deliberate about the trade-offs

I once attended an event where Herb [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines] was interviewed about his business strategy. It was a great talk in many ways, but when he began to talk about how deliberate he was about the trade-offs he had made at Southwest, my ears perked up. Rather than try to fly to every destination, they had deliberately chosen to offer only point-to-point flights. Instead of jacking up prices to cover the cost of meals, he decided they would serve none. Instead of assigning seats in advance, they would let people choose them as they got on the plane. Instead of upselling their passengers on glitzy first-class service, they offered only coach. These trade-offs weren't made by default but by design. Each and every one was made as part of a deliberate strategy to keep costs down. Did he run the risk of alienating customers who wanted the broader range of destinations, the choice to purchase overpriced meals, and so forth? Yes, but Kelleher was totally clear about what the company was - a low-cost airline - and what they were not. And his trade-offs reflected as much. 

It was an example of his Essentialist thinking at work when he said: "You have to look at every opportunity and say, 'Well, no... I'm sorry, We're not going to do a thousand different things that really won't contribute much to the end result we are trying to achieve."

Greg McKeown

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.49,50

the meaning of a sacrifice

Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

Viktor Frankl

Man's Search for Meaning. 1946.

if you want it, go and give it

Giver cultures, despite their power, can be fragile. To sustain them, leaders need to do more than simply encourage employees to seek help, reward givers, and screen out takers.

In 1985, a film company facing financial pressure hired a new president. In an effort to cut costs, the president asked the two leaders of a division, Ed and Alvy, to conduct layoffs. Ed and Alvy resisted—eliminating employees would dilute the company’s value. The president issued an ultimatum: a list of names was due to him at nine o’clock the next morning.

When the president received the list, it contained two names: Ed and Alvy.

No layoffs were conducted, and a few months later Steve Jobs bought the division from Lucasfilm and started Pixar with Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.

Employees were grateful that “managers would put their own jobs on the line for the good of their teams,” marvels Stanford’s Robert Sutton, noting that even a quarter century later, this “still drives and inspires people at Pixar.”

When it comes to giver cultures, the role-modeling lesson here is a powerful one: if you want it, go and give it.

Adam Grant

"Givers take all: The hidden dimension of corporate culture". McKinsey Quarterly. April 2013. 

a willing sacrifice or simply suffering

In 2009, two US professors set out to study zookeepers and aquarium workers in an effort to discover what kept them motivated at work.

The results pointed to an overwhelming similarity: The keepers gained a deep sense of meaning from their jobs. It didn’t matter that caring for animals was extremely badly paid and offered little career advancement, or that many of the actual tasks involved could be classified as “dirty work”—cleaning up feces, chopping vegetables, scrubbing floors. The zookeepers, most of whom were highly educated, felt that they were fulfilling a calling, and in doing so were extremely dedicated, often volunteering for months before even beginning to be paid, and rarely quitting....

The difference between finding a situation bearable—possibly, indeed, happy—and unbearable is about whether we experience ourselves as performing a willing sacrifice, or simply as suffering. When working hard tips over into working too hard, or with too little reward, sacrifice has slipped into suffering.... “Sacrifice might be hurtful and exhausting, but it is a conscious choice,” (Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD) writes. “Suffering is the result of feeling that we cannot slow down or else we will be shamed and lose control. Sacrifice makes us who we are. Suffering keeps us captive.”

The zookeepers in the 2009 research saw themselves as performing a willing sacrifice—of high pay, or status, or a warm office to work in rather than a pen. They experienced those things, but didn’t seem to resent their work, because they believed the tradeoff was worthwhile.

Cassie Werber

"The key to loving your job in the age of burnout." Quartz. April 7, 2019

are you undercommunicating?

Transformation is impossible unless hundreds or thousands of people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices. Employees will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible. Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of the troops are never captured....

Executives who communicate well incorporate messages into their hour-by-hour activities. In a routine discussion about a business problem, they talk about how proposed solutions fit (or don’t fit) into the bigger picture. In a regular performance appraisal, they talk about how the employee’s behavior helps or undermines the vision. In a review of a division’s quarterly performance, they talk not only about the numbers but also about how the division’s executives are contributing to the transformation. In a routine Q&A with employees at a company facility, they tie their answers back to renewal goals.

In more successful transformation efforts, executives use all existing communication channels to broadcast the vision. They turn boring and unread company newsletters into lively articles about the vision. They take ritualistic and tedious quarterly management meetings and turn them into exciting discussions of the transformation. They throw out much of the company’s generic management education and replace it with courses that focus on business problems and the new vision. The guiding principle is simple: use every possible channel, especially those that are being wasted on nonessential information.

Perhaps even more important, most of the executives I have known in successful cases of major change learn to “walk the talk.” They consciously attempt to become a living symbol of the new corporate culture. This is often not easy. A 60-year-old plant manager who has spent precious little time over 40 years thinking about customers will not suddenly behave in a customer-oriented way. But I have witnessed just such a person change, and change a great deal. In that case, a high level of urgency helped. The fact that the man was a part of the guiding coalition and the vision-creation team also helped. So did all the communication, which kept reminding him of the desired behavior, and all the feedback from his peers and subordinates, which helped him see when he was not engaging in that behavior.

Communication comes in both words and deeds, and the latter are often the most powerful form. Nothing undermines change more than behavior by important individuals that is inconsistent with their words.

John P. Kotter

"Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" Harvard Business Review. May-June 1995

what we want eventually

Happiness can be defined, in part at least, as the fruit of the desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually.... The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.

Stephen R. Covey

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.  Simon & Schuster, 2013. p.48, 72

to be hopeful

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Howard Zinn

A People’s History of American Empire. Henry Holt & Co. 2008

authenticity

[A]s [Director Baltasar] Kormákur addressed the 3-D goggled audience before the start of the [premier of Everest]... he made it abundantly clear that he “didn’t want to sanitize the people and the events.” Rather, he hoped to “humanize them and make them real.” He went on to explain that he shot in temperatures as low as -22F and at altitudes of 16,000 feet. He said he took the cast and crew as high as any insurance company would allow them to go. He wanted his actors to feel the stress and discomfort that’s associated with being up high, because that was the only way he could make sure that what came across in the final cut did indeed feel authentic.

They filmed a great deal of the movie in Nepal, with the balance filmed in the Dolomites in Italy and on a sound stage. I caught up with actors Michael Kelly and Jason Clarke (separately) after the screening, and talked to them about what it was like to film at altitude in the cold temperatures. They both mentioned how difficult it was to be flown right to the shooting location. They didn’t have time to properly acclimatize and were plagued with the headaches, nausea and insomnia that commonly accompany altitude sickness. Bummer for the actors, but another brilliant Kormákur move as far as “keeping it real,” since Everest climbers deal with these ailments on the mountain.

So, how did Kormákur get his celebrity cast and crew to deal with such uncomfortable conditions on top of an already-grueling shoot schedule? He did what any good leader would do: He went through the hardship with them. In his own words: “I think what’s helpful is that I will stay right there with them, in the same conditions, show them what they need to do…So they are more likely to work with you than if you’re sitting someplace warm and telling them, ‘Keep going.’”

Bingo. It’s important for leaders to show their teams that they’re willing to make the same sacrifices and endure the same hardships as everyone else. As a leader, you can never expect the people on your team to be willing to endure anything that you are not willing to endure. By getting out there with his cast and crew, Kormákur was building trust and loyalty—two incredibly important aspects of high-performing teams. And he needed these actors to perform, because they were re-creating scenes that would require them to withstand some of the most physically challenging conditions they had ever experienced.

Alison Levine

"Here's what you can learn about leadership from 'Everest'" Fortune. 9/20/2015

willing to sacrifice

[Simon] Sinek mentions Captain William Swenson, who was awarded the congressional Medal of Honor in 2013. When his column came under ambush in Afghanistan, Swenson ran into live fire to rescue the wounded officers. Someone captured the entire experience on camera, including the moment when Swenson bent over to kiss a wounded soldier before putting him in a helicopter.

At first, Sinek thought altruistic people like Swenson were simply drawn to military service. Then he realized it works the other way around — the military environment can prompt anyone to act selflessly.

Unfortunately, this is hardly the current environment in most organizations.

“In the military, they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. In business, we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain. We have it backwards,” he quips.

But moving ahead at the expense of others teaches your subordinates to do the same, to the detriment of the organization as a whole. That’s because employees spend time competing with and fearing each other instead of joining forces and protecting the company from external threats.

A truly effective leader knows to put her employees’ well-being before her own, so that her employees ultimately do the same for her and for the organization. 

“When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first, to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results, so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen,” Sinek says.

Shana Lebowitz

"Why effective managers act like military leaders." Business Insider. 8/14/2015