I wish I could get The Beatles on Spotify. I am a big Beatles fan, but also someone who gets frustrated with the patchiness of many of the Fab Four’s output. Look at “Abbey Road” – a great album, really managed to capture an atmosphere, especially from “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” onwards – but then they ruin it with “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Octopus’s Garden” – what a pity they didn’t take those off and fill in the gaps with a couple of tracks from “Let It Be” … continued below …

.

To “Abbey Road” I would have …

• added “Dig a Pony” in for “Maxwell’s …”
• cut “Her Majesty” [as The Beatles intended]
• moved “I Want You …” to side 2.
• moved “Here Comes The Sun” and “Because” to side 1 to create space for “I Want You …”
• add “Don’t Let Me Down” to the end of side 1

This leaves the tracklist as (side one is tracks 1 to 7):

1. Come Together
2. Something
3. Dig a Pony
4. Oh! Darling
5. Because
6. Here Comes The Sun
7. Don’t Let Me Down
8. I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
9. You Never Give Me Your Money
10. Sun King
11. Mean Mr. Mustard
12. Polythene Pam
13. She Came In Through The Bathroom Window
14. Golden Slumbers
15. Carry That Weight
16. The End

I don’t just mean technically, that’s really the easy bit. There are plenty of great providers who can ensure you get the technical platform and performance you need, the hard bit is how can an organisation that has succeeded offline for years, adapt itself to the new environment.

This might be a reaction to a threat: business is slipping away as customers increasingly turn to online alternatives. Bookstores are a great example of this, most failed to adapt to the new terrain, held out as long as they could, then withered away.

It might also be a proactive move to take advantage of an opportunity. The offline business might be doing fine, but the company wants to explore opportunities and doesn’t want to miss out on getting out ahead of the pack.

Often this means transformational change …

… but not always …

An innovative construction company, for example, might come up with some clever ways to engage online (a “Grand Designs” type blog, augmented reality mobile apps to show how things would look etc.), but essentially the main business is still – quite literally – the bricks and mortar of construction.

In most other businesses, the transformation required is not just adding an online team, it’s challenging every corner of the business and building a whole new value chain.

Sometimes – like with e-commerce – this is obvious, but in many other sectors it is far less easy to see …

A small neighbourhood restaurant might stick its menu, opening times and contact details online and think that that’s it. Maybe, if they’re seriously good, they’ll allow online reservations – but the real innovators in their sector will be doing more than an online advert, they’ll be engaging with their customers and building loyalty and using this as a platform for social influence.

How to do this is not easy. There are as many answers as there as businesses, but this is why the process of going online must be treated as a full-blown change management project, and not just a quick fix website managed by the marketing team.

Anyway, I wrote this post as an introduction to a post I wrote for ColbensonLive website about this very topic … so please click the link if this is of interest.

It was this line that made me jump up with concern:

… if we make their lack of motivation more about us as managers rather than about them, we turn their failure into our failure, and give them an easy way out.

If this is so, then surely it works the other way around too? Can we turn our failure into their failure by not accepting that we are the major influence in the motivation of our teams.

The assumption throughout my argument was that the manager was competent – not perfect, but solid enough to live up to the end part of the post where I stated that it was the manager’s responsibility:

… to remove the demotivating factors as far as possible, and to manage the team properly …

… but you know what they say about assuming things: it makes an ass out of whoever it is that tells you what they say about assuming things.

So, OK, my assumption covers me, but I got me to thinking about road testing this with a case study based on the worst working environment I’d ever known. It’s not a perfect example, because the manager was failing, but I wanted to look at whether or not the team themselves were right to make the manager entirely responsible for the appalling levels of motivation.

The Case Study: a demotivated office

The job was data entry, and I’m a dab hand at that. I can type like nobody’s business, and could get into a zonal trance and whip through the work like an efficient machine. I was one of three data-entry clerks, in a room of about six or seven people. One of them was a cool-looking punk guy who was extremely nice. Upon interrogation he shamefacedly admitted that he was actually listening to Andrew Lloyd-Webber musicals on his Walkman (1). I know you shouldn’t judge, but still …

The office had a terrible atmosphere. People barely spoke to each other, and certainly not to me. Their blank empty stares in response to every attempt at engagement just screamed disapproval of everything I said or did. Eventually I lost confidence, and just stayed in the corner with my own dodgy musical choices.

One day when I was alone in the office with the main guy; I said something like:

This office seems really unfriendly, and I feel very excluded. Is there some reason why I’m being treated like this?

And he said something like:

You may have noticed that the main problem here is Claire

(Claire was the manager, I changed the name – it’s not even like Claire, so don’t try to guess).

That was the most demotivated team I’ve ever worked with – and it was, in their opinion, all the manager’s fault.

But is this fair? Was it all her fault?

It’s true that the manager wasn’t delivering in her role as leader of the team, but according to my big tough theory of each person’s motivation being their own responsibility, the team members should still have done something about it.

I don’t think they should have exacerbated the situation by huffily performing a mean-spirited work-to-rule. Had they taken responsibility for their own motivation, they wouldn’t have put up with such a dysfunctional situation. I mean, Claire (she was the manager remember), wasn’t a bully, she didn’t mistreat anyone, she just wasn’t engaged and wasn’t any good at being a manager. This is difficult, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle.

So, in the absence of any scientific research or objective analysis whatsoever, I have decided that even in this extreme example of a dysfunctional office, my theory holds water.

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Notes

1. Yes I said “Walkman“, that’s how long ago this was.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This central thesis of this book is summed up perfectly in its own conclusion:

[M]icroscopic changes in brain functioning, made in a hundredth of a second, can sometimes create massive change in people’s lives.

That is what is argues: understand how your brain works, pay attention to what it’s doing, and take control of it to improve your work life.

Not just work, people who master the skills set out in this book are (according to its author at least):

… less stressed, have more fun, have a better relationship with their kids and even appear to have a better sex life. People like this tend to be healthier, contribute more to their communities, and even have longer lives.

The first part of the book is about how to manage your brain to make it easier for you to concentrate, get on with things, be creative and succeed at other essential work tasks. The metaphor he uses is that of a theatre stage. The point being that we can only manage a few actors on stage at the same time, it’s a very limited resource, and we need to tightly control what goes on on the stage (be our own Director), keeping distractions out the way. Rock goes through several chapters explaining techniques that can be learnt to help achieve this.

The latter parts of the book are more interesting, they deal with conflict, social situations, teamwork and change.

The change section is slightly weak – I think there was a lot more he could do with this bit.

He addressed individual change well, if superficially, by rightly suggesting that we turn “constructive performance feedback” (which is usually more destructive than constructive) into “facilitating positive change” (CPF to FPC!) (1). This is fine, I liked this bit, I have long wanted to form a more coherent model of performance feedback, and this will feed into that (hold on to your hats, my views of feedback and performance appraisal will appear on this blog in the future).

The bit on wider change was less good. Earlier in the book he proposed a model called SCARF which represents the factors that the brain seeks: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. If these are absent or threatened, the brain will move away, if these are considered positively, the brain will move toward. Most change is a package of threats across the SCARF model and therefore bound to meet resistance. We need to be far more considerate of SCARF to better effect change.

This is a useful add-in to change management, but I feel he could really pull this whole section out and expand into something much wider, incorporating other change management models and knowledge.

A great book, everyone should read it.

View all my reviews

Below is a video of David Rock at Google Tech Talks discussing this book.

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Notes

1. One of the best things I ever learnt from the guys at Manager Tools was the idea that feedback was about the future not the past. A huge lesson for managers.

I was too caught up in the whole thing to really notice – but people more observant than I felt the pictures of miserable desperation were not quite right for an event about excellence and innovation in e-commerce.

Fortunately, not even the guy with the gun to his head could detract from what was a really successful event.

As the event host and organiser I was pretty nervous that it was going to work out. I had worked hard to pull together an interesting group of speakers and was particularly proud of getting Professor Cathy Barnes, Professor of Retail Innovation at Leeds Met University, and Head of the Faraday Centre for Retail Excellence. I really wanted to give the event some academic kudos and offer a different kind of insight. This is not how these things are normally done so I was relieved that it really worked. It also sat well next to the other main speakers who offered a very different approach, a real “warts and all” everything-we-did-wrong case study which went down particularly well (Stephen Sumner), and a very different way of looking at mobile commerce from the point of view of a social commerce provider (Andrew Lee, of Reevoo).

Read the full post-event blog post here on ColbensonLive website.