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This is the ninth piece in the 10×10 series by innovation firm Method. Read more from the series here. Comedy, especially stand-up, is widely regarded as the most difficult gig in show business. Similarly, successful product innovation is so difficult, it could be regarded as the stand-up comedy of the business world. E.B. White once said that analyzing comedy is like dissecting a frog: Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. However, a sacrifice must be made to help more great ideas see the light of day, and studying how good comedians work can reveal insights into how innovation can benefit from the same advice.

1. Know Your Audience, Then Ignore Their Advice

When it comes to innovation, the customer is rarely right. At least, they’re rarely right about what they want next. Businesses run on process, and the traditional market research process of concept testing is indeed an efficient process: Nothing kills ideas faster than concept testing. That doesn’t mean research has no place in innovation development; the key is to use it to understand, not to evaluate. A comedian doesn’t ask the audience what the next joke should be about, he has the skill to tell them. Great comedians are tremendously astute observers of human beings. They know how people think, what experiences we have in common, and how to direct (or misdirect) our attention. They have to be ahead of their audience, but not so far ahead that they baffle us instead of amusing us. Similarly, the best market research is aimed at understanding how customers interact with a given product category, not asking them what should come next.

2. Data Does Not Replace Insight

Don’t just collect data about your audience, study them. Data doesn’t tell you what to do, insight does, and insight is the responsibility of the innovator, not the audience. It’s the lifeblood of both comedy and great design. It can be sweet, crude, or startling, but it is always brutally honest. Why did it take so long for Heinz and its competitors to introduce the “upside down” ketchup bottle? We all knew that getting the last third out of the bottle was a huge pain, yet it took decades for bottle design to acknowledge this universally held understanding. The data was always there, it just needed to be recognized. The head-slapping “of course!” moment of seeing this bottle is much like hearing the punch line of a joke—it’s as surprising as it is familiar. The operative skill is in seeing the basic truth that has been ignored, forgotten, or actively denied by the audience, and then revealing that truth in a new and unexpected way. When successful, it lets the audience see the most familiar things—especially themselves and how they interact with the world—in a fresh, but relatable way. That instantaneous discovery of the knowing self-recognition, is what makes us laugh and what makes us buy.

3. Keep It Fresh

Comedians can’t rely on the same routine for very long, no matter how successful it is. The same can be said for successful brands. As long as the approach and the tone are identifiable and consistent, the brand itself can and should change and evolve over time. George Carlin kept his same scrutiny of language and hypocrisy consistent over a 40-year career, even though the material changed constantly. He was a relevant and vibrant comedian well into his seventies. Radio Shack changed its name and logo to The Shack, but visit the store, and it’s like the last 30 years never happened. The mix of merchandise and limited store format is the equivalent of still telling the same joke from the 1970s. Meanwhile, Amazon has evolved to sell streaming television episodes and digital storage space, as well as the latest hardcover novel, all of which still fit within the brand’s point of view of broad reach and efficient delivery.

4. Develop Your Own Point of View

Late-night television talk show hosts all have the same daily news to work with, yet they each put their own spin on it. Leno takes a safer angle, which is why he tends to appeal to the broadest audience. Letterman will be more crass and juvenile, which might explain why he has greater appeal among men than women. Conan will be more cerebral, perhaps even surreal. Jon Stewart will simply let politicians provide all the necessary absurdity on their own. The content changes constantly, yet the various points of view stay consistent night after night. Apple has the same access to components and contract manufacturers as its competitors, but Apple makes more interesting stuff out of it. It’s not that Apple has better or more data; in fact, they studiously avoid traditional market research. Instead, they consider not what people say they want, but what they are ready for. Then, they design the product according to their own point of view, not that of the audience. David Pogue of the The New York Times called Apple’s “secret sauce” a mix of “simplicity, intelligence, and whimsy.” The results, from the iMac to the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, are unmistakably theirs, as iconic as Letterman’s Top 10 list.

5. Create a Story Around the Material

Think of the story leading up to the punch line. Few comedians during the past 50 years have survived by merely telling a series of jokes. Instead, most are excellent storytellers. Good comedians and designers constantly play with the expectations that are built into the patterns of storytelling. Some comedians are such good performers, they can transcend what would otherwise be quite ordinary material. Likewise, a Michael Graves toaster may not toast bread any better than a plain GE model, but through such products, Target changes the storyline for what everyday products are expected to deliver. That story serves to differentiate Target from WalMart and provides a rationale for paying a little more for functionally identical merchandise.

6. Even Friendly Audiences Need to Be Won Over

Getting people to laugh is probably even harder than getting them to buy. Buck Henry put it very well when he said “to make someone laugh is to disarm them.” Deciding to buy is as much a release of tension as laughing, especially when people aren’t buying on the basis of need alone. People may watch a comedian expecting to laugh, but they still need to be disarmed and won over. It’s a competitive environment, just like business. What does a comedian say after he leaves the stage with the audience cheering? “I killed ‘em out there.” What does a great salesman say after a fantastic quarter? “I made a killing in the market.” Brands have to do more than just meet expectations, they have to penetrate the built-in resistance to commit. That energy and insight has to be supplied by the performer, not the audience.

7. Don’t Expect Everyone to Get It

Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Andy Kaufman were not for everyone, so their appeal was not as broad as Milton Berle, Jay Leno, or Jerry Seinfeld. Switch the core audiences between these groups of comedians and, from the response, you might conclude they were all lousy comics. Similarly, the audiences for a Toyota Prius and a Cadillac Escalade are not all that different demographically, but they don’t “get” cars the same way. Good branding and design, like good comedy, is often the art of sacrifice. You are defined by who and what you’re not for, thus freeing you to excel within the audience that gets you.

8. You Can’t Test Your Way to a Decision

Comedians know what they think is funny, but they can’t test their routines in a vacuum. They might try out new material in smaller clubs, after hours, before making it a part of their main act. Even so, there’s no guarantee that what works in one club will work in front of a larger audience in a different city. Similarly, research predicted that New Coke and the new Tropicana packaging were sure-fire hits. Meanwhile, both Herman Miller’s Aeron chair and the Seinfeld pilot bombed in research. The problem is not that respondents lie or that the researchers are stupid. The biggest mistake is in the willingness to cede control of creative decisions to the consumer. Research is an aid to judgment, not a replacement for it. It still comes down to a judgment call, and that judgment should be based on understanding the consumer, not in asking their permission to proceed.

No, but seriously, folks…

Innovation, like comedy, is a messy, often counter-intuitive business. It’s an iterative loop of creation, feedback, revision, rejection, and creation again. Used correctly, research fuels the understanding that leads to real breakthroughs. In the wrong hands, it all but assures the death of originality. So, I killed some frogs here, but if one more good idea sees the light of day, perhaps they did not die in vain.

Virtual meetings are the suboptimal reality of most information workers’ lives. They save on travel time and costs, but they deprive meeting-goers of a host of non-verbal signals that help us understand each other. Without the body language, the information stream goes down from broadband to dial-up, the signal to noise ratio goes up, and the possibility for miscommunication accordingly rises.

And it’s not just the visual cues that are missing. The quality of most phone lines and digital voice lines are quite poor, so a huge amount of vocal tone is also lost, and the resulting loss of nuance makes virtual meetings even less satisfying and more difficult.

So what’s to be done? Here are five steps you can take to help put some of the richness back into a virtual meeting.

1. Recognize that virtual meetings are suboptimal and plan accordingly.

Do the less important things via virtual meetings whenever possible. Save the emotional stuff for face-to-face meetings, because it’s emotions and attitudes that are conveyed mostly via body language. So if you’re kicking off something important, or celebrating a big win, bite the meeting bullet and bring everyone together. In the virtual meetings, do the routine information-sharing stuff. Trying to solve disagreements or rev people up via a digital phone line is pure folly. Our emotional investment in a phone call is simply less than in a face-to-face meeting, and the lack of visual and tonal information makes it much harder to get key messages across.

2. Plan the virtual meeting in 10-minute segments.

Recent evidence suggests that attention spans may be about 10 minutes long in this computer-addled, information-overloaded age. Our attention spans are certainly no longer on a phone, so plan your meeting in short segments and take breaks in between. The breaks will allow people to re-engage.

3. Pause regularly for group input.

One of the first casualties of a virtual meeting is group participation. The overwhelming tendency is to put the phone on mute and take care of other chores while half-listening. You can keep the group involved by going around the phones asking for input. In a face-to-face meeting, you’re able to tell how people are doing by monitoring their body language. In a virtual meeting, you need to stop regularly to take everyone’s temperature. And I do mean everyone. Go right around the list, asking each locale or person for input.

4. Label your emotions, and ask others to do the same.

Lacking visual cues, we have a very hard time reading other people’s attitudes, so make yours clear and train other people on the call to do the same. Say, “I’m excited about this next bit of news, because it means that..” Or, “Jim, I’m really surprised to hear that third quarters numbers aren’t improving. Surprised and worried, actually. How are you feeling about them?” You’ve got to put back in what the phone lines are removing.

5. Don’t neglect the small talk — but use video.

Face-to-face meetings keep a group tight and cohesive through all the non-verbal signals of solidarity and for the ability of groups to share emotions. That’s much harder to do via virtual meeting. So put the fun and sharing in through small talk — but make it video small talk. Get the group to send each other 30-second or 1-minute clips of what they’re up to or what the weather’s like where they are. Technology makes these clips easy to do, and they help remind people of the visual existence of each other even when not physically co-present. Put some of that money you’re saving on travel to good technological use.

Virtual meetings will never replace the need for humans to exchange emotional and unconscious non-verbal information through face-to-face exchanges, but they can be made to do for all but the most important purposes.

Notes about the Author
Dr. Nick Morgan is President of Public Words Inc., a communications consulting company, and the author of Give Your Speech, Change the World, and Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma. He writes and speaks frequently on communications issues.

By: James Rores, Pipeline Coach

“Everyone loves to win.” That’s what one business owner recently told me when referring to the investment she was making in her business. Results were being produced, her vision was being realized and her team was energized. They were winning!

If you are a regular to our site, you may already know that winning is one of our core values. Transforming winning from a core value into a living discipline, however, requires us to cultivate the attitudes and habits of market leaders and top performers who are above all:

1. SELF-DEFINED
2. SELF-MOTIVATED
3. SELF-ACTIVATED

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Rule 1: Market Leaders and Top Performers are SELF-DEFINED

We believe that winning both confirms and expands our potential as human beings and as business leaders. The key to unlocking this potential is the competition we face every day in our personal and professional lives. The greater the competition the greater the ‘struggle’ and the more energy we must expend as we pursue the goal. But, what is the ultimate competitive source? And, where do we find it?

Many believe that sports exemplify competition at its best. Yet, despite popular belief, competitive environments where individuals and teams stand opposed to each other actually limit the potential of those involved.

When success is defined by our ability to defeat an external competitive source, like an opposing team, it is the opposing team that is ultimately defining us. This is why in sports the quality of our champions from season to season is so often dependent upon the quality of their competition.

Of course, our competitors may help to make us great as we are working our way to the top, but once we are there if we have always been defined by those we were chasing there will be no one left to show us what it will take to stay. This is one of the most
common reasons why the vast majority of market leaders and top
performers simply don’t last.

Without someone to chase – to define their next step – business leaders will convince themselves that they have finally “made it.” The curiosity that once drove their success is replaced by a culture of complacency and arrogance that can only lead the business into crisis. Even if this fate can be delayed by focusing on those who are now doing the chasing, the business will never learn how to lead its market and perform to its potential.

On the other hand, companies that line up to compete against themselves never peak. They are ‘self-defined’ by their ability to improve upon their last, best performance. These companies operate from a position of control. They breed cultures grounded in curiosity, independence, and self-reliance and never become complacent or arrogant. Their leaders turn achievement into a belief and winning into a perpetual habit that is relentlessly tested and proven over time.

By being ready, willing, and able to look inward for the definition of where we are going, we take control of our ability to define what we will become.

* NOTE: If your goal is to take greater control of your segment or market position, you would certainly look outward for intelligence to better understand the challenge ahead. But, you would not DEFINE the goal based on the definition written by your competition. Your definition would be bigger, defined based on your vision and the systems, skills, and talent you can bring to bear. Do you have the building blocks required? Do you have a culture that promotes innovation, risk taking, and rapid decision-making? If there is work yet to do why not create an incremental goal relative to your last best performance and define the adjustments necessary to get you there?

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Rule 2: Market Leaders and Top Performers are SELF-MOTIVATED

We often talk about the importance of systems, skills and talent when building sales teams. All three are critical, but without the confidence that comes from proper preparation individuals and teams can’t sustain the motivation necessary to compete and win over time.

There is a direct relationship between how prepared we are to achieve a goal and how motivated we feel to undertake the challenge. Top performers and market leaders are constantly assessing and investing in themselves; taking it upon themselves to ensure that they are effectively prepared and motivated to address the challenge ahead.

Motivation, however, is not one-size-fits-all. Winning approaches motivate when they are tailored to what the individual or team knows it needs to operate at the next level. Self-motivated individuals and teams know themselves and take it upon themselves to proactively fill the gaps that will prepare them to compete and win.

If the goal is to make winning a cultural imperative in your business, you must find ways to empower individuals and teams to understand and invest in their own unique needs so they too can be better prepared and motivated to compete and win.

* NOTE: The debate over the value of motivational speaking is timeless. In sales environments especially, motivational speakers must deliver more than just entertainment to win the approval of top performers and market leaders. They must deliver the skills and confidence required to turn that motivation into action. In the movie Patton George C. Scott, playing the lead role, told his men, “You don’t win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making the other guy die for his!” A powerful line. But, what if his men were going to battle with pocketknives and slingshots while the enemy wielded bayonets and automatic weapons? This is the same disconnect many sales people are left with following a ‘motivational’ sales meeting or kick-off event when the emotion of the moment is not supported by the tools required to win. Preparation is the only thing that can turn motivation into action.

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Rule 3: Market Leaders and Top Performers are SELF-ACTIVATED

Market leaders and top performers create environments for themselves that reinforce the unique characteristics of what defines and motivates them to win. Yet, it is ultimately the quality and consistency of their execution that determines the quality and consistency of their success.

Beyond simply taking action, those who are self-activated understand that it is in the struggle to compete where the knowledge to succeed is acquired. There is a passion and drive that accompanies and optimizes their efforts. There is a relentless consistency in the attitudes and habits they cultivate. And, there is a higher level of awareness that accelerates decision-making and minimizes distractions.

Those who are self-activated acquire the knowledge and experience to be more confident and self-defined, to be more prepared and self-motivated, and to be more aware and self-activated.

* NOTE: How often have you left a meeting having made relevant and important decisions, only to revisit the same issues again in subsequent meetings? When action is delayed time and opportunity are lost. The opportunity costs can never be recovered. What causes this to happen? Where does the breakdown occur? It starts with leadership. Don’t fall victim to the ‘ready-aim-aim-aim-aim syndrome. Be ready, willing and able to ‘fire’ at all times. Collecting information and identifying needs is critical to initiating change, but without the leadership required to turn that information into action we lose the ability to lead and take advantage of the opportunities before us.

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Today we hear a lot about the new economy, the new economic reality that is facing business leaders who survived the recent downturn. How many of us are leading our own way out of this mess? How many of us are waiting for a market leader to show us the way?

More than any time in the last 25 years, market leaders are gaining a far greater proportionate share of the markets they serve. They are ‘growing into the recovery’ and leaving fewer opportunities behind for those who choose to follow.

We see market followers growing far more slowly. They are having a much tougher time competing for what is left over because broad economic growth is coming so slowly. Market leaders are leaving less behind and there is no rising economic tide to help followers keep pace.

For many of us, this is an old story. Every day we are seeing more businesses fold and more of our neighbors looking for work. What never gets old, however, is the experience of winning and the disciplines that allow perennial top-performers and market leaders to dominate in any economy or business environment.

Where are you? Where do you want to be? What resources are required to get you there? Why not start with your own discipline of winning? After all, everyone loves to win!

Happy holidays! As we wrap up the books for 2010, now is the perfect time to begin planning how you’ll take 2011 to the next level. I’ve compiled a list of 10 New Year’s resolutions for your small business.

1. Build a plan to succeed.

If you want to be successful, you have to have a plan. Creating a plan keeps your business on track and creates a framework for success. Start by examining the three to five things you want to accomplish. Make sure you understand not only what you want to do, but also how you are going to do it.

2. Share your plan.

When you start thinking, “Holy cow, this is the millionth time I’ve said this,” say it again. As a small business owner, continually sharing your plan will allow employees and stakeholders to see what’s important. I once worked for a boss that started every meeting with why our group existed and what we wanted to accomplish. I never felt more connected to the company’s success than I did then. Start by sharing the company plan in the next employee meeting. Make sure each employee knows the plan and understands how the plan links to their job.

3. Grow your network.

You’ve heard the old saying, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” That’s no longer true. Now it’s who knows you that really makes a difference. Take this opportunity to make sure everyone knows you and your personal brand. Start by defining your personal brand, identifying how you are perceived, and commit to attend one networking event per month.

4. Create an awesome workplace.

As a small business owner, you have a responsibility to create an environment that employees enjoy. Employees who enjoy their workplace work harder and your retention levels are higher. Start by determining how your team feels about the work environment and begin to look for opportunities to improve.

5. Recognize your employees’ contributions.

This is a great time to institute an employee recognition program. Talk to employees and gain an understanding of what makes them feel recognized and appreciated. Recognition doesn’t have to be expensive, just sincere. Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most impactful. Start by asking each employee how they like to be recognized and do your best to recognize them that way when they do something positive.

6. Develop a culture of feedback and coaching.

Employees want to be told if they are doing well and how they can improve. When you see an employee doing something right, tell them. When an employee has an opportunity to improve their performance, tell them that too. Just be sure to acknowledge their effort and provide constructive feedback in a supportive way. Start by holding meetings with each member of the team in which you talk about performance. To begin the discussion, focus on three positives for every opportunity.

7. Focus on managing performance.

People want to be viewed as valuable members of the team so understanding employee performance is critical.  Managing performance is all about setting measurable goals for each employee that link to the business’s objectives. This link is critical because without a clear vision teams have a tendency to spin their wheels and waste valuable company resources. Start by ensuring every employee has goals written down and a clear understanding of what they need to accomplish.

8. Document what you do.

Documentation is a first step to creating consistent and reproducible business results. Many franchises are successful, in part, because they build systems and processes into their everyday tasks. Building systems for your business avoids recreating the wheel each time you do something and allows employees to spend time on more important, revenue-generating matters. Start by creating a small procedure manual for key jobs.

9. Get employees the training they need.

How long does it take to get a new person up to speed in your business? Set new and existing employees up to succeed by providing the proper training and tools needed to do their job. This doesn’t have to be expensive and the return on your investment will be well worth it. Start by creating a consistent new employee training experience.

10. Strengthen your team.

Team building doesn’t have to be time consuming. Building an effective team is about knowing what makes them tick and knowing what you can do to remove the obstacles that impede performance. Start by getting to know each member of the team and what is important to them.

How To Stay On Track

Often times people try to do everything at once. To increase your success rate, break your tasks into manageable pieces. Don’t try to do everything at once; that is a recipe for disaster.

Once you have broken the tasks into small pieces, hold yourself accountable to those activities and reward yourself for each accomplishment. In the past, I hated doing quarterly budgets, but it was a necessary part of the business. To make sure I did them, I rewarded myself with a nice date night with my wife when they were completed. Suddenly, I looked forward to doing the books. Or maybe it was the time with my wife…

Words to live by.

1. You can choose your attitude. Choose wisely.
2. You can make a difference in someone’s life. Try your best.
3. Love each day.
4. Never be afraid to say you are sorry.
5. Never go to bed angry.
6. Always trust the people around you.
7. Always see the best in people and that is what they will show you.
8. Always learn. If you are not learning you are not growing.
9. Never underestimate the power of kind words.
10. A plan with out action is just talk.

What words do you live by? Have a happy and safe holiday season from Your Training Team.

For those of you that didn’t see the show or preview.  Jessie is a 19yr old girl who was asked to train the Chief Development Officer on how to make sandwiches.  Instead, she berated him for being old, unintelligent and the like.  The whole scene made me cringe.  And what made it worse was that when she came to corporate and learned who he was she was rewarded instead of disciplined.  I mean come on folks.  Lets not reward behavior that should not be tolerated.

I think this episode has pushed me over the Undercover Boss chasm.  Tivo >>>> Delete Season Pass.

If you want to see for yourself …. click here

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By Julian Birkinshaw, contributor

When you ask children what they want to be when they are older, how many of them say they want to be a manager? I’ve certainly never met one who had such aspirations. In part this is because management is a pretty amorphous concept to a ten-year-old. But it’s also because we adults aren’t exactly singing the praises of the management profession either.

For example, in a 2008 Gallup poll on honesty and ethics among workers in 21 different professions, a mere 12% of respondents felt business executives had high/very high integrity — an all-time low. With a 37% low/very low rating, the executives came in behind lawyers, union leaders, real estate agents, building contractors, and bankers.

What should we do about this? Some observers would like us to get rid of the word manager altogether, favoring terms like leader, coach and entrepreneur. But I believe a more useful approach is to reinvent management — to go back to first principles, and recapture the spirit of what management is all about.

We need to help executives figure out the best way to manage, and we need to help employees to get the managers they deserve.

Management versus leadership

Let’s start with a definition: Management is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives. There is a lot of stuff missing from this definition: no mention of planning, organization, staffing, controlling, or budgeting; no mention of companies or corporations; and absolutely nothing about hierarchy or bureaucracy. And that is precisely the point — management is a social endeavor, which simply involves getting people to come together to achieve goals that they could not achieve on their own. A soccer coach is a manager, as is an orchestra conductor and a Cub Scout leader.

But over the last century, the term management has metamorphosed into something narrower, and more pejorative, than Webster’s dictionary might suggest. Managers are often seen as low-level bureaucrats who are internally focused, absorbed in operational details and controlling and coordinating the work of their subordinates.

Why has this change in perception taken place? One reason is that our way of thinking and talking about management is based on the century-old form of management practiced in large industrial firms. This approach to management was all about improving efficiency, standardization and quality control, and it was built on principles of hierarchy, bureaucracy and extrinsic rewards.

The trouble is, these objectives are not what drives success in most sectors today — we are much more likely to be concerned about innovation, agility and engagement. And yet we are still, for the most part, using these industrial-era concepts to shape the way we get work done.

To make room for leadership, gurus felt compelled to diminish the role of management. John Kotter saw managers as being the ones who plan, budget, organize, and control, while leaders set direction, manage change, and motivate people.

Warren Bennis viewed managers as those who promote efficiency, follow the rules, and accept the status quo, while leaders focus on challenging the rules and promoting effectiveness. By splitting the work of executives in this way, Kotter, Bennis and others squeezed out the essence of what managers do and left them with the boring work that “leaders” don’t want.

Leadership is a process of social influence: it is concerned with the traits, styles, and behaviors of individuals that causes others to follow them. Management is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals.

We all need to be leaders and managers. We need to be able to influence others through our ideas, words, and actions. We also need to be able to get work done through others on a day-to-day basis.

What is the future of management?

In the face of all these challenges, can management be reinvented to make it more effective as an agent of economic progress and more responsive to the needs of employees?

Some say it can’t. Henry Mintzberg argues in his most recent book, Managing, that the nature of managerial work has not changed noticeably in the 40 years he has been studying it. Management is fundamentally about how individuals work together, and the basic laws of social interaction are not susceptible to dramatic change.

Indeed, it’s interesting to note that most of the major innovations in management — the industrialization of R&D, mass production, decentralization, brand management, discounted cash flow — occurred before 1930. If we extend this logic, we could conclude that the evolution of management has more or less run its course; that, to use Francis Fukayama’s famous expression, we’ve reached “the end of history” with regard to management progress.

But we haven’t.

Of course there is some validity in arguing that the basic laws of human behavior are not going to change. But management practices are largely dependent on context, and as the nature of business organizations evolves, so too will management.

Another school of thought says we are on the cusp of inventing an entirely new model of management, largely because of the information technology revolution.

The only trouble with this argument is that we have been here before. All the arguments around decentralization and empowerment have been debated for a very long time. Every generation of management writers, including such luminaries as Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and Sumantra Ghoshal, has argued for its own version of revolutionary change in the years ahead. And they cannot all be right.

Is there a third way here? I believe there is.

We don’t need to throw up our hands and say management has gone as far as it can, because that would accept the failures of management as something we must simply live with. And we don’t need to create a whole new model of management — we have plenty of ideas from theory and practice to guide us.

We need to develop a more comprehensive understanding of what management is really about to make better choices. By going back to a basic definition of management — the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals — we can frame our discussion of the activities and principles of management much more explicitly. And armed with this new understanding, we can help managers make better choices within the universe of known possibilities, rather than suggest they invent something that has never been thought of before.

Here is an example. Why should we assume that all important decisions need to be made by the people at the top of the organizational hierarchy?

Traditionally, this was the case, but is it possible that important decisions might be made in less hierarchical or non-hierarchical ways?

Yes it is. In fact, entire books have been written on the “wisdom of crowds” and “crowdsourcing” techniques for aggregating the views of large numbers of people to make better decisions. So it would be wrong to assume that all decisions made in the future will be made exclusively by those at the top, and it would be equally wrong to assume that crowdsourcing will replace traditional decision making structures.

The prosaic truth is that it depends — the right model depends on a host of contingencies, including the nature of the decision being made, the company’s size and background, the interests and capabilities of the employees, and so on.

Your management model is simply the choices you make about how you work — the way you set objectives, motivate your employees, coordinate activities, and make decisions.

Most companies have an implicit approach to defining their management model, by simply working with what they have inherited, or what they have seen in other companies. My view is that you should take a more critical look at those choices. This involves four steps:

1. Understanding: You need to be explicit about the management principles you are using to run your company. These principles are invisible, and often understood only at a subconscious level, but they drive the day-to-day processes and practices through which management work gets done.

2. Evaluating: You need to assess whether your company’s management principles are suited to the business environment in which you are working. There are risks associated with whatever principles you employ, so you need to understand the pros and cons of each one so that you can choose wisely.

3. Envisioning: You need to seek out new ways of working, by looking at examples from different industries and from new contexts.

4. Experimenting: You need to be prepared to try out these new practices in a low-risk way to see how they work.

Alas, there is no recipe book for reinventing management. While these steps suggest a process for evaluating and rethinking your management principles, there is only so much you can learn from the mistakes made by troubled companies or from the latest Dilbert cartoon. The right choices depend entirely on the specific circumstances and opportunities that your company faces, and on your willingness to experiment with unproven practices.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/22/pf/jobs/employee_retention.fortune/index.htm?section=money_pf&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmoney_pf+%28Personal+Finance%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

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FORTUNE — You doled out extra vacation days to make up for paltry bonuses to your top performers. After the 401(k) match was cut, you passed out gift cards to remind your stars how much they mattered. In a tough economy, it’s the little things, right?

Wrong. Perks and trinkets are nice, but they won’t keep your best people when things improve. Some 27% of employees deemed “high potential” said they plan to leave within the year, according to a recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board. That rate of dissatisfaction is rising “precipitously” as the economy stabilizes, says Jean Martin, executive director of the CEB’s Corporate Leadership Council, up from just 10% in 2006 and increasing at twice the rate of the general employee population.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that perks aren’t the only way to keep your high performers engaged. They want a mix of recognition and challenges that stretch them without completely stressing them out. Liz Wiseman, a former Oracle executive and author of the bestseller Multipliers, says money “never came up” when she interviewed 75 Fortune 500 managers about the leaders who motivated them most.

The CEB survey, which asked nearly 20,000 high-potential employees what drove them, found that feeling connected to corporate strategy was tops on their list. But many managers turned inward when the economy sank, giving fewer employees the chance to influence the company’s direction.

Another way to get your stars involved is to turn them into headhunters. Many companies already do so through employee-referral programs, but they don’t realize that there is an upside beyond bringing in new talent. Dave Ulrich, human resources consultant and University of Michigan professor, says such programs can actually boost loyalty for those doing the recruiting. “It sounds tautological,” he says, “but when people behave as if they’re committed, they become more committed.”

Even if money isn’t the best motivator, it still talks. To make a smaller bonus pool go further, fine-tune your timing. Rewards handed out at tough times can have a major impact. It’s also smart to rethink your selection process. More companies are paying bonuses to those with hard-to-replace skills instead of just top performers, says Hay Group comp expert Tom McMullen.

Building a real future lies primarily in bigger opportunities. Yet so-called stretch assignments can be tricky; challenges meant to be energizing can feel like punishment for success if they aren’t designed well. To avoid that fate, managers should make sure assignments give the employee more independence and are custom-tailored to their talents, says Tom Rath, head of workplace consulting for Gallup. If not, he says, “it can be perceived as piling on. And that’s the quickest way to push that person toward the door.”