Ed Batista

Organizational Effectiveness

What makes organizations effective?  For that matter, what do we even mean by effectiveness?  I've been giving these questions some thought recently and the following graphs are the result.  (Here's the whole 9-slide PowerPoint file, 75 KB.)

I love the Peters/Waterman/McKinsey "7s" Model, but we can extend it in two directions.  First, looking within an organization, if we reduce the model further and boil it down to its most essential core elements, I think we're left with People (or Staff, in 7s-speak) and Culture (an amalgam of Style, Skills and Shared Values.)  Second, if we look beyond the organization--if we ask why it exists and whether its fulfilling its purpose--we begin to assess its Impact, which includes not only profitability and financial sustainability but also the value created for any stakeholders, from a business's employees to a nonprofit's clients.

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My focus on these three elements is also due to their tightly interrelated nature--they all affect the other two in fundamental ways.

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I think one of the least-understood dynamics is the relationship that exists between an organization's people and its culture.  Sometimes it's difficult to even know where to draw a boundary between the two: Where do I stop and where do my contributions to the culture around me begin?  This may be why so many organizations operate without a clear understanding of their culture.  (And to be clear, every organization has a culture: "When you've decided you don't have a culture, you've got one...")

But what's most important to recognize is the dialectical nature of this relationship.  An organization's founders create the initial culture, which then exerts its influence on them in turn.  Future colleagues are attracted to the pre-existing culture because in some way it meets their needs, and so they reinforce it.

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I've also focused on People and Culture because I see these elements as most closely connected to an organization's Impact.  This isn't to say that other elements don't matter--but ultimately people implement an organization's plans, and the culture in which they operate helps them or hinders them.  Talented people can overcome misguided strategies and suboptimal systems, but they can't outrun a dysfunctional culture (not for long, anyway.)

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And an organization's Impact--its ability to achieve its goals, fulfill its purpose and create value for stakeholders--directly affects its ability to attract and retain effective people and to build and sustain a high-performance culture.

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OK, having mapped out the relationships that exist among these three elements, what do they actually look like?  How do we define People, Culture and Impact in effective organizations?

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Here's my definition of effectiveness as it pertains to People.  I emphasize connections with Culture and Impact; interpersonal skills and accountability; self-development and growth.

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Here's my definition of an effective Culture.  I emphasize distributed leadership, continuous learning, openness, and decentralization.  The final quote from Tom Peters deserves further explanation: The 7s Model is sometimes divided into "Hard" elements (Strategy, Structure and Systems) and "Soft" elements (Skills, Staff, Style and Shared Values).  Our business culture tends to value the former and dismiss the latter, and Peters thinks this is entirely ass-backwards.  The "hard" stuff, from strategic plans to complex financial structures, is actually pretty fuzzy and surprisingly easy to fake.  The "soft" stuff--relationships, leadership, interpersonal skills (in short, culture)--is actually pretty resilient and surprisingly difficult to get right.  Hard is soft, soft is hard.

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I don't believe there's a universal definition of Impact--organizations define value-creation in different ways, and they're answerable to different sets of stakeholders.  But I do believe that effective organizations share the characteristics listed above, which enable them to understand, measure and communicate their impact, and to use that information to drive decision-making (cf. Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer's Hard Facts.)  At the same time, they reality-check regularly and don't let data dictate decisions.

Effective organizations also know when to give up and move on.  They take a pragmatic approach and never let sunk costs fuel persistence--instead, they've mastered the art of strategic quitting.

Finally, effective organizations have a vision of victory that they're driving toward.  What would it look like to win?  For some organizations (including many nonprofits), ultimate victory means putting themselves out of business because they've succeeded in fully and permanently meeting the need that they were created to fulfill.

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Again, if you're interested, here's the whole 9-slide PowerPoint file (75 KB).  As with the other models I post here, I consider this a work-in-progress that helps me make sense of the world, and I welcome any feedback to improve it or make it clearer.

Three Questions with Mark McGuinness

Mark McGuinness is an executive coach based in London who specializes in working with artists and creative professionals and who writes regularly at Wishful Thinking.  He's also the most tech-savvy coach I know, and he's found a number of innovative ways to integrate technology with his interpersonal work.  As another fan of technology who happened to spend two years in art school as an undergrad, I was thrilled when Mark agreed to do a Three Questions interview with me--thanks, Mark!

1) You describe yourself as "a poet and a business coach," but which came first? Were you writing when you saw an unmet need for coaching among artists and creative professionals, or did you begin to write as a form of personal expression to complement your coaching practice?

Poetry came first. And it will last longest. I never planned on being a coach, I just wanted to write poetry. I got interested in hypnosis as a way of tapping into creativity, and as I like to do things properly I trained as a hypnotherapist. I found myself being consulted by writers who were stuck on their latest novel and actors with stage nerves - they were great fun to work with, and of all the clients I worked with they seemed to get the most out of the sessions. So I started looking for ways of working with more artists and creatives, and developing it as a niche. Most of them weren't really looking for therapy, just a way of kick-starting their creativity, so I started offering professional coaching instead of therapy.

After a few years another coach invited me to do some work with him at Vodafone, which introduced me to the world of coaching in business. One assignment led to another and I ended up doing a lot of work with various organisations, mostly helping managers to become better coaches for their teams. After a few years of that, I decided to put the creative and business coaching together and focus on companies in the creative industries - advertisting, marketing, TV, computer games, web development etc.

I felt reasonably confident of my coaching skills, having been doing it for around 10 years, but I wanted to get more of a sense of the big picture of the industry sector. So I took the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises at the Unversity of Warwick, which was a fantastic course - we studied the usual core business topics like strategy, marketing and organisation theory, alongside intellectual property law, theories of creativity and theories of the creative economy. A great mixture of inspiration and business knowledge, that made me look at my business and my poetry in a different light.

2) Your recent e-book on Creative Management for Creative Teams does a great job of explaining coaching, but I'm also curious about how working with your particular clientele affects your approach. What do you think you might do differently as a coach because of your focus on creative people?

Well two things I might do differently are not to wear a suit and not to call myself a coach! It's probably no surprise that creative types don't feel comfortable with suits, but I discovered through my work and via my MA research dissertation that a lot of people in creative businesses really don't like the word 'coaching'. They associate it with corporate management-speak, so the image doesn't work for them at all. But when we get down to work, the label doesn't matter, we're too absorbed in looking at the situation and finding new options.

Image aside, a lot of what I do with my creative industries clients is no different to what I would do with any other client. People are people after all. There are a lot of issues around communication, collaboration, teamwork, management and generally dealing with other people that are the same, whatever industry you're working in.

The obvious area that is different is working on the creative process, which we can approach from several different angles. Sometimes we focus on fine-tuning creative thinking strategies. Sometimes people have difficulty getting into the right state of mind for creative flow, so with my background in hypnotherapy I can help them find the right triggers for a particular emotional state. Time management doesn't sound like a particularly creative topic, but I show people that if you don't manage your workload it can play havoc with your creativity. Other times we might focus on the craft element - using your critical faculty to appraise and revise your work. And for me the creative process doesn't end until you've reached an audience with your work, so sometimes we're focused on presenting it to others (boss, client, public) in an engaging way.

Another nice thing about working with creatives is sharing what I've learned from my own practice as a poet. I find that a lot of clients are quite intrigued by poetry, so it can be very fruitful to look for the common ground between poetry and graphic design or singing opera or writing a film script or whatever it happens to be. Clients seem to find that helpful and it's fascinating for me - I get a window on all these creative worlds that I can never enter properly, but I can have a look inside as a visitor and see some of the amazing things people are doing.

3) One of the reasons I've enjoyed your work is your effective use of technology--photos from Flickr, a Facebook group, a Tumblr link blog, prominent links to your feed, etc.  I wish more people in the field did the same, but I know that many coaches and consultants are daunted by the prospect.  How do you decide which new tools are worth using, and how do you implement and support them?

I discovered blogging by reading Seth Godin's e-book Who's There? (PDF, 2MB) and it was such an exciting idea there wasn't a decision to make - I was going to do this and I was prepared to learn all the techy stuff I needed to get it up and running. So I immersed myself in the blogging world out of sheer enthusiasm, reading sites like ProBlogger and CopyBlogger and devouring what they were teaching.

A lot of the other tools came about by seeing cool things on other people's blogs and thinking 'How do they do that?' and investigating from there. These days time is a big factor for me. E.g. I wanted to do a links blog for a while but looked around for something that wouldn't add to my workload. I was already bookmarking pages on Delicious, so I wanted a Firefox extension that would allow me to simultaneously post to Delicious, my Tumblr links blog and StumbleUpon - I found the Mahalo share extension [for Firefox] which does a great job. It means I'm creating a whole new blog without any extra work - result!  [On a related note, see Mark's e-book on Time Management for Creative People.]

If you're thinking of taking the plunge with blogging and social media, the key thing to remember is that it's not about technology, it's about people. That's why they call it social media - the tools are designed to connect people and they do a great job, I've met loads of great people since I started blogging, and the tools are getting more user-friendly as they develop.

Bonus Personal Question: Your first New Year's Resolution for 2008 was maintaining a daily meditation practice.  How's it going?

So far so good! I've settled into a rhythm of meditating first thing in the morning for 15-20 minutes and now it feels like the normal thing to do. I'll admit there have been a few days I really didn't feel like sitting, but I found myself thinking 'Well, you promised your readers you would do it - what are you going to tell them?'. And sat down. So there you have it - the power of blogging!

Cool Tools

I've been able to spend a little time recently digging into some social media tools to understand how they work as well as their potential value for someone like me, i.e. an executive coach and change management consultant with an abiding interest in technology.  So here's a quick rundown:

Utterz is an extremely user-friendly service that allows you to capture and publish audio, video, pictures and text.  The site essentially creates a link between your phone, your camera or your webcam and the web at large.  You can call Utterz and use your phone to record an interview, snap a picture while you're at it, and publish the audio and the video not only to your Utterz page but also to just about any other site you designate on the fly--the audio's captured immediately, and you simply text the photo to Utterz.  You can do the same with video, but if you're like me, A) your phone's OK for stills but terrible for video, and B) uploading video via your carrier sucks up too much time and bandwidth.  No problem--just use your laptop's webcam and send the stream directly to Utterz, or upload a previously recorded video file.  (You can also opt to send all your Utterz videos to your YouTube account simultaneously.)  I see Utterz as a way to turn any conversation into an interview you can share with colleagues AND as a personal podcast for friends and family (depending on where I choose to send the files.) Very cool and stone cold simple.  Many thanks to my old--well, let's say former--colleague Holly Ross for the inspiration.

Tumblr is sort of like Utterz but a bit more lightweight, which makes it both easier to use and slightly less useful--or, rather, useful in a different way.  It's another service that allows you to capture and publish links, text, and photos, and although it doesn't have built-in support for audio and video, it's really easy (especially via their Firefox bookmark button) to publish to your Tumblr page and to anyplace you can insert a little code.  I see it as a great way to share and promote links to articles, posts and photos that don't merit a full-on blog post but merit something more prominent than a del.icio.us tag.  Many thanks to Mark McGuinness for the (continued) inspiration--he's THE most tech-savvy executive coach I've met since I stopped working in technology to launch my coaching practice, and I learn something every time I stop by his site.

And now for something completely different: Don't Break the Chain is a fun site supposedly inspired by the motivational wisdom of Jerry Seinfeld, according to Brad Isaac:

[Seinfeld] told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

True?  Who cares.  It's a great story that translates brilliantly into a free web service.  Your "Chain" account serves as the online equivalent of Seinfeld's big wall calendar, and you use it to "X" out days on which you accomplish your given task.  (The image above indicates that I've gone running three straight days--no mean feat this past year.)  You can create multiple calendars to track different goals, you can customize the display a bit, and if you want the world to help hold you accountable, you can copy-and-paste a little code to publish your calendar anywhere you'd like.

Twitter is a service that's clearly useful for many people..but not me--at least not right now.  If Utterz makes it easier to blog audio and video, and if Tumblr allows you to turn your tags into a mini-blog, then Twitter is a sort of micro-blog, allowing you to send out even more ephemeral messages (up to 140 characters) via your phone or the web to your personal Twitter network.  The How? isn't an issue here--if you've used IM or sent a text message, you know how to use Twitter, but the Why? (or Why not?, in my case) is more complex.  I signed up for a Twitter account months ago, but it's never seemed useful to me.  This is primarily because my work as an executive coach involves a lot of face-to-face interactions that can't be interrupted, and my time online (or text-accessible) is limited as a result.  But I'm also aware that I need a certain amount of distance between the world and myself in order to think, to focus, to stay grounded.  I understand the appeal of feeling more connected with the people in my network via a steady stream of Twitter updates, and I could see myself using Twitter if others on my team did as well, because although most of our work with clients and students is face-to-face, we often work from separate locations--but until that happens, I'm content to opt out.  (See Common Craft's typically well-done Twitter in Plain English if you'd like to learn more.)  UPDATE: One day later, John Unger posts a Twitter manifesto, describing how he uses it--and he notes that his initial response was "Why the hell would I want to do that?"  It didn't change my mind about Twitter's utility to me at the moment, but it did open my eyes to the creative ways people are adapting the service to meet their needs.  UPDATE 2: OK, I give--with Mark McGuinness weighing in as well, I'll see if Twitter can add value despite my unusual schedule.

Finally, even though the services rendered by Creative Commons are nothing like those described above (and even though I've been a CC user for years), my work on this post led me to realize that my CC license was out-of-date, and this seems like a good opportunity to point anyone unfamiliar with them in a helpful direction.  CC provides an alternative to copyright that allows people like me to share our writing, our photos, and any other type of content with the world under the restrictions of our choice.  For example, everything I post on this site is published under CC's "Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States" license, which means that you're free to copy, distribute and/or remix my work as long as you also 1) attribute it to me by linking to this site and 2) further distribute any remixed works under a similar license.  Almost all of the photos I use in my posts (including the one above) have been published under the same CC license as mine, and I'm both grateful for the right to access such highly creative work and hopeful that my contributions are as useful to someone else.

Photo by Paul Schultz.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Swivel

Swivel is a content-sharing application for data and graphs.  It's sort of like YouTube meets Wikipedia for people who love spreadsheets.  As with YouTube, you can create a user account, upload your content (in Swivel's case, raw data or a spreadsheet file rather than a video), format and tag it, and set it free for others to view, comment upon, embed or otherwise use as they see fit.  As with Wikipedia, accuracy is in the eye of the beholder, so read the citations and take the figures with a grain of salt.

The most-viewed graph on Swivel today is Growth of Creative Commons Photos on Flickr, by Brian Mulloy, Swivel's CEO and co-founder:

There's tight integration with several Google apps, including the ability to make Swivel graphs from Google spreadsheets and a feed from Google Blogsearch showing people posting Swivel graphs, which just this minute led me to my friend Beth Kanter, who posted today on this very same topic, using the very same graph above.  Small world!

A Little Housecleaning: Feedback Requested

Just in case you haven't noticed, I've been cleaning things up around here over the past few days.  (Note to Explorer users: I know the boxes in the left-hand sidebar are running wide--I'm trying to determine the cause of the problem.  Thanks for bearing with me...and have you ever considered using Firefox?  Um, just a thought.  Note to feed readers: Feel free to skip this post.)  Here's a quick orientation--and any feedback would be greatly appreciated:

• The "Stay in Touch" menu at the top of the left-hand sidebar includes links to subscribe to my feed, get updates by email, use my contact form, and my email and IM/Skype addresses.

• The "About Me" menu at the top of the right-hand sidebar includes links to my About page, as well as my Recent Transitions and Local Meeting Spots posts.  (I'll keep the latter two up for a while, but I'll probably update and/or replace them shortly.)  And on my About page, I've consolidated my reputation/profile links under the "For More Info..." menu, which currently includes LinkedIn, Opinity, Trufina and RapLeaf.  I'm uncertain as to how useful these services are--if you've found them helpful (or not), I'd love to know.

• I've moved the "Search This Site" links to the left-hand sidebar, at the top of the content navigation menus (Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories and Archives).  You can still choose between Google and Technorati, but I've added logos and simplified the interface.

• I cut out a few menus from the sidebars that didn't really seem useful--like my Del.icio.us tagroll, which you can still find as a link under the "Tools I Like" menu on the left.  And I'm about to do a major culling of the sites in my blogroll--they're all worthwhile reads, but I'm currently oversubscribed to technology sites and undersubscribed to management sites, and I need to adjust my feed reading to fit my current interests.

• I may not be done--I'm thinking about a new, less cryptic banner [Update: I've added a new banner and tweaked the color scheme] and a swanky top menu (if I have the guts to tackle it), and I'll definitely be adding a page on my professional services soon--but I'm reasonably happy with how things have turned out to date.  Thanks to TypePad for continuing to exceed expectations and to John Unger at TypePad Hacks for some great ideas.

Three Batistas: On Blogging, Marketing and Global Fandom on the Live Web

The ways in which the Net--particularly the "Live Web" of indexed blogs and powerful search engines--continues to shrink the world never ceases to amaze me.  For example, if you Google "batista," the first three people who come up are Dave (the professional wrestler), Fulgencio (the Cuban dictator deposed by Castro), and, uh, me.  (Can you guess who's who above?)

I'm not sure how many students of Cuban history stumble across this site, but I know that some pro wrestling fans do because yesterday morning I received the following email:

Dear Batista Supper Star,

 

My name is [deleted] and My nationality Cambodian people I watching TV on the Supper Star of Smarkdon and Raw clubs soar you to be the Supper Star have the justice and have the very much people support and take care and this firs time I searching see your email and would like to support you. I am very happy to search see your email. My two daugther she like-minded and she is like watched TV supper Star very special to be to see you.

if you contact me please you see bellow my address.

 

Thanks, Best Regards

[deleted]

On a certain level, of course, the confusion is pretty funny--"Supper Star" is my wife's new nickname for me--but I'm not posting the message to mock it.  Never having seen Dave in action, I don't know much about his wrestling persona, but apparently he's a good guy--he "[has] the justice" and "the people support."  And it's somehow touching to think about a man in Cambodia watching pro wrestling with his daughter, both of them rooting for Dave Batista, then tracking down an email address and sending a message to express their admiration as fans.

I know I shouldn't be surprised that American pro wrestling is popular in Cambodia--but I am.  And now I have all sorts of questions about the internationalization of pop culture: How is pro wrestling perceived in places like Cambodia?  As pure entertainment?  Pure sport?  Some combination of the two?  Are the wrestlers' outsized personas seen as characters?  Are kids around the world holding "backyard brawls" like their American counterparts and getting scolded by their parents?

But there's an even more basic question: What have I done to be in the mix with Dave (whose reach obviously spans the globe) and Fulgencio (a third-rate dictator but an historic figure nonetheless)?  The answer is: I blog.  And blog posts are indexed, and search engines just love indexed content, and that's how you get found on the Live Web these days.

On Metadata: What You Can't See CAN Hurt You

I had a vivid reminder this morning that we're represented online not only by the data we can see--from blog posts to search results--but also (and increasingly) by metadata that we often can't see.  (And I also learned just how good customer service can be.)

One of my favorite tools is Feedster, which describes itself as "the largest and richest archive of indexed feeds on the web."  (What's a feed?)  I use Feedster, Technorati and Ask.com's blogsearch service on a daily basis to keep up news from feeds on a variety of topics--including myself.

Searching feeds for my name or for links to my site allows me to see who's commenting on or linking to my posts and to jump into the discussion if I want.  I can also just confirm that my posts are being picked up and indexed by these services so that other people can find them.

Although I do like Feedster, I'd gotten a little lazy and hadn't run a vanity search on their service for a while.  So it was a little surprising to run one this morning and get the following:

If you look carefully, you'll notice that at the bottom of each search result is a link to my feed, which has been given a somewhat lengthier and, ah, more colorful title than plain old "Ed Batista."  To each his own, of course, but that's not really how I want my feed to be described.

I use FeedBurner to add a bunch of features to my feed, so I immediately took a look at my FeedBurner configurations.  Nothing there suggested that my feed should be titled anything but "Ed Batista."  I searched their forums for advice but didn't find anything applicable, so I used their contact form to ask for help directly--and just 34 minutes later I heard from Paul at FeedBurner.  Paul couldn't solve my problem, but he confirmed that it didn't appear to be on FeedBurner's end and suggested that I contact Feedster.

After double-checking that my feed wasn't mistitled on any other feed search services, I went to Feedster's site and used their contact form to ask for help--and 19 minutes later I heard from Jeff at Feedster.  Success!  Apparently "certain fields were corrupted" at Feedster (whether inadvertantly or by someone with too much time on his hands, I don't know), resulting in the "inappropriate title" for my feed.  Feedster solved the problem, but they're still in the process of checking the millions of feeds they index to be sure that the metadata associated with each feed is correct.

And happily, a search for "ed batista" on Feedster is now a little less...adventurous.

Lessons learned?  Even free services like FeedBurner and Feedster can do customer service right, so there's really no reason to settle for anything less.  Kudos and thanks to both of them.  And I'm sure as hell going to run those vanity searches a little more often.

Who Am I? You Tell Me

Go ahead and edit my WikiBio.  Or set up your own and ask me to edit yours.  What's the catch?  You can't edit the contents of your own bio--only other people can.  (You can roll it back to previous versions if someone writes something you disagree with, and you can ban troublesome IP addresses.)

Sure, there's a degree of silly narcissism involved in this, but at a deeper level it's a potentially powerful reputation system.  You may not believe what I say about myself, but perhaps you'll believe what others are saying about me.

tags: wikibio

Feed-Cleaning: One More Thought

How do I feel when I see new items queued up in my reader from a subscribed feed: A) "Great!  Another post from [so-and-so]."  Or B) "Sigh.  Another post from [so-and-so]."

I just realized that even after re-organizing and culling my feeds substantially, there are still a few underperformers that I'm hanging onto out of a sense of...obligation to keep up?  hope that they'll return to form?  fear of missing something?

That's no way to run a blogroll.

tags: feeds rss

Michael Goldhaber on "The Value of Openness in an Attention Economy"

Over the the course of 2006 I've been writing fewer posts about technology (blogging and dead laptops excepted) and more about management and leadership.  That's partly because I've been writing more intensively about technology on my "day blog" at AttentionTrust, the nonprofit where I serve as Executive Director.  But it's primarily because technology has always been just a means to an end for me--I only started caring about it in the mid-'90s, when I saw how it would help the social services organization where I worked be more effective and more efficient.

What's far more important to me than technology is helping people fulfill their potential (starting with myself.)  I firmly believe that technology can play an important role in that process, but looking toward the future, I'm increasingly interested in such disciplines as executive coaching and organizational development.  (If I hadn't settled into nonprofit management after college, I might have gone back to grad school to become a psychologist like my dad, but somehow I would up with an MBA.)

Given all that, I'm thrilled when I come across concepts that bridge my vocational focus on technology and my avocational interest in personal development.  So this morning I'd like to touch on a topic that springs from my technology-related work at AttentionTrust but ultimately transcends technology entirely and speaks to such issues as how we relate to each other as individuals, how we relate to the world at large, and even the underpinnings of our social and economic structures.

To provide some background: AttentionTrust's mission is to educate people about the existence of "attention data," (i.e. the various types of digital records that reflect what we pay attention to [and what we ignore], and in turn serve as the fundamental basis for determining value in our information-based economy), and to subsequently empower people to exert control over and make effective use of their attention data, thereby becoming active participants in the emerging "attention economy."

One of the intellectual forefathers of the concepts that underlie our work is Michael Goldhaber, an incredibly thoughtful and gracious man whom I've had the pleasure of getting to know over the past year.  Michael just posted "The Value of Openness in an Information Based Economy" (PDF, 198 KB), a paper he delivered last month at First Monday's "FM10 Openness: Code, Science and Content" event.  I posted the following excerpts from Michael's paper on AttentionTrust's site, and I'm re-posting them here because I think they have some significant implications for how organizations and individuals define and obtain success.  (More on that in future posts.)  Please note that I've invented the headings--they're not in Michael's original paper: