The headlines rolled across my feed like the credits on a blockbuster movie. Something big seemed to be happening but I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It seemed that Zappos—the popular business management poster child for happy employees and customers—just announced it was adopting some new-fangled “boss-less,” “hierarchy-less,” “structure-less” management system called Holacracy.

“Hola-what?” I said to myself as I started clicking links. Aimee Groth at Quartz wrote: “Zappos is going holacratic: no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy,” while the Washington Post headlined with, “Zappos Says Goodbye To Bosses,” and the Canadian Broadcast Company led with “Holacracy management style eliminates all bosses, titles.”

I’ve been around long enough to know that what the media was reporting would be far removed from the truth. I also had the inkling that the level of publicity that Zappos generates made it likely that Holacracy would become the next buzzword in management in 2014. Paul Herbert captured it well: “A new word crept into HR’s vernacular last week: holacracy. Better get used to seeing it.”

Each year I attend two personal/professional development workshops for my own education and growth. After trying to make sense of Holacracy through their website materials and recorded webinars, in the spirit of exploration I decided to dive deeper and make Holacracy one of my annual workshops. I signed up for their 1/2-day Taster Workshop followed by a 5-day Practitioner Certification Training in Las Vegas hosted by Holacracy founder Brian Robertson.

A few weeks later I hopped in my car to make the trek from my home in Santa Barbara across the desert to Vegas. The seminar turned out to be located just down the block from the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop of History Channel fame. As I drove by their shop at 1pm on a Friday, there was a line of people down the entire block. “Note to self,” I murmured while rubber necking the crowd, “this is what a reality TV can do for your small business.”

I parked and found my way to the seminar, located on the third floor of a secured building. I buzzed the intercom, walked up three flights of stairs, and entered the room where I’d spend the next week. I noted there were about 25+/- people gathered around circular conference tables and a standard lecture area at the front. I found a spot, put down my stuff and, with a mixture of curiosity and anticipation, made small talk with my fellow attendees, a surprising number of whom were French nationals, while waiting for the seminar to start.

Little did I know then what a struggle that entire week — and even several weeks after digesting my experience — would be for me. What did I struggle with? First, I found […]

The NFL is the most popular professional sports league in the United States. In fact, it’s bigger than the next three largest professional sports leagues combined. But when it comes to the field of talent management, what makes the NFL such an interesting case study for businesses of all types and sizes is not its popularity but its parity.

Each season, all 32 NFL teams begin with the same basic chance to be competitive. All teams have a roughly equal amount of money to spend and the same numbers of players to a roster, and the worst teams from last season get higher draft picks and an easier schedule this season. If a team gets “harmed” during free agency, the league will assign it compensatory draft picks to help it stay even.

Parity in the NFL has worked. On any given Sunday, one team can beat another. However, a few teams — despite parity — have been able to win consistently over time. In fact, over the past 13 NFL seasons from 1999 to 2012, just 6 teams out of 32 have achieved a 60% or better winning percentage: the Patriots, Colts, Steelers, Packers, Ravens, and Eagles, with only one team achieving a 70% winning percentage: the Patriots.

Clearly, if everything else is held nearly equal, then these winning teams have cultivated an edge in how they go about managing their business and developing their front office and on-field staff. Is there something you can learn from these consistent winners? And if there is something you can take away, can you actually apply it in growing your own business — a business that probably has just a fraction of the money and assessment resources that an NFL team can throw at the hiring problem? And can you teach it to your own team?

These are smart questions to ask. Even if you don’t follow the NFL or understand the rules of the game, anyone can appreciate the dedication it takes to thrive over time in a highly competitive setting. True, the NFL has its problems and its detractors. It’s violent beyond belief. It’s hypocritical when it comes to player safety. Its locker rooms and rosters are filled with some great men and some giant a@*!#$. That said, the NFL absolutely provides some critical insights for how to think about and approach the hiring process for every business, not just a professional sports team.

While you may not have considered the similarities between your business and an NFL team before, there are many. First, you too are faced with intense competition for great talent. Second, you can’t just throw money at the problem. You have finite time, energy, and resources to make great hires and avoid bad ones. Third, when an athlete is drafted and signed to a professional […]

How can I use my genius more effectively as a leader?

While few people are intellectual geniuses, each of us has an area of outstanding ability that allows us to perform at a high level and adds to our overall energy and satisfaction. This zone of activity is what I call your Genius Zone. What is your own Genius Zone? You can begin to identify it and activate it using an outline. Talents, Purpose, Values, Desires, and Vision.

Basically, add all of those things together and allocate your time and energy to be more “in the zone” and you’ve got it. When you’re operating from within your Genius Zone, you experience high energy gains. You tend to feel deep engagement, high personal satisfaction, and elevated productivity. You also produce outstanding work. When you’re operating outside of your Genius Zone, life is more haphazard, less fulfilling, and you have to fight vs. flow.

• Your Talents are those activities that you are naturally exceptional at and that add to your energy, joy, and satisfaction.
• Your Purpose is the why of your life that brings meaning and focus to your endeavors.
• Your Values are the commitments you hold dear.
• Your Desires are your most heartfelt desires.
• Your Positive Collective Vision is a vision larger than yourself.

Leading from your Genius Zone means that you design your activities in such a way so that you spend most of your time and energy engaged in those that add to your energy, joy, and satisfaction and at the same time, create the most enterprise value for your business.

If you’re struggling right now to grow your business, manage your team, find the right strategy, and to do it all quickly, then this concept might seem pretty far fetched. You don’t have enough time and energy to do all the crap you DON’T want to do, so how can you find the time and energy to do the stuff you WANT to do?

I hear you. But the fact is that you want breakthrough levels of performance in your life or work then leading from your Genius Zone is not a luxury but a necessity. For instance, if you look at the most successful businesses in history, the ones that assume almost transcendent, iconic status — IBM, Apple, Ford, Disney, Walmart, Standard Oil, HP, Intel, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Virgin, etc. — you’ll see that while each founder had his own unique approach and management methodology, each also designed their business to be symbiotic with his or her own innate genius.

Many people erroneously believe that these world-changing entrepreneurs were just born special. Not true. We’re all shaped by the environments we inhabit. What’s truly special about these entrepreneurs is that they designed their time, relationships, and management structures so that they could spend most of their time […]

This article is for leaders who are seeking an edge in maximizing the talents and performance of their teams.

Adam Grant, author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (a must read book!), recently published a great LinkedIn article called “What’s the Common Ingredient for Team Success in Surgery, Banking, Software, Airlines, and Basketball?” I want to share it with you, along with my comments, because it’s a great illustration that success has more to do with the surrounding environment (i.e., vision and values, structure, process, and team) than with individual talent.

To get important work done, most leaders organize people into teams. They believe that when people collaborate toward a common goal, great things can happen. Yet in reality, the whole is often much less than the sum of the parts.

Many teams fail because they lack the requisite experience. If you want to perform a successful cardiac surgery, you need to bring in surgeons who have mastered the techniques. If your aim is to make good stock recommendations to investors, it would be wise to hire analysts with a long track record of star performance. If your goal is to produce high-quality software, land an airplane safely, or win basketball games, you’d be smart to rely on people who have done it before. As Jim Collins put it, we need to get the right people on the bus. But what if work experience is overrated?

How many times have you interviewed in the past year looking for “past experience” as one of the primary drivers of job fit? This is a fallacy, which I’ve written about before in “What Warren Buffet Can Teach You About Hiring”, that needs to end. Yesterday. And here’s where this gets interesting:

In a brilliant study, researchers Robert Huckman and Gary Pisano tracked more than 200 cardiac surgeons at 43 hospitals. After analyzing more than 38,000 procedures, it turned out that the surgeons didn’t get better with practice. Their patient mortality rates were no better after 100 surgeries than after the first few.

A closer look at the data revealed a fascinating pattern. The surgeons did get better as they gained more experience at a particular hospital. Each procedure performed at one hospital decreased patient mortality rates by an average of 1%. But the benefits of experience didn’t carry over to other hospitals.

The technologies weren’t any different from one hospital to another; the people were. When the surgeons left their teams behind, it was as if they were starting over from scratch without any of the benefits of practice. Practice wasn’t an individual act; it was a team process. As the surgeons worked with a core team of nurses and anesthesiologists at one hospital, they developed effective routines that leveraged the unique talents of each member.

There’s a growing movement within […]

Yahoo is in the news this week because the board just hired Marissa Mayer away from Google to be its new CEO. Mayer, who by all reports is highly intelligent and creative, excels as a product visionary. Yet not surprisingly, short-term value investors are upset about this hire. This is because they want Yahoo to focus on cutting costs and milking the company for cash until a strategic buyer can be found. So who’s right and what’s the best strategy for Yahoo? Before I answer, let me explain how we can answer this question.

In Organizational Physics, we use a simple code called PSIU to tell what’s right, what’s wrong, and what to expect from situations or decisions. Like DNA, PSIU explains why things “show up” the way they do. It can be used to understand individual styles, analyze organizational design, and even to anticipate organizational problems well in advance of when they occur. PSIU can also be used to understand and design a business strategy in a simple, elegant, and effective way.

Effective strategy design starts with a simple premise. Play to your strengths. What is your organization exceptional at? Basically, a business can have a strategy that capitalizes on:

• Better customer service than its competitors (P)
• Cheaper costs than its competitors (S)
• Higher innovation than its competitors (I)
• Stronger organizational culture than its competitors (U)

No single company can be the best in all four. Why? Because any given strategy consumes finite time and energy. It’s expensive and time consuming to invest in any given track. Great companies recognize where they will place their focus and what they will sacrifice.

For example, Zappo’s focuses its strategy on having a stronger organizational culture (U) and providing better customer service (P) than its competitors. They’ve done a great job of using those strengths to their advantage so far. Can you get cheaper shoes (S) elsewhere? Yes!

Amazon (which owns Zappo’s and seems to allow it to operate autonomously), on the other hand, focuses on providing the lowest cost (S) possible and providing great customer service (P). Is Amazon an example of great organizational culture (U)? Not according to insiders.

Walmart excels at delivering cheaper costs (S) than the competition. But notice that Walmart doesn’t also focus on providing a personalized shopping experience (P) or showcasing the most innovative hot new fashions (I) like a small boutique store must do. Nor is it recognized for having a great organizational culture (U). You can’t be all things to all people. Don’t even try.

In order to make sacrifices to play your strengths, you must first and foremost understand what’s happening in the environment. What type of industry do you operate in? Is it growing or aging? Are your current strengths still relevant and will they be relevant […]

If you’re like me, the journey to finding alignment between expressing a meaningful life purpose and growing a business has been arduous. On the one hand, you crave that deeper sense of meaning and contribution that comes from living your life on purpose. On the other, you need to make a living, support your family, and pay the mortgage – not to mention your desire for financial and time freedom. Too often these things seem diametrically opposed.

So how do you do it? How do you live your life guided by a deep sense of purpose and, at the same time, have a meaningful and prosperous career? Although it took me years to find the answer, I ultimately realized how anyone can find that alignment. In this article, I’m going to show you how. But first, I need to debunk an all too common myth about money.

Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow? Not Even Close

“If you do what you love, then the money will follow.” I know you’ve heard that one before. Is it true? Nope. I admit that it sounds great. I know it sells a lot of books and tapes. But you’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you think that doing what you love will bring in the dough.

So what is the secret to financial prosperity? The answer lies in how you answer three simple questions:

1. Do you operate in a large and growing market opportunity?
2. Does this market perceive that you have unique capabilities that it desperately needs?
3. Do you meet those needs efficiently and in a repeatable manner?

Financial prosperity is pretty simple. If you can answer “yes” to all three questions above, then your business is financially successful. If not, then your business is struggling financially, and it will continue to struggle, until you can.

Why do your answers to these three questions determine your financial prosperity? As I share in lifecycle strategy, these are related because the goal of any strategy is to efficiently acquire new energy (e.g. money, resources, clout) from the surrounding environment, now and in the future.

To get new energy, an organization must develop and integrate its capabilities with opportunities in the marketplace. If you’ve completed the business purpose exercise earlier in this series, then you already have you a good sense of what your unique capabilities are. In addition, the business execution guide will show you how to operate efficiently and adapt to market changes. What remains is the market opportunity itself and it’s a critical piece in creating purpose, meaning, and money in your life and work. Let’s see how it all comes together.

The Sweet Spot

In the past month, I’ve had three separate founder and CEOs who are in similar positions contact me. Each of their businesses is doing $3-5M in revenue and they’re expecting to double or triple sales this year. Over the past six months, two of the companies made a key hire in the VP of sales role that they initially thought was great but turned out otherwise. The common refrain is: “We thought we had the right guy – and he is a great guy – but he just wasn’t able to execute in the way we needed him to.” Both are now in the middle of trying to re-hire for a VP of Sales role and don’t want to make the same mistake twice. The third company hasn’t hired a VP of Sales yet but wants to make sure they do it right the first time. There must be something in the water.

There’s obviously a great cost in time, capital, and energy spent in making a key hire. Making a bad hiring mistake once is costly. Making it more than once can be catastrophic.

There is a very simple step to take before embarking on a new hire process. This step isn’t followed by most traditional recruiting firms. It will help your company make great hires — hires that stick and perform well over time. It applies not only to VPs of Sales but any other role, from CEO to customer service rep. Here’s the approach and its advantages.

Step #1: Know the Forces at Play

To know the PSIU forces at play means this: Before you do anything, first break down the new hire need into its most basic PSIU forces. When you can start with the basics, it’s much easier to get things right.

NOTE: Within Organizational Physics, organizational functions and individual management styles are broken down into their PSIU forces. If you’re not familiar with the PSIU forces yet, do yourself a favor and read this management guide. Once you’ve read the guide, continue with this article.

Let me show you how this is done by breaking down the VP of Sales role into its PSIU forces. First, every sales role requires the Producing (P) force to produce results. It is this force that drives making the calls, setting the meetings, doing the work, and winning the sale. That’s easy. But what other forces does the VP of Sales really need? It depends. What does the organization really need?

• Does it need a Stabilizing (S) force to create highly efficient processes and systems to manage a sales team?
• Does it need a high Innovating (I) force to do early-stage business development and ideation?
• Does it need a high Unifying (U) force to connect well with customers and partners and […]