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If Picasso had your schedule, we'd never have heard of him

You're going to way too many meetings.

And yes, I do mean you. In fact, I'm thinking about you as I'm writing this. It's exactly 5.27am and I can picture your schedule for the rest of the day. All those meetings - in your office, in their office, in meeting rooms, 'conferenced in', synchronous, asynchronous, vital, tedious, overlapping and running long...always running long.

Look, meetings are great and all - they get stuff done to a degree, and they give us a sense of being part of more than just a lonely daily grind, but the fact is that Michelangelo didn't produce a single great work of art during a meeting (it's true - I checked in Wikipedia). Nor, so far as we know, did Picasso*, Hemingway or F Scott Fitzgerald. Even those titans from meetings-ville (otherwise known as Hollywood) like Stephen Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Marty Scorsese, beset with meetings as they are, produced their masterpieces - gulp - on the set, not in the meetings.

Vince Lombardi, Bill Walsh, Tom Landry, Alex Ferguson and Bill Shankly sure had meetings, but is that how you remember them? Or is it running, sitting, standing, shouting, coaching, pleading, growling and mesmerizing their team to victory, season after season after season? Churchill and Roosevelt held many meetings during the war, often at great personal expense to their safety, but the war was actually won in real time, on the battlefield.

The common thread here - and it's true in business just as much as it is in entertainment, sports, politics and war - is that meetings are only useful insomuch as they provide fodder for real action in the arena. They have no validity in and of themselves.

If Picasso, Lombardi, Scorsese or Churchill had your schedule, we'd never have heard of them. You're going to too many meetings. Fix it.

* Picasso was in fact known for producing some great 'doodles' (can you call something Picasso drew, a 'doodle'?) during meetings, particularly if they were held in restaurants, but I'm pretty sure they were produced in rebellion against the meeting, not in celebration of it.

Why end-of-year planning sucks

Let's face it, most end-of-year strategic planning sucks. The process is clunky, avoided or postponed until the last moment, dreaded by those who have to dredge up the numbers, and worst of all, by early in the first quarter of the next year, the outputs from all that work rarely bears any relationship to the key issues faced by the organization.

The aspect of much year-end planning that dooms it to swift irrelevance is that it is relentlessly tactical, concentrating on the detail of numbers and budgets, and is not sufficiently strategic, failing to focus on the real threats and opportunities faced by the organization. Consequently even a small shift in the strategic environment results in a high degree of irrelevancy in the underlying numbers.

A long time ago and in a different world I was a CPA (technically the British equivalent), so I'm not likely to suggest that you forgo the tactical, 'numbers and budgets-based' aspect of your year-end planning, but what I do suggest is that you redeem the end-of-year planning process: embrace it, welcome it - make it your friend, and turn it into an incredibly useful tool that will reward you through all of next year. After all, apart from the time set aside for year-end planning, when else will you get the opportunity to think strategically without being under constant pressure to manage tactically, on an hour-by hour, moment-by-moment basis?

The key to redeeming the end-of-year planning process is in adding a solid base of strategic thinking as the precursor to, and foundation of, your tactical planning.

Think about (your organization's) Predictable Success: how will you attain it next year, how will you maintain it and improve it? Instead of laboriously podding through spreadsheets that may or may not be relevant to next year's trading environment, start by using the year-end planning cycle as an 'approved' haven for genuine, effective strategic thinking.

There's no secret to strategic planning - it's not rocket science, despite what management gurus would have us believe. There are just two parts to good quality strategic planning:

1. Asking the right questions, and
2. Getting (or giving) the best answers.

I can't help you with 2. (well, I can, but just not here...), but I can certainly help with 1. Here are my top 10 Strategic Year-end Questions I use to jump-start strategic thinking in the organizations I work with:

1. If you fired yourself today, and came back as a new boss tomorrow, what would you do? (*1)

2. If the 'perfect' competitor opened up across the street from you tomorrow, what would they be like? (*2)

3. What is the one thing your organization was worst at this year? What single thing most needs to happen to fix it?

4. What is the one thing your organization did best this year? What do you need to do to turn that success into a repeatable process?

5. Which individual was most responsible for standing in the way of your organization's success this year? What are you going to do about it?

6. Which department, division, team or function was most responsible for standing in the way of your organization's success this year? What are you going to do about it?

7. Which individual was most responsible for your organization's success this year? What are you going to do about it?

8. Which department, division, team or function was most responsible for your organization's success this year? What are you going to do about it?

9. What is the single metric or measurement you least liked hearing about this year? What will you do to prevent the same thing happening next year?

10. What is the single metric you will measure your success by (not how anyone else will measure your success - how you will measure your own success). What are you doing about it?

Notes:
1. See Hymowitz, Carol. 2006. Fire Yourself -- Then Come Back and Act Like a New Boss Would. Wall Street Journal. October 9, 2006.

2. See Seth Godin: 'Small is the New Big', Portfolio Publications, 2006.

The single largest unused resource in your organization

The org chart is an unloved document. No-one believes it, it's unlikely to be up to date, and unless a merger or acquisition is in the air, it rarely sees the light of day.

So read this slowly: Your org chart is the single largest unused resource in your organization.

If you watched me walk past an Aston Martin Vantage every day and instead jump into a beaten-up 7-year old Camry, you'd think I was either crazy or ... well, you'd probably just think I was crazy.

And yet business owners and leaders do the organizational equivalent of exactly that, every day, all day.

Here's the deal: To be a success in business, the one and only thing you need to do is to make good decisions - frequently and consistently. Making good decisions frequently and consistently is tiring, stressful and hard to maintain. Wouldn't it be great if you had...let's say... a machine for effective decision-making...?

Well, as a business leader, turns out you do: it's called your org chart, and it's sitting there waiting for you in the garage drawer, just where you left it yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that. All that you need to do is dust it off, turn the ignition, and use it. Simple.

There are only two things you need to do to turn your org chart into an effective machine for decision-making:

1. Redesign it.
This sounds time-consuming and unnecessary but is in fact both essential and (relatively) simple. Simply take a copy of your existing org chart and a colored crayon or marker. Using the crayon, draw lines between people who communicate frequently (if you don't know who communicates with who in your organization you have a deeper problem, but for now, go find out). The more two people communicate, the thicker the line you should draw.

Where the lines you have drawn match the lines on the existing org chart, all is well, Where they don't, your org chart isn't working as an effective machine for decision-making. You need to either (a) change the org chart to reflect the existing reality, (b) train one or more people who aren't communicating but should, to do so, or (c) fire or relocate someone because they're not communicating effectively in their current position. Your call.

2. Add a third dimension (optional if you have less than 50 employees).
Org charts are two-dimensional at best - they only show vertical and lateral communications. If you have an organization with more than 50 employees, it is certain that your 2-D org chart does not reflect a lot of the formal and informal cross-functional communications (extending across functional silos, and up and down through levels of seniority) that actually make the decisions about many of the more complicated issues you face.

Have someone take time to record this third dimension of decision-making as an integral part of the org chart. You can show the cross-functional teams as an appendix or as a 'call-out' on the side of the page - just so long as you show them: they're just as important and as inherent to effective decision-making (if not more so) than the 2-D command and control boxes in the traditional org chart. Don't get hung up on chasing down every small cross-functional interaction - just get the big obvious ones for now and add more later. (A company wiki is great for this).

Your org chart is now an effective machine for decision-making. Six or nine months from now, pull out the org chart (including cross-functional teams), grab your colored marker and do a reality check. Don't touch that Camry.

Reclaim, Restore, Renew: A 3-Stage Strategy for Recovery in 2010

For many industries, 2010 will bring a distinct improvement in the trading environment. For individual companies within each industry - that's you and me - the manner in which they respond during 2010 will lay the foundation for success (or otherwise) for the next five to ten years.

There are three ways to respond to economic recovery, each of which builds on the others to provide a stronger platform (and a longer timeline) for success:

1. Reclaim.
Basic recovery is a reclamation process, concerned solely with getting the organization back to, or near, the trading levels it was at before it was hit by the economic downturn. Conservative or lagging organizations organizations in 'reclaim' mode will slipstream the rising tide of economic upturn and add cost only when absolutely necessary. Focussing externally, they will re-enter abandoned markets where possible, sell more to existing customers, and seek to win back any business they lost to competitors in the downturn.

2. Restore.
More aggressive organizations will seek not just to to reclaim their external position in the marketplace, but will also work to restore important elements of their internal culture: those practices and norms that were weakened or lost during the last two to three years. People practices in particular - hiring, retention and development activities being among the first to wither in a recession - will be recognized as crucial to the organization's vitality and restored.

3. Renew.
Those organizations that will come through 2010 in a leading, rather than lagging position will be those who not only reclaim their external markets and restore their internal culture, but those whose leaders have the courage (and take the time) to renew what they do, and how they do it: specifically, to redefine anew, then teach and enforce what effective management means in their organization.

Put obversely: those organizations which continue (consciously or unconsciously) to expect and encourage the same skill-set in and from their managers as they did pre-2008, will find that those managers, and by extension, the organization as a whole is not equipped to compete in the post-recovery economy. Fail to transform your managers and you will live in the exhaust fumes of those who do.

More later on what that new skill-set for managers looks like, but for now, what will your organization do in 2010: Reclaim, Restore, or Renew?

Intuit Buys Mint: New Old Same Old

So lumbering Intuit bought spunky little Mint - there's a shock. 'Aging cash-rich company with poor perceived customer value takes out young cool upstart' isn't exactly a new strategy - see Microsoft with Hotmail, eBay with Skype and Google with...well, 932* 'started to be bought by Google' companies in the last 4 years.

Now watch the inevitable disappearance of Mint as a genuinely innovative, fun, 2.0 web application, as Intuit slowly smothers it or folds it into the mother ship until it is all but invisible. The one thing that won't happen is that the adoption of the best of the Mint brand - zippy interface, cool features and a general air of relevancy - into the core Intuit product base. Nope, Quickbooks, Quicken and TurboTax will continue to be bloated, inefficient and clunky.

Why? Because when a company in Treadmill or The Big Rut buys a company in Fun or early Whitewater, it does so to remove competitive threat, not to rejuvenate its culture. And any time the acquired company resists integration, trouble (and divestiture) will soon follow - usually with messy results.

Farewell Mint, we hardly knew ye.

* Fake number made up by me.

The Difference Between Big Dogs and Top Performers

Top performers deliver the goods, and play well with others. Big Dogs deliver the goods, and suck the air out of the room with their need for recognition.

Top performers know that lateral relationships with their peers are at least as important as vertical relationships with their team. Big Dogs build a personality cult (based on loyalty to them) with their team, and exclude others.

Top performers build your business, Big Dogs build your revenue.

Top performers delegate, build benchstrength in their team, and have a succession plan in place. Big Dogs try to make themselves personally indispensable.

Big Dogs resent change, hinder progress, ignore directives, plunder talent, drain other people's energies and passive-aggressively sandbag opportunities for growth. Top performers look for ways to continuously improve, ask for help when needed, lift others and offer encouragement and help.

Big Dogs have sweat equity, because they built the business for you, back in the day. They rescued lost deals, made angry customers happy, opened doors, sold more business than you thought possible and stayed incredibly loyal though hard times. Your top performers were hired in from the outside, don't quite get the culture, think they know more than they do on ocassions,and don't have the long history, loyalty, and sweat equity your Big Dogs do.

Nonetheless, your long-term growth and scalability - the possibility of building a predictably successful business - rests with your top performers, not your Big Dogs.

The challenge with top performers is in retaining them. The challenge with Big Dogs is finding the courage to let them go.

Carpet-Bombing the Organization: Leaders Who Talk to Think

Some leaders - specifically, those with a Visionary style - use debate and discussion as a way to frame their thoughts and opinions. To find out what they really think about a problem or issue, they will often set up a straw man - usually a stance directly opposite to that with which they have been presented - then challenge others to push back with their thoughts and opinions. Eventually, out of this (often heated) discussion, the theory is, a 'true' and 'tested' consensus will emerge, honed and strengthened by the rigorous debate.

All well and good - and if used properly, very powerful. At least, that's how it starts out. Unfortunately, over time, the Visionary leader's habit of 'talking to think' very often degenerates into a tic or identifying characteristic, and becomes less of a useful tool than an irritating source of confusion to others.

This happens if and when the leader loses sight of the most important part of 'talking to think': involving others in the talking part. Whether because they grow to like the sound of their own voice, or because they like to combine 'talking to think' with manipulating their team, or simply because they surround themselves with weak people, eventually, what were once vibrant discussions descend into monologs - rambling, self-contradictory, seemingly schizophrenic monologs at that.

This is bad enough in itself - who wants to hear their leader sound like King Lear on a bad night? - but it's positively dangerous to the growth of the organization when it is left unchecked. Eventually, subconsciously aware that he or she has lost the interest of their immediate audience (their direct reports), the Visionary-leader-who-needs-to-talk-to-think begins to prowl the corridors, reaching down and across the org chart to find someone before whom they can muse. Corridor discussions, ad-hoc 'chats', 'phone calls out of the blue, lengthy emails to surprised subordinates, hi-jacked meetings all play their part in helping scratch the itch of 'talking to think'.

I needn't write a paragraph explaining what happens next - you've either experienced first hand, or you can imagine, the havoc wreaked when the Visionary leader's little time bombs of musings start to explode throughout the organization...

Boom!...He said what...?
Boom!...We're doing that...?
Boom!...She can't be serious...!
Boom!...That's not what he said to me...
Boom!...That doesn't make sense...
Boom!...That's not what we decided last week...
Boom!...So that's our policy now...?
Boom!...When did we agree to that...?

...you get the idea.

Let me be straight: these are not (necessarily) bad leaders - they just suffer from a 'talking to think' Tourette's syndrome that can be cured. Here's how:

1. Show them the collateral damage

Most visionary leaders think that everyone else is just as flexible, open-minded and capable of dealing with ambiguity and contradiction as they are. Hence, they don't really understand the damage they cause when they spray the workplace with their carpet bombs.

Make a list of half a dozen specific instances where people have been worried or confused, or better yet made bad business decisions as a result of misinterpreting 'talking to think' as gospel (choose examples that aren't going to kill anyone's career). Have a quiet, unemotional, fact-based discussion with the bomber pilot - sorry, Visionary leader - and show them the real effect of their actions. Enlist the help of others to back up your case with their own examples. The goal should be to have a discussion that isn't confrontational or causes anyone to get defensive.

2. Get them an outlet

Visionary leaders need to talk to think, so it's unrealistic (and wrong) to expect them to stop. What you need to do is help them find a suitable forum for doing so. Encourage them to hire an executive coach (this is one of the very few genuinely good reasons for doing so), join an organization like Vistage,* or put together their own mastermind group.

3. Set internal boundaries

Just like it's icky when Daddy dumps his criticisms about Mom on to the kids, your visionary leader needs to see the inappropriateness of over-sharing willy-nilly in the organization. Agree broad outlines of where, when and with who 'talking to think' can happen internally, and ask for permission to hold him or her accountable to those guidelines.

4. Restore healthy debate.

The biggest shame of the degeneration of 'talking to think' is the loss of healthy debate at a senior level in the organization. To restore this, set specific, agreed times aside for brainstorm / blue-sky / bull sessions - whatever you want to call them - involving your Visionary leader, in which you and your peers commit to full engagement, and your leader commits to avoiding anything that sounds like a monolog (these sessions can be part of your regular management meetings if you wish, but don't let them take over the whole agenda).

* I'm not a member of Vistage, so I can't personally recommend it - but a number of people I respect have said they found it a helpful forum.

The Fibonacci Sequence of People Management

The Fibonacci sequence - that series of numbers that recur so frequently in nature - has no known equivalent in business, but in the important area of managing people, there is an equally important numerical series. Here it is:

1, 4, 20, 75, 250, 2000, 5000
The sequence above refers to the total number of people employed in an organization, and here's the significance of each:

1. Wow. You've actually employed someone - congratulations! Welcome to the world of business. At this stage, people management is like parenting 101 - despite the fact that it seems very important, no-one really told you how to do it, so you're making things up, reading books and magazine articles, and trying stuff to see what works.

Relax. It'll be OK.

4. For some reason, when it comes to employees, four is significantly different from three. A break point occurs here - not obvious, not causing any fault lines, but a break point none the less. The culture of the 'organization' (it barely warrants that description, but it's what you have, nonetheless) changes subtly, from playroom to living room.

Up to three employees still gives the founder/owner the luxury of thinking (however subliminally) of the business as a 'hobby business'. Once the fourth person has joined, things change. Gosh - now we're serious.

20. At around 20 or so employees, the landscape shifts again. Two things happen in particular: (a) You're spending as much time doing 'people stuff' as you are doing anything else, and (b) You can't continue to make custom arrangements with individual employees for every little thing. Stuff like time off for sick babies, random bonuses, clothing eccentricities, where people park their car and the like switch from being a cutesy positive differentiator of you as an employer to becoming a negative irritant.

You can still maintain a family vibe, but it's hard work and doesn't come easy any more.

75. Somewhere between 75 and 125 employees, the 'family vibe' is threatened most by the simple fact that you - yes, you - have too much to do. Now you're running a substantial, growing business, and those halcyon days of Friday afternoon bull sessions, walking around to visit your key team members unannounced and knowing everyone's birthday and wedding anniversaries seem like a distant dream.

Or they do to your employees, at least. You personally may well be in denial, thinking this is just a temporary aberration caused by current circumstances, and that soon - when everything calms down - you'll return to the more bucolic days when you had time, and lots of it, for everyone.

Don't kid yourself. Although nothing will ever be quite the same as when you were a microbusiness (that's the nature of growth - things change), you can, in fact, restore a substantial degree of the family vibe, and take some of the pressure of yourself, by, perversely enough, doing something you swore you'd never do: hire a (good) HR person.

By a 'good' HR person, I don't mean an administrator or paper-pusher (though by now, you probably need someone with those skills to keep you out of employment law court), but rather someone with a genuine feel for people, who can make your hiring and skills training better, deal with the myriad issues of managing a 100-strong workforce, and let you concentrate on culture-(re)building.

You're gonna have to make that HR hire sometime - best do it now, and best make it a good one.

250. This is the size of organization where 'people issues' become most expensive on a per-employee basis.

Big enough that you now have your HR person firmly in place (it's probably a small two or three person department by now), you're also big enough that new employees expect more from you than just a good salary, skills training and some degree of job security. You're now at the size where potential new hires are also looking for personal development and career opportunities. They expect you to develop them on the job, and to provide a career ladder they can work on.

Problem is, personal development is expensive (and it's not a skill you're good at as an organization), and career opportunities are frankly limited. Until you get to around 1,000 employees (when the per-person cost of development programs reduces to reasonable amounts and career opportunities are numerous), you're going to have a big decision to make every year: do you budget for an investment in personal development programs and move people around to fulfill career growth needs, or are you going to accept turnover of key employees?

2000. By now, you've got a handle on personal and career development. You probably have a corporate (oh yeah - we say 'corporate' a lot at this size of organization) training/development department that's distinct from HR, and your training and development programs are part of the warp and woof of your business.

The only real blockage is right at the top. Your 'C'-level team (including SVP's or whatever you call them in your organization) isn't going to turn over real quickly, so the superstars one level down are apt to get frustrated and leave. It's time to start building the concept of benchstrength and succession planning - get those 'C'-level types to start mentoring and coaching their direct reports to identify a likely successor - however far out that event may seem. It at least shows you're thinking about the issue and may keep some of those hot shots a while longer.

5000. You're there, baby. If you aren't - or won't - provide world class hiring, onboarding, skills training, personal and career development and succession planning, the only way is down. More fool you.

The Benevolently Manipulative Leader and the Atrophied Team

Strong leaders often dominate their team, to the detriment of high quality outcomes. Speaking too much or too soon, steering conversations in a predetermined direction, using pointed or aggressive body language, lobbying team members ahead of a discussion, jury-rigging the agenda, doctoring what is agreed after the event - these and other smaller, but equally manipulative actions can easily become habits, excused as merely ways to hurry the team along.

Manipulative leaders are often not bad people (though some of them are). Usually, the original intent is benign, but force of habit, and the simple fact that they can get away with it makes the leader sloppy, and to a certain degree lazy, finding it easier to push buttons to achieve a desired outcome, rather than doing the hard work of facilitating a hard conversation.

When I'm working with such a leader and their team, the leader will often pull me aside at some point and say something like "I'm going to step out of this next session. I'd like the group to be open and honest about [topic 'x'], and they'll find it easier if I'm not there."

Which seems admirable - shows a little self-awareness, right?

Well, maybe, but self-awareness isn't the problem. The problem is that because of the leader's past history of dominance, the team has lost the ability to honestly and openly discuss anything, and also knows that what it decides isn't worth squat in any case, because our benevolently manipulative leader will subsequently massage whatever they come up with into what he wants.

Here's the cold fact: If you're a manipulative leader (even a benevolent one), the problem isn't with your team - it's with you. And absenting yourself is no solution - that's just avoiding the issue. What you need to do instead is to buckle down to the hard work of learning to be part of your team without dominating it.

Try this:

1. Let someone else open and close the meeting for a change.
2. Let someone else frame the discussion at the start.
3. Have an opinion, but keep it 'till last.
4. Let everyone else speak - in full - and really listen, with an open mind.
5. Manage your body language and facial expressions. If you need a role model, watch some video of Roger Federer playing tennis. That focussed but inscrutable look is what you're after.
6. Be open to the notion that your assumptions and prejudices might be wrong.
7. When you do share your opinion, ask some of your team to repeat back to you what they heard you say. Check that it's the same as what you think you said. It might not be.
8. Agree on what you've agreed on before the meeting ends, and don't meddle with it afterwards.

Feeling a little uncomfortable? Good. That's your manipulative gene protesting. Repeat steps 1 through 8 until the discomfort goes away.

Pattern Recognition and the Business of Thinking

One of the precepts of Predictable Success is that being successful in business (in anything, really) is simple: just make good decisions. Even simpler: just make one good decision (your next one). Then follow it by another. Then another. Then another. Simple, elegant, logical.

One of the delights of my career has been meeting people who can do this like falling off a log - business leaders who, while they're far from infallible, are able (more often than not) to make good decisions. And not just now and again, but repeatedly, in times of calm and in times of chaos.

The skill that such people share is not a subjective one, like 'good judgment', nor a hard-edged objective ability like 'numerical literacy' (though these and many other skills are important and useful). What differentiates serially-good-deciders from the rest of us is pattern recognition: the ability to see the generic and lasting patterns that underpin localized and ephemeral data, and which form the unseen framework around which lasting success is built.

Business leaders with good pattern recognition skills see another dimension to data - like an aviation engineer who can see the wind flow around a wing when we see only a two-dimensional blueprint, the map-maker who can picture the entire landscape while we see only the contours on the page, or the practiced CPA who can diagnose the health of an entire organization while we see only columns of numbers, what they see is more than the sum of the parts.

Pattern recognition can be learned, and it's a skill that every business leader should develop, hone and practice consistently. A great place to start is Christopher Alexander's expensive, but wonderful book 'A Pattern Language' - although the book is about architecture and town planning, the precepts of pattern recognition, how to apply it, the benefits from using it and good and bad examples have never been more eloquently expressed.

Pattern language is also at the core of the teaching of Ron Heifitz - in my opinion the best leadership thought leader writing today - it's essentially what he means when he talks about 'Going to the balcony', one of his key leadership precepts. Any of Heiftz's books is worth reading, but 'Leadership on the Line' explicitly addresses 'Going to the Balcony'.

Twitter Hits Whitewater - Next Up, a New CEO?

Today's article in the New York Times describes Twitter in full Whitewater immersion: growth outpacing hiring, appointment of a COO (to inject process), buying experience and knowledge by hiring others who have made it through Whitewater to Predictable Success.

It's almost like the dot-com era redux - shortened Early Struggle, deep Fun, and hitting Whitewater with virtually no revenue.

Twitter's continued growth and success now depends entirely on what happens next to their internal culture. They've established the market, but further growth means finally generating substantial income. Generating income means enforcing discipline and adherence to process. Twitter’s founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone will find this a great challenge, as they are deeply associated with the current (and past) 'Fun' culture.

If they have any sense, 'Ev and Biz' will go further than today's appointment of Dick Costolo as chief operating officer, and will emulate Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google) who presciently hired Eric Schmidt as CEO and to bring 'adult supervsion' to the deeply Fun-oriented Google.

Skype gets back to Fun, eBay wriggles on the Treadmill

Today's report that Skype has at last been sold by eBay releases Skype to return to its natural position in the organizational lifecycle - having Fun.

Ebay made the classic mistake of an organization in Treadmill - uprooting a fast-growing young sapling, replanting it in their corporate hothouse and expecting it to graft into the main tree, thus rejuvenating the organization as a whole.

As Microsoft found out with Razorfish and Time Warner eventually conceded with AOL, it doesn't work that way, folks.

The only way an organization can halt its slide from Treadmill into The Big Rut and get back to Predictable Success is either by rejuvenation from the inside (like Apple did after the departure of John Sculley, or - less frequently - by a reverse takeover, where the larger organization yields its corporate culture entirely or substantially to a younger, more vibrant organization already in Predictable Success (like the acquisition of Pixar is doing for Disney's animation business).

For a large, lumbering company, writing a big check to swallow up a fast-growing entrepreneurial organization in Fun is simply like downing four margaritas - it might dull the pain for a while, but tomorrow you'll still have the same problems - but with an accompanying hangover.

Time Travel for Decision-Making Teams

Sometimes, walking into that boardroom or conference room with your team is like entering a time machine. Which era is your team stuck in?

Bad - Stuck in the past
Better - Unraveling the present
Best - Planning the future