Business Encounters: Life Scientist

Building a Successful Working Environment

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Creating a working environment seems simple. As in It’s a Jungle in There, you can distill that down to:

  • Care about your staff or co-workers.  (ch. 21)
  • Recognize and praise their accomplishments. (ch 22)
  • Help others out (ch 23).

But creating a successful organization takes much more effort and a mini-degree in psychology.

The challenge starts with how you hire people. 

What are your current criteria? Are you seeking intelligence, flexibility, compassion, perseverance, energy, enthusiasm, mental toughness, physical fitness, leadership, or adherence?

Then decide what makes a person a good fit for your organization by describing:

1) Characteristics that help someone succeed in your enterprise

  • If your Friday dress code means that staff can ditch the suit, but should still be “professional,” that tells you a lot about what you value.
  • If your industry is rapidly changing and challenged with new technology, then flexibility and innovativeness may be your top priority.

2) Criteria that helped others in the past, assuming the environment hasn’t changed.

3) Personal values that predict success in the position

  • Options include money, autonomy, work-life balance, travel, quiet, minimal interaction, constant action, desire for a big success, fear that effort will be discarded, etc.

Once the staff member is on board, it’s time to get them up to speed. Don’t just dump them onto the organization and assume they will “figure it out.” Have a plan for training and inspiration that conveys the organization’s core vision, mission, philosophy, and values. If someone doesn’t seem to buy the core organizational direction, you have a problem you need to fix promptly.

Then use qualitative and quantitative to assess the accuracy of the fit. Perhaps you thought that the person having “energy” was paramount. Then you realized that the person you hired based on that criterion was always pushing for a change in a direction that conflicted with your obligations or timeline. Perhaps the proper criterion you are looking for is “passion” for your mission and goals. That passion will translate to “energy” for staying the course to achieve success.

The fit might be great, but the organization isn’t consistent or is providing conflicting messages. The solution is organizational, not personal.

Or, despite your best efforts, the fit for this position isn’t right. Before you give up, maybe another area would demonstrate an improved fit. For example, you assumed that the person was more extroverted, but it seems that they like quiet and working one to one with people. Migrating to a position that involves coaching vs. one with the leadership of a large team may be the right solution.

Finally, there are the red flags. Occasionally some folks have a toxic side. They breed resentment, crave control, manipulate and intimidate. You need a system to identify such people. It is unlikely they are going to tell you that harming your organization is their goal. And other staff are likely to be intimidated and unwilling to come forward. Folks who are bullied look to supervisors to take action – that’s your (unpleasant) job. You need a system in place to ensure you collect information from other staff so you can identify the problem and take action.

To summarize, It’s a Jungle in There recommends to be kind and helpful to folks and give out praise liberally for work well done. That is a tiny piece of ensuring that you are creating a working environment where everyone is working together, doing their best, and helping the organization meet its mission.

References:

Photo Credit: Competency-circle.jpg. Components of competency-based management. 1 October 2010 (UTC).  Paduch. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

About Health Impact Studio

We are a dedicated team of developers and researchers with the mission to improve the health of individuals through novel technology including games, virtual reality, and role-playing simulations. We welcome input from the full range of stakeholders to create a customer experience with the broadest applicability to improving health outcomes.

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So Where is the Creative Destruction? (Part 1 of 3)

Assuming the existing paradigm of medical school education is tired and in need of replacement, the next question is why hasn’t it happened? Technology change is all around us. Students have replaced memorization and note cards with the EHRs, phones, laptops, and Google. Yet the system is relatively unchanged. How come?

A review of creative destruction is helpful. The original theory of creative destruction (replacement of old with new) was that downturns in the economy spurred such destruction. This “liquidation model” proposed that when things go bad people revisit resource allocation and come up with novel solutions. The application of this model to medicine would infer that the unending growth and riches of healthcare is the problem. Additionally, the ability to dump more and more debt onto medical students (thus forcing students to choose high paid specialties focusing on procedures) has further enhanced the riches of the industry. The end result of all this largesse is that the healthcare aspect of the economy has been protected from from the risks (and destructive value) of recession. Without downturn there is complacency and thus stagnation.

So for us to move out the current “Normal Science” and shift the paradigm, we would then need something bad to happen in terms of health care. Now, since health care is 17% of GDP, you can argue either way.

  • Option #1: No way can that happen, as it will cause our entire economy will crash.
  • Option #2: It is inevitable. How much longer can the US remain competitive when it spends twice what any other country spends and still does not provide health care to everyone?

We do not have the magic ball to predict which one will win. Sadly, based on the above theory, we lose either way. If everything stays rosy then medical student changes. If health care in the US crashes, then medical student training changes but the system is in chaos.

Picture Credit: The Opte Project under CC BY 2.5

Hiring Dilemmas and Keeping Top Performers

Herrenkohl’s book How to Hire A-Players: Finding the Top People for Your Team- Even If You Don’t Have a Recruiting Department suffers from four problems.

The first problem, a “dump them” attitude, is based on the static assumption we associate with human resources. That is, that individuals have defined and mostly immutable skills and talents. In fact, in terms of cognitive tasks (vs. say a physical challenge of putting a ball in a hoop) rarely do individuals recognize their complete skill set. And supervisors have little time to investigate the full set of talents.

In an ocean full of fish, it may indeed be simpler to throw a fish back, but in a competitive market for talent there is logic in seeing if the fish you have can fulfill a need, but in a different area. And a more dynamic company will have expanding and changing needs. An existing employee who is not performing may be appropriate to meet those needs. It’s far more efficient to take an existing known employee and move them to a position where they’re more productive than to fire such an employee and to replace them with an alternative. Of course, if the fish is apathetic or nasty, then put it back in the water.

The second weakness is in the “get the best” attitude. This assumption also does not recognize that human resources are a competitive market. Folks who are “A-players” understand that. They will, by definition, be more expensive and harder to retain. In some cases, such as programming, the added productivity far outweighs the added cost, but in that case it is mostly because better programmers like to program more than they like to negotiate salaries. In business, highly valuable staff are quite adept at negotiating higher salaries commensurate with the skill set. Consider what Goldman Sacks pays its upper level staff.

The effort to obtain “A-players” may be equivalent to Porter’s marketing strategy of a race-to-the-bottom. By competing for a limited resource you are implementing a plan that is repeating what your competition is doing. As in marketing, it may be more strategic to apply an approach that is unique and different. Look outside the obvious. You’ll end up with a gem that no one else sees.

The third weakness is that the book is caught in an older/non-digital model of corporate growth. Most new startups with high capitalization are tech or life science companies. The book ignores the fact that in the current age we can have enormous corporate valuations based on just 20 employees. Recruiting 20 employees is not as challenging or difficult. Finding and optimizing talent is still important, but with a low head count it need not be as complicated or time consuming. Performance problems will also be more obvious.

The final change that the book misses is the movement toward digital marketing and models of sales that do not use human resources. Marketing efforts, including social marketing and content marketing, feed the sales process and enable much more willing customers, thus decreasing the emphasis on a skilled sales team. Platforms create enormous potential wealth without the need of dedicated resources concerning human capital other than information technology resources to maintain the platform. And IT resources are commodities at this point that can be purchased from external vendors.

Further Reading

Photo Credit: Carol GarnettFishing Father, Daughter Sunrise CC0 Creative Commons, Free for commercial use, No attribution required. Created April 23, 2006.

What Do You Want – Money or Power?

Entrepreneurs are often told that the founder must struggle with a “control versus wealth” dichotomy. So, we ask budding entrepreneurs, “Do you want to become rich or do you want to be in charge?” If the assumption is that the entrepreneur is solely seeking capital appreciation, we may advise the Founder CEO to give up control as fast as possible. If a faster runner comes along you should give the baton to them, right? The more folks rowing your boat the faster it will go.

In fact, this is an artificial construct that mirrors the assumption that monetary wealth is the only way to measure value. Many folks decide that because they can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. Are you captive to that false assumption? If so, then a single yardstick (capital appreciation) can fool you and prior economists to determine that that yardstick is sufficient proxy for value.

Craigslist, Wikipedia, Apache, Linux, MySQL, LibreOffice, and Firefox are all enormously valuable, yet their success did not translate to capital appreciation.Today’s entrepreneurs are not the Robber Barons of old. It is rare that the only motivation is money. Most folks have a sense of fairness, ethical behavior, environmental sustainability, equity, and positive impact. At some time these other values will challenge a steadfast emphasis on monetary gain. As one replaces “wealth” with “value” the dichotomy falls apart.

Control and value are not dichotomous. Tight control can yield or destroy value, and lead to a loss of control. For example, a lack of control by the founder can generate a lack of value placed on social responsibility and subsequent production of a company with minimal or negative social impact. In fact, that choice may lead to destroying monetary value as well if the customers also value social impact. Do folks really think that one can launch a successful company that sells a product that kills people (e.g., the tobacco industry)?

If the personal definition of value is more nuanced and a non-monetary reason for a desire for control is defined, a simple function won’t do. To be fair to the entrepreneur and guide them in the choices they need to make, we must develop a more broad definition of the trade-offs associated with value creation.

The first step is to define the personal value of control:

  • Do you want control because you have a vision of something that is truly unique?
  • Do you want control because otherwise you have no clue what you do with your time?
  • Is the purpose of control to ensure that you and only you tell you what to do?
  • Do you want to be invcontrol because you get bored doing the same thing?
  • Do you seek out flexibility to engage in opportunities you didn’t foresee?
  • Alternatively, are you tired and would rather be a spectator than a player?

Value can vary as well. All these models of control seeking and avoiding can achieve different types of value:

  • Where does social responsibility fit in?
  • Do you care about externalities?
  • Is compensation parity an issue?

The control vs. value debate is thus not a battle or a trade-off, but the start of an internal and external conversation, and an exploration of how the two relate for you. That isn’t as simple as a dichotomous model, but our brains are pretty sophisticated.

Reducing motivation to two options was inevitably simplistic.

  • How much control over the direction of the startup do you want and what are the personal and external motivations?
  • What value do you want to create? Assuming there are multiple components, how do you rank them in importance or weigh them?
  • If it turns out that you cannot achieve all your potential values, which one is more flexible for you? What value will you give up?
  • Most importantly, how does your being in control map to obtaining value? In other words, without your efforts, would the value still be realized?

Answer the questions now and write them down. Later, when an investor asks you to change your control or the direction of the company, you’ll have an answer and a guide for what direction to go. Over time, one’s desire for control changes as does what we value. Be prepared to ask the questions again; the answers might not be the same.

The vision of an entrepreneur as someone who wants to become fabulously rich or powerful is pervasive. And we expect that to achieve the goal they need to tirelessly work 80+ hours a week and demonstrate to third-party investors on a daily basis that they are willing to forgo everything to make money for them. Instead, perhaps entrepreneurs are people with new ideas who want to work with others to launch them. Entrepreneurship in America is actually decreasing, despite all the resources that are available here versus elsewhere in the world. Perhaps we should stop focusing on burning out entrepreneurs by locking them into a treadmill assuming that value equals money, and instead focus on capturing their creativity and energy.

Photo Credit: Omnidirectional treadmill immersive simulator.JPG Author: David Carmein Licensing: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

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