Happy talk – Motivation unplugged

"Cos' I'm worth it" - A marketing executive from L'Oreal rocks out at the Marketing Directors Forum in Athens

I was reading the blog of Video Arts the other day on the issue of happiness at work.  It reminded me of the words of honorary punk rockers Rogers, Hammerstein and Captain Sensible, “Happy talk”.  Yes, it’s nice to be happy at work, but that’s only half the story.  We looked at the blues and motivation previously.  The Smiths’ classic “Heaven knows I’m miserable now” is the mantra for people stuck in jobs that don’t fit their skills, attitudes, inner or outer desires.  Let’s check out the dark side of the motivational equation:

What then are the reasons to be cheerful at work?  Certainly NOT because the 360 degree appraisal system has been put online in full colour,  because the team has won a set of fake plastic palm trees inscribed with the company mission statement, or when the HR department places a ‘People are our greatest asset’ plaque in every toilet cubicle.

It may be slightly quaint or even old fashioned to say this, but whatever happened to good old job design, as described by Hackman and Oldham?  They pointed out that people work well when they have well designed jobs.  These include some good old fashioned but not out of date factors:

• Skill variety – using an appropriate variety of skills.
• Task identity – being able to see the whole task.
• Task significance – the extent to which people identify with the task and its importance to something wider.
• Autonomy – giving some discretion over the way in which work is done.
• Feedback – gaining an idea of how well people convert effort into performance.

In practical terms, many of the tried and tested methods of improving job design at work still have value.  For example:   vary work where possible to encourage skill variety;  assign work as a whole unit to enhance task significance;  delegate tasks to their lowest possible level to create autonomy and responsibility;   connect people to the impact of their work through feedback.  Some of the world’s best workplaces such as Prêt à Manger use these principles intuitively as they are common sense, although they are not commonly applied.  Others have made significant improvements by just following them as a conscious protocol, such as I have observed in work at The Royal College of Physicians.

My latest book Punk Rock People Management offers us three chords on motivation:

• Design work according to Hackman and Oldham’s principles.

• Eliminate pointless tasks from the daily grind that add no customer / stakeholder value.

• Remember that reasons to be cheerful include: being listened to; doing things that count; understanding why they matter; being part of something; not having to do pointless tasks;  getting meaningful feedback on what you do and so on.

‘Punk Rock People Management – A no-nonsense guide to hiring, inspiring and firing staff’ is available for purchase of as a FREE download via the Punk Rock People Management webpage.  If you like this extract from the book, you will also LOVE my other book ‘Sex, Leadership and Rock’n’Roll’, acclaimed by Tom Peters, the daddy of them all.  Contact us to book your next conference keynote based on our heady mixture of business leadership and music.  Just back from Greece, and shortly appearing in Romania, South Africa and Slough – hardly a Rock’n'Roll schedule I admit!  Read a review by clicking on the picture:

Good companions

I leave not with Happy Talk by Captain Sensible, but with his rather more thoughtful anti-war / eco warrior song “Glad it’s all over” – The Captain ‘extinguished me’ with a fire hydrant at the Marquee during a Doctors of Madness gig, for which I am eternally grateful.

Under Pressure – Reinvention Lessons from David Bowie

This article finds me in Athens, contemplating the talk I am to give at the 7th international HR Leadership Conference.  My theme is to be that of reinvention which is extremely apt for the business world in Greece and more widely.  Compared with all the ‘one hit wonders’ in music, David Bowie has reinvented himself several times and taken his audience with him.  The parallel lesson in business is that of changing what you do, keeping your customers and gaining new customers.  What can we learn about business from David Bowie?  This is the second article in the series – to catch up with the story so far check out ‘The Laughing Gnome to Heroes’.  Before we start, let’s look at another Bowie classic – China Girl:

Bowie Business Lesson # 5.  Perpetual change

In 1983, he released ‘Let’s Dance.’ Bowie recruited Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers to produce the album, giving the record a sleek, funky foundation, and hired the unknown Stevie Ray Vaughan as lead guitarist. Let’s Dance became his most successful record.

Bowie Business Lesson # 6. When change is over, change again

Bowie’s next project was less successful. He formed a guitar rock band called Tin Machine. They released an album to poor reviews and supported it with a small tour, which was only moderately successful. Tin Machine released a second album, Tin Machine II, which was ignored. Time to change again …

Bowie Business Lesson # 7. Form innovative partnerships

Bowie teamed up with Brian Eno to produce ‘Outside’ and went on tour, co-headlining with ‘Nine Inch Nails,’ to lure a younger audience, but his strategy failed. In 1996, he recorded ‘Earthling,’ an album heavily influenced by techno and drum’n’bass. Earthling received positive reviews, yet it did not attract a new audience. Many techno purists criticised Bowie for exploiting their subculture. It seemed that his attempt to cross demographic and culture divides was not going to work on this occasion. Since then, Bowie has formed partnerships with a number of artists including Placebo and reinvented himself as a brand for a US online bank

The main learnings from this dramatic series of reinventions include:

1. Make radical changes even when your current strategy is successful.

2. Hire and work with the best people you can find, especially if they are better than you.

3. Read the environment and engage with new movements when they are more than fads.

4. Learn from failure and quickly move on.

What else do you consider that David Bowie can teach us about business?  Share your thoughts here.

Finally, let’s catch another Bowie classic.  Under Pressure:

If you enjoy this you will love my new book ‘Punk Rock People Management – A no-nonsense guide to hiring, inspiring and firing staff’. It is available for FREE via the Punk Rock People Management webpage.  A beautiful full colour print version and Kindle version are also available.  David Bowie and the reinvention theme feature strongly in my previous book ‘Sex, Leadership and Rock’n'Roll‘.

Punk Rock HR - Picture by Lindsay Wakelin www.lindsaywakelinphotography.com

Pretty Vacant – 10 Punk Rock Business Management Tips

I kissed an HR girl and I liked it ...

We live in lean times.  Lean times call for lean thinking.  Punk Rock is all about brevity, simplicity and authenticity.   So, here for your viewing pleasure are 10 Punk Rock People Management tips (well, there may be more or less than 10!), from some self proclaimed HR Punk Rock gals and HR Rock Chicks, presented in a slideshare show:

PUNK ROCK BUSINESS WISDOM  – If you don’t use slideshare you can also find the slideshow at  I kissed an HR girl and I liked it

If you have not yet got your copy of Punk Rock People Management, now is a good time to do this.  The book recently overtook Dave Ulrich, Gary Hamel and the usual HR Gurus, having hit No 1 on Amazon Kindle in management and HR books.   There are a number of options:  Beautiful full colour print version,    Kindle version – UK,      Kindle Version – Worldwide.  The print version of the book makes an excellent and unique Christmas present.  Check this review out by the Open University Businsss School.  The contents page can be found here:

Lean People Management for Lean times

We’re off to deliver an HR keynote at the 7th international HR conference in Athens next week following on from Dave Ulrich and Lynda Gratton of London Business School.  To warm up for this, let’s finish with some classic punk – Pretty Vacant, a song which clearly predicted the current HR obsession with employee disengagement in its title!

Pictures courtesy of Lindsay Wakelin Photography, Sue Cook and book design by PDS Hamiltons

Rock’n’Roll innovators – Steve Jobs 1955 – 2011

It’s pretty much all been said, but we lost one of our greatest old school innovators this week as Steve Jobs fell prey to cancer.  This resonated especially with me as my brother also succumbed to this most resilient of diseases this year.  In spite of huge leaps forward cures for cancer still elude medical and pharmaceutical innovation.  Having come from the world of scientific innovation myself, I believe that even cancer will be history by the end of the 21^st century.  Lou Reed sums up the rollercoaster of emotions that cancer represents in his album ‘Magic and Loss’, which examines the demise of personal friends to the disease:

I was talking to Richard Bandler last night and the conversation reminded me of how Steve Jobs describes death as life’s ultimate change agent, in terms of its ability to make way for the new.  Check his Stanford University talk of 2005 on this point, shortly after he contracted the disease.  It is a breathtaking speech:

Steve Jobs was a remarkable man, so I pondered what he leaves us as a lasting legacy:

Jobs was no friend of market research, preferring intuition as a spur to innovation.  It’s a characteristic he shares with Leo Fender, who was not a great guitar player, but designed intuitively great features into his groundbreaking Fender Stratocaster guitar.  I’ll be telling the Fender Strat story in a future post.  For now, here’s my dead Fender Strat, after its premature cremation by IBM leaders at a business conference some years back.

IBM burnt my guitar

Jobs’ 2^nd legacy was his insistence that technology needed to fuse style and substance.  This was modelled down to the last detail in Apple’s products, which made Apple products design icons as well as functionally superior.  People’s love of the Apple brand and design is evident in their personal tributes this week at Apple stores all over the world.  I believe this arises not just out of style for its own sake, but because Jobs fused style with substance.

Jobs’ third legacy is his mantra “stay hungry, stay foolish”.  Comfort does not make for great innovation, nor does taking yourself too seriously.  All too often hunger and playfulness are driven out of corporate life with disastrous consequences for long term innovation.  To read more on the HR issues surrounding innovation check out ‘What’s New Pussycat?”  The credit crunch and the recession have exacerbated blame cultures and disputes over pay.   Steve Jobs’ last reported yearly salary was $1.  Check Dean Becker’s blog out for an excellent personal analysis of the qualities that made Steve Jobs an agile and adaptive learner.

It seems fitting to end this post with a personal consequence of Jobs’ approach to innovation.  Here’s a piece of music I wrote and recorded on my beloved iMac entitled “Mars Warming” from the album “Music from the Basement of Cognition“.  This music was conceived as a coda to an epic film and is filled with joy, sadness and melancholy.  It simply would have not been possible to have recorded this piece of music without Steve Jobs.  May he rest in peace.

Spirit in the sky – The circuitry of networking

It’s been a manic few weeks so I thought I’d write a blog about the gentle art of networking (and a little bit of luck!).  Check out the previous post in this area at A day in the life.  Our networking journey begins at an annual conference we delivered for the Institute of Circuit Technology, sponsored by Spirit Circuits.  That gives us our title.  Let’s travel back in time to the swinging 60′s, purely for some gratuitous psychedelic pop by Norman Greenbaum:

Spirit Circuits are an amazing printed circuit board manufacturing business.  The things that separate them from the crowd include a recognition of the word customer in everything they do and their ability as a smaller business to work globally.  An example of their exceptional customer service is their “Go Naked” offering.  This is a bespoke circuit board design service for small business entrepreneurs who cannot afford to manufacture circuit boards for new products.  Steve Driver, Spirit Circuits’ CEO offers this service on the basis that “small acorns sometimes grow into mighty oaks”.  In terms of their global footprint, Spirit Circuits have pioneered a number of innovative partnerships with China, rather than attempting to compete with this growing economy.  It’s perhaps a case of ‘being inside the tent p…..ing out, rather than outside the tent p…..ing in’.

Spirit Circuits asked me to deliver a keynote event for the Institute entitled ‘Myths and Riffs of Leadership’.  After the event, I found myself jamming into the night with Printed Circuit Board business owners as if I had known them for years.  Playing music really does beat social networking etc. as a means of establishing business bonds that last!  Here’s a clip of ‘Steve Driver and The Circuit Breakers’ performing “The PCB blues”:

Additionally, I was able to put Spirit Circuits in touch with a BBC journalist for the World Service who specialises in Chinese affairs.  Watch this space for developments in what Level 42 would call “The Chinese Way”.

It also occurred to me that there must have been a spirit in the sky the other day.  I had gone to Rochester Castle to meet a client for a coffee, when I bumped into David Sillito, the BBC’s arts correspondent, who was making a news item on a new BBC costume drama.  David had previously made a feature on a ‘School of Rock’ event for a Primary School, which the Headmistress said was pivotal in improving exam performance for the children.  Check out the feature from BBC Breakfast News:

David remembered the School of Rock event with some fondness.  As a result of our brief encounter, I gave him a copy of Punk Rock People Management with a view to developing a feature on simple, jargon free and authentic Human Relations.   Goodness knows, there’s a need for that in most companies I get invited into these days!

What do I get - Punk Rock HR - the contents page

Get your full colour print copy or Amazon Kindle version of Punk Rock People Management, which hit number 1 in the Amazon chart for management / HR books the other week, above books by Dave Ulrich and Sir John Whitmore.  Mail me for a free electronic version of the book.  Or come over to the 7^th international HR conference in Athens on 19^th October, where Demis Roussos with meet Gary Hamel and Johnny Rotten, metaphorically speaking…

I kissed an HR girl and I liked it - photo courtesy of www.lindsaywakelinphotography.com