Know Your Mission-More Management Lessons from the Memphis Belle

April 21, 2009 By 2 Comments

Note from Art: Eric Lieberman is back as a guest author with his second installment of Management Lessons from the Memphis Belle.  The “Rules” were created by Eric and his colleague, Paul Byrne, while they were leading a software company turn-around. They were successful!

Students of history and management practitioners alike will find value in these creative, powerful and practical rules for managing and leading.  Enjoy!

KNOWING THE MISSION

For this second installment of the business rules that my friend Paul Byrne and I derived from watching the movie the Memphis Belle (see my first installment: Management Lessons from the Memphis Belle-Rule #1), I am departing from the order in which we originally wrote the rules.

Instead, because it is a concept so fundamental to our success in anything we do, I am jumping to Rules 11, 16 and 19, all of which underscore the importance of being totally “mission aware”. Without a sense of our mission, the rest of the rules are meaningless.

The Story:

First, the story from the Memphis Belle: Leaving their airstrip on the English coast the crew of the B-17 Bomber Memphis Belle knew but one mission: drop their payload of bombs onto the target in Germany which had been assigned to them and the rest of their large flight-group.

As they flew towards the target, this singular sense of mission got them through the in-the-air machine-gun battles with enemy fighter aircraft and sustained them as the enemy anti-aircraft gun fire (“flak”) exploded around them as they neared their target. They knew their mission and they knew they were flying for a cause they believed in. They carried in their mind and hearts the people at home for whom they fought. (Rule 16: Know your mission and for whom you are flying).

When they neared the target, the pilot turned control of the plane over to the bombardier, who would use the sophisticated B-17 bomb-sight to guide the plane into the right position to drop the bombs and destroy the target. The Belle’s bombardier had a particularly heavy responsibility on this flight: because of the loss of another bomber, the Belle had become the lead bomber. The other bombers in the group would be cued to drop their payloads by the action of the Belle.

The cloud cover was so heavy over the target, however, that the bombardier could not see the target through his bomb-sight. The pilot, laser focused on the singular mission of the flight, made the decision not to drop the bombs on anything less than the primary target. He made the courageous decision to circle the aircraft and make a second run at accomplishing the mission. On the second pass, the bombardier was able to spot the target and the bombs were dropped successfully. Missions accomplished! (Rule 11: Stick with the mission – sometimes it requires two passes over the target before the bombs are dropped.)

Having successively completed the first mission, the Belle now had to realize a second mission: get its crew home alive! Suddenly, the crew was not flying for their country, but for their own lives. The 30-caliber machine guns, needed to defend their way into enemy airspace before the bombing run, became unnecessary dead-weight in the attempt to limp home. To lighten their load, the Belle crew threw some guns over board.

Their mission had gone from reaching a bombing target inside enemy territory to reaching home. They had gone from fighting for the cause, their country, to making it home alive. This change in mission required them to let go of assets that had helped them accomplish the prior mission. (Rule 19: The heavy guns needed for the mission may become dead weight for the next mission.)

Applying The Rules in Business: 

As my crew and I salvaged our software company and eventually sold it - we repeatedly had to stop, breathe and ask ourselves: what is our mission? For whom are we flying? Has the mission changed?

I was reminded of our first sense of mission last week when I attended a meeting of business mentors and ran into a partner at a large accounting firm. It was this same accounting firm that I had hired in 1998 to do an assessment of our company and help me with a strategy to reverse its downward direction. After several weeks of on-site investigation the firm handed me a $30,000 invoice with the advice: the only way to save this business is to fire 60% of its employees.

It was advice that I immediately knew I would not follow. It was short-sighted and had nothing to do with the mission I had been handed. My mission went beyond merely being able to pay debts when they were due. No, my mission was two-fold: (1) restore the value of the company for the benefit of its owners, and (2) protect the people – its employees – who were responsible for building the company. (That was one of the goals of its founders.) A dramatic 60% “rightsizing” would send the company into a tailspin from which it could not recover and our mission would fail.

As our conditions improved, our mission went from saving the company to growing the company. Pivotal in acheiving that growth was building a culture that recognized that we were “flying” a mission for our customers. We became zealots about customer satisfaction. We circulated a poster with a photograph of a mythic customer over the acronym: “WIIFM?” – meaning “What’s In It For Me?” That question – that reminder of our mission to satisfy the customer – kept our mission front and center.

Occasionally, while flying our corporate mission, I had to make the painful decision to fire someone, or demote them. This was never easy to do, especially when it involved a person that had been a key contributor and a friend. However, I’d bounce the situation off of Rule 19 – the resources we need for one mission can be wrong for the next mission – and I’d realize that the person hadn’t changed: it was the mission that had changed. This thought would force me to consider whether the person could be used on a different mission, more suited to the abilities and talents that had served them well in the prior mission. This application of the rule gave me confidence to do the things I had to do.

The Lessons:

And so, knowing the mission and sticking with the mission until it is completed are critical parts of being successful. However, equally important is knowing when there has been a change in mission and adapting accordingly. I was reminded of this in a print advertisement currently being run by MIT Sloan Executive Education. The ad (I saw it in the Financial Times)  shows a lizardly looking creature that looks like it has survived through many versions of our planet. Appearing in large type over the head of the lizard are these words: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change – Charles Darwin.” 

Know the mission. Achieve the mission. Be alert to changes in the mission. Adapt to new missions! 

–About Eric Lieberman: Eric Lieberman writes from his home in Evanston, Illinois and is available for comments and consultations and can be reached via e-mail. by writing ejlieberman@gmail.com.  Click here for Eric’s personal website and resume.

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Decision-Making, Leadership, Leading Change, Performance Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine for the New Week-Expect the Extraordinary

April 19, 2009 By 2 Comments

This week’s boost of leadership energy comes straight from one of my early career mentors.  This truly exceptional individual practiced leadership according to 5 simple handwritten rules that he kept posted on the wall in his office for everyone to see. 

These rules pointed to his True North as a leader, and were the first words that he would read every morning, right after securing his first of many cups of coffee for the day. They read…

5 Simple Rules To Be A Great Leader:

1.  Surround yourself with great people.

2.  Provide them with challenging opportunities.

3.  Expect the extraordinary.

4.  Work like crazy to provide support.

5.  Stay out of the way until you’re needed.

You could do much worse than follow the guidance inherent in those 32 simple words.  While they don’t explicitly encompass all leadership situations, it’s hard to imagine a circumstance that doesn’t lead back to one of the rules. 

I particularly love the part about Expecting the Extraordinary.  I’ve relied on that philosophy for most of my career and have rarely been disappointed.  It’s more than offering up empty words or disingenuous cheerleading.

Expecting the Extraordinary is much about showing confidence in an individual or a team and letting them know that they have the opportunity and your support to push the envelope on creating value, solving a problem, innovating and improving the business. 

My experience living by this philosophy taught me a few things about people and human nature that I’ve learned to employ  along with the 5 Simple Rules to great success:

  • Good people want to do great things.
  • Good people will go to amazing lengths for someone they respect. 
  • Those that aren’t good people expose themselves quickly.  (Get rid of them.)
  • You build followership faster by serving than commanding. (Although, people need to know that you can command.)

Frankly, only the most confident and capable of leaders are capable of living according to the 5 Simple Rules.  Most leaders make the mistake of thinking that it is all about them.  The best leaders got the memo that said otherwise.  

The Bottom-Line for this Week: 

If it helps, write down The 5 Rules for Leading and reference them frequently.  And pay special attention to #3, Expect the Extraordinary.  That one’s a sleeper, but it may just be the most important of all.  That is of course, if you are motivated to lead teams that do great things.

Now get on with your week and if you are truly courageous, dare to see what a difference 5 little rules can make

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine for the New Week: Creating Time to Get Stuff Done

April 13, 2009 By 3 Comments

A number of my last few posts have focused on thinking big, and a wise reader pointed out that with all of the dreaming and visioning he has been doing at my bequest, he’s falling hopelessly behind in his work. 

Fair point, so grab a cup of something hot, along with a pen and paper, and don’t get too comfortable.  After all, who has time to read blog posts all day, when there’s work to be done!  This one’s short and sweet!

Organize, Prioritize and Execute:

In my opinion, there’s still no substitute for the list.  It doesn’t matter if you create it on your p.c., on a notepad or on your iphone, just create one and use it to guide where you focus your time.

I create one every week, and I refer to it constantly as a means to re-establish direction after the phone calls, interruptions and unexpected but inevitable crises do everything possible to keep me from focusing on my priorities.

I use a basic “A,B,C” prioritization scheme that I learned a million years ago in a time management seminar, although I’ve added my own criteria for differentiating between priorities. 

It’s simple.  Jot down your long list of things to do and then force rank them as top priorities (A’s), important (B’s) and someday, maybe (C’s).  If you are working this right, you end up with a few top priorities, a healthy quantity of important items and at the base of the pyramid, a large number of things that would be nice to get to someday. Fair warning, not everything is an A priority, and this is where your criteria are critical in helping you differentiate between items on the To-Do list.

The theory says that you should pick an A and work on it until completion, and then pick the next A.  It works.  It’s actually liberating to allow your brain to momentarily forget about all of the other items and issues vying for your time as you focus on what you’ve reasonably defined as your top priority. 

By prioritizing, you also avoid the really bad habit that so many people have of cherry picking the list and crossing off the maximum number of items.  Note: the easiest items are usually not the most important.  

As your role changes in your career, the criteria for the ranking should change as well. Your very few A priorities need to include a preponderance of people issues.  Here are mine: 

The 5 Criteria that Define A-List Priorities of the Leader:

1.  Performance feedback and developmental discussions with individuals and teams

2.  Fulfilling on responsibilities as an executive sponsor for project teams

3.  Communicating results, clarifying strategy, and calibrating on goals with individuals and teams

4.  Reaching out to customers or responding to customer issues

5.  Brainstorm discussions that focus on innovation around improving the customer experience and increasing customer value.

–

While at first glance my list might seem fairly broad for defining a top priority, it really does help you build your calendar around the right topics.  This gives you the courage to say “no” to the endless stream of status meetings and update calls that you are invited to and it also defines for your direct reports the types of topics that they should draw you into for help or input. 

As a pragmatist, you know that “stuff happens” during the course of a week, and it is likely something will jump suddenly to the top of the list.  Hey, the boss has been known to call and the Board might just want an update.  A little bit of flexibility might just save or enhance your job!

I’ve been a career-long sales and marketing type and externally focused, so if you are internally oriented, you might choose some different words establish slightly different criteria.  However, as a leader, these 5 for me have stood the test of time.  If they don’t fit, chances are that they are a B, and I’ll worry about them later.

Now it’s time to get busy.  And yep, I do get to cross one of my A priorities off the list.  Leadership Caffeine for the week: done!

Have a great and productive week!

-Art

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Decision-Making, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Management Lessons From the Memphis Belle-Rule #1

March 26, 2009 By 2 Comments

Note from Art: It is a pleasure and a privilege to have Eric Lieberman publishing his Management Lessons from the Memphis Belle as a guest author here at Management Excellence.  I had the pleasure of working for Eric and the co-creator of the Rules, Paul Byrne, and it is exciting to see the wisdom that helped us navigate so many challenges come to life here on the blog.  Just as the world waited eagerly for the next installment from Dickens to learn the fate of Little Nell, I predict you’ll find yourself looking forward to future installments of these creative, powerful and practical rules for managing and leading. 

Sometimes the power of a rule is found in its exceptions

When my father learned that I had been drafted by a board of directors to lead a failing software company through a financial turnaround, he reacted: “But, what do you know about running a business?”

The words stung – but he was right: I knew nothing. I’d been an attorney for a wide variety of businesses for years – but had never been responsible for a bottom line, never done a budget, never managed people and had never created a strategic plan!

I began looking everywhere I could for advice. I devoured business and management books by the carload. Most often, I found good counsel in the talented people – like Art Petty – that surrounded me. They brought the experience and skills to the corporate table that I lacked. But, the single most unusual fount of wisdom came one night when my CFO, Paul Byrne, and I drank a bottle of Thompson’s Bourbon Whiskey in the corporate house we shared in Wisconsin and watched the 1990 movie The Memphis Belle.

The namesake of the movie is an Army B-17 WWII bomber (“Flying Fortress”) whose crew had flown 24 missions into enemy territory. According to military policy, the crew would return home if they returned safely from their 25th mission. The movie tells the story of that final mission.

We were in the early days of our trench warfare trying to save the company, so it was natural that we felt a kinship with the pilot and crew of the Belle. As we drank and watched, we began to discover business rules and management lessons within the war-movie plot. By the time we were done, we had Ten Rules of Management From The Memphis Belle. Then, Paul came up with an 11th. I cussed and said “you can’t just have an odd number like 11” – so we replayed the movie in our heads and thought of 9 more.

And thus we discovered the 20 Lessons From The Memphis Belle. We had them printed up on little cards and handed them out to employees. We gifted them to strategic partners and customers. We printed them on posters and hung them in our offices. When we ran into a hard issue in the business we would refer to the Rules: more often than not there was a rule that was right on point. Each time we’d be amazed, but then we’d say: “Ah! The Rules know all!”

I credit these rules with getting me through difficult times. Even today, after leaving the company upon accomplishing a turnaround and eventual sale, I see the continued applicability of these rules to the difficult times we face today. And so, when Art offered some of his blog space for me to do “my thing”, I jumped at the chance to share these rules with a broader audience.

Today, and in weeks to come, I am going to share the rules with you, describe their origin in the movie and illustrate their applicability with some real-world stories. its not mandatory – but you might think about renting the movie and watching it along with these articles.

Ironically, rule number one echoes my father’s comments to me:

Rule No. 1: Don’t pretend to do jobs you’re not trained for!

Val, the bombardier of the Belle, boasts that he has medical training. But when one of his crew-mates is seriously wounded by enemy gunfire, the bombardier must admit to having had far less medical expertise than he had claimed. Val proposes that the only way to save the wounded crew member is to parachute him into enemy hands and hope that he is rushed to a hospital. “Bad plan” say the rest of the crew, and the bombardier successfully treats his wounded mate despite his fear and sense of inadequacy.

Despite his lack of training, Val had the courage and resolve to succeed.

It doesn’t fare so well for another crew member that wants to try his untrained hand at one of the big on-board machine guns. Convincing the real gunner to let him try, he loses control of the gun and slices through another B-17 sending it crashing to the ground in flames and killing its crew.

Sometimes, it is just plain dumb and dangerous to put people in charge that don’t know what they are doing. But, sometimes…

When I was picked to run the company, I clearly didn’t appear to be a person with the right qualifications. I didn’t have the usual training or experience to accomplish what I needed to do. And yet, the board saw in me certain strengths and qualities that they valued more than traditional qualifications. For example, an old law partner told them that I was a “workaholic, he will not rest until the job is done”. And, they made a good call: I succeeded!

I had a young man working for me who was simply an outstanding person. He’d started in the company as a staff guy supporting the company’s internal computer systems and worked his way up the ladder to head the IT department. Despite his technology training, he proved to be a “Jack of all trades”. He was loyal to the company, a great leader and had a “can do” spirit that was unbelievable. Point him in the direction of a mission – and he would accomplish it without fail! I recognized his talents superseded any particular training he had, and I was able to deploy him in a variety of key company positions well beyond IT services. He was a big contributor to the success of the company. If I had limited him to his trained position – IT – I wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of the broader range of skills and talent that this “Jack” had.

Lesson Learned:

When you have a mission to complete, a task to be accomplished or a job to be filled, take inventory of the candidates and their qualifications. At times, on-the-job training might just be inappropriate. Be alert, though, to circumstances that require betting on a candidate that may be non-traditional. Before you write off someone for a position or a mission, figure out whether they have the courage, the mettle, the “right stuff” to succeed in spite of your perception that they lack the obvious qualifications for the job. Always consider whether the obvious qualifications for a job are really the true qualities that will define success. Don’t simply evaluate candidates – always test the premises of your qualifications.

Next time: Rule #2: Don’t Applaud the Event (especially good news) before it happens!

About Eric Lieberman: Eric Lieberman writes from his home in Evanston, Illinois and is available for comments and consultations and can be reached via e-mail. by writing ejlieberman@gmail.com.  Click here for Eric’s personal website and resume.

 

Filed Under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Management Innovation, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Management Excellence Blog Named to Alltop!

March 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

OK, pardon my excitement, but I was thrilled to learn the other day that my blog, Management Excellence, was named to Alltop in the Leadership category!

In case you are not familiar with Alltop, it is is a collection of  “the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic.”  I am honored to be among the “best” in the leadership category on this great site! 

And there’s a lot more than just Management Excellence at Alltop.  In their words, “You can think of Alltop as the on-line magazine rack of the web.” Stop by with your favorite topic in mind and see what the best bloggers on the planet have to say!

OK, I think this means that I’m on the hook for an never-ending supply of quality posts.   I better get to work on the next issue of Leadership Caffeine for the New Week!

 

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