Restoring the Soul of Business

Staying Human in the Age of Data

Rishad Tobaccowala

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781400210664
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

How to keep your intuition and human instinct intact in our current technological era. 

Businesses are constantly moving into uncharted territory as they determine how to navigate an increasingly digital future effectively. But the startling and often overlooked truth is that the promise of digital transformation can only be realized when we find a way to balance it with our irreplaceable humanity.

In Restoring the Soul of Business, business leader Rishad Tobaccowala will teach you how to establish the proper balance between human creativity and data-driven insights that can lead to increased revenue, profitability, retention—and even joy—in your career and business.

You’ll learn how to:

• Understand the benefit that can be realized by combining emotion and data, human and machine, analog and digital.
• Spot the warning signs of data-blinded companies who are failing to innovate well.
• Explore how organizations of various sizes and industries have successfully reoriented their thinking on how to fuse technology and humanity.
• Gain skills to become an expert in connections critical to growth and success, including the connection between being creative and using technology.

 

Restoring the Soul of Business provides practical tools and techniques that every organization should implement and challenges you to move forward with the kind of balance that capitalizes transformation and produces one great success after another.

In the end, it’s the people that matter, and companies must never forget the soul that drives them.

SECTION II

COUNTERBALANCING MACHINES, SCREENS, AND DATA:

Seven Keys to Staying Human

CHAPTER 4

TALK ABOUT THE TURD ON THE TABLE

While the first two chapters talk about the dominance of machines, screens, and data, the third suggests that (1) opportunities exist to counteract this dominance and restore the balance between the story and the spreadsheet, and (2) restoring this balance isn’t only good for employees but for organizations as a whole. Once companies understand what constitutes meaningful work, they can design programs and policies to promote it.

In this section I suggest actions every organization can take to restore balance. The good news is that there’s a lot companies can do; I’ve already made a number of recommendations, such as humanizing the data (chapter 1), limiting screen time (chapter 2), and infusing meaning (chapter 3).

Here I will provide seven overarching steps corresponding to each chapter in this section—steps that can take companies closer to the story-spreadsheet ideal. These steps can be adopted by anyone wanting to be more successful in this endeavor, whether they’re a new employee, manager, or CEO.

You probably can’t anticipate what I’m going to suggest. They go beyond the obvious advice. Some are idealistic. Some are iconoclastic. And some are provocative, as the title of this chapter suggests. All of them, though, are user-friendly, and I strongly recommend you start putting them to use in your own organization.

Talking about It Before the S*** Hits the Fan

This chapter’s title has its origin in a meeting I had many years ago with Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe.¹ We were discussing how our two organizations might work together. I knew that we were facing a big obstacle to partnering: at the time we were fringe competitors, but our future growth paths would intensify the competition. Though we avoided this touchy subject initially, it loomed increasingly large in my mind. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“We need to address the turd on the table,” I said.

I wasn’t sure how Shantanu would react, but fortunately he said, “I am so glad you brought up what I was thinking about, and you brought it up so elegantly.”

The meeting became highly productive after that; we were free to speak openly and honestly about subjects of mutual interest without holding back ideas, information, and opinions.

Pardon the distasteful metaphor, but as I think you’ll see, it’s apt. Instinctively, you may know the turd on the table that is confronting your organization or team—it’s an unpleasant but highly significant subject that everyone would prefer to pretend doesn’t exist.² It can take many forms:

• Mismanagement. For instance, management (particular leaders or leadership teams) is disconnected from reality and refusing to acknowledge the facts—or they’re guilty of bullying, discrimination, or harassment. These are incredibly touchy issues, since the former means confronting powerful people in denial and the latter means addressing an individual’s unethical or immoral behaviors.

• Toxic cultures. Organizations are highly defensive about their cultures, even when they become cultlike and inflexible or fear-driven. Telling a leader that the culture has become poisoned requires courage.

• Financial improprieties. Here, the problem may be a company overinflating revenue, such as Enron, or one that takes short-term measures to goose the numbers, such as Wells Fargo. Confronting these improprieties that have major short-term benefits and may involve illegal or unethical actions is a challenge.

• Major industry shifts. A leader may refuse to address big changes in customer behavior, or the competitive landscape, or mammoth technology changes requiring tough decisions (such as Kodak and digital emergence). It’s easier to rationalize or deny shifts than articulate the business-altering trend and the need for rethinking everything.

• People problems. The boss or some person with influence is acting like a jerk, or is playing favorites, or is blind to internal or external developments. In many ways, this is the biggest turd on the table, in that it requires confronting a powerful individual about his or her issues.

Leaders can also address the turd on the table externally rather than internally. A small minority of leaders are willing to be outspoken and raise what Al Gore has termed “inconvenient truth.” I like to count myself among these leaders. For instance, I recently told a meeting of advertising industry executives that advertising spending would decline between 20 percent and 30 percent over the next five years.³ This prediction was pounced on by print and digital media, and a MediaPost reporter noted that I was making an “ironic prediction for an ad executive whose title is chief growth officer.”⁴

I suppose it was ironic, but more than that, it was a provocation designed to surface a huge issue in the industry that few wanted to confront. My intent was to disabuse marketers of their long-held belief that they could depend on mass advertising to build brands. The whole point of calling attention to the turd on the table, whether it’s inside or outside a company, is to stimulate frank discussions and fresh thinking about how to deal with the issue. The initial articulation of the unpleasant subject can evoke a negative, defensive reaction, but in most cases, it will produce positive results eventually.

The Reluctance to Verbalize Tough Truths

In spreadsheet-dominant organizations, people are often less than forthright. These types of companies don’t just program with code, they speak in code—they qualify their statements, sugarcoat their words, fail to disclose because of paranoia about “security.” In these cultures, leaders are always worried that a competitor is using sophisticated technology to spy on them, that hackers are going to breach their firewalls.

It’s not that all leaders of these companies consciously avoid confronting and talking about difficult issues. It’s simply that, like the stereotypical accountant or tech geek, they gravitate toward safer subjects that can be discussed factually rather than emotionally. A spreadsheet-focused mentality promotes fear and magical thinking.

Common Fears

BEING PUNISHED. You’ve heard the phrase “Don’t kill the messenger”? In spreadsheet cultures, people who bring up messy, problematic subjects tend to draw the ire of others in the room. If it can’t be dealt with logically and analytically—if it causes people to feel upset, embarrassed, or confused—then raising these issues creates consternation. And sometimes it creates condemnation. People are afraid of being punished—verbally reprimanded or worse—for talking about difficult subjects. For instance, they don’t want to address how the CEO intimidates everyone or how the CIO’s tendency to play favorites is lowering morale.

BEING WRONG. In a data-driven world, people like accuracy and correct decisions. The reasoning goes, if you follow the data, you’ll get it right. Of course, that’s not always true. In these cultures employees are often plagued by self-doubt: Am I reading the situation right? Is there a subject flaw in my thinking? Have I analyzed the situation incorrectly? Self-doubt is a highly effective censor.

BEING ASKED TO DO MORE WORK. Or, as they warn you in some stores, “If you break it, you buy it.” People fear that if they raise problems or difficult issues, they will be asked to deal with them.

BEING DISLIKED. Truth tellers aren’t popular in spreadsheet companies, especially when they’re telling hard truths. Most employees want to be liked by their colleagues and bosses, and articulating troubling issues will get them branded as troublemakers. This is especially true if they don’t have facts and figures to back up their insights and opinions.

Magical Thinking (or the “Turd Is a Brownie” Phenomenon)

INABILITY TO SEE A TURD. When you’re viewing the data constantly and thinking about it endlessly, you’re viewing the turd through distorting, rose-colored glasses. I’ve worked with managers like this, people who are insulated by all their software and systems and benchmark developments in a formulaic manner—i.e., they always compare their performance with traditional competitors or use other established measures. As a result, they miss untraditional competitors or unmeasured innovations. They see only what their screens show them. Thus, they fail to raise problematic issues because they can’t see them clearly. At first the music industry did not see—and then did not understand—the impact of the iPod and iTunes on wresting away control of the industry; what did a technology company understand about music?

ACCEPTING DATA WITHOUT QUESTION. We take refuge in the data, believing it to be holy. We accept whatever the machine spits out and forget to ask how the data was collected and compiled, or what biases were in the algorithm. Even if our instincts are prompting us to call a turd a turd, we don’t because the data says it’s actually a brownie. Today many marketers tell me how well their online campaigns are doing and how they wish to allocate more money to these programs, despite no overall gain and often a decline in their total business. I let them know that they remind me of a patient who is getting sicker and sicker but believes the vital signs on the monitor, which seem to be glowing healthily. Could it be that they are not measuring the right thing or the measurement is wrong?

MYTHMAKING AND HERO CULTURES. Magical thinking prevents people from stating unpleasant truths for subtler reasons than the previous two factors. In tech start-ups, especially, cultural success myths are powerful, and they often relate to formulas or other numerical concepts that helped the company achieve success. Obviously there’s validity in these cultural stories, but at times the stories become sacrosanct and that’s when they become a problem (e.g., it’s heresy to speak against the company ethos or its leaders and founders).

When I joined Leo Burnett decades ago, I found an admirable culture of excellence, humility, and achievement reinforced by stories and symbols. Our logo had a hand reaching for the stars, accompanied by the founder’s statement, “When you reach for the stars you may not touch one, but you will not come up with a handful of mud either.” The logo and other symbols had an almost religious significance, and few would have spoken against this message; no one would have said we need to set realistic goals rather than reach for the stars.

I’m not criticizing these symbols and stories, only suggesting that they can have the unintended effect of inhibiting straight talk. At Apple, for instance, they still ask, “What would Steve Jobs do?” That may not be the right question today or in the years ahead because things change. Data-centric companies that have been highly successful are especially vulnerable to drinking the Kool-Aid, since people who work in these companies often have fierce beliefs in their technology, and they have trouble violating their sacred beliefs.⁵

The Value of Straight Talk

Before I offer some advice on how to put this first step into action, let me take a moment to note three organizational benefits of calling a turd a turd.

First, it increases the effectiveness of teams. Teams function best when they possess a sense of connectedness—a sense that often comes from trust and empathy. Straight talk fosters trust and empathy. When teams can’t confront problems or talk about sensitive subjects, they are engaged in a charade. Their members won’t be honest with each other or genuine about themselves. They may be smart and skilled as individuals, but they never generate the synergies that foster great ideas and great execution.

Second, it gets to the root of problems. Discerning problems in organizations requires developing and testing hypotheses, from realistic to speculative. This means taking risks, shooting down bad ideas, identifying who or what is causing problems. In other words, difficult topics must be brought to light. Toes may be stepped on in these activities. But this is the best way to figure out why something went wrong and start on the path to fixing it.

Third, it fosters creativity and innovation. When organizations are ov...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword by Ken Auletta
• Introduction: Why This Book?
• Section I: The Challenge: Carbon-Based, Analog, Feeling Humans in a Silicon-Infused, Digital, Data-Driven World
• Section II: Counterbalancing Machines, Screens, and Data: Seven Keys to Staying Human
• Section III: Fusing the Story and the Spreadsheet: Soul for the Machine Age
• Conclusion: Thriving in the Third Connected Age
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author