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>> Kim Ricketts: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is Kim Ricketts,
and I'm here to introduce and welcome Stan Slap, who is visiting us today as part
of a Microsoft Research visiting speaker series. Stan Slap is here today to discuss
his new book, Bury My Heart in Conference Room B, the Unbeatable Impact of Truly
Committed Managers.
Many managers become emotionally detached due to the conflict between what the
company wants done and the possible compromise of their own values. Keeping a
manager emotionally invested is the ultimate trigger for problem solving, risk
taking, and igniting excitement in others. Stan will outline how we create,
identify and hire these kinds of managers. He has revolutionized performance for
some of the world's most demanding organizations. His international consulting
company, Slap, specializes in achieving ferocious commitment in manager, employee
and customer cultures, the three groups that decide the success of any business.
Please join me in welcoming Stan Slap back to Microsoft.
>> Stan Slap: I apologize, because apparently a lot of us have met before and I
don't remember, which is why front row is almost completely empty. Profiles in
courage.
Okay, listen. Before we start, I know you're here for all sorts of reasons today.
I would assume that one of those reasons is to learn, and, you know, there's two
ways to learn anything. There's data and there's experience. And there's two types
of experience. There's good experience, there's bad experience. And even though
we all love to claim we're nibbling from the higher branches, by this point in our
evolution, let's face it, it's most often the bad experience that finally claims
our dim-witted attention, which is why, before we even get started today, I would
like to dedicate our time together to the one company which in recent memory has
committed the most bone-headed act. An act that is not just so anti-business sense,
it's so anti-common sense that it can only be interpreted as a selfless act, as like
a noble gesture so the rest of us may learn what not to do and so grow and prosper
in our own organizations.
Now, competition for the dedication spot in this talk was understandably fierce.
BP has been sending us fruit baskets for a couple weeks. But I think, you know,
Microsoft, a global company, you know, global outlook, I figured I'd go beyond the
United States and so I think I found a worthy candidate so I would like to dedicate
our time together today to Aeroflot, the Russian airline. Has anyone ever flown
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Aeroflot? Okay. Has anybody ever flown united? You've flown Aeroflot, pretty
much the same thing. And everything I tell you here today is true. Aeroflot
management, in a desperate bid to cure sagging revenues, has leaped upon what they
call a new -- a brand promotion, which they announced in the business press about
six weeks ago. And according to aeroflot, this new customer promotion is called
smile day. And according to aeroflot on smile day, quote, every employee of the
airline will be under orders to smile unceasingly at customers for the entire day.
And so they were asked in the press, so what if smile day is a success? And their
official corporate spokesperson responded, well, if smile day is a success, we will
consider implementing it on an annual basis.
And I thought, you know, it's exactly that treatment of symptom over sickness, of
effect over cause that's really responsible for the chronic ills that business faces
today. Because, you know, the stuff that baffles managers, bedevils them not just
in Microsoft, not just in IT. In every business, in every business unit in every
country from executive to entry level, they're not really new problems. The biggest
problem is that the solutions are not really new solutions. Now, nowhere is that
more the case than when it comes to a subject like we're going to talk about today,
the emotional commitment, the commitment of managers.
Now the commitment of managers, that's a big subject. I mean, we can spend a lifetime
talking about the commitment of managers. I don't have a lifetime to spend talking
about the commitment of managers. I have about 45 minutes. So I figured I had a
choice. I could make the 45 minutes seem like a lifetime to you, hm? Or I could
focus on what's most important. I'm going to focus on what's most important. And
probably since I'm here at Microsoft, what's most important is I get the story about
Microsoft that's in the book out of the way, okay?
So let me just tell you that story. It's a story about a cat by the name of Orlando
Ayala. Do you know Orlando? Okay. It's a story about when I first met Orlando
when he was running global sales, and, you know, at that point, if you looked in
the Oxford dictionary of the English language under aggressive, they just had
Orlando's picture there. I say about Orlando at the time, he seems friendly unless
he senses you're edible.
and so Orlando, running the sales org, had never brought his senior team together
at that point. He'd always met with customers, countries out in the regions.
Somebody told him about Bury My Heart in Conference Room B. And somebody said, you
know, you got to bring us together sooner or later, you know, all of us. Instead
of just little pockets and we should come together and we should do this. And he
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said, all right, well, let's do that.
him in here to do it.
And whoever the guy is who developed it, get
So I said, all right, you know, I'll do this. And we just started working with
Microsoft and the event was supposed to happen off campus. At the last minute,
Orlando, we got an e-mail from Orlando's office that he changed it to on campus.
And I didn't attach any particular importance to this. But his managers definitely
did.
Now, this is his senior team, okay? So they're all pretty big gun slingers on their
own, right? They're managing billions of dollars in revenue. They got thousands
of people working for them. And so I thought they would be able to handle the
provocative counter intuitive argument that is Bury My Heart in Conference Room B.
No. They wouldn't make eye contact. They were twitching, they're like, you know,
they're like -- and they were just going crazy. And it was driving me crazy.
So I said, all right, all right, stop, stop. I said, what exactly is the problem?
And they said, it's this room. You don't know this room. We know this room. This
is the room Orlando brings us in to beat us up about our sales numbers. We call
this room the slaughter house. They said, we can hear the screams. We can see the
blood dripping on the wall, right. And here I am saying, so open your groovy selves
up and bring yourselves to work. That's like telling a bunch of cows open your groovy
selves up and bring yourselves to McDonald's. They go no, we're not going to do
it, right?
So we're like slugging our way through the two-day session version of Bury My Heart,
and they're not getting it. It's like, for the first time ever, a management team
is not getting it, and I'm the one who's stuck with facilitating. I said this just
can't happen, but they're not getting it. I mean, we're like maybe six hours through
this material, and they're still not getting it.
I remember at one point, I said to one of these guys Mike, I said, so tell me about
your deepest personal values. He said, all right I got values of health and
spirituality and wisdom. I said great. Now, I work for you. Tell me what that
means to me. He said, okay. I've got values of health, spirituality and wisdom.
So where are we going, my people? We're going to whack the snot out of oracle, that's
where we're going. We're going to crush them like the insects they are. What you
need to do is work harder, work faster, work more. Everything is going -- I'm like
no, no.
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Second day -- all true. Second day, I said all right, listen, somebody call
security, because nobody is leaving here until you get this. You've got to get this
for yourself, for the enterprise, for your customers, for your people.
So we did a couple things. We got deeper into the material and finally, it cracked.
You could see the epiphany lights start to trip. It got very emotional in that room,
as it often does when discussing these kinds of things. Anyway, we kind of like
dragged our way through to a reasonable close.
So Orlando had asked me, if you're going to work with my directs Monday and Tuesday,
can you do the next level down, still pretty; on Thursday and Friday? So rather
than go back to San Francisco, where I'm based, I stayed up in Redmond that day.
So morning of the day after we did this session with Orlando, I'm standing in the
hallway talking to his business manager, Mike Kramer, and Orlando walks up and said,
I love what we just did last couple of days. He said, I want you to put some thoughts
down about how this could apply company-wide.
And he walked off. And I said to his business manager, I said, well, that was nice.
He said no, Orlando doesn't have a nice switch. That wasn't nice. I said, so he
really wants me to do that? He said yes. I said, well I'll have to do that. He
said, do it now is what he meant. I said right -- he said yes, he's going to a meeting
with Bill and Steve and the 80 top execs at Microsoft tonight, and he's going to
present tomorrow morning. I think he wants to have this information.
I said, okay. All right. And promptly forgot all about it. So I don't remember
it till I get to the hotel that night around 11:00. And I think, oh, shoot, I got
to do this things for Orlando. So I'm just fuzzed. It's been a long day. So I
open up the laptop and I did what I know every single person in this room has done
many times before. I just start typing. I mean, I'm just trying to get my head
in the zone, you know. And so just anything to just like get back into the act.
So I'm typing and I'm typing and I'm typing. Pretty soon, what I'm typing ends up
becoming this blazing indictment of every wrong move I think Microsoft has ever made
to torpedo its brand viability. I'm having a great time. I'm like, Orlando, you
know what your problem is. Right? At one point I wrote, Orlando, there isn't an
empire in history that thought they were going to fall before they fell. I thought,
that's good. I mean, I'm the only one in the room, right? Everything is poetry.
So I finally finished this whole thing, get it out my system, lean back to begin
the e-mail I'm actually going to write, and this very finger, this one right here,
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out of some deviant muscle memory, entirely of its own accord leaps up and goes send.
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I sent this to Orlando saying, basically, you know, Orlando,
don't take this the wrong way, but you have the intellectual agility of a small soap
dish, all right? I sent this to Orlando, a guy I respect very much. And I'm like,
I'm looking at it going oh, my God, oh, my God, what do I do? What? I'm like asking
this of the laptop, right? What do I do? I mean, what am I going to do, send him
another e-mail that says Orlando, did my brother just send you an e-mail? You know,
he's back in the [indiscernible], I game him my password.
I don't know what to do. At this time, it's 3:30 in the morning. I'm so fuzzed,
I just can't figure out, how do I get out of this. So I leave a wake-up call at
the front desk for 5:00, and the desk clerk says, that's 90 minutes. I said just
give me the wake-up call! He said okay, okay. So the phone rings, and I've had
90 minutes' sleep. I stumble back to the laptop, and I try and compose -- what do
you say, right?
So finally, hours later, I have a fairly lame e-mail to send to Orlando that said
Orlando, I'm not taking anything back that I said to you in my first e-mail if you
happen to agree with it. But one could read that first e-mail a number of different
ways. In fact, one could not read it at all, which is my recommendation to you,
right. I mean, it's like the best I can do, right?
I start to send it, I can't get online. I'm going oh, my God. I mean, he's about
ready to do his present -- and so they don't have wifi in this hotel. This is a
few years ago. And so I have a room service fork and I'm chiseling into the wall
liking for -- like I could hot wire it. Finally, I think I've got to go. I'm
supposed to work with his team so I got to get going.
So I look at the phone by the bed. I see the phone slightly off the hook, why I
couldn't get online. By the time I knock the phone back on and send this e-mail,
Orlando, who's definitely gotten the first e-mail, is already standing up to talk
to Bill and Steve and the 80 top managers of Microsoft. And didn't get the second
e-mail. And so Orlando stands up, fresh from Bury My Heart in Conference Room B.
And this is a meeting called Microsoft Software Dynamo, deep in the Washington woods,
supposed to talk about, you know, a lot of serious issues about business success
and market share and growth. And he's a head of sales so he's up like first. He's
going to talk, right?
Orlando says, I don't want to talk about sales. I want to talk about me. People
are like, excuse me? This guy looks like Orlando. This guy sounds like Orlando.
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He said, in fact, let me tell you a story about my grandmother.
excuse me? Is she a customer? You know.
The people are going,
And people are saying, what is that? Is this some alien possession? Is it true
they enter anally? Who is this guy? And he just launches off into this Jerry
Maguire kind of speech, and he ends up saying listen, you know, there's something
I've just learned, and what I've learned is that I can't be real in this company.
He said, and if I can't, if I can't be real in this company, in my position, with
my authority, then nobody can be real. He said, and if we can't be real to ourselves,
we can't possibly be real to our customers.
And this was a few years ago, and he said, and personally, I'm tired of taking heat
over our business practices. It's a violation of my personal values. And then he
ends with, and let me tell you, there isn't an empire in history that thought they
were going to fall before they fell. And he sits down. His talk's supposed to go
an hour. It goes 20 minutes. He sits down. And there was dead silence in the room.
And then the room explodes, and the 80 top managers in this company stand up and
give him a five-minute -- five solid minute ovation.
And people are clapping and people are sobbing, and they're going I'm hurting too,
you know, right? [indiscernible] and people go Orlando, Orlando, Orlando! Except
for Bill, okay. And you remember the kids game, paper covers rocks? A top manager,
Bill. After a while, people notice that Bill is not, like, cheering, right? And
so they kind of calm down and Bill is sitting there with steam pouring out of his
ears saying Orlando, you just did a very bad thing. You said we are bad people.
We are not bad people. Orlando says, bill, if that's what you can say to me after
your 80 top executives just gave me a five-minute ovation, I don't belong in this
company. Starts to walk out. Steve jumps up and goes wait a minute, wait a minute!
Meanwhile, I'm eating a croissant in my meeting going, I wonder how it's going with
Orlando?
So they stop the meeting, they send everybody back to their rooms, say wait in your
room. And bill and Steve and Orlando sit down and they talk, and Bill starts to
talk about his own values and what it's like to be Bill and how much this company
means to him. And when somebody is attacking this company, it's like they're
attacking his family. And like all of us would perceive an attack on our family,
we would intentionally overreact and that's really misperceived by the outside world
and sometimes by -- even within Microsoft.
They bring everybody back and Bill stands up and talks to everybody, and from there
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came this thing, realizing potential about finding corporate values, which is not
where we were going with Bury My Heart. But anyway, I mention this because for the
book, I interviewed a lot of people who were in that meeting, and I went back and
interviewed Orlando. And Orlando said, I was sure I was going to be fired for this.
Said, you know, even in my position, you don't call out the company. You just don't
do that. You know, we can say we believe in being critical and stuff. That's
critical of you personally or something else. Not of the entire structure and
culture of the company.
And he said, my brothers all live in Seattle so I called them together the night
before, told them what I was going to do, and said I'm probably going to be fired
for it. And they said, why would you ever do such a thing? He said, because I have
just learned that you cannot say tomorrow I am, but today I'm not. And the only
person who can determine your legacy is you.
And he said, before I stood up, I remembered thing to myself, well, let's see how
real this company actually is. He said, nobody was more surprised by me. It was
the most bizarre thing I've ever seen, people crying, people clapping. And I said,
well, how did it feel to do this? And he said, you know, he gets that Orlando look,
pretty intense. And he said, I felt liberated.
That's what I want for you. That's why I wrote this book is to help you feel
liberated. Not from your job. I mean, this book is the ultimate book about work
life balance. Which work life balance is not going to come to you escaping from
work. It's going to come to you if you can bring the best of who you are wherever
you are, including work.
And that's what this book is about. This book is designed to completely redraw the
potential for manager fulfillment and enterprise success. And so I want to talk
to you a little bit about how we do that.
So this isn't a leadership book. I mean, the world does not need another leadership
book. And I'm not going to ever say I wrote one. But I talk about leadership here
in the book, here and there as an organizing framework. So for today, I'm going
to use that same framework for a little while, and let's talk about leadership.
I did ten years of research on this book. I had, even before the book, because this
is an actual solution we put into the enterprise, and so there's ten years of research
and then I've had the solution for ten years so this was Beta tested with tens of
thousands of managers in the real/surreal world of a manager. And then to write
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the book, I employed a 23-person research team, including Pulitzer winning
investigative reporters and a specialist in psycho neural biology, a woman that I
just reviewed to make eye contact with for the entire time.
And here's what I found out about leadership. Let me just bottom line the whole
thing for you. Leadership is meaningless. I should just stop right there. Thank
you very much. In case you always wanted to know that, there you go, okay? That's
what all this research has taught me. Leadership is absolutely meaningless.
Now, what leadership provides, that's very important. You know, you can go on
Amazon.com. You can type in books, subject leadership. How many books do you
think, or how many titles do you think are listed? I actually did this for you.
I did it about a week ago and they borrowed like rabbits so I don't have the exact,
but I can give you a rounded figure. How many titles do you think are available
on leadership?
>>: 10,000.
>>: 100,000.
>> Stan Slap: Yeah, close. 389,000. And 84% of those books written in the last
15 years, 91% about something called business leadership. Do you ever wonder where
all this incessant babble about leadership in business comes from? It comes from
the one thing that any company, including this company, wants most from its managers,
from people like you. Emotional commitment.
A manager's emotional commitment, your emotional commitment is worth more than your
financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. A manager's emotional
commitment is the ultimate trigger for their discretionary effort. So your
emotional commitment is the stuff that solves problems that are unsolvable. It's
the stuff that creates energy when all the energy's been expended. And it's the
stuff that ignites emotional commitment in others, like employees and teams and
customers.
Leaders are those rare human beings in history who have emotional commitment and
can inspire it at will in others. Any organizational success on a legendary scale
is the result of a group of emotionally committed managers. And that's the
connection between that and leadership.
Now, any manager in this room -- by the way, before I go any further, let me just
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make sure, how many people in this room are actually managers with head count? Raise
your delicate, well-manicured fingers, please. Okay. Is there anybody here who
would say I would probably classify myself more as the managed? Raise your tough,
callused, working class hands, please. All right.
Well, I'm going to be talking about this from a manager perspective, but the book
has got applications for -- and our talk today does too, for your relationship with
any organization. Family, community, company. So if you're not a manager, though,
don't be getting all snarly and cocky, going ha, ha, ha. Your career could take
a sudden wrong turn. You could become a manager that quickly. You're going to wish
you'd listened to this information.
So let's look at this from a manager perspective. Any manager in this room, joining
any manager at Microsoft, every manager at Microsoft, joining every manager in the
world can appear fully productive and enthusiastic, simply because you are
financially, intellectually and physically committed. But if you've ever witnessed
a human being emotional committed to a cause, working like they're being paid a
million, they're not being paid a dime, you know there's a difference. You know
it's big. It's that difference that the company wants most from you.
Unfortunately, what any company wants most from its managers is the one thing it
most stops its managers from giving. So it's time for some fierce truths about
management. Let me tell you first of all that the neuro biological source of
emotional commitment in a human being is not a mystery. The source is the ability
to live your own values in whatever relationship or environment you're involved in.
So for you as a Microsoft manager that would be the relationship with the company
and your environment at work.
Now, there are a lot of experts about human relationships. I mean, deep -- not
talking about women are from Bloomingdale's, men are from big chief auto parts. Not
that stuff. I'm talking about deep expertise in human relationships. Regardless
of their point of view, they'll all tell you the same thing as a fundamental tenet.
If you want an emotional committed relationship between human beings or groups of
human beings, everybody involved in that relationship has got to be free to bring
the best of who they are into the relationship. Unchecked, unvarnished,
unhesitatingly.
Well that concept is almost impossible in the relationship between a manager and
their company. A manager may be a great job to have. You may be having a great
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time doing that job. But embedded in the job description of any manager is a
requirement to constantly subordinate or compromise your personal values in favor
of company priorities.
I'm not saying you're out there committing heinous acts as part of some Faustian
bargain. Although even if you are, listen up. But what I am saying that what the
company wants done and how it wants it done must regularly take precedence over your
own deep priorities, right? That's what it means to be a manager. You serve the
company first.
Well, if you put a person in a position like that, they detach to protect themselves.
That's an automatic, it's a neuro biological reaction. Your values, according to
your brain, the limits in your brain are healthy safe choices for you. If there's
any hesitation about you being able to live those values, your brain actually neuro
chemically detaches you from the circumstance.
So if you can't physically leave, you're gone here. Now, you may not realize you're
gone. You're detached. There's a party in your head. You're not invited. But
the detachment is there.
And let me give you a little data point about this. The first time we put 10,000
managers through this process as part of the research -- now, these are managers
from executive to entry level, Montana to Mumbai, in many of the world's most admired
companies. We went back and looked at some of the data and the answer to the
question, well what are your deepest personal values, was this. Now, this is not
a test question. There's no right or wrong values. But there were some that were
chosen more often than others by far.
The number one value chosen by more managers than any other was what, do you think?
>>: Integrity.
>> Stan Slap: Integrity was on the list. Family, number one. Integrity, number
two. Now, we asked those same managers, 10,000 managers, executive to entry level,
70 different countries, many of the world's most admired companies, what are the
personal values that you are most under pressure to compromise on a regular basis
to do your job successfully? What was number one, you think.
>>: [indiscernible].
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>> Stan Slap:
>>:
What was number two, you think?
[indiscernible].
>> Stan Slap: Yeah. Most important, most compromise.
emotional detachment right there.
That is the equation for
Now, if this isn't -- and by the way, this happens in every company. In a bad
company, have any of you ever worked in a really nasty, toxic, belly of the beast
kind of company? Just awful? Okay. In those kinds of companies, the detachment
is a conscious choice, right? Managers in those kinds of companies say, you know
what? I'm going to suit up every day for the detachment factory and hope that, you
know, who I really am is still at home when I get back.
But even in a good company like Microsoft, trying to do the right thing for its
managers, this detachment happens anyway and in many ways it's more dangerous because
it's harder to see. And intellectual, financial, physical commitment will combine
to masquerade as emotional commitment. But emotional commitment is something far
different, far deeper and far more reliable for the enterprise.
So if there is no real emotional commitment, any hope of real leadership is gone.
So let's talk about real leadership for just a couple minutes. If you go back to
those 389,000 books on Amazon.com and read them, they will all tell you pretty much
the same thing about the purpose of leadership. They will tell you that the purpose
of leadership is to increase shareholder value and team productivity. Okay?
That's not true. That is not the purpose of leadership. That has never been the
purpose of leadership. That will never be the purpose of leadership. It will do
those things, coincidentally when you apply it in the enterprise, but the irreducible
essence of leadership is leaders are human being who live their own deepest values
without compromise and they use those values to make life better for other people.
That's why people become leaders and that's why people follow leaders.
So the question today, and for those who are going to watch this later, is can
the -- let's say the people in this room, can you become real leaders? Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. Leadership is not some rare genetic imperative. It's innate in every
human being. It's damn well innate in you. You just have to know where to get
started.
Now, you study the chronology of any iconic leader in history, their leadership all
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started in exactly the same place. With their personal values being put under
tremendous pressure. You want to know something's important to you, meet somebody
trying to take it away.
Well, that same pressure is on your personal values as a manager. It's just harder
to tell, because the pressure on your values as a manager arrives gift wrapped. It
arrives with financial reinforcement. It arrives with a sense of self to be gained
from affiliating with the might and magnificence of the company. Besides, it's not
like Microsoft actually wants you to be a leader. Okay. You didn't fall for that,
did you? All right. Let's just clear this.
Okay. No company really wants their managers to be leaders. You study leadership
throughout human history, leaders are people who use their own values and vision
to overthrow the established order and set everybody free. What are you, nuts?
This is a last thing that any company actually wants their managers to be particularly
interested in or capable of. What the company wants you to do are the things that
leaders do. Like model selfless acts of devotion. And inspire a sullen group to
make a bloody charge up the competitor's hill to capture the fourth quarter flack.
And what the company really wants is your emotional commitment. Now, there's
nothing wrong with that. But listen up. That's not why you should be a leader.
As a manager, your most important responsibility is to Microsoft. But as a leader,
your most important responsibility is to yourself.
You must fulfill your personal responsibility first, far from being a subversive
act, this is the single most supportive corporate action you can ever take. The
bottom line, the bottom line of the book, the bottom line of my message you hear
today about this is you will never really work for Microsoft unless Microsoft really
works for you.
Now, I say in the book, this shouldn't have to be a book. It should be a pamphlet.
Who's going to argue with that concept, right? Well, let me tell you who's going
to argue with it. Managers. Managers will argue with it all the time. And the
weird thing that I found in the research here is if I took any couple of you out
of this room and talked to you as managers about how you want to live and work and
live at work, managers tend to be pretty sane and sensible about that. Even if you
couldn't put it into words, you would say, I'd like to live my personal values at
work. I'd like to be judged by that. I'd like to use that as a filter for which
I do my job.
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If I brought you back in this room and you're surrounded by a bunch of other manager,
some bizarre herd mentality takes over and you begin to legislate against yourselves.
There's no evil brain in the jar behind the curtain, okay? The conditions that
managers deplore about work, like not being able to live their values at work, those
were created, accepted, mandated by managers acting as management. The honor guard
of the corporate organism.
Let me tell you something, the corporate organism, like any organism, it has a
priority. First priority of survival. And this concept is petrified to the
corporate organism. Because the corporate organism believes it needs to be the
dominant organism in the relationship with you, because it's got to get you to do
what it wants you to do when it wants you to do it. How it wants you to do it.
So it will bribe you. It will bluff you. It will bully you if it has to, and it
will get your commitment, financial, intellectual and physical commitment. But
unfortunately, it will automatically shut down the one commitment most important
to success, which is your emotional commitment. Because by demanding to be
dominant, you're not able to live your own values, which is why even on the biggest
days with the best wins, the C suite feels anxious and vulnerable because the
corporate organism senses it doesn't have ultimate commitment, because it stopped
itself from getting ultimate commitment.
Because it's anxious and vulnerable, it's even more likely to overcontrol. And so
from the corporate perspective, if you have family as a value, maybe you won't work
50, 60, 70 hours a week. Maybe you won't take your laptop and cell phone on vacation
with you. Maybe you won't be on that conference call at 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday. Maybe
you won't miss your kid's birthday party, baseball game, whatever. If you have
integrity as a value, maybe you won't represent our products as the best and the
only, when they may not at any given time be either one. Or in IT, they may not
even exist.
If you have health as a value, maybe you will insist on balance, true balance in
your life. If you have creativity as a value, maybe you won't listen to the way
we want you to do it. You'll do it your own way.
And so from the corporate perspective of the corporate organism is if I set you free
to pursue your own values, you'll leave me and I'll die. Well, the irony in this
is you're already free. You're free to detach. That's as free as a human being
can get. The key is to make you free to commit. And this is a very difficult thing
for the corporation to talk about. To think about. I mean, consider how many times
14
you've had leadership as a concept embedded into your job descriptions. That you've
been talked to about it, shrieked about it, bleeded about it. How many times you
said you've got to be a leader, this is a leader, take leadership training, read
leadership books, be a leader, do leadership things. Yet how many times has it
stopped short of allowing the true motivation that is critical to the formation of
leadership in the first place, which is live your own values, pursue your own values
first.
So from the corporate perspective, inviting real leaders into the organization to
inhabit the corporate organism could be death to the organism, because real leaders
will not carry the corporate values wallet card. They'll carry their own. They'll
burn the corporate house down to make a point.
But even if -- but only if the point of their leadership was to overthrow the
established order. What this book is saying is what if the point of their leadership
was to protect the established order? Because by protecting the company, they're
protecting their ability to live their own values. Humanity is only dangerous and
unpredictable if you don't start from humanity in the first place. The new truth
is the company cannot always be the first cause. Managers fulfillment of their own
values have to also be a primary cause. This is not licensing chaos. This is
insuring control. There is no greater way for the enterprise to become the cause
than by not always insisting on becoming the cause.
And I would say this, I say this to the C suite all the time. Could you trust your
managers to take care of this company if you said live your own values as a priority?
Here's an easy way to figure that out. Could you trust insures if the answer is
yes, you're going to extend that same trust throughout the manager culture.
And I will tell you this as well, we do this with the C suite as well, and when you're
clawing your way to the top in your career you can be convinced that everything will
be figured out and fulfilling when you get there. When you finally get there, and
you find that things still suck, and things are still unanswered, and you
can't -- you're kind of a culture of one, you can't really admit what you don't know
what doesn't feel good? And you have all the apparent rewards a job has to offer
and there's no place else to go, people jump from the top floors in buildings, not
the bottom, okay? So this is something that plagues managers at every level.
Okay. Let me just wrap this up here for you with a few other things. When managers
get the point of Bury My Heart in Conference Room B, they have three sales questions.
So I think it's fair, before I answer other questions from you today, to explore
15
those three questions. Because they always have those three questions.
are sales questions, and they are in order.
And they
The first question that managers always have, once they get the concept, is, can
I sell this to myself? Because you are -- you're talking about being committed and
I'm detached. If you're detached from a relationship, you're doing that because
you think it's safe. Safer to be detached. So you're telling me to be unsafe. And
I respect that. I mean if you think it feels funky when your foot falls asleep at
work, wait till your heart wakes up. I totally get that.
But the bigger risk is to not do what we're talking about. And let me prove it to
you right here. I have heard from so many managers at this point, oh, you're talking
about my personal values? That's what this whole thing is about, living my personal
values? Don't worry about it. Of course I live my personal values. I'm an adult.
In my personal life, I protect and promote my personal values.
But I'm also a manager, so yes, in my personal life, I protect and promote my personal
values. And then every morning when they clamp the helmet down on that hazmat suit
that says manager across the back, I'm going to the office, I'm all over the company
values. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's very inspiring. But there is one fatal
flaw in this common management logic. So a brief interactive portion before we
ultimately turn it over for questions. And I don't know where to start so I'm just
going to pick a number to start.
Let me ask you, how many managers in this room work on average 40 or more hours a
week? Raise your hands. Okay. How many of you are clocking in at 45 hours or more
a week? Raise your hands. How many of you would say, if I netted it out, week in,
week out, I'm probably pulling about 50 hours a week. Raise your hands. 55 hours
a week or more, raise your hands. 60 hours a week or more, raise your hands. 65
hours a week or more, just flop around if it's more than 65 hours, okay? So is it
fair to say, on average, if you average it week in, week out over a year, you're
putting in about 50 hours a week? Is that fair? Okay.
How about travel time, the time that you spend traveling back and forth to work,
for work, even if you're not days Farrell road warrior, is it safe to say you're
at least spending another ten hours a week traveling for work? Okay. So now we're
at 60 hours a week. You're working 50, you're traveling ten.
How about think time, the time you're not actually doing the job, but you're thinking
about the job. How many hours a week is that? That's just the rest of the time,
16
right? Okay. Well, think about this, consider seven a day, potentially 24 hours
a day in one seven-day span, is it reasonable to say that you spend maybe another
15 hours a week not actually engaged in doing the job, but thinking about the job,
obsessing about the job, worrying about the job, talking to somebody outside the
job about the job, waking up screaming about the job? Could that be another 15 hours
a week? Now we're at 75 hours a week. You're working 50, you're traveling 10,
you're thinking about it 15.
I'm going to skip the whole mathematical formula for you. Let me just give you the
bottom line. In the combined 75 hours a week, between work time, travel time, and
think time, each and every person in this room is spending more than double your
waking hours working than not working. Welcome to your personal life.
You think you get these hours back? Death sends you an e-mail. I know you're
Microsoft managers. You think I would just delete that e-mail from death without
reading it. I will live forever, okay? It does not work like that. This is it.
This is it. These are the irretrievable hours of your personal life. You do not
get this time back. And to not live your deepest values for over half of those waking
hours every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every project, every year
is a crime. What's worse, it's unnecessary crime.
Microsoft is not -- it may be panicked organizationally about the concept, but it's
not deliberately saying to you don't live your personal values. This isn't that
kind of company. I mean, unless one of your deep personal values is, like, corporate
embezzlement or something, that could challenge your company value.
Yes, you have a responsibility as a Microsoft manager to protect and promote this
company's values and this company's vision of where it wants to go. That's why you
get a paycheck. But side by side, you have an opportunity, and that's to protect
your own values and your own vision. And jumping on your opportunity will not hurt
your job as a manager. In fact, jumping on your opportunity will make your job as
a manager happen for you. Because if you can turn your job into a mechanism for
fulfilling your deepest personal values, you will protect that mechanism by making
this company successful.
You'll think twice about ever leaving, because this company will be doing something
for you, wittingly or unwittingly, it has never done before.
Second question is will my people buy this? I mean, that's a reasonable question.
Managers say you just taught me four words and some new language, say walk the plank
17
in front of your people. And I suspect those words translate roughly into hand me
that saw, Luigi, I'm not going to do it. But you gotta do it, because if your people
don't know what your values, and they don't case, you don't have a chance of meeting
them at work. It's in their hands now.
So a lot of this book is talking about how to take what's important to you and turn
it into something very important to your people. Take your personal values and
translate them into the promise of better working conditions for your people. If
your people want that, what are they going to do? They're going to make it happen
and they're also going to keep you safe, because now you're doing something for them
you never did before. How do they keep you safe? You give us the performance goals.
We got that, you stay right where you are.
So I want to give you two examples of this. I got one other thing to tell you, wrap
it up and take questions. But let me give you an example of what this would look
like if you have family as a value, as many managers do. And let's say you went
through the exercise in the book, which teaches you to think beyond the literal
definition to what family gives you that makes it so important to you. Out of a
whole list of values, you pick family.
And let's say, as many managers do you, say, well, what family gives me that makes
it so important to me is open, honest communication and unconditional support. And
for my family, I get tough love when I need it. But if I stumble and fall, my family
will pick me right back up and in my family, I'm surrounded by people who put my
Welfare ahead of their own. And they inspire me to do the same for them. And there
is no righteous feeling in the world that can touch that. That's why family is so
important to me, and I'm not going to do without that for half my waking hours.
Well, if you want your people to support that, you have to turn that concept into
improved working conditions for them. You would have to say to them, listen up.
Let me tell you what life is going to start looking like on this team. Number one,
you will never again put your job and your family into conflict without giving me
the chance to do something about it.
Your job, your family will be strangers no more. You're doing good, important work
here. As we celebrate that for you, we're going to roll that celebration right out
to your family. The people that make it possible for you to get in here every day
and do that good work. When something great is going on at home for you, don't you
dare think you have to leave it locked up at home. Roll it in here. We'll cheer
you on. But God forbid something serious ever goes wrong for you at home.
18
I want you to know you have the strength and support of this family during your hard
time. Because we're like family too. So it's time we start acting like a family,
and I mean the very best families. This team will have open, honest communication.
This team will have unconditional support. When we need it, this team will have
tough love. But under pressure, this team will never turn on this team. This team
will come together to protect this team. Because that's what families do. And
family is very important to me.
Now, if you think your people are too cynical to buy that from you, cynical doesn't
mean people don't care. Apathy means people don't care. Cynical. Means it hurts
to care. Your people still have plenty of commitment to give to you if they can
be convinced it makes sense to give it.
Now, I'm going to give you one other story and do a quick wrap-up here. But this
story, this is straight from the book. Came out of a Bury My Heart session. And
I just want you to think, when you listen to this story, would this manager ever
have been able to get the same attention, the same response she got from just saying,
so this is important to me, let's go do this. Got to do it for the enterprise.
This is a story of a woman by the name of Florence Taylor, which is not her real
name. It's the only time in the entire book I did not name names and name companies.
But the only way she would agree to have me put this story in the book is if we obscured
some personal details, like her name. But the rest of it is just as she told it.
She said that I grew up in a small town in the deep south called Philadelphia,
Mississippi. She said, when I was a little girl, there were two schools. There
was the white school, there was the black school. She said, the white school was
the better school. It had more teachers. It had more books. It had more toys.
But I was black, so I went to the black school. She said, but I was a smart little
girl. And my mother made up for the shortfall in my education every day. And when
I got home, before I could go out and play, she would sit me down at the dining room
table and she'd pull this big family encyclopedia we had off the shelf. She would
ask me what I learned in school and then she would teach me more information about
the world.
She said, and so there came the day when I arrived home with a report card that was
so good that my mother said, you know, honey, with grades like this, I think we can
get you into the white school. Do you want to go? She said, I said sure. Now,
she said, I didn't realize that the federal government was pressurizing the local
19
governments to desegregate the schools. I thought it was just about me, but I was
glad I had the opportunity. She said so we held a family conference that night with
my mother and me and my two older brothers, because my mother did not want me to
be the only black child in this all-white school. So my brothers had to agree to
apply as well. She said my older brothers didn't want to go to this white school.
They had their friends. They had their football, but they loved their little sister
and they obeyed their mother.
So they all agreed to apply. They all applied. They all got in. And so she tells
the story about her first day as the first black girl in this all-white school. She
said, I only had two dresses, but I got to wear my Sunday dress for my first day
at school. She said, I looked good. She said, and they sat me all the way in back
next to this little red haired girl who immediately became my new best friend.
She said, when the bell rang at recess, my new best friend said, well, why don't
you come and play with me and my friends, because I don't know anybody here. I said
okay. So she said we went out, and we were playing on the recess yard and we were
laughing and having fun, and then one of her friends said, you see that fence there?
And I looked up and there was a huge wire fence that ran from one end of the recess
yard to the other. She said, that fence was put up because of you. They just put
that up this weekend. And she said, they put that up because they did not want white
boys mixing with black girls and especially did not want black boys mixing with white
girls. And I looked and sure enough, the other side of the fence was a football
field and I could see my brothers there. She said, but we didn't care about that.
Boys are stupid. So it didn't really matter.
She said so we were laughing and we were screaming, and she said then I heard screams
of an entirely different kind that I will never forget. She said I looked up and
at the edge of the school yard came three men on large riding -- riding large horses
with masks on carrying baseball bats, the Klan decides they do not like the school
being desegregated. She said, everybody ran for the school building. The teachers
got there first and they locked the doors behind them. And she said, I was running
and running and running. She said, now, I only weighed about 90 pounds, but most
of it was legs. I was a fast little girl and she said, I could hear my brothers
screaming my name and trying to get over that fence to help me, but they weren't
going to be able to save me. That fence was too big.
She said, and I got close to the school building, and I saw some bleachers were stacked
on the side of the building and I realized I could jump and hide under those bleachers
and the horses couldn't get me. She said, I was just about to do that when I heard
20
a scream I thought I recognized. She said, I turned around and one of these men
on this horse had my new red haired best friend holding her by the hair about three
feet off the ground. She was holding on to her hair and screaming, because she'd
been seen playing with me.
She said, I didn't really think about it. She said, I just turned and I ran at that
man at the horse. She said, now maybe it's because I was a little girl, but this
horse was huge and it was wild-eyed, sweating, trying to hurt me. She said, he was
holding my friend on the right side so I ran around on the left side. She said,
I didn't know what to do so I grabbed this man's leg and I went -- and I sunk my
teeth into his leg.
She said the good news is, he dropped my friend. The bad news is he picked me up
instead by my arm, and he dragged me all the way out the school yard on that horse.
She said, my Sunday dress was the first thing to go. My underpants were the second
thing to do. My skin was the third thing to go. She's still got the scars today.
She said, he left me about two blocks outside the school yard on the street. She
said I don't remember that. They told me that. She said, what I remember is waking
up in the hospital, and my mother was there. And she had my school work and she
had that encyclopedia. She said, and I was in the hospital for about seven weeks
and every time I woke up, if the pain wasn't too great or the medication didn't make
me sleepy, my mother would take me through my lessons and take me through the school
just as if I was going to school.
She said, I finally got out of the hospital, it was about another six months before
I could really get up and get around. She said at that point, we held another family
conference and my mother said, what do you want to do now? And she said, what do
I want to do now? I want to go back to the white school. I want to graduate. She
said, so that's what I did. I went back to that white school and I graduated.
And she said, I'm not a little girl anymore. This was a message to her employees.
She said, I'm not a little girl anymore. She said, I'm a woman now, she said, I'm
a wife. I'm a good wife. She said, I'm a mother. I'm a good mother. She said,
and I'm a manager. And she said, we do not have easy times on this team. We have
so many obstacles in front of us in our attempt to do what we know we should be doing,
and the worst part is that a lot of the obstacles that are in front of us come from
our own company. Our own company is stopping us from doing what we know we need
to do. And she said, these are hard times. And she said, and I can't even tell
you when these times are going to change. She said, but I can tell you this. I
can tell you the most important thing in the world to me, and that is loyalty. She
21
said, that little red-haired girl is still my best friend today. And she said, I
can tell you this. If you are on this team and you ever go out there and try and
do the right thing and you get into trouble for it, I'm coming back for you.
There's a number of ways you can tell that story. Certainly telling it from a
hyper-awareness of what's most important to you as human being is what will create
human to human credibility with your people and get them to offer that same support
for your own values.
Last thing to wrap this up is the third sales question is how do I sell this to my
company. So let me clear this up for you. Will Microsoft buy what I'm talking
about? Maybe not. But it doesn't matter. Because what the company will buy, what
any company will buy is any reasonable action on the part of a manager that produces
business results. And this will absolutely produce business results. I wrote the
introduction -- I didn't write the introduction of this book. I turned it over to
managers, already very successful in various companies. And I said, what would you
say to another manager, manager to manager about this? And they talked about what
this has done for them. Got the guy who wan the channel business for the
America -- for all of Hewlett-Packard, Adrian Jones, said this made the channel
business. Metric after metric after metric. This will definitely produce results.
Plenty of stories in the book.
Really, to get back to leadership, here's the difference between management and
leadership. Any management message you ever hear, management message, no matter
how expensively or eloquently delivered, whether it comes on to you in the small
screen in your hand, whether it comes to you on the big screen at MGX, whether
Microsoft got The Village People to play together again, I thought all those guys
were dead, whether there's free clothing involved, any management message you ever
hear, no matter how expensively or eloquently delivered, is simply an equation that
ends only one way. Equals work harder.
Any leadership message, true leadership message you ever hear is also an equation
that ends only one way. Equals live better. Now, I can tell you your people are
not going to work harder for you unless they are convinced it will allow them to
live better. And, of course, the same goes for you. That's what we've been talking
about.
So why should you live your values here on the job? Because your values are your
very own source of safety, hope and renewal. Your values are your very own
description of what life looks like when you live it exactly the way you want to.
22
So that's why you should live your own values. But why should you live them at work?
This is an excellent question to ask if your attorneys are planning an insanity
defense, because you don't get this time back. Because those 10,000 managers who
said family and integrity were most compromised, they were not saying that family
was most compromised because I don't have work life balance. They were saying that
the dependable support and affection and community I get from my family, I'm not
getting in a place that I'm spending over half my life.
They weren't saying integrity is compromised because I'm forced to lie, cheat, steal
to make my numbers. They were saying there's an alarmingly low amount of integrity
between who I really am and who I am at work.
Why should you live your values at work? Because your life doesn't get graded on
a curve. If you're not living them here, you're not living them. There is no safe
container to put your values while you're at work. It's going to leak on you. It's
going to jump the fence. It's going to follow you home.
And I don't want to stand up here and act all emotionally involved. That would be
a violation of my parole, but I will tell you, I will tell you this. This is your
one and only precious life. Somebody's going to decide how it's going to be lived
and that person had better be you.
So to wrap this up, one minute left, and then I'll answer any questions I can for
you. I'm asked all the time if I ever talk to a group, if you could give just one
piece of advice to any manager in the world, you could only tell them one thing,
any manager, executive to entry level, any country, any business unit, what is the
one most urgent recommendation you would give to any manager in any country in any
position in any company? I love it when people turn my life's work into a game show
question, but I've had a chance to think about it. So I'm going to end my portion
of this with this most urgent recommendation for you.
For yourself, because it's your life that's at stake here, and this time you're
spending on the job, you do not get this time back. Your life is happening to you
right now. For your family, because the health of your family outside the job
depends in large are part on the health of your family inside the job. For your
people, because it's not easy working in environments of constant uncertainty and
pressure with regular reminders of how little control you have over your work life.
For someone who you only know as my manager.
For your customers, because people
23
don't trust companies, they trust people. For the company itself, because Microsoft
is not a technology company. Don't ever make that mistake. Microsoft is a human
company selling technology. And the pivot point upon which any strategic success
rests is a discretionary level of its human organizations.
You can't sell it outside if you can't sell it inside. And finally, for the world,
because, let's face it, things are very weird out there right now. I'm not just
talking economically. There's a scary place, and we actually have every indication
that things are going to get a whole lot weirder before they ever get any better.
Now, what is it, what is it that a manager can possibly do about a condition like
that? Can one manager really change the world? When considering the state of the
world today, that's the only way it's going to change. One person influencing one
group at a time. So what can you do as a manager? You can fall back to your own
community. Not just the one chosen by you outside the job, but the one assigned
to you inside the job.
And in the name of what you know to be right, start by making that world a better
place. What is it that the good people gathered together in this room today can
possibly do about the conditions that affect the world at large? We can extend our
own humanity to the people that we are closest to, including the people that we see
every day, including our employees and our customers.
And so for all of those reasons, I urge you to be human first and a manager second.
Okay? All right. Thank you.
Happy to answer any questions and raise plenty more for you.
Yeah?
>>: So now that you've been doing this for many years, have you seen a shift in
managers and their ability to have emotional connections or be committed at work?
>> Stan Slap: It's a good question. The capacity has always been there. I don't
think willingness has changed. In fact, I think recently. The willingness has
actually gotten less because managers are spooked. They're even busier than they
were before, because they've got less resources and more to do, and yet, this is
ironically the best way to get more out of less.
But I think that they've, they've just begun to doubt themselves and their ability
to control their world. But in the companies and we do this in many companies. In
the companies that we put this into, yes, absolutely. Once this catches fire, it's
24
very difficult to see the world the way you used to see it. As far as that goes,
we're getting out more. Doing this more, yes, we see that more. In terms of the
state of being a manager, not so much.
Yeah?
>>: What's the risk of opening up more of the emotional connection?
>> Stan Slap: It's a reasonable question and I can tell you I have never -- not
sometimes -- never, ever once in ten years and I have a whole facilitation team in
the company that does this. Never have we ever heard one instance of employees using
this against you. Or the company, really.
There's a couple risks. There's a risk to adopting any new behavior as a manager.
I always look at managers eat from a magic plate. It doesn't matter how much you
swallow, nothing ever seems to disappear. Have you noticed that? And the companies
that prize competence the most, like this one, rarely slow down long enough for it
to develop. I mean, if you really were going to be a competency shop, you'd let
people try new stuff, fail, learn from it, pick themselves up.
There's very little tolerance in most organizations like that. So the risk is that
you'd fumble first. You wouldn't do this expertly. That's why in the book, there's
a lot of information about how to get the support of your people. Your people will
protect you. If they see what you're doing has got benefit for them, they will
protect you by making sure that the organization continues to deliver.
I think the bigger risk is opening your eyes in the job of management. To say, you
know, the accountability for my fulfillment is mine and nobody else's. And so it
doesn't mean that you should care less about the company. It just means that you
should take your own responsibility. And sometimes it's easier to stay asleep.
That's probably the bigger risk.
>>: Say you wanted to try some of these things out.
you just want to show up one day.
>> Stan Slap:
You probably don't want to -- do
The new me!
>>: Yeah, the new me kind of thing.
[inaudible].
Would you spook people a little bit more
25
>> Stan Slap: There's plenty of information in the book about how to do that. I
can tell you when you roll this out to the employee culture. You're going to -- like
this woman Florence Taylor, you're going to get out there and you're going to pour
your heart out about what's really -- first of all, your employees, you've pimped
your credibility so shamelessly as a manager for years that you're going to say,
let me tell you, I have gathered you together today because I've been to the mountain
and I have discovered and rediscovered what's most important to me, and it is
spirituality. And your people are going to listen to that thinking, so you're
telling us we're working Christmas day. Let's just get to it. Please. I've got
plans to make.
But what's going to happen is you're going to pour your heart out to your people.
And they're just going to sit there and look at you. So let me tell you what's going
on when that happens. It's called listening. They're actually listening to you.
You're not used to that as a manager. The employee culture is going to drag it back
to its own cave.
What's going to happen is now you're going to have to deliver on this. But the only
way to start it is to start it. And then you can attach this to metrics. You can
attach your emotional commitment and what you're able to create from your team very
clearly in a metrics from the rapid absorption of change to employee attrition
to -- there's a number of metrics that are in the book.
So once you have a new story to tell about how you got the performance you got, you'll
be okay. There's really no way of kind of easing into that. But I got to tell you,
once you lock and load on your own values, something that's a lot more difficult
than it seems. That's why there's five diagnostics in the book to help you figure
that out. Once you do that, you'll feel it. And the idea of doing without that
half your waking hours will be untenable to you.
So you won't want to take it easy. You'll want to get into it fast. So there's
a part in the book that says here's the first five steps to personal implementation
at work.
The other thing I would say, one of the best ways to pilot this is go home. Take
it home. If you have a significant other or target significant other or -- how many
of you have kids? Okay. There's a separate diagnostic in the book about how to
do this with kids, either young kids and a separate one for teenagers. This is such
a cool thing to do with your kids. Little kids, you got to explain what the values
mean. You have to tell why what's important is important to you. So you can Beta
26
test it at home and get plenty of support there if you're looking for a place to
pilot.
But when you get into the enterprise, you're just going to start it.
>>: My instinct is that your team will sense your sincerity.
buy the book and give it to your manager.
As insurance, you can
>> Stan Slap: It's a weird thing. Again, this plagues managers at any level. But
when you're able to have a conversation about values, they got the same values in
many cases. Same struggles. It's a whole different -- when you're able to say,
hey, I'm telling you that if you let me live these values, we're going to get this
performance. Just trust me this far. I'll show you what we're able to do. And
at the same time, if you're able to say, man, this just doesn't work for me on a
value sense, it's just an entirely different conversation. A human to human
conversation. So yeah, you're right. And your people will give it up for you as
a human being more than they'll ever give it up for you as a manager. Yeah?
>>: One of the things like since you talked about your own values, but companies
have values. You talked briefly about those. And they often don't quite ->> Stan Slap:
Yes.
>>: I don't know if you're familiar with the Jack Welch performance review of
70/20/10. We implement that.
>> Stan Slap:
Yes, it's one of the seven steps of the apocalypse.
>>: Exactly. So essentially, you know, if your think that your value is family,
you don't differentiate your ->> Stan Slap:
Right.
>>: Johnny, you know.
>> Stan Slap:
I'm sorry, it's not me.
It's the system.
>>: So, you know, if you find yourself, you're in a company where the values don't
allow you, you know, fundamentally, there is a problem there. What happens?
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>> Stan Slap: I totally respect that. What I would say to you first of all is we're
not dealing with the literal definition of these words. We're dealing with the
greater meaning to you. So it's the things that can be protected are the things
like how you support one another and how open and honest you are in communicating
what these values really give to you.
I would also tell you that although you may not always have a choice on what to do,
you have more flexibility than what you think on how you do it, as long as you get
business results. It's true that some of this stuff, you absolutely cannot impact,
like structures like that. But there is so much that you can impact that you can
still make this job significantly better for you and for the people within you.
Within your team.
If you treated them like a family to say -- it's not true, in the literal definition,
you don't say to your family sorry, we were re-orged while you were at school. I'm
sorry. I hope you find another family, though. And come in and check us out, not
at dinner time, but come back and let us know how you're doing, okay?
No, it's true, and that is part of what causes managers to detach is that you know
you don't have control over that. All I can tell you is if you use these principles,
you have an entirely different story about performance you can tell. And even the
most hard core organizations are very superstitious about the people that perform.
And it will give you some room. Now, you may not be able to do anything about
70/20/10. But you can do stuff about a lot of other things.
If you have something to counter -- I mean the reason the organization is doing that
is because it's trying to get performance, training to get control. If you don't
have any other way of showing it to them, how there's an alternative, you know, fair
is fair. So there are plenty of stories of real managers in this book that have
wrestled with that same issue and there's plenty of information on how to deal with
that. It's a legitimate question. Yeah?
>>: You're very familiar with companies like Best Buy that let people work in the
way they want to work and in the hours they want to work that works best as long
as they just meet goals.
>> Stan Slap:
Um-hmm.
>>: Have you seen that -- how do you see that work or not work?
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>> Stan Slap: I think most managers recognize that it's like when casual day first
came out, managers were saying I thought casual day was lying on the beach with an
umbrella on my drink, not answering 75 e-mails from noon wearing a pair of Dockers,
okay?
So some of that is good, but if you still have the same requirements to get the work
done, you know, then you're at home working, it's almost, in some ways, it's like
what a lot of managers have told me. Take a vacation. I'd rather stay at work and
let work take a vacation. That would be perfect. It's when the lines get blurred,
which seems like a real perk, I don't know where the accountability starts and stops
during the day. I think it's an honest effort to try and create a better work
environment. It's not the same thing as this. This is deeper. It's a lot deeper.
But still, any effort like that, any effort to shake up the way things are and see
what managers would do given theoretically greater autonomy, is a step in the right
direction. Yeah.
>>: Are there any success stories where your manager or your directs aren't bought?
You talk about people who bought in on both sides, but if they're not, are there
any success stories in that case?
>> Stan Slap: I didn't put it in the book. One of the things, a variation of that
question that's often asked is what if my manager has these values and I have these
values and that. The answer to that question is don't worry about. The employee
culture will snatch that problem away from you. Your culture, your people will pay
the most attention to whoever directs their survival and emotional prosperity. So
Kevin has a good day or a bad day, that's of mild interest to your people. You have
a bad day, that's of wild interest to your people.
So the culture cares about proximity, not position. If you legitimately have a
circumstance where you are bought into this and your manager is dead set against,
so detached they can't see the way around it, yeah, there are plenty of success
stories, because this is designed to say you're working in a host of environment.
Your ability to live your values depends on you first satisfying the priorities of
the company. And if the company was a human being, maybe it would have values of
competitiveness and accomplishment and security. You have to make those work first.
When you can do that, here's how to gain the flexibility to live it yourself.
So even if your manager just said I just don't believe in this, that's different
than saying, I don't believe in the results you're getting. And that would be very
difficult. If they were dead set against this methodology, even if it was producing
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results, they're incompetent, they're not going to be there that long, okay?
They'll get promoted.
So okay.
Any other?
Yeah?
>>: Have you come across managers who have a problem identifying with their own values
because they have not been living it?
>> Stan Slap: Oh, yeah. It's hysterical. We asked managers in the session and
you go through this in the book. So what are your values? I know my values, this,
this, this and this. Okay, no, they're not -- no, this, this. Hm, this, this and
this. You know what? I either have to pick flexibility as a value or I'm hosed
because I have no idea.
And my favorite, Microsoft, Simon With had a guy working for him, I think is still
here, Frank McKosker, years ago and Frank then went to the public sector and worked
for Jerry Elliott when she was around. And we did this for Simon and his group in
Amia when he was in Amia. And Frank was out in the hallway in the middle -- took
a break in the session.
Have you ever been in a meeting or a party where it's very busy, very noisy and then
somebody stops talking and just coincidentally, somebody else stops talking and
somebody else. Just for a minute, just for a brief period of time, it's like quiet
and picks up. That's what happened when Frank was out in the hallway and he was
calling home, I guess. And he was saying -- we could all hear it. He was saying,
hi, honey, no I'm in this thing. I'm in this thing. Yeah, it's great. He said,
you pick the values that are most important to you and then, you know, you got to
give up a couple to get to the ones that are real important to you. Yeah, yeah.
Freedom, health and security.
Uh, family? Yeah. Yes, dear. Yes, dear. Yes, dear. And he came back into the
room, he said if I can just make one change, take freedom out and put family in it,
that would be fabulous.
So anyway, it is very difficult to know your values. Why? Because anybody who's
trying to sell you anything stands to profit if you don't have a strong sense of
self. If you don't know what's true for you, everyone else has unusual influence.
And at work, in the world, advertising, everything. But at work, that's a relentless
seductive fog. I cannot tell you how many managers have said to me with a straight
face, yeah, I have family as a value. That's what I work all the time, never see
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my family, make enough money to take care of my family by killing the competition,
which is other people and their families.
So it's a lot harder than it seems. It is. Again, there's not a simple diagnostic.
There's five different diagnostics in the book to drop you deeper and deeper. You
will feel it when the clicks though. When you know it, you'll know it. And at that
point, you will not be able to imagine not bringing the best of what your life gives
you and everything your life has taught you to a place you're spending over half
your waking hours.
All right? I'm going to wrap it up with this for one minute. Years ago, before
Microsoft made peace with Nokia -- or maybe that's gone now. The Microsoft people
are running Nokia, I don't know. But this is years ago, okay. I gave a keynote
speech in Helsinki. And after the speech, a bunch of the senior Nokia people huddled
around, wanted to talk. Didn't have anything to do with my talk. It was freezing
outside and they just wanted to stand.
And they wanted to talk about Microsoft, and I said, are you worried about Microsoft?
They said well, you know, tough competitor. I said, are you worried because of how
much share on the desktop Microsoft has? They said, well, we have our own market
share, but yeah that's a concern. I said are you worried about because they're such
fierce competitors? They said, well, you know, we're fierce competitors, but yeah.
I said, are you worried because they have the gross national product of Brazil in
cash in the bank? They said you know what? This conversation is just not going
the way we wanted it to.
I said, well, let me tell you somebody who works at Microsoft and knows people at
Microsoft while you should really be worried if this company ever has you in its
gun sights, because of how much heart is really inside that company. How much deep
desire there is to do the right thing.
Now, traditionally, the company hasn't always done an elegant job of breaking down
the wall between what's inside and what's outside, but if it ever does, it will not
only rule the world, people will want it to.
This is your chance to do that.
Okay?
All right.
Thank you.