Best
Business Books 2016: Management
It’s
satisfying when corporate wrongdoing comes complete with a villain, preferably
someone larger than life and twice as mean. Having an evil mastermind à la
Bernie Madoff to pin things on sets up a happy ending. The bad guy or gal is
brought to justice and, voilà, all is right in the business world.
Unfortunately, we are often denied that
satisfaction. Some organizational disasters — such as the Deepwater Horizon oil
spill and Dieselgate — seem to occur as a result of unintentional internal
combustion. Scapegoats always seem to be found, but it’s a stretch to argue
that there was a black-mustachioed villain who put match to fuse. Instead, when
the investigations are over, the real culprit turns out to be a hodgepodge of
systems, processes, or managerial decisions that didn’t raise alarms until the
consequences suddenly exploded.
This
year’s three best business books on management offer compelling and useful
advice on how to avoid such problems. In Pre-Suasion, the best of
the group, Robert Cialdini explains how managers can be predisposed to make
constructive decisions and can predispose others to take constructive action.
In Managing in the Gray, Joseph L. Badaracco shows how managers can
make difficult decisions in a more responsible manner. And in The Process
Matters, Joel Brockner explores how the decisions that managers make when
constructing processes can help prevent undesirable outcomes.
Can
You Hear Me Now?
More
than 30 years ago, a psychology professor at Arizona State University named
Robert Cialdini wrote a book that, like most other books, quickly and quietly
sank beneath the relentless waves of new releases. But then, a few years
later, Influence: Science and Practice resurfaced, buoyed by
the growing interest in the mashup of psychology and economics now called
behavioral economics. An eager audience of marketing and sales pros, including,
ironically, the very “peddlers, fundraisers, and operators of one sort or another”
whom Cialdini had been hoping to arm his readers against, ate it up. Influence,
with its six principles explaining how others get us to do what they want, went
on to sell more than 2 million copies.
Pre-Suasion:
A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade is
an intellectual prequel to Influence. It explores an insight that
came to Cialdini when he “infiltrated the training programs of a broad range of
professions dedicated to getting us to say yes.” While shadowing top-performing
professionals in such fields as sales, direct marketing, corporate recruiting,
and frontline management, he discovered that “the best persuaders become the
best through pre-suasion — the process of arranging for
recipients to be receptive to a message before they encounter it.”
There was, for instance, the fire-alarm
system salesman whose behavior puzzled Cialdini. This guy forgot something
in his car on every appointment, and always remembered it while the homeowners
were completing a knowledge assessment. He would ask permission to leave and
re-enter the house, often getting handed a door key in the process. “Think,
Bob,” the salesman eventually explained to the author. “Who do you let walk in
and out of your house on their own? Only somebody you trust, right? I want to be
associated with trust in those families’ minds.”
Cialdini found that the most effective
persuaders are, like the alarm sales rep, experts at channeling our attention
in order to create what he calls privileged moments — “identifiable points in
time when an individual is particularly receptive to a communicator’s message.”
It is possible to create these moments, research reveals, because we not only
assign undue levels of importance to whatever captures our attention at a
certain point in time, but also assign causality to it. This explains why CEOs
get outsized credit for the success of their companies — and also why they make
such satisfying scapegoats when disaster strikes. “The person at the top,” says
Cialdini, “is visually prominent, psychologically salient, and hence, assigned
an unduly causal role in the course of events.”
Channeling our attention, it turns out, is
not all that difficult, even in this age of the smartphone and constant
interruption. In fact, three attention attractors reliably cut through the fog:
sex, violence, and (perhaps more appropriately for managers) novelty. Pavlov’s
dogs, Cialdini points out, didn’t always salivate when the bell rang. When
visitors arrived at Pavlov’s lab to witness the reflexive drooling, the bell
didn’t produce the desired result. Pavlov gained a new insight: The strangers
triggered an “investigatory reflex” in the dogs, a reflex more powerful than
the dinner bell.
Further, once something attracts our
attention, a number of “magnetizers” can be used to hold it in place. These
include self-relevant cues, like the word you; unfinished ideas or tasks, which
stymie our desire for cognitive closure; and, as the enduring popularity of a
130-year-old consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes testifies, mysteries. Why
not simply deliver your message as soon as you have created a privileged
moment? “The communicator who can fasten an audience’s focus on the favorable
elements of an argument,” explains Cialdini, “raises the chance that the
argument will go unchallenged by opposing points of view, which get locked out
of attention as a consequence.”
Cialdini offers many more tips and tactics in
this handbook on the ways and means of pre-suasion, which managers can and
should use to become more effective influencers. But he also devotes
considerable effort to persuading us to wield pre-suasion in an ethical manner.
Surprisingly, Cialdini considers and rejects the idea that the risk of getting
caught is a compelling enough reason to avoid devious practices, because studies
show that “uncomfortably large numbers of [senior business leaders] are willing
to undertake misconduct anyway.” Instead, he focuses on the organizational
consequences, citing his own research, which reveals that companies that
condone and use deceitful tactics raise the risks of an implosion triggered by
poor employee performance, high employee turnover, and employee fraud and
malfeasance.
The bottom line in the best business book of
the year on management: Pre-suaders are more effective influencers, and they
reap what they sow.
The
Anatomy of Gray
Cialdini’s
obvious concern about his work being misused, combined with the studies he
cites in which “close to half of high-ranking executives reported that they
would act unethically to get or retain business,” suggests that the way in
which many managers are making decisions needs some serious reframing. No book
published this past year makes this case better than Managing in the
Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work,
by Joseph L. Badaracco.
Badaracco, who was the first tenured
professor of ethics at Harvard Business School, has been writing about
leadership integrity, responsibility, and ethics since the 1980s. He does so in
a nuanced and empathetic manner that clearly recognizes the challenges and
conflicts routinely faced by well-meaning managers as they strive to make
decisions.
With Managing
in the Gray, Badaracco jumps into the deepest thickets of decision making.
“Gray areas are basically organizational versions of the classic Gordian knot:
that is, they are dense tangles of important, complicated, and uncertain
considerations,” he writes.
Gray areas harbor the big and small decisions
that not only try managers’ brains, but also can come back to lop off their
heads. Your company needs to cut costs and maximize the flow of oil. Should you
postpone that costly safety check that’s going to take 90 days to complete?
It’s impossible to meet the conflicting demands of low emissions and high gas
mileage without a misleading software fix. Should you use it?
Remembering that the above questions sound
like no-brainers only in hindsight, how should a manager respond when
confronted with similar dilemmas? “The answer, in its shortest form,” writes
Badaracco, “can be stated in a single sentence: When you face a gray area
problem at work, you should work through it as a manager and resolve it as a
human being.”
That might sound a touch cavalier. But
Badaracco backs it up with a five-question process to help managers meet the
challenge. First, ask what are the net, net consequences. This means thinking
deeply and broadly about the available options and “asking what you will be
doing for other people and to other people,
depending on the options you choose.”
Next, the ethics professor goes all humanist
on us. “What are my core obligations?” he wants us to ask. This is a doozy of a
query, because Badaracco isn’t talking about a manager’s obligation to his or
her employer. Rather, he means “one’s basic duties as a human being.” It’s not
exactly clear what those duties are. But Badaracco suggests that they stem from
two fundamental dictates: the human right to live without needless danger,
pain, and suffering, and the human right to be treated with respect and dignity.
Then, Badaracco begins channeling
Machiavelli, focusing on the practical aspects of decision making. “What will
work in the world as it is?” he suggests we ask next. Of course; decisions that
won’t work in the real world are useless.
With his final questions, Badaracco gives
managers the queries they need to zero in on their final answer. The fourth —
“Who are we?” — requires seeking “options that will reflect, express, and give
reality” to the norms and values of the company and community to which the manager
belongs. And the final question gets to the self-perception of managers as
human. “What can I live with?” The crux of gray-area problems is that there is
no right answer, and that means managers must create an answer. Then, right or
wrong, they must be able to live with its consequences.
Resolving
gray-area problems won’t always be pretty, no matter what process managers
follow. Throughout Managing in the Gray, Badaracco keeps coming
back to the story of Aaron Feuerstein. Feuerstein owned Malden Mills, a fabric
company that had invented Polartec fleece. In 1995, when its factory was
destroyed in a fire, Feuerstein made headlines with his heroic and hasty
decision to rebuild the fabric factory with the latest technology and keep all
of its employees on the payroll throughout the construction. He did just that,
but the company never recovered and went bankrupt in 2001. Afterward,
Feuerstein was asked what epitaph he wanted on his tombstone. “After a long
pause,” reports Badaracco, “he said simply, ‘He did his damnedest.’
The
Power of the Process
Asking
Badaracco’s five questions suggests that even when managers get the final
answer wrong, the process that they follow can be a source of solace and
redemption in and of itself. The idea that how we do things
can be as important as what we do — a concept popular in
psychology circles — is supported strongly in The Process Matters:
Engaging and Equipping People for Success, by Columbia Business School
professor Joel Brockner.
Process plays a much more significant role in
corporate performance than is commonly understood, according to Brockner. But
unlike most business process engineers, he isn’t interested in cycle time,
volume, and quality. Instead, he focuses on how employees perceive processes —
and how by constructing processes in certain ways, managers can bolster the
success rate of change initiatives, enhance employee productivity and morale,
and promote ethical behavior.
That perception is rooted in the concept of
fairness. “Process fairness has a huge impact on how well employees react to a
wide array of organizational events and decisions,” writes Brockner. “Whether
you are trying to gain support from many people or even a single person for a
particular decision, you better make sure that they believe the process is
fair.”
Brockner finds evidence for this assertion in
numerous studies, including a study of expats, which he conducted with Ron
Garonzik of the Korn Ferry Hay Group and Phyllis Siegel of Rutgers Business
School. It found that expats who were having trouble adjusting to their new
surroundings — for family and other reasons — were less likely to return home
prematurely “if their employers allowed them to have input into decisions and
if they felt that their employers generally treated them with dignity and
respect.”
The real payoff for process fairness comes
when outcomes head south. Brockner finds that employees are far more willing to
accept negative outcomes when they feel that the process was fair. Conversely,
if outcomes are negative and the process is seen as unfair, it adds insult to
injury.
For instance, Brockner’s own research into
the reactions of employees who remained on the job after layoffs found that
their productivity and morale suffered when they felt that the layoff process
was unfair to their former colleagues. Moreover, it revealed that process
fairness could compensate for smaller severance packages in the estimation of
the remaining employees. “Survivors responded about the same when
they believed the package was moderately generous and the process was handled
fairly as they did when they believed the package was highly generous and the
process handled not so fairly,” writes Brockner.
The
Process Matters also explains the instrumental role of
process in the ethical behavior of employees. “First, those on the receiving
end of high process fairness behave more ethically. Not only do they steal
less, but they also show their ethicality by behaving with greater process
fairness toward others,” says Brockner. “Second…the more that the process
causes people to see themselves as having esteem, identity, or control [that
is, global self-integrity], the more ethically they behave.”
The
business school professor casts a wide net into a seemingly bottomless pool of
research to help managers design better processes. Occasionally, the net gets
tangled, and The Process Matters drifts into the weeds. But
most of the time, he hauls in a promising catch. “Doing the process well often
entails simple things like involving people in decisions, showing respect, and
doing things transparently. Not exactly rocket science,” Brockner writes.
“Furthermore, doing the process well may not require much in the way of
tangible resources.”
by Theodore Kinni
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/Best-Business-Books-2016-Management
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