An 80/20 approach to understanding business

Harold Jarche and I were reflecting this morning on how few of us have expertise in learning, business, and web 2.0. Two out of three ain’t bad, but a corporation seeking a social networking/learning solution wants the full picture. Whether or not you have business credentials, you can stay abreast of trends by following the ideas published in Harvard Business Review.

HBR comes out with such thought-provoking, breakthrough articles that it’s a pity I rarely find time to read it. I used to feel guilty about missing six issues a year. Now HBR is a monthly publication, so I miss it a dozen times a year.

Enter HBR’s Executive Summaries. Here’s a sample from this month’s HBR:

Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
Tony Schwartz

As the demands of the workplace keep rising, many people respond by putting in ever longer hours, which inevitably leads to burnout that costs both the organization and the employee. Meanwhile, people take for granted what fuels their capacity to work—their energy. Increasing that capacity is the best way to get more done faster and better.

Time is a finite resource, but energy is different. It has four wellsprings—the body, emotions, mind, and spirit—and in each, it can be systematically expanded and renewed. In this article, Schwartz, founder of the Energy Project, describes how to establish rituals that will build energy in the four key dimensions. For instance, harnessing the body’s ultradian rhythms by taking intermittent breaks restores physical energy. Rejecting the role of a victim and instead viewing events through three hopeful lenses defuses energy-draining negative emotions. Avoiding the constant distractions that technology has introduced increases mental energy. And participating in activities that give you a sense of meaning and purpose boosts the energy of the spirit….

Wachovia Bank employees who went through an energy management program outperformed a control group on important financial metrics like loans generated, and they reported substantially improved customer relationships, productivity, and personal satisfaction…. When organizations invest in all dimensions of their employees’ lives, individuals respond by bringing all their energy wholeheartedly to work—and both companies and their people grow in value.

That’s enough for me to capture the main meme and to decide whether I want to investigate further. Thinking a moment about one of the summaries helps me tie together concepts I’d already stuffed into longterm memory. Take this excerpt from the summary of an article on Amazon:

The Institutional Yes
Jeff Bezos

…the company’s strategy and culture are rooted in a sturdy entrepreneurial optimism and rest on the single question of what’s better for the customer.

Bezos describes himself as “congenitally customer focused.” He knows that the buyers in Amazon’s consumer-facing business want selection, low prices, and fast delivery—and he’s confident that won’t change. “I can’t imagine,” he says, “that ten years from now [our customers] are going to say, ‘I love Amazon, but if only they could deliver my products a little more slowly.’”

More briefly:

CEOs are nominally and ultimately responsible for strategy, but they have less and less time to devote to it. As a result, CEOs are appointing “chief strategy officers”—executives specifically tasked with creating, communicating, executing, and sustaining a company’s strategic initiatives.

Or:

Traditionally, markets have been viewed as simply the confluence of supply and demand. But to function properly, they must be able to attract a sufficient number of buyers and sellers, induce participants to make their preferences clear, and overcome congestion by providing both enough time to make choices and a speedy means of registering them. Solutions to these challenges are the province of market design—a blend of game theory and experimental economics.