November2007

If the world’s oil supply were as plentiful as the flow of advice for CEOs and senior executives, the price would be ten cents a barrel, rather than nearly $100. This surplus of consulting advice would be an unqualifiedly good thing, except that it creates the additional challenge for already busy executives to separate the valuable advice from the not-so-valuable. To assist in this task, I offer for the reader’s consideration five Myths/Half-Truths (M/HT) I have encountered lately, some direct quotes and some paraphrases.

M/HT #1: The most successful companies have the happiest employees; therefore, to be successful make your employees happy.

Here we have a case of the classic confusion of jumping from correlation to assumed causation. Maybe those employees are happy because they work for a successful company, rather than the other way around. There is nothing like working for a profitable, well capitalized organization, able to afford high pay and lavish perks, to make employees feel a certain satisfaction about their jobs.

This particular half-truth also overlooks the very useful distinction long ago established by Henry Herzberg between “hygiene factors” at work and motivators. Hygiene factors include good pay, benefits, job security, feelings of inclusion, and being in the know. The absence of such factors in a reasonable degree will make employees dissatisfied. But providing such factors will not alone motivate employees to do much more than the minimum needed to keep their jobs. The motivators that create extraordinary success are a belief in the significance of the work the organization is engaged in, responsibility commensurate with skills, recognition, opportunity to grow, and actual growth when earned. It is even possible to have highly committed and enthusiastic employees when the hygiene factors are significantly lacking, if the motivators are present. Just look at many not-for-profits and the gung-ho staff at many start-ups.

M/HT #2: “Your employees are a perfect reflection of management at the top.”

I heard the head of a leading consulting firm make this claim recently in a presentation at a conference for CEOs. In the same presentation, he urged everyone to treat their employees with respect, which is sound advice. But how can I respect anyone who is so malleable as to be a perfect reflection of whatever I do? And how can I treat people with respect if I am so arrogant as to believe I have this much power over others?

It is certainly true that top management sets the culture and tone for an organization. It is also true that each employee comes with his or her own character, past, and set of values, over which I have only minimal control. This is why employee and executive selection is so important. It is also why it is pointless to engage in guilt-ridden soul-searching before getting rid of someone who has clearly demonstrated a lack of the character, skills or fit for the job into which he or she was hired.

The quality guru W. Edwards Deming did much to promulgate this myth. One piece of evidence cited for this thesis is that the Japanese could manufacture high quality cars in the U.S. using American workers, while the Big Three could not. The sole difference, it was said, was the management. Well, not quite. Japanese firms set up their U.S. plants in parts of the Mid-West and South where the work ethic was high and inclination to union membership was low. The Japanese auto manufacturers knew their workers could not be turned into “perfect reflections” of themselves. They had to pick and choose carefully.

M/HT #3: “Leadership is making it easy for people to succeed and feel good about themselves.”

This is a direct quote from a CEO of a successful enterprise speaking recently to a group of entrepreneurs and business owners. I attended his presentation just after reading the book Sole Survivor by Marcus Luttrell, the only member of a Navy SEAL team to survive a ferocious battle against the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan. Luttrell describes the unbelievably rigorous training SEALS undergo and the extraordinary leadership that is developed and for which his commanding officer Lt. Michael Murphy was recently awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. The only thing SEAL training makes easy is failure; all trainees are volunteers, and anyone can quit at any time with dignity intact. They feel good about themselves only after they survive ordeals that would be labeled torture if meted out to inmates at Guantanamo.

Granted, this is an extreme example. But it seems to me to offer a better model of leadership than talk of making things easy. I say this because I have been privileged to hear first-hand from countless, successful entrepreneurs of the sacrifices, rigors, and bouts of despair they had to overcome—and lead others through—in order to reach their goals.

M/HT # 4: Employees from the different generations—such as Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y—bring different values and priorities to the workplace and must be managed according to these generational differences.

This is a thesis for which the mas media have created a popular consensus. Unfortunately, there is little to no rigorous social science research or study to back it up. It is certainly true that one’s early childhood experiences affect how one views work, whether one came from a background of want or plenty, strict moral teaching or permissiveness, political freedom or repression, unlimited opportunities or a rigid class or caste system. But now that we are getting beyond typecasting people in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, etc., why should we still be trying to do this with age? A worker in her twenties or thirties who was raised in great poverty in China, India or in an American inner city may have more values in common with someone in his seventies who remembers the Great Depression than with someone of her same age raised in an affluent U.S. suburb. In a global economy and highly diverse society, it is simply provincial to assume that all members of the same generational “cohort” have similar values.

M/HT # 5: The key to extraordinary success is to first set ambitious, clear goals and then implement a well thought out action plan.

In his recent book, Strategic Intuition, William Dugan, of Columbia Business School, argues that this is not at all how it works. Citing examples from Napoleon through Martin Luther King and Bill Gates up to the current micro credit industry in Bangladesh, Dugan claims that the source of spectacular success is being creatively alert for opportunities that cannot be planned. If this is true, the usual corporate process of goal-setting has it all backwards. You cannot plan for unforeseen opportunities; it is only after they are found that you can make plans on how to exploit them. In other words, out of a bureaucratic fixation on “metrics” and a low tolerance for ambiguity, we may be sacrificing the chance for achievements that truly change the world.


	Mulkern Associates is a privately held consulting firm of Anthony J. Mulkern