“Do you guys have email addresses?” our waitress asked. It was Thursday, and my colleague and I were partaking in 60-cent Boneless Wings Day. After delivering a sarcastic “No” I inquired why she was asking so bluntly. She wanted us to enroll in the Buffalo Circle Loyalty Program. No, she didn’t want us to…BWW did. Most restaurants have some variation on “offer a free $4 appetizer on your birthday in exchange for attacking you with spam” programs. Our waitress didn’t seem too interested in gaining our email so I asked, “What do you get out of it?”

“I get a ticket for each person enrolled, and every week we have a raffle. The winner gets out of clean up duty.”

The reason for her lack of interest became obvious.

In a perfect world, employees would be perfectly matched to their job. Every manager would be a leader and leaders would inspire and engage their employees by reminding them how their job ties into a larger mission. But sometimes you just need wings delivered to table eight. Those jobs call for transactional leadership, a.k.a., incentives. It’s a standard rule of organizational psychology: that which gets measured gets done; rewarded gets done better (or more often). Expectancy theory tells us incentives work when task performance is easily related to the reward, and the reward is desired. But if you make the incentive too complex, or one no one cares about, the system falls apart.

You get waitresses who don’t care if I become a member of the hallowed Buffalo Circle.

So what should Buffalo Wild Wings do? Pay for performance: a dollar for each enrollee. Or force rank employees: everyone gets a percentage in tip share equal to their percentage of enrollees. There are many different incentive solutions that would simply tie performance to reward.

A raffle tickets is not one of them.

In many ways, the book recaps a lot of Sutton’s old ideas but re-presents them through the lens of boss. The boss role is almost a breeding ground for bossholes because we often judge them solely on their ability to get results. Sutton, and many others, argue that bosses must be judged by their results and how their followers feel in the process of getting those results. Using this as the measuring stick, Sutton outlines seven core habits that the best bosses do, and fills each chapter with case studies and amusing stories that prove that good bosses do things that bad bosses don’t do (the corollary is also true).

If you’re a boss, someone who manages others, than Good Boss Bad Boss is a worthwhile read. It’s a short course on Sutton’s work that will reveal how to be a boss who gets results, and good reviews.

Tony Hsieh (2010) and Zappos serve as an example of these organic values. Hsieh had an idea of what values Zappos had. But rather than state them outright, he actively sought out the participation of every employee at Zappos. His leadership role consisted of compiling and editing this list. In doing so, he left Zappos employees feeling included and created a list that actually reflected Zappos’ values (a rare find).

Joas, H. (2000). The genesis of values. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Hseih, T. (2010). Delivering happiness: A path to profits, passion and purpose. New York: Business Plus.

O’Toole, J. 1996. Leading Change: The Argument for values-based Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

When reading Ruthless Focus, the parallels to two authors develop immediately: Collins and Porter. Jim Collins in Good to Great offers his “Hedgehog Concept” a simplistic way to develop a strategy by answering three questions. Hall and Bock’s two questions mirror two of Collins’. It would have been interesting to hear Hall and Bock’s reasons for not include Collins’ passion question. Likewise, the five strategies echo Porter’s competitive strategy model, where organizations select one of five market positions.

The highlights of the book are the case studies. Many of the case studies are of oft-profiled organizations such as Toyota or Amazon.com, but some are companies that don’t immediately come to mind. Additionally, each chapter ends with a “Thinking Points” section, a unique way to cause the reader to reflect on the case studies. Overall the ideas in Ruthless Focus are not new. The ideas behind developing strategy have been writing about previously. However, the companies Hall and Bock profile are unique, which allows the reader to see old ideas from a new perspective.

1. Create urgency. Leaders to help the organization see that it can not continue down the same old road.
2. Form a powerful coalition. In order to lead change, leaders at the top must form a team of change champions who hold status from a variety of sources.
3. Create a vision for change. Once the organization has a sense of urgency, the coalition can begin to propose a solution to the organization that will inspire them to work toward change.

Notice that step three is create a vision, step four is to communicate that vision. How often do we hear of a new CEO who enters intensely sharing a vision and who is fired just as intensely. If we want successful change, we must make followers change ready by creating this sense of urgency, getting a powerful team of champions together and writing that vision as a team.

Kotter, J. P. (1996) Leading change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Lewin, K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Clever is less of a step-by-step guide to leading clevers and more an awareness of the need to lead them uniquely. Clever gives the reader ideas about how a company should engage their clevers, how the presence of clevers changes organization design and how the rewards for leading clevers can be tremendous, as can the risks. The book doesn’t present much research, however the examples given are more than enough to challenge leaders thinking about how, and if, they can lead their clevers.

Theories such as Charismatic leadership and Transformational leadership appear to be more about rallying followers to better future using motivating factors (Northouse, 2006). These theories seem to be more appropriate for consideration when working with an organization’s top leaders, those concerned with motivating followers toward the future of the organization.

Buckingham, M. (2005) The one thing you need to know: about great managing, great leading and sustained individual success. New York, NY: Free Press

Hersey, P. and Blanchard, K. H. (1972). Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources (2nd ed.)New Jersey/Prentice Hall.

Northouse, P. (2006). Leadership: Theory and practice (4^th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

LeaderLab Episode 0108 – Website

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The book itself is organized into ten chapters, each chapter covering a different quality. The chapters are organized around standardized questions: “What is it?” “How do you know it when you see it?” and “How do I get it?” This format makes the content very easy to absorb, a plus for time-strapped leaders. While the book cites a wealth of leadership and theory, it does so in order to expound upon these ten qualities. No real indication of how the research methods behind the creation of this list is given. It’s unclear whether this is a definitive list, or the author’s opinion on which qualities matter most.

To the well-read leader, there is not much new in this book. However, the book presents a useful review of the literature surrounding leadership which serve as a primer or reminder. Overall, The Intangibles of Leadership, is worth a read either to learn or relearn the subtleties of leadership excellence.

When leading change in organizations, the primary role for leadership is to unbalance the force. Leaders need to influence followers to see the reasons to change, strengthen the helping forces in the process. If leaders fail to unbalance the force, the change effort simply will not occur.

Lewin, K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science. New York, NY: Harper & Row.