Steve Tobak on Management, reprinted in full below my own quick post. This one is good for a bit of thought. And even some clarification, which I’ll do briefly.

Speaking to people of many different cultural and experience sets, I encounter many differences in the perception of the term “humility.”

Without stating that only one is correct, here is mine:

Humility is a state of being knowledgeably self aware.

It is associated with extraordinary self confidence, as only the confident person is able to see him/herself honestly – and even desire to.

It is associated with efficient action, as an aware person draws on more facts than most, and therefore can optimize actions of those he/she manages.

It is also associated with empathy, enabling greater awareness of other team members’ capabilities and skills.

Lastly and obviously, humility is associated with good listening and with a heavy dose of mature reality.

Arrogance? The opposite. With impulse, with lack of factual basis, and with continuously (perhaps expertly?) masked lack of confidence. With the need to fool others.

These characteristics are dangerous. If this arrogant person doesn’t actually commit fraud, he/she will certainly appear to be a good candidate to do so.

This is not the guy you pick for your team…makes a big boast then can’t even hit the ball… Then blames the ball for this dilemma! He’s amusing, yes.  maybe even clever. But if he could do the job, he would not need to act this way. Fact.  

Basically, the qualities Tobak describes are all humility, in different forms. Choose another term if you like, but don’t brush off the knowledge that might make your management skills real.

Don’t start out thinking you know it all, because the facts say otherwise.

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(Tobak) When I was a young engineer at Texas Instruments, I had a manager named Dick. Dick had a sign in his office that read: “I may not be smart, but I sure am experienced.” Being a smart-ass, I made a sign that read: “I may not be experienced, but I sure am smart” and hung it in my cubicle. Dick didn’t appreciate the humor.

Last week’s Does Management Ability Improve With Age? sparked an excellent dialog, but it also got me thinking about the qualities I’ve developed over the years since my “sign war” with Dick that made me a better manager and leader. Here are five and they’re not the ones that would automatically come to mind:

Balance. Dick and I were both wrong – balancing intelligence and experience is more important than either one. Strategy versus operational execution, ideology versus practicality, intuition versus logic, passion versus calm. The key to balance is knowing when you need one versus the other and not going overboard in either direction.
Humility. It’s okay to be arrogant or young and full of yourself, but it also leaves you wide open to all sorts of issues like shortsightedness and believing your own BS. Humility leads to objectivity. It’s also an important leadership quality; if you can be humble, then confidence and strength can’t be far behind.
Objectivity. Since executives are by definition immersed in their environment, perspective is as critical as it is difficult to achieve. One of the most powerful tools in decision-making is being able to take a step back, ask others what they think, and see the big picture.

Teaming. I once had a boss who asked me if I ever looked back to see if anyone was following me. I was more than a little head-strong in the early days. I can’t overstate the importance of team, meaning aligning with peers, working with customers to solve problems, and understanding what being part of a company means.

Knowing what you don’t know. It’s good to be intelligent, logical, and able to wrestle tough problems to the ground and reason them out. But knowing what you don’t know is just as important. Until you know what you don’t know, you won’t ask the tough questions and arrive at the right conclusions. What qualities do you think contribute to being a better manager?

http://blogs.bnet.com/ceo/?p=2132&tag=nl.rSINGLE

Steve Tobak, 04.24.09, The Corner Office

I know an SV funder who counts the pages in each investment presentation he receives – before reading it.

If it’s more than 20, the presentation is chucked into the circular. Gone. I kid you not.

I’ve told that anecdote quite a few times over the past few months. To the entrepreneur who calls me and says “I’m special. I’m going to solve EVERYTHING!”

I’ll say “OK, how.” And the enthused caller will say “well, I haven’t figured that out yet. But how ’bout this concept!” The concept blows on for 8o pages.

I’ve said, to paraphrase a founder of a valley VC firm I know: if you have an invention in development?  Get a government grant.

If you have a specific, well-done, relevant business plan, only then can you talk to those that invest in business.

I have to return to this a lot. I say, with candor that might come across less than kindly, don’t explain the whole truth to me. Don’t give me a concept. A concept is just that. A concept. It is not bankable. 

If you want money for a floating idea or premise, go to your rich uncle. And hope he doesn’t sue you when you fail. Chances are he just might. Because without the plan, he might misunderstand exactly how you are going to spend his money.

Or you could screw the big ego vision and assemble  a real plan. And by doing so, get real investors and real customers. Do it for real, with skill and ethics. Or don’t do it at all.

You are not competing for a museum pedestal honoring you as the chief of  passionate excitement. You are trying to get funding.  

 I do not want to read 48 pages of why healthcare is important (I’m not making this example up…). I am a human being, so I know that already without reading your magnum opus.

But maybe I can put together a presentation for you, which forces you to focus on what you are really offering? (The prospect said, but you aren’t an MD! I said, quote, ”precisely.” The product was to be directed at consumers. I am one of those.) 

Remember. It’s not just about getting people to think you are smart. You probably are. It’s about how,you are going to create success for the investor.

Whether the reviewer likes you, or your concept? Ultimately irrelevant. 

If this communication bit takes you more than a handful of  concise slides?

Then think again. Start over. Focus again, and more.

ThreePoint’s clients - and even those who are just in conversation with us at this point - will see a lot of familiar  statements in the post reprinted below. 

 Steve Tobak did a superb job on this one – especially by bringing in the real life examples, and noting a key role of the Board (don’t stroke the ego, challenge it! Every day.)  So I’m reprinting it with many thanks to him. I’ve also included the link so you can view other posts by same. 

Pay close attention to the  list of 5 questions to ask to make a business case.

**

How to Make a Business Case for Any Enterprise  02.10.09,  Steve Tobak

Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard sits on the board of a wireless startup in Silicon Valley. He says the entrepreneurs are brilliant but they see opportunity everywhere. It’s the job of the board to get them to prioritize and focus.

He’s right about that, but figuring out what to focus on is really the bigger, make or break problem for any enterprise. Finding the right solution to a critical market need – that you can actually build a successful business around – now that’s what separates the cream from the crop.

Some entrepreneurs make brilliant business people, but they’re a rare breed. The rest just can’t connect the dots between ideas and products that customers may actually want to plunk down money for. Those entrepreneurs lack the business gene. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but one that needs to be addressed, nonetheless. 

Examples: Bill Gates was the former type. He instinctively knew what kind of deal he wanted to cut with IBM for the PC’s first operating system. I’m not saying that turning Microsoft into a technology powerhouse was a walk in the park, but with a little help, Gates was up for the task.

As for the latter type, well, Steve Wozniak needed Steve Jobs. We’ve all seen the difference between Apple with and without Steve Jobs. Make sense?

I’ve worked with both types of entrepreneurs, but I seem to attract the latter type. This started way, way before I became a consultant.

An engineer at Xerox – one of my customers in the late 80s – tried to get me to help him take his invention to market. I’ll never forget it; it was “the perfect paper clip.”

Another engineer had an idea and a design for a handheld, digital book reader … in 1993. It was too soon for that sort of thing, but he didn’t know that. Fortunately, I did.

Look, I don’t care if you’re an engineer, a marketer, an inventor, a CEO, an academian, or an enterprising opportunist. Every successful idea has to satisfy certain criteria for the business case to make sense. When I evaluate a concept, product, or service for business potential, I ask five questions. The answers essentially make a business case.

Five Questions to Develop a Business Case:

1. What’s the market need?What critical customer or market problem does it solve?
2. Is there a big market opportunity? Is it big enough to build a company around and interest investors?
3. What’s the business model? Where does the company fit in the food chain, who will its customers be, and how will it make money? 
4. What’s the value proposition? What’s its competitive differentiation with respect to competing ideas, technologies, products or services? 
5. What are the competitive barriers? How defensible is it? Patents, know how, trade secrets, trademarks, or just time to market.

These are loaded questions, to be sure. But if you can’t build a compelling 2-pager and 10-20 slide presentation around the answers, you’re going to have great difficulty building a successful enterprise.

Of course, the knowledge, strength, and commitment of the individuals involved are critical, as is the timing of the enterprise. That goes without saying. As for focus and prioritization, well, once you know what to focus on, then you’ve got the whole execution thing to worry about. That’s a post for another day

http://blogs.bnet.com/ceo/?p=1802&tag=insight

**

http://blogs.bnet.com/ceo/?p=1416

Bringing back a great post (10.09.08, link above) by Steve Tobak. If the ThreePoint team were to suddenly launch a new career in standup comedy (not going to happen, but indulge me,) we’d for certain tell the fabulous stories of um, unique marketing techniques we’ve seen along the way.

As one of our functions is training new and restructured management teams, we get to encounter and advise some of these people. Since startups often started, admirably, via the good old bootstraps, sometimes the senior king queen VP of marketing is someone’s sister, nephew or girlfriend. We get to test out what he or she is made of.

In some cases, we see early brilliance, and we just add a little bit of knowledge and get out of the way.

In other cases, we stand agape before deciding what to do, in sheer horror at what passes for experience.

A few notes from me:

1) Every department is the marketing department. The brand soaks into everything. Everything smells like it. So make it smell good.

2) Marketing people and sales people ARE NOT THE SAME PEOPLE. This is a frequent misunderstanding. A microtargeted, close it now salesperson likely doesn’t even understand the big picture, intuitive yet quantitative brain combinations a marketing person needs to be good at his/her job. And a marketing person is not trained to negotiate and close.

3) Bragging on an executive level conference call to a  PE firm about how you satisfy the CEO in ways we couldn’t imagine, and make him forget his fat, powerful wife who owns all the family property in her name alone, does not brand your technology product.

Neither does giving intricate (ugh!) details about how he likes to be told what to do and is like putty in your hands. This is, quite frankly, anti-marketing.  It is also revolting. (I couldn’t even look at the CEO after this.)

 And the company that was about ready to sign an alliance agreement so funding would be secured? They changed their mind.  

They decided to wait to buy or endorse, because they figured that the management team would be gone really, really soon.*

My point? Don’t be cute.  Don’t make it about your own prowess. Everything is about the company – the brand.

Be darn good at what you do instead. Know your function and make it happen so well and so smoothly that no one even notices the sweat.

*Yes, this actually happened. Both the satisfied CEO and the marketing mistress he insisted upon (I guess we know why…she’d never held a marketing position before being named VP) were soon let go. And the Board was faced with bringing back a rather ruined brand.

Remember when you could count on hanging on to your job as long as you showed up on time and did good work?

After the scare on Wall Street today, plenty of job holders are wondering if they can keep their jobs or find another one that pays as much. The turmoil is enough to give anyone the jitters.

The owner of your business is more accountable than ever for business profits and efficiency. His job is no more secure than yours. As a result, the pressure is on everyone at a workplace from the hourly worker to the CEO to produce more, cut costs, and get by with a reduced staff.

Suddenly we’ve all been thrown headlong into a global scramble for financial security. Our society is ratcheting up to a quick-fix mode. We don’t know for sure what success is, but we want to get there fast.

We don’t want much. We just want to lose weight, get rich, and feel good. Immediately. At work, requirements to do more with less help are spreading from industry to industry as businesses attempt to cut costs without affecting productivity.

A report by the Centers for Disease Control’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) states that “The nature of work is changing at whirlwind speed. Perhaps now more than ever before, job stress poses a threat to the health of workers…”

Studies cited in the report underscore the rise of stress in today’s workplace:

• Four out of ten workers say their work is “very or extremely stressful.”(Northwestern National Life)
• Nearly one of four workers report they are often burned out or stressed by their work. (Families and Work Institute)
• Three out of ten workers report feeling“quite a bit or extremely stressed at work.” (Yale University)

If you truly believe that stress is caused by the business doing all the wrong things and treating its employees unfairly, here’s a tip from Steve Tobak, a nationally known business consultant:

“That’s what’s great about America,” he says. “You can always quit and go somewhere else.”If you find the same stress at your next job, the problem is yours.

If, we might add, you’re lucky enough to “go somewhere else” and find a job.

Post in CNET today talks about work stress.  We all have it to some degree.  But with almost everything in life, it’s a choice, usually.  How you manage it is up to you, and no one else.  That is easier said than done of course, but like Steve Tobak (writer) says, no one else is going to do it for you.  One point that made me think:

Are you creating your own stress?  So many times it’s easier to blame others, but let’s all take a look at ourselves, as individuals and what we contribute.  Small changes can make a big difference.

Steve Tobak spreads confusion at C|NET by arguing for “Intellectual Property”. With complete disregard for commercial vs. noncommercial use, Steve states that downloading unauthorized works while criticizing those who sell unauthorized copies is a “double standard”. He then trumpets the virtues of patents in general, while failing to distinguish between software idea patents, patents on tangible objects, or patents on pharmaceutical products designed for healthcare – all of which bring up very different issues. Steve says:

By definition, a patent, a copyright, or a trademark–intellectual property–entitles the owner to reasonable compensation for its use by others. It’s the law.

The word “compensation” implies that whenever you listen to or view a copy, the original author has worked for you and that he should be compensated accordingly. This absurdly puts listening and viewing copies on par with situations resembling a live performance. However, if one were to manufacture then sell a similar but patented toy or sell a product using another’s trademark, “compensation” is an inaccurate descriptor. What has occurred here is best described as “damages”, not a situation where work deserving of “compensation” has been done. Steve sums up:

We are a nation of laws. Without them, I doubt we would have the quality of life we have. And without intellectual property rights, I doubt we’d have technology-enriched lives. It’s not a perfect system, but it works pretty well. You either buy into that or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways.

Steve demonstrates that lumping these disparate laws together often produces incoherent, misleading, and all-or-nothing arguments. Arguing either for or against “Intellectual Property” invariably spreads confusion. If we wish to construct reasonable laws then we must avoid the temptation to argue in such abstract terms (“Intellectual Property”) and acknowledge their disparity.