Adapt, by Tim Harford

ADAPT is about using failure in a positive way, in business or any other field of life. It shows how, facing unprecedented degrees of complexity, we should use evolutionary processes and start solving problems through trial and error.

ADAPT provides diverse applications of the three “Palchinsky principles”:

1. Seek out new ideas and try new things;
2. When trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable;
3. Seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.

Here's a short video presenting the book:

What's In It For HR Pros?

When working in Organizational Design, Talent Management or Strategic HR, we often rely on certain hypotheses that find themselves seriously challenged by Tim HARFORD's views.

Among these challenging points:

• We badly need to believe in the potency of leaders. […] We have an inflated sense of what leadership can achieve in the modern world.
• We tell ourselves a story about how change happens: that the solution to any problem is a new leader with a new strategy.[…] It is impossible to know in advance what the correct strategy will be.
• Mos people overestimate the value of centralized knowledge, and tend to overlook 'knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place'. In other words, as organizations are confronted with a diverse, fast-moving range of markets, the advantage of decentralization, rapid adaptation to local circumstances, has grown.
• You should not let people at the head office run the business.

The book has a short (but interesting) chapter called “The Adaptive Organization”. In this part, HARFORD makes the case for innovative management practices, like:

• Self-selecting teams, where colleagues vote to decide if a new employee will be kept after his trial period
• Ambitious “refer a friend” recruiting schemes
• Upside-down management (a form of empowerment)
• Peer monitoring
• The strategy of having no corporate strategy

The last chapter, titled “Adapting and You”, offers uplifting views about personal development.

Book Data

• Adapt – Why Success Always Starts With Failure
• By Tim Harford
• Abacus – Little, Brown Book Group
• 265 pages + appendixes
• Available at Amazon.com: Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure
  
  

To know more about the author, you can visit http://timharford.com/ or follow him at @TimHarford

The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge

To survive and to thrive, organizations need to get a sense of how best to achieve their purpose. This is how Peter Senge defines learning.

The process of organizational learning involves five disciplines.

Rather than synthesizing Senge's views about each of them, I'd like to highlight just a few inspiring ideas.

1. Personal Mastery

• Organizational learning can't happen without individual learning.
• Personal mastery is not an end, it's a process. It means continually expanding your ability to create the results in life you truly seek.
• Happiness may be a result of living consistently with one's purpose.
• The first step is to clarify your personal vision : to define what is important to you. (Note : some good books can help you do that : see « Total Leadership » and « Becoming a Resonant Leader »).
• The second step is learning how to see current reality more clearly. It's a lifelong discipline that involves being constantly aware of your ignorance and your growth areas.
• Development comes from then tension between vision and current reality.
• You can't force someone to develop his or her personal mastery. As a leader, the best you can do is to be a model, by committing yourself to your own personal mastery.

2. Mental Models

• Mental models are internal images of how the world works. These deeply held images limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting.
• Mental models are OK if they stay explicit and can be discussed. Problems arise when they become implicit.
• One dangerous way of building mental models is called a leap of abstraction. It occurs when you take a limited amount of data and use it to build a general view. (Note : I'm afraid we HR people are specialized in leaps of abstraction. When recruiting, for example, just think of the way we draw conclusions about a candidate's personality).
• A conversation can become a learning experience when there is a balance between inquiry (acknowledging that you may be wrong and really seeking the truth) and advocacy (explaining where your conclusions come from). Unfortunately, most managers are trained to be good advocates but not so good listeners.
• One indicator of a team in trouble is when, in a long meeting, there are few questions.

3. Building Shared Vision

• A learning organization needs a shared vision. Vision provides focus and energy for learning.
• A shared vision changes the relationship between an organization and its employees. It creates a sense of ownership.
• Shared visions emerge from personal visions.
• The first step to build a shared vision is to share one's personal vision and to encourage others to do the same.
• Building shared vision is not a project. It's a never-ending task. It's part of a leader's daily work.
• You can't “sell” someone a vision. You can't get another person to enroll or commit, because real commitment to the vision requires free choice.
• Vision is the What. Purpose is the Why. Core values are the How.

4. Team Learning

• Team learning is the process of aligning and developing the capacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire.
• Dialogue and discussion are different and both are necessary. Dialogue means exploring together complex and subtle issues by listening to one another and suspending one's own views. Discussion means presenting and defending competing views to support decisions.
• The difference between great teams and mediocre ones lies in how they face conflict.
• Team learning is a skill. To develop this skill, some practice is needed. One way to practice team learning is what Senge calls “dialogue sessions”.

5. Systems Thinking

• Systems thinking is what Senge calls the fifth discipline.
• Systemic thinking, or structural thinking, is the ability to discover structural causes of behavior. It is opposed to widespread linear thinking, or event thinking.
• It's the most important among the five disciplines and it is linked to each of the four others.
• Small changes can produce big results, but the areas of highest leverage are not often obvious.
• Understanding a few systemic archetypes can help you understand reality in a much richer way than the usual linear thinking. 

Recommended by a seasoned HR pro

Tom HAAK

Tom HAAK, Corporate HR Director at Arcadis in Amsterdam, is the professional that recommended this book to me. You should check out his HR blog, where Tom shares the lessons of his 30 years of experience in Human Resources at an international level.

Here's what Tom has to say about The Fifth Discipline:

“Early 90s I went to a seminar organized by the European Foundation for Management Development, in Brussels. The theme was 'The Learning Organization', very fashionable in those days.

Highlight of the program was a session led by Peter Senge, Chris Argyris and Arie de Geus (formerly Shell). In groups we played the beer game. A description of the game can be found in Chapter 3 of the Fifth Discipline.

Here were 100 or more people playing the game in groups of 10. The objective of the game his to demonstrate learning disabilities, and this was done very successfully. And it was great fun. After the beer game there was a stimulating dialogue between Senge, Argyris and De Geus. The atmosphere was exciting, and most of the people in the room felt energized to go back home and create learning organizations.

I had already read the book. For me this was a breakthrough. Finally here was somebody who was showing the root causes of dysfunctional organizations. Senge showed a way to improve the learning capabilities of people and organizations.

Many of the myths and mental models described in Senge's book are still fully functioning today (alas). Creating learning organizations is not easy. Mastering the five disciplines of Senge takes life-long learning and a lot of practice.

After 22 years Senge's book is still very actual and readable. It might be time for a revitalization of The Learning Organization.”

Book Data

• The Fifth Discipline. The Art & Practice of The Learning Organisation. (New edition, revised and updated)
• By Peter M. Senge
• Random House Business Books
• 382 pages + appendixes
• Available at Amazon.com: The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
  

The Rare Find, by George Anders

I am grateful to Michael Danubio for recommending me this book. When he did, Michael was Talent Acquisition Director at Hasbro. He is now Human Resources Director at the Boston Red Sox.

Everybody Wants the Top Performers

It is often said that top performers produce as much as 10 times more than the average worker. In specific fields that put a very high premium on excellence, like professional sports, popular music, investment banking or literature, the gap may be even higher.

In business, Jim Collins showed that companies making the leap from good to great build their success on talent : first they recruit outstanding people, then they define a strategy.

So, obviously, everybody wants to recruit exceptional talent. The Rare Find is not a book about recruitment in general. It focuses on how to source and select top performers.

Being a journalist, George Anders interviewed hundreds of successful recruitment professionals. He asked them how they proceed to find exceptional talent. His sources include army officers, basketball scouts, venture capitalists, surgeons, academics, country music producers, CEO recruiters and even a Facebook "Puzzle Master". 

Compromise On Experience; Never Compromise On Character

Anders' inspiring recommendations include the following:

• A wide view of talent: the best assessors don't stick to classic measures of experience. They don't look for people that are immediately ready for the job, but for candidates that might reach excellence in a few years, based on specific traits. In other words, these recruiters can compromise on experience, but not on character. (Other authors have the opposite opinion: they think that, when selecting leaders, we tend to focus too much on the candidates' potential, as opposed to craftsmanship. This view is expressed, for example, in “Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management”, by Martin and Hetrick).
  
• Reading résumés upside down. This means that you focus first on a candidate's biographical details, which give you a sense of his personality. Then, you can check the classic markers of competence, like education and professional experience.
  
• Aggressive listening: great talent scouts are great listeners. Intensely interested and focused, they ask a lot of follow-up questions in order to zero in on the issues that relate to candidates' core character. That's a very good point, that was also made a few months ago by HR blogger Tim Sackett, in a brilliant post called “The Only Interview Questions You’ll Ever Need ».
  
• Picking one trait that matters more than anything. For many jobs, resilience might be what distinguishes high achievers from other good candidates.
• Announcing tough challenges as a way to attract the best candidates. If the position you offer involves high demands, you should not formulate them as liabilities. High achievers might view them as opportunities to learn and grow.
  
• Seeing what could go right. Most assessors use interviews to detect each candidate's flaws. When searching for exceptional talent, a better way could be to start by looking for what can go right. Does the candidate have a hidden potential? Under the right conditions, could he become a great performer in a specific field?

And these are just examples, as the book provides many other useful ideas and advice.

If your job involves recruiting highly talented people, you should definitely read it. In these times of “war for talent” the Rare Find supplies heavy weaponry for HR snipers!

Book Data

• The Rare Find - Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone else
• By George Anders
• Penguin Business
• 247 pages
• Available at Amazon.com: The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else
  

DRIVE, by Daniel H. Pink

In September 2011, HR leader Charlie Judy wrote an enthusiastic post about “Drive” on his HR Fishbowl blog.

Here is how Charlie's article started:

“As an HR Professional you play an integral role in helping your organization motivate its employees. If you believe this, then you really should read Daniel Pink’s bestselling “Drive”. In 220 pages, it will take everything the archaic world of business has taught you about “what motivates us,” turn it on its head, and slap you across the face with an enlightenment toward the binding constraints your organization is likely imposing on its people. »

No More Carrots and Sticks!

In “Drive”, Daniel Pink unveils a major gap between what science knows and what business does. Social scientists have shown that traditional motivation techniques, like cash rewards, often don't work. Worse: they sometimes do more harm than good!

What is called “extrinsic motivation” has a positive effect on performance only when the task at hand is very simple, almost mechanical. But when it comes to the complex tasks that are typical of the 21^st century knowledge workers, carrots and sticks are just a waste of time and money.

So, instead of elaborating traditional bonus schemes, we HR people (as well as all organizational leaders) should focus on fostering “intrinsic motivation” in our organizations. To do that, there are three levers we can activate:

1. Autonomy : To feel motivated, people should have control on what they do, when they do it, with whom, and how. 
   
   
2. Mastery : Seeing that, through relentless efforts, you are getting better and better at something that matters is a very motivating experience. It starts with flow, this good feeling that we have when we perform at the top level of our skills.

3. Purpose: We all do a better job when we know that it serves the greater good, not just profit or personal income.
   
   

A Serious, Useful... and Funny Book!

Drive is a serious book: it is based on a review of the scientific literature.

It is also useful, filled with examples from big corporations, technology companies or hospitals. It offers a toolkit that includes practical advice about:

• Awakening your (personal) motivation
• Fostering intrinsic motivation in your organization
• Compensation : how to pay people in a way that does not get in the way of motivation (specially relevant for HR professionals)
• Educating your kids
• Getting (and staying) motivated to exercise

As part of his toolkit, Pink presents a reading list (I really love that guy!) and the names of six business gurus that offer guidance consistent with Pink's views.

Last but not least, reading “Drive” is really funny. As you will notice in the videos below, Daniel Pink has a great sense of humor!

Videos

In this speech at TED's 2009 Global Conference in Oxford, Daniel Pink offered a passionate and convincing summary of his book: 

And in this one, his summary is illustrated by nice drawings:

Book Data

• DRIVE - The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• By Daniel H. Pink
• Canongate Books
• 215 pages
• Available at Amazon.com: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
  

More about Drive and Daniel H. Pink

• At www.danpink.com/drive-survey you can fill out a survey to assess your own levels of motivation.
• You can also subscribe to a newsletter and receive a free PDF called "The Flip Manifesto: 16 Counterintuitive Ideas About Motivation, Innovation, and Leadership"
• And you can follow @danielpink on Twitter.

  

Financial Intelligence for HR Professionals, by Karen BERMAN and Joe KNIGHT

HR leaders need to be well-rounded managers. If we really want to become strategic partners, we need to understand the business we support. And one key to understand it is to know the language of finance.

I once heard a university professor argue that "If a director of HR can't read his company's balance sheet, he shouldn't be a director". I think he was right (even though his statement made me feel very bad at the time).

More generally, Karen BERMAN and Joe KNIGHT advocate for financial literacy for all. They believe that organizations would be better run if all managers, even all employees, understood the basics of finance.

In this brilliant book, they explain the many subtleties of corporate finance, and how these can affect HR:

• How to read an income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash flow statement;
• Why these are relevant and complimentary to understand the realities of a particular organization;
• How finance is as much an art as a science, because estimations and assumptions can have a strong impact on the numbers published;
• How this "art of finance" can have important consequences for an HR department;
• How to calculate and use relevant ratios;
• How to champion financial literacy in your organization.

I never thought that a book about finance could be so enjoyable and "reader-friendly". All concepts are explained in simple words and illustrated by real-life examples. The appendixes include the income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements of Kimberly-Clark and Fedex, which can be used in exercises.

This is really a must-read for every HR leader.



Book Data

• Financial Intelligence for HR Professionals: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers
• By Karen BERMAN and Joe KNIGHT, with John CASE
• Harvard Business Press
• 232 pages (+appendixes)
• Available on Amazon.com: Financial Intelligence for HR Professionals: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers

For additional information and updates, the book has an official website: www.financialintelligencebook.com.

"Becoming a Resonant Leader" by Annie McKee, Richard Boyatzis, Frances Johnston

Becoming a Resonant Leader offers a practical answer to the question: “How do you use Daniel Goleman's theory of Emotional Intelligence to become an inspiring leader?”

It is a reading recommendation coming from Barcelona, where Rosalinda Hernández works as Europe Talent Acquisition at PepsiCo. She tweets at @Recruiter_Rosie.

More Than 50 Leadership Exercises

You don't read this book as much as you use it, with a pen in your hand. Offering more than 50 exercises, it is really a practical guide that aims to make you reflect on how to become a better leader by leveraging your emotional intelligence. It is also filled with inspiring examples. 

The exercises reminded me very much of those I have found so profoundly useful when I read Total Leadership, by Steward Friedman. 

Both books offer a holistic perspective about personal development and leadership: becoming a great leader requires you to know who you are and what you want.

First, McKee, Boyatzis and Johnston make you think about:

• Important people around you : who do you admire, who do you lead, who can help you...
• How you work : your defensive routines, your passions, your strengths and challenges, your philosophical orientation, your learning style...
• What you want : your ideal life, your dreams, your personal vision...

Then, the authors help you use this knowledge to develop a personal learning plan.

And finally, they explain how to ignite resonance in teams, organizations and communities.

Useful Leadership Tools and Concepts

Let me share five tools or concepts developed in the book that seem particularly useful from my HR point of view.

• Resonance is defined as “a powerful collective energy that reverberates among people and supports higher productivity, creativity, a sense of unity, a sense of purpose, and better results”. It is, in other words, the link between emotional intelligence and organizational success.
• Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence: when you meet a great leader, you feel that she knows who she is and what is important to her. In particular, good leaders show emotional awareness: they can name and manage their emotions. The way to improve emotional awareness is to practice mindfulness, i.e. to become consciously attuned to oneself, others and the environment. (In a recent post on the HRFishbowl blog, I wrote about the link between meditation, mindfulness, and good HR).
• The sacrifice syndrome is precisely one of the things that await leaders when they lack mindfulness. As they try to respond to the many demands they face, their stress mounts above the level they can handle. Their tactics for avoiding this stress are part of the problem. They soon feel overdrawn physically, mentally and emotionally.
• The philosophical orientation questionnaire included in the book lets you determine your preferences regarding three basic operating philosophies:
  • Pragmatic: you appreciate an activity if it helps you achieve your goals. This operating philosophy is linked to utilitarianism and consequentialism.
  • Intellectual: you appreciate an activity if it helps you learn and understand new things. You tend to use abstract variables to understand and describe the world.
    
  • Human: you appreciate an activity if it has a positive impact on specific other people, and on your relationship with them.
    
  • The authors explain that if your scores on those variables are close together, you can feel conflicted when making certain types of decisions. This proved relevant in my case: I scored equally high scores on “intellectual” and “human”, and I'm afraid I'm sometimes an indecisive person indeed.
    
• Planning Style. Annie McKee found in her research that when it comes to think about the future, people use three different approaches:
  • Goal-oriented planners tend to focus on very specific goals and outcomes.
  • Direction-oriented people know the general path they wish to pursue, but they don't set very specific objectives. They might be less effective than goal-oriented people, but they are also more flexible, which helps them spot opportunities.
  • Being action-oriented means living for the moment, without many thoughts about the future. Action-oriented people are spontaneous.
  • And as the authors say, each of these three styles has wisdom for the other.

The book also provides ideas and a methodology to conduct participative processes that could be used for team-building, vision-building or change initiatives.

If you work in HR, it can thus be useful in a variety of ways: for yourself, for people you coach, or for your organization as a whole.

Book Data

• Becoming a Resonant Leader - Develop Your Emotional Intelligence, Renew Your Relationships, Sustain Your Effectiveness
• By Annie McKee, Richard Boyatzis and Frances Johnston
• Harvard Business Press
• 213 pages
• Available on Amazon.com: Becoming a Resonant Leader

The Case for Meditative HR

I am honored and excited to have an article of mine published today on HRFishbowl.com, Charlie Judy's excellent HR blog:
http://hrfishbowl.com/2012/02/guest-post-case-for-meditative-hr/