So farewell, Steve Ballmer

I had looked forward to seeing Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft (who has recently announced that he is stepping down). He was guest speaker at a major Coca-Cola conference in the mid-90s that I was co-facilitating with Bill Boggs. At the time Microsoft was the hottest company on the planet.

In the event… I just thought he was preachy, screechy and dull.

I’m not really surprised that the company has performed so poorly over the past two decades. So poorly that Microsoft’s stock surged when he said he was off.  

The illusion of measurement and control

The notion that control of a business follows from measurement is a fallacy.

What’s the mantra? “If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it.”

It’s a comforting illusion.

My colleague, Bill Boggs, famously responded to a client in a workshop, who had just put out the usual line, with: “I’ve been measuring my d**k since I was fourteen and I still can’t control it.”

Did you know that in Britain there’s an Institute of Measurement and Control. Wonder how they are doing with the Boggs question?

Snoozing through Julius Caesar

My colleague, Bill Boggs, came over from America to work with Andrew Bailey and me on a new book on creativity. (Sadly it never saw the light of day.)

Since we were nearby, I took them to a performance of Julius Caesar by the RSC in Stratford.

Quite early in Act One, I noticed that Bill was asleep. Irritated, I wondered why I had brought him along.

Then, later, I glanced in his direction again. He was awake. And his lips were moving constantly. He was silently mouthing the words of the play. All of them, apparently.

I didn’t know at that time that he suffered from sleep apnoea and was likely to drop off for a nap at any time.

Nor had I realised that he knew Julius Caesar inside out.

In Memoriam Bill Boggs: Managing Mavericks

All my working life, I’ve worked with and managed mavericks – highly creative individuals who don’t fit well into the corporate mould.

For many years this was in ad agencies. They rarely produce outstanding work if they don’t have some mavericks on staff. And they won’t join unless there are signals that it’s OK to be different. It’s the same for all organisations that are committed to creating breakthrough of one kind or another.

When I joined the innovation consultancy, Synectics, one of my American colleagues, another recent joiner, was Dr Bill Boggs. And it didn’t take long to discover two things.

One was that most of my colleagues did not appreciate Bill’s ways. He was difficult, self-obsessed, driven, irreverent and disruptive. There’s no doubt that he thought that corporate rules, even ones he personally participated in shaping, applied to others, not to Bill.

The other thing that I discovered was that Bill was uniquely brilliant, creating completely new ways of working and producing far, far more business for our firm in the USA than anyone else – in effect bringing the revenue that paid many colleagues’ salaries. And he was on his day the finest facilitator of creativity I ever saw.

All this seemed to make no difference to colleagues’ attitudes to him and many thought he should be fired – and said so frequently.

Somehow or other we held on to him for several years, but in the end he went. What he discovered then was that in reality he needed the relatively secure home that we provided. He was nowhere near so effective without us.

But then we were so much less without him.

Put bluntly, the issue for organisations is: how to recruit and retain the mavericks who can and will drive their future – and have colleagues appreciate their value. It’s not easy, but it may be vitally important.

Oprah, Queen of Facilitators

So Oprah Winfrey is to give up her TV show after a couple of decades.

When I started out on the journey of learning to become a facilitator of creativity and innovation, aside from the excellent training I was given by Jasmine Dale, I also sat in with any and all other facilitators who would have me, making notes - really detailed notes - on how they did it, what worked and what didn’t.

Doing this with my colleague, Bill Boggs, was extraordinarily important to my own development. At his best he was unbeatable. Irrespective of the numbers in the room he seemed continuously to know what everyone was thinking and feeling. And to know what needed to be done in order to get towards a result.

But, in parallel, I looked at all the TV “facilitators”. Many of them seemed to me to be almost completely incompetent – and by the way I learned much from this.

Two emerged as head and shoulders above the rest – Jerry Springer and Oprah. I studied both carefully, making sure that I focused on them, not on the topic at hand. My colleagues were uniformly dismayed that I should pay such attention to Jerry. After all, wasn’t he serving the forces of darkness? But with such skill and style.

On the other hand, Oprah in her early days was magical in her ability to draw out her guests, often working with a large studio audience as well as with the celebs. All were treated with dignity and empathy. Her connection-making skills were particularly evident. She always knew when to move in, when to back off, when to paraphrase to help clarity, when to confront…

Of course, I was studying these people twenty years ago. By now both Jerry and Oprah have become the true stars of their shows, irrespective of the exalted standing of guests, and that has made them, from my point of view, infinitely less interesting. But I owe them a lot.

Are you a facilitator? Do you have your own role models?