May No New Thing Arise

Alana Newhouse | Changing How To Change | Factoids | Elsewhere | Elsewhen

Photo by Roberto Sorin on Unsplash

Quote of the Moment

Everything bad comes from change, but so does everything good.

| Alana Newhouse, Brokenism

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There is an old expression in Spanish, often used as a benediction when parting: ‘Que no haya novedad’, or ‘May no new thing arise’. The gist is that change is destabilizing, and this was seen as dangerous.

We now have a less fearful approach toward change, generally. But as Alana Newhouse points out change is the wellspring of all things new, both good and bad.

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I am a bit delayed on releasing this issue, which I had planned for Thursday. I got bogged down in other work and research. Apologies.

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Changing How To Change

Ashley Goodall is the co-author, with Marcus Buckingham, of a truly great book, Nine Lies About Work. I quoted them and wrote about some of its themes in A Useful Fiction [emphasis mine]:

Just as the idea of the company is […] unreal, so is the idea of company ‘culture’. It’s a useful fiction. That doesn’t mean we should dispense with it; however, that does mean we should be careful not to mistake it for what it isn’t. Culture locates us in the world. It consists of stories we share with one another to breathe life into the empty vessel of “company.” But—and here’s the kicker—so powerful is our need for story, our need for communal sense making of the world, that we imagine that our company and its culture can explain our experience of work. And yet it can’t. So strong is our identification with our tribe that it is hard for us to imagine that other people inside our company are having a completely different experience of ‘tribe’ from us. Yet they are — and these local team experiences have far more bearing on whether we stay in the tribe or leave it than do our tribal stories.

| Marcus Buckingham, Ashley Goodall, Nine Lies About Work

The best business book of 2019, and since, I think.

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Goodall, in Corporate America: Employees Need Stability, Not Constant Change, takes on the never-ending change mantra that seems to dominate corporations these days. Here’s a few of his recommendations:

I think that what’s happened in the last few years is that we’ve decided that change and improvement in businesses are the same thing, and they’re not. Improvement demands an environment where people can offer their best. And a lot of disruption directly undermines that environment.

I think he’s alluding to the necessity for learning, a culture for learning, and too much extrinsic change — imposed by corporate initiatives — disrupts individual and team-level learning.

It’s a ridiculous proposition to argue that we should do away with change. But we do need a way of distinguishing between change that lifts humans up and change that pushes people down. I think a lot of the ways to distinguish between those two is to actually … to start by understanding the psychological needs of human beings at work.

[…]

We humans do very well with some sense of control over our environment or agency. When we announce a change initiative, we’re announcing it. We’re not inviting people to control it, we’re telling them what’s going to happen.

When I read that, I immediately thought about the Bayer DSO initiative (see Bayer and Co-Determination), in which the U.S. employees collided into a top-to-bottom change initiative almost totally directed by the CEO, with little input from U.S. workers.

I think we’d do better if we trained leaders to look for sources of stability. What can be kept the same? What is valuable in an organization in terms of its rituals, its rhythms, its structures, its cadence? And then on a basis of that stability to ask the question, what might be better?

There is good change, and less good change, and bad change. And that your job is not to create change, your job is to create improvement. And so that demands that you be able to distinguish between those sorts of changes.

The second thing is to change more slowly. Time is where we rediscover, as humans, our certainty, our agency, our belonging, our meaning, our rhythms and rituals. And then the third thing is [to] honor stability.

Stability is not stasis, but stability is a generally predictable set of relationships and ways of doing things that help people do their jobs.

If leading is about making things better, then leading has to be about understanding what people need so that they can help you make things better. That’s the answer.

Business management might benefit from adopting the mindset that John Rawls called the ‘Veil of Ignorance’: someone asked to consider which principles they would select for the basic structure of society — in our case, a business — but they must select as if they had no knowledge ahead of time what position they would end up having in that business.

But, the philosophical shadowplay aside, the executives who are so strongly motivated to undertake change initiatives — because it sends signals of action to shareholders and markets — are unlikely ever to cast themselves as an accounting clerk or an engineer, being made into mincemeat in the grinder of the newest grand change scheme.

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Factoids

Intelligent.com surveyed 800 managers, directors, and executives in December 2023 and found that more than a third admitted they'd rather hire someone with more experience than a recent college grad. And it doesn't stop there. Nearly half are even open to hiring older employees who are “overqualified” just to avoid bringing younger people into the mix. It's a pretty interesting shift in hiring preferences and a departure from recent historical norms that favored the young.

| NewRules

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Only about a tenth of Americans read a daily newspaper, and nearly half never read one at all. Fewer than a quarter watch television news.

| Unherd

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[15-year-old] students who spend less than one hour of “leisure” time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose usage is greater than five hours a day.

| PISA

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Across the [U.S.], about 70 million acres have burned over the past 10 years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Federal agencies have fallen behind in replanting; only 5.5 percent of their destroyed and harvested acres were reforested in 2023, compared with nearly 50 percent in the 1990s. The state governments and thousands of private landowners that own the rest aren’t doing much better.

| Lydia DePillis

Russia, the most forested country in the world, is home to 642 billion trees.

| Alexander Nazaryan

That is a lot of trees in both cases.

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Elsewhere

In There’s a surprising culprit behind mass layoffs, says a prominent management professor at Wharton, Sheryl Estrada speaks with Peter Capelli, who lays out some bad economic incentives for lay-offs:

For decades, public companies have been required to use generally accepted accounting principles to report their financials. But the standards for these accounting rules set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board need a reboot, according to Cappelli. Though they may be your biggest competitive advantage, "Employees are not considered assets—even though the tenure of a valuable employee is often far longer than the life of any piece of capital equipment,” he writes.

Employees, along with investments in them, are treated as expenses or liabilities, Cappelli notes. According to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks tech layoffs, 312 tech companies have laid off more than 97,000 workers since January.

But sometimes layoffs are counterproductive as there are also hidden costs, Fortune’s Geoff Colvin reports. “Some companies learned this lesson the hard way in past downturns,” Colvin writes. “In the prelude to the Great Recession, Northwest Airlines fired hundreds of pilots. When business recovered, it couldn’t hire pilots fast enough and lost millions of dollars of revenue from canceled flights.”

The current state of financial accounting of human capital also distorts practices in hiring, training, and benefits, according to Cappelli. Let’s say a company believes in an employee's potential and sends them for a tech course. You’d think that would be investing in an employee. However, the financial accounting rules consider training costs an expense that “needs to be completely offset by income earned that year,” Cappelli writes.

Once again, all the reasons why not to invest in workers, and to devalue learning.

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Elsewhen

I wrote this back in 2012, based on a piece by Eric Ries.

Five Whys Illuminates A Core Flaw At The Heart Of Today’s Business

Eric Ries demonstrates the application of Taiicho Ohno’s Five Whys technique, originally developed as part of the Toyota Production system. But In Eric Ries’s case, it illustrates why start-ups (and all companies, really) need to invest in training employees and not just pretend that know-how will miraculously happen: