Managers have plenty of problems. What they crave are people who can competently produce results for them without continual supervision. For the millions of managers who are like me in this regard, here are two splendid references. Feel free to use them for training and discussion.

For my past, current, and future students–consider this as career advice for the jobs you have and the jobs you will have.

1. A Message to Garcia. This classic short story illustrates the value of employees who go forth and get the job done. Read it here.

2. The Doctrine of Completed Staff Work. Many themes here overlap with those in A Message to Garcia, with an added emphasis on producing solutions. Read it here.

The most reliable path to success in any job is simple: work hard. Very hard. And do it in a way that makes life easier for those around you. Both A Message to Garcia and The Doctrine of Completed Staff Work emphasize these and other priceless gems of advice; that’s why I think they both contain timeless management wisdom.

The downside is that R requires some work to learn and use effectively. That’s what’s been keeping me from giving it a try.

But I figure that I’ll just figure out little bits at a time. That way, I’ll learn it without burning out or losing my sanity. If you happen to know of any great resources (aside from those on the R website), I’d be grateful to hear about them.

So here goes. I’m downloading it and installing it right now.

Running a small business is a monumental effort. To stay competitive, you need a high-performing team that can solve problems, find opportunities, and identify potential threats—a team that is highly reliable in the face of adversity.

For a limited time, I’m offering a free assessment for small businesses with at least 4  total employees. This assessment will provide the business owner or primary manager with valuable insight into their own leadership style and their team’s perceptions of group processes and communication. Click here for a sample report that provides a precise preview of what you’ll get for your participation.  

In addition to giving you a rare insight into key aspects of your team’s behavior—completely free of charge—your participation in this study supports the completion of my dissertation research, which I need to complete to earn my Ph.D. in organizational science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. That’s why it’s free for you to participate. 

This study is open to any small business with at least 4 total employees (including you). As the business owner or primary manager, here are the steps to completing the study and getting your free report.

1. Let me know that you’d like to participate (by submitting your information via this link).
2. I will then contact you to learn more about your business. Then, I’ll send you a survey that you (and/or your primary supervisors) will complete. I will also send you a note to forward to your employees to let them know about the study. Within your survey, you and/or your primary supervisors will rate the performance of your employees and answer a few questions about yourself and your business. You will be asked to provide the e-mail addresses of your employees as you rate them. This is necessary so I can accurately track and link the data. Your employees’ e-mail addresses will not be used for any other purpose.
3. Once you complete your survey, I will send a different survey to your employees. In this survey, your employees will provide input regarding the facets of behavior described in this report (see p. 2).
4. After all of your employees and the other firms in the study complete their surveys, I will analyze the data and prepare the final reports for you.

Thank you very much for considering to participate. Feel free to spread the word to others who meet the criteria and may be interested. Please note that this study has been fully approved by UNC Charlotte’s ethics committee and all data will be treated with the highest level of security and confidentiality.

For more information, please contact me at ben@benbaran.com.

Here, I’ll try to summarize some of my thoughts on how changes in the business environment are influencing a more independent workforce and businesses seeking new sources of talent. My thinking has been influenced by my own research and study of work within the organizational sciences during the past several years. While what I discuss here is likely over-simplified, the implications are hard to dispute.

As depicted in the figure below, changes in the business environment—for example, globalization, advances in information technology, and increasing competition—are driving a number of changes. First of all, these changes are driving businesses to make their workforces more flexible.

Flexible employment contracts refers to the reality that organizations are increasingly turning to part-time, temporary, and contract arrangements with employees. This is a drastic departure from long-held beliefs and expectations surrounding employment, such as lifelong work with a single employer and relatively stable job security. As such, college graduates today will have much more varied, self-managed careers than those of their parents and grandparents.

The independently managed career is becoming and will be a norm, particularly among professional “knowledge” workers. People will continually need to be on the lookout for new opportunities while demonstrating their worth to their current employers.

One the employee side, this means that people will need to manage their own personal brand and sell their services. Career success will depend upon people being able to showcase their talents and accomplishments, via the Web, and use their online social networks to find new opportunities.

On the business side, independently managed careers will likely influence businesses to seek new ways to access talent. They, like individual employees, will depend upon the Web and social networks to find talent. Furthermore, firms will likely be look outside of their own organizational boundaries for solutions as a way to maintain a fresh approach toward innovation.

Finally, as depicted in the figure, the arrows between “changes in the business environment” and both “personal branding and selling” and “businesses seeking new talent sources” are double-headed. That’s because those latter changes are likely to influence new changes in the business environment, creating a cycle of sorts.

Directly related to these changes, we see the Whinot platform as filling a niche, as depicted in the figure below.

By providing independent workers with a way to brand and sell their services, Whinot will be an individual source of competitive advantage for workers as they manage their careers. And by connecting businesses seeking new talent sources with those workers, Whinot will foster and even more productive collaborative community—one that we see as a win-win for both businesses and employees.

This post also appears at The Whinot Blog.

Here’s the discussion organizations should be having: “How do we train our managers to lead many different types of people?” It all comes down to bringing an attitude of inclusion to the everyday practice of management and learning to lead people of all types—be they male or female, white or black, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim, young or old. So, regarding all of the talk about generational differences—enough already.

So that’s how looking at what makes collaboration successful within organizations can potentially shed light on what makes collaboration successful among organizations. After a rather extensive review of the research on collaboration within organizations, I’ve identified a number of factors that explain why people may or may not be likely to collaborate. These factors include:

Characteristics of the collaborative group. It turns out that a variety of individual factors—such as demographics, group size, and personality and ability differences—matter when it comes to how well people work together. Research on these differences and their influence on group effectiveness is rather messy, but a few general implications include that it’s important that group members have high levels of ability while having sufficient diversity in terms of expertise and background to promote creativity.

Resources. People are likely to work together when they perceive that other parties have valuable resources that may benefit them.

Goals. Goals that reward cooperation within groups may facilitate higher levels of collective performance than other more individualistic or competitive goal structures. Individual goals, therefore, should be integrated into group goals and vice versa.

Technology. The tools that workers use often have a dramatic impact upon how they collaborate. Specifically, workers are increasingly turning to various information technologies as ways to collaborate across distances. Although advanced technology certainly has its advantages, managers must ensure widespread familiarity with such technology while minimizing potential information loss among collaborators.

Organizational culture. Organizations develop deep norms that reflect and drive “how things get done around here.” If that culture rewards and supports solely independent work, then collaboration is unlikely. Building a culture that promotes collaboration, however, will encourage employees to bridge departmental boundaries and work together.

Interpersonal trust and fairness. Collaboration is about sharing, and sharing requires trust. People need to believe that the people they’re collaborating with will hold up their end of the bargain. When people perceive that they’re being treated unfairly in a collaborative relationship, things are likely to break down quickly.

Leadership. Good leaders foster collaborative relationships by clearly defining roles, setting cooperative goals, and rewarding productive collaborative behavior.

While the factors influencing collaboration within organizations are numerous and multifaceted, those listed above cover many of the reasons why people choose to collaborate. And although these factors are specifically related to collaboration within organizations, they’re also important points to keep in mind when maintaining productive relationships among representatives from different organizations.

This post also appears at The Whinot Blog.

Some businesses try to deal with uncertainty by copying what works for others. This can happen explicitly—for example, a CEO deliberately decides to offer a similar service as a competitor—or implicitly. An example of the latter might be the shared knowledge that spreads across organizations in the same industry by consultants, who may offer similar advice to different firms.

One problem with these tactics has to do with imitability, or how easy something is to copy. If a firm copies a resource and turns it into a capability, then it’s clear that another firm could potentially copy the resource and use it to its advantage. And there goes the firm’s competitive edge.

Another way in which business leaders are trying to make their firms more competitive has to do with collaboration. Academics have defined collaboration as something beyond coordination (negotiating interrelated tasks) and cooperation (parties coming together and forming relationships). Specifically, some scholars defined collaboration as a “relationship that is negotiated in an ongoing communicative process and that relies on neither market nor hierarchical mechanisms of control” (Lawrence et al., 2002, p. 282).

What on earth does that mean? It means that collaboration has to do with developing mutually beneficial relationships. These relationships can be formal or informal, and they can occur within organizations (intraorganizational) or among organizations (interorganizational). Strategically, collaborative relationships are quite handy for business leaders and achieving business success. That’s because they depend upon complex relationships among people, and that’s something that’s really tough to copy.

In a series of future posts, I’ll discuss a little bit more about the business case for collaboration. I’ll start by exploring intraorganizational collaboration, and then I’ll unpack interorganizational collaboration. My goal is simply to introduce some of the research surrounding these topics, in a way that—I hope—is relevant and clear, maybe even sparking some thoughts about using collaboration as a way to achieve business success.

Reference: Lawrence, T., Hardy, C., & Phillips, N. 2002. Institutional effects of interorganizational collaboration: The emergence of proto-institutions. Academy of Management Journal, 45: 281-290.

This post also appears at The Whinot Blog.

That’s the sneaking suspicion I’m starting to have about SPSS. My primary complaint is that it can’t do some of the statistical analyses that I currently use or may want to use in the near future. Specifically, I’m thinking about structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear modeling. Currently, I need two additional software programs to run those analyses.

Of course, one logical alternative is SAS. But given my limited experience using SAS, I want to explore my options prior before I learn another programming language. In a recent conversation I had with a quantitative methods expert, he mentioned another data analysis and statistical computing program, known simply as “R.”

Among other circles—for example, computer science and statistics—R is probably well known. But being in the social sciences and business, I’m just hearing about R for the first time. After some preliminary research, it seems like R might be a very attractive option. Here’s why:

• It’s free. You simply download it and get started.
• It’s flexible, with the capability to do all sorts of statistical analyses, including those I mentioned above.
• It’s open source, meaning that code-writing geniuses around the world are continually making it better and providing updates.
• It appears to have a community of avid supporters, who produce user manuals, publish a journal, and host conferences. Its Web site refers to the software as “The R Project for Statistical Computing,” which has a neat grassroots, cutting-edge kind of feel to it.

R seems like a promising alternative to the limited, get-a-new-version-every-year scenario offered by SPSS. I’m curious to know, however, about others’ experiences in learning R and using it for applications in business and social-science research. Metaphorically speaking, I suppose, I’m still in the window-shopping phase. But I’m starting to think that my current “blue jeans” aren’t really cutting it anymore, and R might be a nice alternative that I’d like to try on in the near future.

Here’s how it works. You simply pick out a movie using the machine’s touch-screen monitor, swipe your credit card, and take your movie from the contraption’s dispensing slot. All you pay is $1 plus tax, and if you keep it for an extra day, you simply pay an extra dollar per day. An even quicker option is to pick out your movie online and then pick it up at a pre-selected location. You can return your DVD at any Redbox location.

So it’s an easy, cheap substitute to other movie-rental options. But that’s not what’s really interesting. What’s particularly intriguing will be to see how chains like Hollywood Video will compete with Redbox’s extreme low-cost leadership strategy.

Should chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video fight to regain competitive advantage or just roll over and die? Have they outlived their purpose?

Regarding Hollywood Video’s strategy, at least, it’s clear that the corporation has directed its store managers to emphasize customer service and give personalized incentives. For example, the chain’s card-holding members get birthday phone calls inviting them to enjoy a free rental. This isn’t a new offer.

What’s new is that Hollywood Video’s employees, at least those I’ve encountered, have turned into small-talk-making, movie-recommending chatterboxes. And just today, one of those friendly local film buffs called just to invite me to stop by for a free movie rental.

Talk about desperate.

The fact of the matter is that Redbox exploited a unique opportunity in the market. Apparently, millions of people are just like me—people who don’t already subscribe to Netflix or a similar online rental service and are loath to shell out $4 for the latest new release from Tinseltown. For us, Redbox hits the spot. It comes down to a product that matches its customers, and a strategy that considers their priorities and desire for relatively commitment-free service.

Speaking of Tinseltown, the big studios are also upset with the Redbox’s low prices. Apparently, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Brothers are withholding their new releases from Redbox until the new movies have been in stores for one month (see this New York Times story). Redbox is suing the three studios on antitrust grounds.

Regarding business strategy, my bet is that executives at chains like Blockbuster are taking Redbox very seriously and kicking themselves for not thinking of the Redbox concept first. According to this Chicago Tribune story, Blockbuster is reacting in a completely predictable manner—by copying Redbox and rolling out its own legions of cheap-movie renting kiosks.

But what will influence customers to shop at Blockbuster kiosks over Redbox? Will Blockbuster adopt a personalized, people-centered approach like Hollywood Video? How will top management communicate the new strategy and ensure it’s implemented? Who knows.

If Blockbuster wants to stay viable, though, it’ll need to differentiate itself, find some way to achieve a competitive edge. Otherwise, we’ll all be seeing red—Redbox kiosks, that is—whenever it’s a stay-at-home movie night.

Through systematic, rigorous qualitative data analysis procedures, we found that these experienced workers suggested eight general types of coping strategies, as listed below.

• Competence or skills strategies. These types of strategies included gaining appropriate education and training and practicing proper techniques when conducting euthanasia.
• Euthanasia behavioral strategies. This category of advice centered on specific practices to follow when conducting euthanasia, such as allowing enough time for the procedure, having someone else euthanize special pets, and keeping the euthanasia room neat.
• Cognitive or self-talk strategies. These pieces of advice were primarily ways in which workers could manage stress through their own patterns of thinking. For examples, workers should realize that euthanasia is sometimes the best option for certain animals, avoid blaming themselves, learn about the reality of sheltered animals and overpopulation, and focus on successful aspects of animal welfare.
• Emotional regulation strategies. These types of strategies involved ways in which workers should deal with the emotional aspects of their work. For example, acknowledging their feelings and venting when appropriate. Another strategy within this category involved workers altering their levels of emotional attachment to animals, striving to maintain a healthy balance between becoming completely detached from the animals and becoming too dependent upon them for their emotional well-being.
• Separation strategies. Respondents suggested that sometimes it’s helpful to find ways to distance themselves from their work. For example, they advocated keeping work separate from non-work activities and seeking diversions through hobbies and reflection.
• Get-help strategies. This category of advice focused on ways to cope with euthanasia-related strain that involve assistance from others, including communicating with management about concerns and seeking counseling from professionals.
• Seek long-term solution strategies. These types of advice involved those aimed toward focusing on ways to reduce the frequency of euthanasia overall. For example, respondents advocated that workers should learn about and promote responsible pet ownership. One way in which this could take place is through participating in various types of community outreach programs.
• Withdrawal strategies. According to respondents, euthanasia is such a tough part of their jobs that sometimes workers should know that the job is not for everyone and, as a last resort, seek a different type of job.

The full report includes more information, including examples of survey respondents’ actual comments in each category of coping strategies. Overall, this study provides valuable insight that could help animal shelter workers, especially newcomers to the job, to deal with the strain caused by having to conduct euthanasia.

With increased public outreach and education—in areas such as spay and neuter programs, animal adoption, and responsible pet ownership—euthanasia should become less necessary as an over-population control measure in the United States. But in the meantime, shelter workers and their managers may find the strategies advocated by respondents in our study to be helpful ways to maintain their psychological well-being despite the threats posed by animal euthanasia.

Reference: Baran, B. E., Allen, J. A., Rogelberg, S. G., Spitzmüller, C., DiGiacomo, N. A., Webb, J. B., et al. (2009). Euthanasia-related strain and coping strategies in animal shelter employees. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 235, 83-88.