In Bad Advice Yelled Loudly Is Still Bad Advice Lisa Barone took on Forrester and AdAge’s call for most businesses to wait before spending resources on FourSquare and its competitors:

Peanut butter

“I’m not going to lie, it seems absolutely ridiculous to me that anyone in this space would advise marketers take a “sit and wait” approach to any new marketing application.”

A few years ago Yahoo!’s Brad Garlinghouse penned the Peanut Butter Manifesto, nicely captured and decoded by Kara Swisher. Here’s it’s essence:

“We want to do everything and be everything–to everyone. … We are scared to be left out … I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.”

When I was 24 I completely shared Lisa’s optimism and enthusiasm to just do it, and her disdain of those who took a wait and see attitude. I’ve changed sides. I more regret the things that we did that we shouldn’t have than the potential opportunities that we let pass by. Because success requires focus and focus requires saying No to all but the best opportunities.

Many people find my view stodgy and depressing. Maybe the 24 year old me would have killed himself if he knew what he would become.

People admire action more than restraint. Many Met fans hate Carlos Beltran not because he struck out, but because he struck out looking. Managers call for bunts and hit & run plays because they’d rather hurt their teams by acting than help them with restraint. OK, that’s not quite right. They lack the discipline and humility to understand how often restraint is the right move.

Restraint is difficult, underrated, and unappreciated. Master it anyway.

Where do you stand? With Lisa? Or with peanut butter?

Image courtesy of genbug.

I was privileged to spend an evening at Google Haifa with:

• Yossi Matias, Head of Google’s Israel R&D center
• Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products and User Experience
• Noam Nisan, Google research scientist
• Some Googlers demonstrating some of their products (Sadly I didn’t catch their names — anybody who knows them, feel free to chime in)

The understated descriptions for Yossi, Marissa, and Noam are from Google’s page for this event, and remind me of Danny Sullivan joking that “Matt Cutts is a senior engineer at Google. Which is all you need to know about him.” Dr. Matias is a former air force pilot who published over 100 research papers and holds 20 patents. Dr. Nisan is an expert in algorithmic game theory. Marissa Mayer has led product management efforts on Google search products since 1999 and was the youngest woman to ever make Forbes’ list of most powerful women.

What most stood out to me was Google’s approach to product management.

• A Googler mentioned that Google has never been good at starting with a business plan and building the technology to address those needs.
• The same Googler mentioned that meetings are usually short at Google because Google’s product managers were all very smart & technical and understood the issues right away. He contrasted that to the other companies in which he worked where he said most product managers were idiots.
• There were 4 rooms where Google engineers were holding court, describing the products they were working on and answering questions. The passion and pride were impressive.
• Dr. Matias discussed how Google doesn’t have traditional product management. In addition to Google’s famed policy of letting engineers spend 20% of their time on pet projects, they have a large role in defining the features on which they spend the other 80% of their time.
• They don’t have any project managers. He said they don’t use Gantt charts, by which I think he meant they don’t use any scheduling tools. They do have deadlines, but the deadlines don’t seem to be driving the pace of development.
• Within engineering, the team leadership positions are fairly fluid. One person will lead one project, and then a different member will lead the next project.
• It’s largely geeks working together to design and develop products and features that they want to develop and use. Their passions, skills, and professionalism drive the pace.

They were trying to recruit developers, so they may have been playing up the sides that sound like developer heaven, and perhaps showing off their happiest and most passionate developers. It did all sound great, but it’s important to understand some of the harder things that make this work:

• Test-driven development. They had papers put up in the bathroom educating about test-driven development’s importance and best practices.
• Multivariate testing environment exporting boatloads of data.
• Data-driven decision making.

In this sense Google is the ultimate engineering organization. Their product development process seems built on the metaphor of the compiler. Developers are given more say to develop what they think will work because ultimately their creations have to pass this super-compiler, which checks not just for syntax errors but also whether or not the code breaks some other functionality or harms some business metric.

As a product manager, I’ve been repeatedly humbled by our own data-driven systems. It’s our nature to assume we’re usually right. Maybe you are. Testing has proven to me that I’m not.

Google’s Udi Manber told Business Week that they ran 5,000 experiments last year, and probably have 10 experiments for every successful launch.

On a perhaps related note, at SMX Advanced Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi pointed out that Bing’s mission was to help people accomplish their tasks, while Google’s mission was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Bing focused on people, Google focused on data. One quick data point: Googling “Google’s mission” got me directly to what I was looking for. Binging “Bing’s mission” got me nothing, so I’m quoting Mehdi from memory. Focusing on people sounds like a great idea, but focusing on the information may actually be a better way to give people what they want.

Peter Drucker spoke of “management by objectives and self control.” Google takes this a step further by giving testing and data a central role in management. I wonder if most engineers would rather be managed by a compiler or by a person. It’s nice that Google has icons like Marissa Mayer to put a human face to it all. Google’s system is admirable, IMO, and probably quite efficient. Still, it may be best that Google’s product managers are generally engineers by training. This approach may be best suited for us tin men.

More about Google and its competitive environment:

• Google & The Facebook Fantasy
• Microsoft, Mehdi, and Matt Cutts
• The Google Definition Link and Answers.com

Kanban Board

Medical ethics begins with the principle primum non nocere, Do No Harm. It’s the first rule of management too. Not because harm caused may or may not be worse than harm not prevented. But because it is so common for managers to do more harm than good.

A recent study by Nielsen Co. found that

“Companies with less senior-management involvement in the new-product process generate 80% more revenue from new products than those with the highest levels of senior-management involvement …

“While we don’t dispute senior management’s strengths and good intentions, they are often too quick to get involved in the creative process, especially when things are not going well and their mere presence can stifle free thinking …

“When senior managers do get involved, he said, there’s a ‘tendency to hip shoot. They come in, throw a grenade, and it slows things down.’”

(hat tip: Larry Kramer).

Management, like government, is a tricky job. It’s necessary, and yet it frequently harms more than it helps.

I just came back from a vacation, walked into a Kanban meeting, and was amazed by how my team was functioning. I know they function like that all the time, but the vacation let me see it with fresh eyes.

But such a scene always leads to some introspection. There’s always that self-doubt and pain in the ego when seeing your people functioning perfectly without you. And I have too much dissonance here to see this objectively, so I’ll state my claim and let you decide.

Managers first job is to not interfere with their team. Be ready to step in when needed, and provide help when called on. Have other critical tasks that you can do so you don’t feel the need to interfere or save the day. But when in doubt, step aside and let your people do their jobs. Make sure they get the credit they deserve. Don’t sap their enthusiasm or step on their toes. Give them the control and authority they need to enjoy their jobs and to succeed at them. Help, guide, encourage, support. Take pride in how successful they are without you. But first: do no harm.

Image courtesy of alq666

Ironic that immediately after David Brooks’ column criticizing the Tea Party movement for being too radical, Brooks publishes a column criticizing politicians’ lack of passion and commitment for fiscal responsibility:

“To actually reduce benefits and raise taxes, we’re going to need legislators who wake up in the morning passionate about fiscal sanity. The ones we have now are just making things worse.”

The management lesson to me is that — contrary to popular perception — there’s often far more pressure to say yes than to say no. This is true whether the sexy new thing is Universal Health Care or a War in Iraq or some cool new widget.

Sometimes the correct answer is Yes. Usually the correct answer is No. And the only way to be able to say Yes — and to deliver — where appropriate is to say No all the other times.

I have very mixed feelings about the Tea Party movement, but the part I love is their passion for fiscal responsibility. Any moron can increase spending and lower taxes. And any product manager can get excited about all the new great ideas that come along. But you won’t be able to deliver on any of those new ideas unless you’re very passionate about saying No to all the others. The average company is like the US government. Its biggest challenge isn’t finding great ideas. It’s finding the discipline to store up enough resources to focus on the one or two great ideas that they have.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/biscuitsmlp/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

George Washington never got the same respect from many intellectuals as some of the other Founding Fathers, but that tells us more about those intellectuals than it does about Washington. Washington was the central figure of the American Revolution, and I’m not only referring to the war, but also the fifteen critical years that followed. A blog about greatness should consider this man on his birthday.

George Washington

The following 6 lessons stand out most from the life of George Washington:

1. Know when to step down or step aside: Chronologically this came last but conceptually this comes first. Washington was not the center of his vision of the United States. He understood that he was playing a temporary role in something bigger than himself. This understanding allowed him to play his role to the fullest, and to step aside at the appropriate time. BTW, this is a key concept behind the Sabbath as well. We improve our ability to contribute to the world by frequently reasserting our knowledge that we’re not the center of the universe, and that the world can turn without us. One of Washington’s finest and final political acts was insisting that Vice President Jefferson walk before him the day Washington became a private citizen.
2. Know when to retreat: Yeah, similar theme. Washington was best known for his retreats. His greatest military accomplishment might have been surviving 1776. And yet his ability to avoid most military engagements allowed him to win the war.
3. Don’t make enemies: He fought the French, and then enlisted them as allies against the British. Even while fighting the British, the British press continued to paint a positive image of the opposing general. After the war he established strong relations with the British. A century before Lincoln established his Team of Rivals, Washington managed to keep even bigger rivals united under his leadership.
4. See things from others‘ perspective: Richard Brookhiser writes in Founding Father that Washington won the war by making it unwinnable for the British. In a zero-sum situation, he focused on his enemy’s strategy and subverted it.
5. Step up: I’ve focused on Washington’s restraint, but Washington’s restraint  is so impressive only because of the context of a revolutionary leader. At all the key moments, Washington stepped up and took the helm. Washington made great things happen as a plantation owner, military commander, and political leader. His retreats must be understood in the context of the strategy that he developed that ultimately proved victorious. The rest of this post focused on his restraint because that’s what most set him apart from other revolutionaries. What most set him apart from the average person were his remarkable actions.
6. Help others shine: I’m returning to the restraint theme for the final point. Whenever an ensemble cast shines it’s important to recognize the leader who helped it happen. I don’t know of any other revolutionary leader from any other period under whom men like Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and others could have contributed so greatly and shined so brightly. Jefferson wrote of Washington and Franklin that “I never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point.” Washington wrote “Speak seldom … never exceed a decent warmth, and submit your sentiments with diffidence. A dictatorial Stile, though it may carry conviction, is always accompanied with disgust.” Yes, sometimes Washington’s diffidence was a barely veiled act, as when showing up in military uniform to the Continental Congress and declaring himself unequal to the task of commanding the army. But the years where Washington stood at the center of the American Experiment saw remarkable contributions by others. Washington was president of the Constitutional Convention. The convention was an historic success. The fact that his name is often ignored as others are credited with the resulting document IMO speaks loudly to Washington’s greatness.

The American Exception is largely based on the remarkable balance the Founding Fathers achieved between Revolution and Restraint. Nothing exemplifies American greatness more than the humility and heroism of George Washington.

Also see: 9 Management Lessons from Lincoln

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/the-o/ / CC BY 2.0

I know Moses found inspiration in the desert but I didn’t think I would.

Vegas can be inspirational

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s keynote speech was the most inspirational keynote I’ve heard. He focused on:

1. Figure out what brings you happiness. Don’t start a business thinking about the money.
2. The main things that brings happiness are feelings of connectedness, meaning, and purpose.
3. Focus on bringing happiness to your employees and customers. He loves when Zappos is described as Happiness in a Box.
4. He sold his first company (to Microsoft) because in their rapid growth they had lost their company culture, and he stopped looking forward to coming to work. He was determined not to repeat that mistake with Zappos.
5. Zappos has 10 values that they use for decisions about hiring, firing, and everything in between. They include “create a little fun and weirdness” and “be humble.”

Bob Brisco’s keynote was very down to earth, and sometimes seemed like a rebuttal. Key points from his keynote and subsequent session:

1. Most brilliant, innovative, inspired and dedicated entrepreneurs fail.
2. “I’m amazed at how many people don’t think we look at profits when valuating companies.” I guess one of the things that differentiates the Web 2.0 from Web 1.0 is that traffic, growth, and awesomeness aren’t enough. As Brisco says, there’s too much unknown if you’re trying to think 20 years out. There needs to be a clear path to being very profitable in the 24-month period.
3. He did say that the 6^th “transcendental” feature of a great company was passionate leadership. But he made clear that this was in no way a replacement of the first five, which involved building a business based on building a unique, focused site with great content, community, and monetization.

Though Hsieh was far more inspiring, Brisco’s might have been the better keynote. When leaving Las Vegas I picked up Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Quick points from it and from Dennis Prager’s ‘Happiness is a Serious Problem’:

1. The expectations that we all be positive causes us to deny and ignore our real feelings and what they’re trying to tell us.
2. Paradoxically, it’s not at all clear that expecting good things makes us happier. The ideal is striving for success within the knowledge that failure is more common. (See In Defense of Negative Thinking)
3. The best thing to do is often nothing, and positive thinking leads us to IMO disastrous overreach in Iraq, Stimulus Packages, Health Care, etc. All noble endeavors but I think we’d have more success had we gone in with a more realistic view of how our actions could backfire.

I was glad to hear both Hsieh and Brisco. Between them they gave me a nice view from both sides. I then started reading Rick Smith’s ‘The Leap’ which helped put things together for me. He argues powerfully for making important changes, but for making them slowly, incrementally, carefully. He’s talking about career change, but the same applies for any strategic issue. Answers.com‘s worst changes were the dramatic huge leaps into new products and markets. Its best were ultimately as dramatic but more cautious and incremental.

I’m with Hsieh that we need to focus on happiness, meaning, and doing great things. I’m with Brisco, Rick Smith, Ehrenreich, and Prager that we need to be making our changes with care, discipline and conservative expectations.

Finally, Shabbat in the Young Israel of Las Vegas was more inspirational then I expected, but I’ll leave that for another post.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/http2007/ / CC BY 2.0

D'oh

The key difference between people who analyze data and people who don’t is that people who analyze data know that they’re wrong 90% of the time, and people who don’t analyze data incorrectly assume that they’re right. Ideally analyzing data makes us humbler, more realistic, and more tolerant about others’ mistakes. It can also help us get better at being right next time.

It’s easy to tell yourself the opposite, to look down on the number crunchers and say “ah yes, but unlike you, I’m a visionary, I don’t need no stinkin’ numbers .” Good luck with that. Many of the number crunchers are also visionaries, they’re just visionaries with a better respect for where things go wrong and with a better chance of getting things right.

Our nature is to fail. Many find that view depressing. I find it invigorating. You need to build your strategies around these realities. And once you realize that failure is natural and usually inevitable, you can stop feeling defeated by it. You’ll also better appreciate your successes.

Google’s Udi Manber recently told Business Week:

“We ran over 5,000 experiments last year. Probably 10 experiments for every successful launch.”

The 5 steps of optimizing around failure:

1. Embrace its inevitability. Don’t put all your efforts into trying to prevent it.
2. Fail early and often. And minimize the downside risk. Realize that each  effort has a reasonable chance of failing, and don’t bet the company on it. Don’t spend man-months on design, development, and testing.
3. Have a clear and important goal, along with a falsifiable hypothesis, and a way of measuring against it. Such as “this change should increase RPM by at least 5%” or “this should decrease spam by 10%.”
4. Have the discipline to measure honestly and to revert appropriately. One of my favorite compliments was when a colleague said “I’m always happy to run tests for Gil, because I know that if it fails he’ll be the first to admit it.”
5. Get better.  Figure out what went wrong and do better next time.

The zeroth rule, the premise behind the whole endeavor, is that you must first recognize that you’re usually wrong. Until you can do that, your chances of success are slim. Once you embrace the frequency of your fallibility you can greatly increase your chances of success, as well as your appreciation of it.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/ / CC BY 2.0

Evaluation

Yom Kippur is the climax of a 40 day period of self-evaluation and repentance. The period kicks into high gear with Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year, nine days earlier. The process suffers from some of the same challenges that we face as managers with annual performance evaluations.

I hate this period, and I know many others who hate it as well (and no, it’s not just the fasting). There’s 2 weeks of “Slichot” where we beat ourselves up pretty good for a host of sins we may or may not have done. Then Yom Kippur with ten repetitions throughout the day of “We’ve been guilty, we’ve betrayed, we’ve robbed, we’ve slandered …” (in Hebrew it follows the ABCs, which makes it no less annoying). And eight sets of 44 lines of “And for the sins we committed before you through [baseless hatred / obstinance / slander / begrudging eye / haughtiness ...].” While striking our chests with each statement. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any of this, but the dominant theme of the day seems to be “we suck, we truly suck, let me count the ways.”

One piece of good news (for me, anyway). The people who currently lead the main prayers for the “High Holidays” in our community have beautiful inviting voices and tunes, and have somehow replaced the awe and trepidation with a greater feeling of love, inspiration, and connection. Which is a very good start, but I digress.

Tom Peters once said that it takes the average American worker 6 months to recover from each performance evaluation. In my experience, he’s about right. I summed up my view in Performance Evaluations: The 5 Do’s and Don’ts. Making it all scary and negative would definitely be a don’t.

Now I’m sure that more liberal branches of Judaism are less negative about this, but I accept Orthodox Judaism’s principles regarding Jewish Law and tradition. And to clarify, I’m not looking for softer expectations. I’m looking for something more in the lines of “With great power comes great responsibility” in a Chris Robertson type of voice.

One of the few prayers prescribed in the Bible includes “I have also given it [a tithe] to the Levite, the proselyte, to the orphan, and to the widow, according to the commandments You commanded me; I have not transgressed any of your commandments and I have not forgotten … I have hearkened to the voice of Hashem, my G-d, I have acted according to everything You commanded me.” And it then asks for G-d to keep his part of the contract “… Bless Your people Israel, and the land that You gave us, as You swore to our forefathers …”

Now that’s a prayer. That’s a contract. That’s standing up with pride, accepting responsibility, and demanding the relationship He promised.

How different than Ecclesiastes‘ “because who is man that can be righteous and not sin” that has unfortunately dominated too much of religious discourse since.

And if our prayers can include admissions of sins that our community committed, surely it can also include statements of good things that we just as surely did.

I love Frank Sinatra’s My Way, because of lines like “To say the things he truly feels / and not the words of one who kneels.” A gentle dig at the religious impulse to focus on our faults and not our successes and potential.

But religions’ impulse towards regret and self-negation need not limit us. Yes, rituals surrounding spinning dead chickens over our heads generally last centuries longer than rituals about — say — doing a personal SWOT analysis, or listing our successes and failures for last year and our goals for next year.

But we can view that as simply a challenge for what we need to add. Jewish tradition tells us that our ancestor was called Israel because he wrestled with G-d, and was successful. It is the religious Jew’s duty to constantly wrestle with tradition, with humility (and IMO while observing it), and making sure he or she is doing what needs to be done. It’s a cop-out to not to do what needs to be done just because the Rabbis never commanded it.

So with this post I hope to initiate a year of far greater self-reflection, self-evaluation, and self-improvement. This blog is about management … but religion and management are often confronting the same challenges, and often offering similar solutions.

So today maybe I’ll sing My Way and read Rudyard Kipling‘s If. And finish this blog post and resolve for a year of greater soul searching and self-improvement (can you do me a favor and join the conversation?). And then I’ll enter the fast and attempt to come closer to G-d through the traditional methods and with the community.

So to this site’s readers (both of you), whether you’re Jewish or not, I wish you a day and a year of successful self-evaluation and improvement. Of confronting our weaknesses and overcoming them. Of recognizing our strengths and getting more out of them. Of standing tall, recognizing our potential, and improving our lives and our world. May we all have a great year.

PostScript: During the Seudah Mafseket (the meal before the fast) I told my family that I wanted us to use the meal to discuss what we would like to change for next year. They told me we do that every year. We expanded it a bit, saying what we think we did right, what we did wrong, what we’d like to accomplish next year, and even what we appreciate about each other. Generally, I think that’s often the best strategy when you somehow can’t accomplish the goals through the established rituals. Supplement / surround the ritual with something new. I intended to do something similar in the post-Yom Kippur meal, but the migraine headache that came on late in the fast made that impossible. Oh well. Maybe next year.

Humility: Recognizing Greatness Beyond Oneself

Fantastic piece the other day by David Brooks (welcome back, David!) on humility and the lack thereof (High-Five Nation). The Joe Wilson / Serena Williams / Kanye West fiascos provided the opening to a piece that highlighted how our attitudes towards war and foreign policy changed since World War 2. WW2 ended with the US president and troops accepting the awe and terror of the moment and of history. The US performed a great and noble task and reacted with the proper humility of a people who appreciated the greatness of the challenge they had faced. Contrast that to the simplistic posturing of many of those both for and against the war in Iraq. One nice thing about Barack Obama as president is that we have neither a smirking President Bush bragging about Mission Accomplished nor a self-righteous Senator Obama taking a leading role in an equally dangerous and simplistic campaign mocking those who chose war and clamoring for immediate withdrawal, a policy he then rejected upon becoming president.

Humility is fundamentally a respect for the difficulty of the challenges we face, and a respect for those who choose other ways to face those challenges. It is one of the most essential traits of a good manager.

Note: Humility does not mean that you shrink away from the challenge. It’s not a minimization of self, it’s an increase in respect for people and challenges. And not the way Ali G says Respect while mocking everything he comes across. Somehow when Self Expression replaced Humility as a value, Respect came to mean respecting somebody else’s self expression, thus turning the word completely on its head.

As a manager you must stand humble as your great people try to solve complex problems. If you think you have a simpler solution, humbly approach them and see what you can work out together. You must stand humble in the face of projecting your business. There are generally far more obstacles than meets the eye. Respect them.

Personally speaking, almost every time I brag I regret it. I know there are those that build a career on it (you know who you are — actually, maybe you don’t). As Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of the excellent Fooled by Randomness and the Black Swan) would point out, we get fooled by a survivorship bias here. Those that succeed in building a career through self-expression catch our eye and we don’t notice the millions who failed making similar attempts.

Humility also involves putting the challenge and your teammates ahead of yourself. You’ll feel better, accomplish more, and make others happier and more successful. As a manager, it may be your most important trait.

One to Many

After 10 years working with my wife (Rena Reich) at Answers.com I’m now watching her do great things on her own site, The Pet Wiki. So in the evening I watch my wife creating on her own and it gives me food for thought for working as part of a team the next day. It’s a good daily reminder of management’s goals, opportunities, and challenges.

Rena is her own development team, product and project manager, SEO expert, social media director, director of community, investor, senior management, and QA. I know that eventually she’s going to need to start growing her organization / network, much the way WikiAnswers grew from a one person project.

Which has been driving me to think about how we can maximize the benefits people get from joining organizations and minimize the costs.

Today I want to discuss the three types of ownership the individual gives up when joining a company. In reverse order of importance, IMO, a person gives up ownership of:

1. The wealth created
2. The definition of the product / service
3. His or her own life, at least during work-hours (and often beyond)

The first trade-off is straightforward. You get a monthly salary and somebody else assumes the upside potential and the downside risk. We try to be generous with salaries, benefits, and stock options, but ultimately, the individual is trading upside potential for a paycheck.

The second trade-off is harder for some people. They’re often sure they know what’s best and they often get overruled. I try to defer to my people when I can. If we’re working together well, we all understand the company’s goals and are working towards them, and respect each other enough that the individual rarely feels that he or she was arbitrarily overruled. More often than not I’m letting my people overrule me, because they’re closer to the front line, and they’re the ones that have to carry the decisions through.

The third trade-off is the biggest and hardest. As any Star Trek fan knows (I guess others learn this lesson from other sources), the human need for freedom is very strong, as is our fear of being controlled. An individual working for him or herself may have to answer to rude or unreasonable clients, but there’s generally not the same feeling of being owned. Parents, teachers, husbands, and wives should remember this too. You have to be sensitive to people’s fear of being controlled, especially in a relationship where one (or both) might feel stuck. So as a manager, the biggest thing you can do to keep your people happy is to let them maintain their feelings of ownership of their own work lives. If they feel like slaves, they’ll work live slaves, which may or may not have led to high productivity on medieval plantations, but certainly will not lead to creativity and effectiveness among knowledge workers.

Many of the lessons I learned reading Tom Peters as a teenager I’ve since rejected. But helping your people feel ownership over their work lives and over their work? Essential. My experience has been that Peters was dead-on on these issues. Keep your people happy, inspired, respected, admired, appreciated, and empowered. And watch them do great work. If they can’t feel that ownership within your company, they’ll either do mediocre work for you, or do great work somewhere else.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dottieday/ / CC BY 2.0