Let’s forget about the technical aspects of mandated insurance and focus on the principle of it. On principle alone, I’m not sure why the positions of Republicans and Democrats positions on this measure aren’t reversed. At the core of this issue is who should be financially responsible for one’s care: the individual or the state? In the real world, Republicans gravitate toward personal responsibility and Democrats tend to favor the social safety net. In Political Bizarro World, they hold the opposite positions.

In full disclosure, no one is likely to tag me with a liberal label any time soon. As a student of mine said on my Rate My Professors page, “He’s from Texas, need I say more.” That said, I fully support the principle behind mandatory insurance. I liken it to liability insurance on your car. If someone else causes a crash with me, either accidentally or because of poor choices they made, why should I be stuck with the bill? Shouldn’t the other person have to take personal responsibility? The parallels with mandatory health insurance are obvious. If someone gets sick, either accidentally or because they made poor health choices, why should the taxpayer be held financially responsible?

There are certainly important technical and economic issues of mandatory insurance that may sway one’s opinion. However, I find it hard to believe that the majority of the American people know enough about the details of the legislation that technical details are responsible for their opinions overall. This issue seems to show just how strong the influence of political leaders is…as they have convinced their constituents to take positions opposite their own principles.

You can hold people accountable for the process or the outcome, but not both.

President Obama will close border "when pigs fly."

The swine flu has already ruined my Mexican vacation I had planned for May. I’m sure I was one of the last holdouts to cancel my plans, but when the CDC says a pandemic is imminent, I don’t lock myself in my house, but I don’t go to ground zero either.

It is nice to know, however, that President Barack Obama is doing everything he can to see that the swine flu comes to me. When asked if he would consider closing our border with Mexico, he said there was no need. “It would be akin to closing the barn door after the horses are out.” The only problem is that there are probably tens of thousands unhealthy horses still in the barn and maybe a million more that are looking to head to greener pastures anyway. Maybe the President just has a different conceptualization of containment?!?!

CNN just broke with a story that an official who traveled to Mexico City in support of Obama’s delegation has come down with flu like symptoms. Hopefully it is not the swine flu, but in any case, I bet the Obama’s aren’t leaving the White House doors open to him.

Nothing like bizarrely painted people to make you think about animal cruelty

So here we go again. PETA is in the midst of some odd ball campaign. This time, they have asked the Pet Shop Boys to change their name to the Rescue Shelter Boys at least this time they acknowledged that at first glance, it might appear to be a “bizarre” request. If you remember their last campaign was to get fish to be called “sea kittens” so people think twice about sticking a hook in them. The truly sad part about PETA is that their campaigns lead to two outcomes: 1) less thought or concern about animals, and 2) more cruelty toward PETA. I grin when I remember a comment I once heard from a friend of mine. He said something to the effect, “It is unfortunate I don’t wear fur. I wish I could be doused in red paint just one time by a PETA person. It would be 1 second of shock followed by 15 minutes of a bruising discussionon their campaign strategy.”

There actually is a valuable business lesson here. How could an organization with a general cause of “no cruelty to animals” have such strong negatives? They ought to be able to command the same power as agriculture does. The reason agriculture is so strong in the U.S. and abroad is that no one is anti-food. There is no natural competition for them. The same goes for PETA. Very, very few people are pro-cruelty. So why do they keep wallowing in the mud?

PETA is dedicated to no discernible goal. Even if you assume that their goal is ending cruelty to animals (however broadly defined), their campaigns/behavior do not lead logically toward that goal. If they wanted only to appeal to people who are as singularly minded as themselves, then they have succeeded. But to accomplish the goal of “ending cruelty to animals,” their appeal will have to be much further reaching than the bizarro social club they have created.

The problem is that they are task oriented. As opposed to goal oriented organizations, they jump from one task to another with no real forethought as to how or why those activities would help them reach their goals. Task oriented organizations are almost always reactionary, they build up a culture that is dedicated to sticking with what they have always done. If those tasks/strategies don’t seem to be moving them toward a goal, they simply intensify their current efforts and dig a deeper hole for themselves in the process. And that, my friends, is how you get things like this…

Is this middle east instability?

I often hear people bemoan instability in the middle east, but what exactly makes it unstable? Things that are unstable almost by definition are unpredictable. But let’s see if we could predict what will happen next in the middle east. I will wager my next months salary that Palestinian militants will attack Israel, Israel will respond aggressively, Europe will ask them to stop fighting, and the process will repeat itself all over again. This has happened in one form or the other over the last half century. The middle east should be an illustration of stability in the dictionary.

It is interesting to contemplate the counterfactuals: 1) what if no militants fired rockets into Israel? 2) what if Israel refused to invade the Gaza strip in response to such attacks? 3) what if Europe refused to put pressure on Israel to halt such invasions after being attacked by militants? Either one of these occurrences would change the decision calculi of all other parties.

My bets:
1) The pressure on Israel to pull out of every part of Palestine and halt all sanctions against Gaza would be too immense to tolerate and they would have to give in.
2) Any sympathy for the militants’ cause would disappear. Right now defenders of Palestine blame militants aggressiveness on Israel’s aggressiveness. They could not sustain this argument for long if Israel refused to invade. All of Europe would turn decidedly against Hamas.
3) Militants can attack Israel because they know Europe will get involved. They know any invasion by Israel will not be complete and/or it will be temporary. Europe doesn’t get involved, the costs of militant attacks become too much to bare. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that militants are irrational thus it wouldn’t stop. The leaders who supply them and support them are definitely rational politicos.

Everything changes if one party doesn’t respond as they have in the past–in other words, they introduce instability into the middle east.

Cookie cutter approaches to addressing patient satisfaction make some routine suggestions such as better compensation, time off, more staffing, etc. However, given the emphasis on diversity in the workplace, why would we think there is one magical type of satisfier that will meet everyone’s needs? Take compensation. Even if everyone receives a little more pay, we know that people often judge their benefits relative to other’s. So even greater compensation is not such a “no brainer” after all. If I perform better than someone else, why should they get as much of a raise as I?

The question we should be asking ourselves is who we want to be happy to work in our organization. I believe it should be a specific goal of organizations to make work as uncomfortable an experience for low performers as possible. The objective is to get such low performers to improve (to be happy) or move on (to be happy). If your low performers are relatively happy, they’ll stay. If they stay, your high performers will be unhappy and they’ll look elsewhere.

Exact practices that differentially impact the two groups of employees depends somewhat on the type of industry. High performers in service industries will desire greater flexibility. High performers in manufacturing might respond better to a more structured environment.

But one thing we should be able to agree on is that high performers aren’t scared of being held accountable for their work. They even thrive on it and desire it. For the unsuccessful, accountability is the arch enemy. You want to make your top performers happy? Find what makes your low performers unhappy.

It is not what you say, but how you say it. The best ideas for changing work processes often come across as “just another task” when the boss tells you what you are going to do.

What follows is the backdoor way of getting your ideas into your people so that it feels like it is their idea. It may be easier to just tell employees what they should do, but if you don’t want to be looking over their shoulder all the time to see that they are complying, if you want them to internalize the changes, then take the counseling approach:

1. Ask your employees or representatives from the group for their help.
2. Define the objective. Ask them why “the old method” didn’t work/isn’t working as we had expected. (Note that it is very important to talk in the plural we/our/us to make it a team effort.)
3. Work out the new solution together as a puzzle, one piece at a time, even if you think you have the solution. Be sure to follow the throughput process from beginning to end. You may be surprised what kind of effect a seemingly minor inconvenience at the beginning of a process can have by the end.
4. Highlight the good logic and ideas they have along the way. Let them own those ideas.
5. When you arrive at the best solution, let them tell you again why “they” think this was the best way to go about reaching that objective.

Another benefit of the process above is that you get to test the waters with your idea without incurring any penalties for demanding something that won’t work. If you are managing to improve rather than managing to control, this counseling style approach will get you there.

William Ayers can be an important issue in this election, but the way he is being used (or rather not being used) is problematic. McCain keeps bringing him up in isolation without tying Ayers’ relationship with Obama to a more troubling pattern. If he was more strategic about it, he would link Obama’s supposed naïveté in world politics with his more troubling relationships with Ayers and ACORN. It would go something like this:

–”Obama wants to sit down with Ahmadinejad and Chavez like he sat down with Ayers. Is Ayers really an exception, or does it seem like just the same people Obama wants to talk with?”
–”Jugo Chavez, the Mullah’s in Iran, and Vladimir Putin used strong arm tactics to “dissuade” their enemies. ACORN can’t take that approach, so they just make up new friends and create voter registration cards for them. That is why Barack Obama’s work with groups like ACORN is so troubling–ACORN’s tactics are just the flipside of the same vote rigging coin.”

The key for McCain gaining yardage out of the Ayers and ACORN issues is making a clear link between them and Obama’s foreign policy stances. Ayers and ACORN are not exceptions or irrelevant, but they will be if McCain doesn’t fold them into the pattern.

Personally, I really want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt though I’m supporting McCain. But my psychological training has focused my attention on finding patterns in people’s behavior. Obama is naïve if he thinks simply approaching some of the more dictatorial regimes of the world with the hand of friendship is going to work. Their power is based in part on opposing the “Yankees” (oh, and voter fraud). They need an external enemy to blame their own domestic failures on so they will not let Obama get that close without claiming they are winning against the Americans.

In any event, it looks like Obama might get the chance to try his approach. I just hope we aren’t bitten like the world was in 1939.

Management Strategy → Structural Design → Structural Change → Organizational Success (greater organziational efficiency, greater results)

When an organization is on its last leg, the modus operandi is to bring in a new, highly paid leader who sets out to eliminate excess administration and improve the efficiency of throughput. In such cases, the nuclear option of massive restructuring may be the only viable option.

For most businesses that may be experiencing some significant shortfalls but not on their last leg, I caution you against this type of change. There is a predisposition on the part of newly hired executives to take advanage of the political capital they have when taking over a declining business. Desperate stakeholders will often provide a rather long leash for the executive team to shake things up, and the opportunity to implement massive restructuring may be too enticing to pass up. It is certainly the option most likely to capture headlines.

Let’s suppose that the new organizational strategy is brilliant and perfectly aligned with the proposed organizational design. We can even suppose that management has the political will and ability to implement the changes and all goes as smoothly as possible. According to the simplified model above, that is all that is necessary to achieve organizational success.

The problem with the model is that it lacks a very important distinction between the formal and informal structures. The formal structure shows how work processes are supposed to be organized; the informal structure dictates how work really is organized. The informal structure is not as easily observed, but no less real. It is responsible for processing a great deal of information about business processes and relationships and can be both an ally and enemy.

The informal structure presents a double threat to organizational developers. For one, massive restructuring threatens to torpedo positive informal processes that have developed over time to circumvent problematic formal arrangements. An example might be two managers sharing information and adopting strategies to circumvent an inept director. Formally, it looks at is if the director is responsible for the successes. Reorganization efforts to move this director to a more prominent role would clearly be a bad move.

The other potential threat is that disruptive informal arrangements will remain largely intact when the dust settles from restructuring. The relationships built over years and decades do not simply disappear when formal change occurs. Formal changes can lead to positive changes in informal social networks, but quick successes are key. The first move for any kind of social group that does not see positive developments quickly or extensively enough is to revert back to long established relationships and processes.

In most cases that are not completely desperate, I suggest a different approach to organizational development. The focus is on working with individual units to improve their effectiveness and then building the structure up, much like one would build a house from a solid foundation.