Boiling Frogs

You’ve heard about the boiled frog experiment right?
It goes like this: If you stick a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out or at least try to.
However,
If you stick the frog in cool water and gradually begin to turn up the heat, the frog won’t move.  Allow the water to boil and the frog still won’t try and jump out.  In many cases the frog will die before it tries to escape.  Why? Because the frog’s internal apparatus for sensing threats is based on sudden changes in its environment not gradual ones.

Sometimes it’s hard for us to see the gradual erosion in things as a real problem mostly because we tend to respond to immediate problems.  Our internal apparatus, like the frog, typically responds to sudden changes like departmental blow ups, major decreases in attendance, broken pipes with water gushing out of them and stuff like that.  The shifts in culture and subtle changes in technology for example, can go unnoticed for some time before organizations realize they’re in hot water.  But let’s be honest, no one likes to be the guy in the meeting to talk about a little symptom they see as an issue of concern.  Even if you have the courage to be that guy the response is never all that satisfying.  It’s either a blank stare, a courtesy nod or if you’re lucky an item “that gets added to next week’s agenda.”  As difficult as it can be to try and identify the gradual changes in our organizations, we must try.  It’s the gradual erosion of things that ends killing the frog.

Saying No to Good Ideas…

In his book “Good to Great” Jim Collins explains that “good is the enemy of great.”  He goes on to explain that all Great companies have a laser focus on 3 things.  He called it the Hedgehog Concept.  Read the book if you haven’t, believe me you’ll be thankful you did.  But what are the implications of being focused? People don’t talk about that in meetings.

Of course it means saying Yes to the right thing but just as much or more as it does saying NO to the wrong things.  Wait there’s more.  That means you not only say NO to bad ideas but also have to say NO to a lot of good ideas so that the great idea can prevail.  Steve Jobs put it well when he wrote:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”
–Steve Jobs

Have you ever felt like you were able to identify what you needed to focus on but couldn’t quite get to it because you were too busy?  It may be time to start saying NO.

Pursuing Elegance

In his article “In Pursuit of Elegance,” Guy Kawasaki present 12 tips to pursuing elegance.  Here are a couple that really stood out to me.  Read the entire article here.

1. Question: Why is elegance so important?
   Answer: Elegance cuts through the noise, captures our attention, and engages us. The point of elegance is to achieve the maximum impact with the minimum input. It’s a thoughtful, artful subtractive process focused on doing more and better with less. That’s especially important during this economic crisis when everyone is trying to move forward while consuming fewer resources.
2. Question: Why do companies with unlimited money continue to put out such crap?
   Answer: I’m not sure anyone has unlimited money at the moment, but even those less worse off than others probably suffer from a dire lack of two things: discipline and discrimination. The enemies of elegance are (1) adding and (2) acting. The notion of subtraction goes against how we’re hardwired which is to push, collect, hoard, store, and consume. We’re natural-born adders which is partly why elegance is so elusive. Whether we’re talking about a product, a performance, a market, or an organization, our addiction to addition results in inconsistency, overload, or waste—and sometimes all three.And here in the US we have a cowboy instinct, where the bias is for action. In other words, Don’t make me think, let me just do. Doing SOMETHING is deemed better than doing nothing. But that’s not always true. I spent some time with National Geographic adventure journalist Boyd Matson. He taught me how to stand still when the hippos charge. If you act, and run, you’re dead. Stand still, do nothing, they stop charging. But that is fiendishly difficult because it’s so unnatural and counterintuitive. But that’s what happens in business.
3. Question: What’s the first step a CEO should take to get her company on the right track?
   Answer: When Fortune named Apple “America’s Most Admired Company” as well as “Most Admired for Innovation,” honors owing largely to the success of the iPhone, Steve Jobs revealed that a “stop-doing” strategy figured centrally into Apple’s approach. What he said was: “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.”That’s the mindset.And step one? Create a solid stop-doing list. Sounds simple, but few do it. Guru Jim Collins says you absolutely must have a “stop-doing” list to accompany your to-do list. As a practical matter, he advises developing a strong discipline around first giving careful thought to prioritizing goals and objectives, and then eliminating the bottom 20 percent of the list. If as CEO you do that, and demand that everyone do that, including designers and engineers with respect to the stuff they’re building, your ugly crap quotient goes way down.

Thoughts?