Endnotes

¹ What if cows had wings? The what if question is the only one on the list that allows a manager to step out of his or her formal role and engage people in a unique way because it suspends the normal rules of managing.

² Fred Taylor studied shovels, and he studied the men who wielded shovels. He concluded that large men can use larger shovels and smaller men need smaller shovels. That is not management. That is observing and explaining the obvious. The management part of his story came next. He concluded that the smaller man needed a shovel small enough to enable him to shovel fast enough to shovel the same amount of material as a large man with a large shovel. So, the manager’s job was to match the man with the right shovel. That is the foundation of modern management. Fred Taylor was hailed by Congress as a genius.

³ The company in this story produced medical products. It has been bought and sold since the time of this story.

⁴ The product manager was eventually promoted, perhaps more slowly than she would have been if all had gone well. Years later, she eventually left the company to pursue other interests.

⁵ Here are two websites that you can visit for more information and to listen to Sam Ervin and other Watergate figures: www.satergate.infor/chronolgy/1973.shtml and www.lib.msu.edu/digital/vincent/findaids/Watergate.html.

⁶ Fred (not his real name) did so well running this customer service operation for a technical service company that he took a job leading customer service for a consumer products company. He later became an executive with a brand name retail chain and still sees “daylight” all 24 hours of the day in his operations. By the way, he did not consider his original assignment as manager of the night and weekend crew as a particularly good career move for him. As a matter of fact, although he was well liked by management, they thought he had “limited potential.” (Ha! Ha!) I happened to run into him at an airport one day and asked him about his success. He mentioned that his worst assignment turned out to be the best one of his career. He also attributed his success to a skill he picked up working in customer service: good listening. You cannot be successful in that line of work without it. He said he just started “listening to the young kids,” and if it sounded like a sound business idea, he followed their lead.

⁷ The actual study by Deloitte Consulting, by Brian Fugere, found that “The three year growth rate of straight talking companies was better than those of companies that obscured their communications with baffling verbal fog.” The quote is from an article in the Telegraph on June 24, 2003, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml.

⁸ The pass could be intercepted, the pass could be incomplete (thus wasting a down), and the pass could be completed. To Woody Hayes, a completed pass was almost as good as a gain on the ground, but not quite.

⁹ The decision could turn out to be wrong. The decision could have no effect and, therefore, look wrong because the manager wasted time on it. And finally, the decision could actually be the right one, but someone else will take credit for it—they always do.

¹⁰ One other management lesson can be taken from this example: A business cannot have two number one priority projects at the same time. Management must decide and then must staff the one considered most important with their best people. Sharing personnel across projects confuses the teams by creating personal challenges, as cited in this example. The rationale used by the business was that the second “top priority” project was to enter the market ahead of the one that was identified as most important to the future of the business. Everyone was aware of this. Neither product was particularly successful.

¹¹ This term was noted by the The Wall Street Journal in a front-page article describing the shuttle investigation at NASA. (May 22, 2003)

¹² Security and Exchange Commission—the mission posted on their website: “The mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” You can understand how damaging this kind of managerial behavior can be to a company as a prelude to misleading people in an irresponsible and potentially damaging way.

¹³ Pick any one. Rehab is all about dealing with the reality that a person has been denying by use of a bad habit.

¹⁴ Vulcans, although incapable of lying, are indeed capable of deceptive behavior, and Androids can be programmed to lie. So, the only place you should do business with them is a at a Star Trek convention.

¹⁵ “Are You Asking the Right Questions?” John Baldoni, Harvard Management Communication Letter, March 2003, Article reprint No. C0303C.

¹⁶ The expression high-impact words is from Haydock and Sonsteng, in their book guiding lawyers in developing cross-examination skills, Examining Witnesses: Direct, cross, and expert examination (Advocacy) (NY: West Publishing Co., 1994).

¹⁷ Quoted from Leadership, by Rudolph W. Giuliani.

¹⁸ One excellent book on critical thinking is Asking the Right Questions: A guide to critical thinking, by M. Neil Browne and Stuart M. Keeley (Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2004). It describes a method for improving thought processes.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Profiting from Uncertainty: Strategies for succeeding no matter what the future brings, by Paul J. H. Schoemaker (NY: Free Press, 2002).

²¹ Francis Wellman in the Art of Cross-Examination (Touchstone, 1997).

²² Hannity and Colmes was a “liberal versus conservative issue format” show in a kind of yin and yang tradition on Fox News. It may or may not be on the air when you read this. Just think of any television news interviewer raising a finger to constantly paint a point in the air and you have the picture.

²³ Richard Feynmann: “I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder.”

²⁴ Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson.

²⁵ I am using grandstanding to mean two things; first, the deliberate capture of management attention by one or more persons who desire to be noticed; and second is the filibuster by one or two persons who want to exert some control over the discussion to serve a different agenda.

²⁶ Double-direct questions are drawn from the legal textbook Examining witnesses: Direct, cross, and expert examination (Advocacy), (NY: West Publishing Co., 2004), by Haydock and Sonsteng.

²⁷ This question is often cited as a leading question, and many leading questions are trick questions. They are designed to yield information that the person might otherwise not provide.

²⁸ For more information on follow-up questions from the perspective of an interviewer, refer to Payne, who discusses some of the questions noted here (as well as others).

²⁹ Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson.

³⁰ Avoid taking the bait by following up on this misdirected answer. This is also a signal to probe—see this same situation under the section “Follow-Ups and Probes.”

³¹ Do you ever wonder why some good products just disappear from the store shelves, never again to be found? This is one case that resulted in such an outcome. The finished product made by the company posed no known threat, but the production caused one of the key ingredients to “escape” into the environment. It was not known to be toxic, but the long-term effects of exposure to the material were unknown. Because production facilities were in the United States, Europe, and China, the potential was great enough to cause one of the two companies to take the unprecedented step of going out of the business of producing that particular product. It was a serious blow to both companies.

³² During the frenzy of degradable development activity, I had the opportunity to meet with a VP of a major European diaper and incontinence product supplier. I asked him how much of a market did he envision once all technical difficulties with degradable materials had been worked out. None. No market opportunity would emerge. So, when I challenged him as to why his company continued to encourage the makers of degradable materials to provide him with sample products (thus implying there was an opportunity), he retorted that there was one need his company wanted to meet: supplying adult incontinence products to government-operated elder-care facilities in the one country in the European Union that required degradable materials. That was the only opportunity in the world where there was both a requirement that degradable materials be sought and that the buyer be willing to absorb some cost increase.

³³ The story of how one company turned this fatal business flaw into an opportunity is told in the book Radical Innovations: How mature companies can outsmart upstarts, by Richard Leifer et al. (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). A team of faculty from Rensselaer worked with a number of companies to develop a perspective on how large corporations were handling innovative opportunities. Check out the story of Biomax (hydrobiodegradeable polyester).

³⁴ Although most businesspeople understand this concept, it is not general knowledge that all new inventions need to be formally protected before they are discussed in public with anyone. We can debate whether the invitation-only scientific meeting constituted a public disclosure; Dr. Z obviously did not think so. When an invention is exposed publicly by any means, the inventor has one year to file a patent application in the United States. However, the opportunity to gain patents outside the United States is generally lost. So, the objective in every case is to guard inventions as closely as possible until the appropriate paperwork has been filed. In this example, the physician really believed that the private meeting was, in fact, confidential because all attendees were asked, informally, to keep them as such. Dr. Y did not seem to feel the need to avoid discussing the technology, as scientists focus on advancing knowledge, and this is best accomplished through papers and discussion. It would be up to the lawyers to figure out the appropriate legal standing of the technology—the business decision needed no such effort. All investment in the idea ceased following the coffee conversation. In this case, the fatal-flaw question was asked and answered before the investment. But given the naiveté of the inventor, more probing was required to enable him to remember.

³⁵ Richard Milhous Nixon was the thirty-seventh president of the United States. His quotes are preserved for history on a number of different websites. All presidents end up with a series of less-than-flattering quotes because their every public utterance is captured for posterity. Here is a sampling of some of his other remarks: “If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?” and “Solutions are not the answers.” For amusing quotations from notable personalities, go to www.brainyquote.com. It posts quotations from Democrats as well as Republicans and a variety of other nonpolitical personalities.

³⁶ Kubota Shinya, Norio Mishna, and Shoji Nagata, “A study of the effects of active listening on listening attitudes of middle managers,” Journal of Occupational Health: 46, 2004, 60–67.

³⁷ Stephen M. Wilson et al., Listening to speech activates motor areas involved in speech production, Nature Neuroscience 7:7, July 2004.

³⁸ “Listening for Secret Nukes, Hearing Giant Meteors,” by Richard Stenger, 5/23/01, www.archives.cnn.com/2001/tech/space/05/23/secrete.meteors/index.html. The human ear cannot detect the low-frequency infrasonic waves emitted by meteors hitting our atmosphere or by nuclear weapons exploded in secret places. Intelligence agencies hear a lot of these kinds of sounds and keep it to themselves unless the “noise” becomes public. I wonder what else they hear?

³⁹ This is a method of inquiry in which questions are used as the primary tool for investigating an idea, advancing a thought, or winning an argument. Plato positions Socrates as the “curious questioner” in his stories about him. Wikipedia is the primary source of this information. There is also a very good book, Trial of Socrates, by I. F. Stone that examines how grating Socrates’ method of asking question after question was on his fellow citizens, particularly because he was challenging their morals. And, of course, Plato wrote a number of Dialogues recording the discourses of his mentor.

⁴⁰ You still remember Frederick Taylor—the guy who built the modern science of management based on shoveling.

⁴¹ “...unless he sells them.” Critobulus in The Estate Manager.