not going to do, and then the discipline to stick with the decision.  Some people have this kind of discipline in spades:

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.
He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

In The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors (New York Times February 26, 2008), John Tierney discusses the work of MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely.  As Tierney describes, Ariely proves scientifically that brainpower is not a sufficient driver for discipline:

Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.

…Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

In the M.I.T. experiments, the students should have known better…

But they didn’t act like they did.  Read the article and learn about the psychology.  Then remind yourself that discipline is hard, and prepare yourself for the effort.

A Toyota Motor Corp employee died of overwork after logging more than 106 hours of overtime in a month, a judge ruled Friday, reversing a ministry’s earlier decision not to pay compensation to his widow. …The employee, who was working at a Toyota factory in central Japan, died of irregular heartbeat in February 2002 after passing out in the factory around 4 a.m.Overworking is a serious issue in Japan, where an average worker uses less than 50 percent of paid holidays, according to government data.

In fiscal year 2005-2006, the labor ministry received 315 requests for compensation from the bereaved families of workers who died of strokes and other illnesses seen as work-related.

– Kubota and Kim, Court Rules Employee Worked to Death, Reuters News Agency, 30 November 2007

The first case of karoshi was reported in 1969 with the death from a stroke of a 29- year old, married male worker in the shipping department of Japan’s largest newspaper company [1]. Karoshi can be translated quite literally as “death from overwork.” The major medical causes of karoshi-deaths are heart attack and stroke, including subarachnoidal hemorrhage (18.4%), cerebral hemorrhage (17.2%), cerebral thrombosis or infarction (6.8%), myocardial infarction (9.8%), heart failure (18.7%), and other causes (29.1%) [2]. The Ministry of Labor began to publish the statistics on karoshi in 1987, as public concern increased [3]:

Nishiyama and Johnson: Karoshi-Death from overwork: Occupational health consequences of the Japanese production management (Sixth Draft for International Journal of Health Services). 4 February 1997.

By comparison:

GENEVA (ILO News) - US workers put in the longest hours on the job in industrialized nations, clocking up nearly 2,000 hours per capita in 1997, the equivalent of almost two working weeks more than their counterparts in Japan where annual hours worked have been gradually declining since 1980, according to a new statistical study * of global labour trends published by the International Labour Office (ILO).

– International Labour Organization press release “Americans work longest hours among industrialized countries, Japanese second longest. Europeans work less Time, but register faster productivity gains New ILO statistical volume highlights labour trends worldwide”, 6 September 1999.

Among your outside advisors, your account is likely to have the greatest impact on the success or failure of your business.

– Jacquelyn Lynn in Start Your Own Restaurant (and Five Other Food Businesses) (Entrepreneur Magazine’s Start Ups).

[what we first learned in the 80s is that…] Firms that earned superior levels of customer loyalty and retention also earned consistently higher profits–and they grew faster as well….[W]e learned that customer loyalty is inextricably linked to employee and investor loyalty and that major improvements in the one often require improvements in the other two.

– Frederick F. Reichheld of Bain & Company, Inc., in his preface to The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value.

…[T]he true mission of a business is to create value. Any business muddled enough to believe that its real purpose is producing profit is probably not long for this world. Profit is absolutely essential, to be sure, but it is a downstream outcome of creating value, and so it functions very poorly as an objective in itself.

– ibid, p. 186.

Reichheld published this book in 1996 — a few years before the “balanced scorecard” entered common parlance. Indeed, “balanced scorecard” appears nowhere in the index, but it seems likely from the above two quotes that Reichheld is on the same wavelength. If you don’t take care of all the stakeholders, you’re not going to be around long.

On advice-giving:

People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.

– source unknown

One of my favorite Far Side cartoons shows a man in his bedroom getting dressed for the day. A sign by his mirror reminds him, “First Pants, Then Shoes”.

This cartoon and the above quote remind me that there’s often a sequence to things. Knowing how to do the last step and knowing that the last step needs to be done are not enough if other things have to happen first.

Related blog: David Maister on Being Helpful

Chief executives at charitable hospitals in Massachusetts received substantial pay and benefit increases in fiscal year 2005, for the first time boosting their overall compensation to more than $1 million at most of the largest institutions.

Also, the highest-paid hospital executive in the state, Partners HealthCare chief executive James J. Mongan, broke the $2 million barrier, another significant milestone.

“Just because the hospitals are nonprofit doesn’t mean they can afford second-class leadership,” [Partners HealthCare Board Chair] Connors said. “I really feel we’re doing the right thing by paying these guys top dollar in the field.”

– from Hospital CEOs join the $1m Club, Boston Globe, August 31, 2006.

What do you think?