"The software proved to be more sophisticated than the people who used it, and that has caused the whole world a lot of problems."

...a statement that eerily echoes one of Charles Morriss's conclusions in his book The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: that the systems traders use are often too sophisticated for the traders who use them.

I can't comment on the specific allegation that stock and bond traders are dumber than their systems - I don't know enough about either - but I do know enough about managing a business to realize that this is a valid and important question:

Which of your systems or processes are smarter than the people who are using them, and what's the downside?

"If I were to give the home cook any advice, it would be to cook with the people you are cooking for, and to cook for the people you love...If you make cooking something that everyone is involved in, not just a delivery system for the food, it can be a tremendous source of sustenance in any family unit."

Great advice, with obvious read-across for management - and one of the reasons that employee engagement programs don't work.

Proof that a Processor can at least learn to emulate the Visionary mindset.

I you're a reader, you'll also enjoy checking out the prof's reading list and his business manifesto.

However, in troubled times there's one type of interaction that seems to rise like a kid's lost balloon, especially in team meetings: The 'strongly held opinion' - one (vocal) person's simplistic, dramatic or counter-intuitive proposal for resolving a painful issue:

- "It's vital to our survival that we slash our prices by 20%."

- "We need to raise our prices across the board by 20% - today!"

- "Shut down all our overseas offices."

- "Open a new division delivering more environmentally-friendly products."

You know the type of thing - you've seen it before, and you're sure seeing it now...

The important thing to remember about SHO's is that there's nothing inherently wrong with them - but there's nothing inherently right about them either. A strongly held opinion is (in it's first appearance) just that - someone's strongly held opinion. It might be their mantra, a flight of fantasy, a genuine flash of insight (these are rarer than all those books would have us believe), something they read on some geezer's blog over the weekend, or a revelation from God his/herself. Often (though not always), they're delivered by executives with CADD - Corporate Attention Deficit Disorder: people who find it really painful to grind through the detail involved in most decision making.

The problem for most teams is that unless it is outstandingly goofy, upon first declaration, they can't tell which of these many version's of a SHO this particular one is. And as a result, it gains traction, and before you know it, the SHO has become the benchmark for the entire discussion - should we do this thing or not, and if so, how do we make it work?

The Predictable Success rule for SHO's is simple: don't lob them into meetings without warning, like a hand grenade. If you have a serious proposal for resolving a painful issue, do us all the favor of thinking about it before hand, and commit at least the bones of an outline to paper - just a bullet list of the pros and cons will give us a start.

And if you don't feel like doing so, and instead insist in using your SHO as a club to hijack the discussion on the run, then we'll table the item, excuse you to let you work on the bones of it for half an hour (while we sort out something equally pressing), then you can come back in and lead a though-through, planned discussion of your idea.

Managing a business in times like these is in itself a serious business - it's not helped by allowing highly vocal mavericks to short-circuit the process just because they can't stand the pain of detail.

As all you Predictable Success^® followers will know, a returning founder/owner is almost always a sure sign of an organization in Treadmill trying to recover its lost glories by returning to Fun - a process that never works.

Yang told employees in his departure memo: "All of you know that I have always, and will always bleed purple," (Yahoo's corporate color). Big deal. If an organization is ever to grow beyond their founder/owners, the first painful step is for those same founder/owners to realize that their job is to downplay their personal 'bleediness' and to complete the process of passing on the vision-baton to senior and middle management.

[Someone needs to tell Howard Schultz (trying, and predictably failing, to do a similar thing at Starbucks) that it's not enough to bleed Green, or muddy brown, or whatever Starbucks corporate color is these days.]

Yang was a big 'V'*, so in an attempt to right the ship, expect to see Yahoo's board over-compensating by going for a big P when seeking a replacement CEO. Which of course will take Yahoo...right back to Treadmill.

* Footnote for avid PS-ers: Technically, Yang is a Maverick (in private workshops I might use the title 'J*rk'): not a member of the McCain-Palin gang, but rather an extreme version of the Visionary - one with little or no ability to communicate with 'O', 'P' or 'S's [i.e. his PS DNA is V _ _ _ ].

This lack of an understanding of how others think and what makes them tick is at the heart of the failure to do the Microsoft deal, which placed Yang in the position of having to communicate with one of the biggest 'O's in business: Steve Ballmer. Ballmer is as extreme in his 'O'-ness as Yang is in his 'Y'-ness. Result: No understanding. No empathy. No deal.

The predominant characteristic of an organization (or an entire industry) in bureaucracy is its inability to perform any useful or transformative self-diagnosis.

In fact, this is the key differentiator between Treadmill and Bureaucracy - in Treadmill, even while the organization is becoming sclerotic, management recognizes the problem and battles against it: in Bureaucracy, there is both an overt acceptance that the organization is arthritic and a perverse 'Alice in Wonderland' belief that all the (to everyone else) obvious disadvantages of size are in fact competitive advantages.

Nothing could describe the US car industry more accurately.

Here's a mutli-billion dollar industry, employing tens of thousands of people (and supporting hundreds of thousands in its supply chain), the senior management of which appear never to have undertaken any serious scenario planning about two of its most basic trading assumptions:

1. The likely effect of the price of oil sky-rocketing; and / or

2. The likely effect of an intense consumer spending freeze.

What Predictable Success teaches us is that the management of an organization in Bureaucracy cannot self-diagnose (and therefore fix) its underlying problems - they're the very reason the organization slid from Treadmill into Bureaucracy in the first place. If they knew how to fix it, they would.

Time and again we've seen that the only way an organization in Bureaucracy (or in this case an entire industry) can avoid sliding into Death Rattle is by way of a massive external intervention.

There are loud arguments being made that the US Government should provide just such a massive external intervention by way of (yet another) financial bailout for the industry.

Should it? Would doing so reverse the decline to Death Rattle and send the industry back to Predictable Success?

Sadly, there is no reason to believe it will, and one compelling reason to believe it won't. Injecting funding alone is not the intervention an organization in Bureaucracy requires. Cash is not the problem here - it is just a symptom (albeit it a large and painful one).

Injecting large amounts of cash will only delay the slide into Death Rattle - it will not prevent it.

The underlying problem for an organization in Bureaucracy (especially one as close to Death Rattle as the motor industry is) is a catastrophic failure of leadership.

What needs overhauled is the industry's leadership, not its cash flow. And I'm not talking about one, ten, or even 100 people 'at the top' here: while they're included, and are clearly where the primary changes need to occur, the leadership problem in the industry - as in any Bureaucracy - is systemic and reaches down throughout the entire organization.

So, how do you radically (and quickly) transform the leadership of an entire industry? Thoughts for another day.

The problem with this strategy is simple - you can't 'hyperlink' to stages in the lifecycle like that: there simply isn't a direct path from Treadmill to Fun.

Watch as the strategy comes undone and Mr Schultz increasingly flails around to find a 'quick hit' that will return the company to its old culture. When that doesn't work (and it won't), Predictable Success principles tell us that the board will eventually - albeit reluctantly, painfully and belatedly - ask Mr Schultz to step aside. Unfortunately, by this time Starbucks will be back in Whitewater, trying to reconcile its schizophrenic identity as an organization with Treadmill structures and Fun goals.

The real answer to Starbuck's dilemma? A return to Predictable Success (not a jump back to 'Fun') by a consistent but controlled re-injection of the Visionary role throughout the organization: in other words, teaching the organization how to incorporate Visionary thinking at all levels - not the return of a personalized 'Visionary' - not even if it is the quasi-founder.

Mr Schultz has fallen victim of the hubris of the Visionary - believing that their return, their vision, their zeal and passion can reclaim former glory days, when in fact it's the last thing the organization needs. Instead of 'living the vision' and 'embodying the vision' (as recent press articles have put it), Mr Schultz needs to teach it.

Political campaigns (and more generally, political parties) follow their own version of the lifecycle, but with different descriptors.

One of the formative political events in my lifetime was watching the UK Tory party in the Thatcher era as it cycled through the entire lifecycle over a 15 year period:

Early Struggle = Underdog
Fun = Populist
Whitewater = Electability
Predictable Success^® = Governance
Treadmill = Entitlement
Bureaucracy = Sleaze/Scandal
Death Rattle = Wilderness

As a lay observer of the current US political cycle (I'm what the US Government quaintly calls a 'resident alien' which means I have no voting rights), it seems clear that this race has been all about Electability - what we know in the business world as Whitewater.

In political terms, 'Electability' means: does the candidate, his or her campaign, and their party as a whole have the policies, processes and systems to deliver stable, dependable, predictable governance.

Because their candidate is running to be the first African-American US President, the Obama campaign appears to have been acutely aware of the 'Electability' issue from the get-go. The McCain camp, on the other hand, seems to have relished the 'populist' (Fun) phase so much that they have struggled to maintain the discipline and focus to push through 'Electability' (Whitewater).

Indeed, in these last days of the campaign there are signs that the McCain camp is going all the way back to the 'Underdog' (Early Struggle) stage in an attempt to play to their candidates perceived strength. I'm not a political advisor or pundit, but my observation of the shifts in the UK Conservative and Labour parties (they've both gone through the entire cycle above a number of times) would lead me to believe that 'Underdog' status needs to be worked out in opposition, and that a campaign needs to start at least in the 'Populist' phase, and cannot avoid the 'Electability' stage if they want to get to Governance.

On the other hand, Obama and the Democratic party now face an issue they might have viewed as unlikely 12 months ago - with a week to go, do the polls make their election look inevitable, and are they in danger of slipping into 'Entitlement' - even before they are elected? Republicans who recall the 1948 election presumably hope so.

The concept is simple, and self-explanatory: seek to be constructive and positive in all your interactions, but do it without fear or favor, and always for the better good of the organization as a whole, not for your personal benefit, or that of your project, or you team, department or division.

Easily said, but tough in practice. Being ruthlessly constructive is particularly difficult for passive-aggressives, emotional manipulators and bullies (and is one of the reasons it is so powerful - it shows them up and if practiced consistently by others, eventually calls them on their behavioral dysfunctions).

In the last few weeks I've been thinking a lot about the power of being ruthlessly constructive. Why? Because about 80% of the leaders I work with - CEO's, presidents, VP's, owners, founders, general managers - have asked versions of the same two questions:

"How do I and my team do any sort of realistic planning in the current climate - short and long term?", and

"How do I keep the morale of my team high right now?"

Now both questions deserve longer treatment than a blog entry will allow, but it has struck me how often the importance of being ruthlessly constructive comes up in answering both questions.

Let there be no misunderstanding - times are tough, and for many of us, they're going to get tougher before they get better. But when it comes to importance of good planning and high morale (two interconnected drivers of Predictable Success), there's no point wallowing in negativity, and there's certainly no point in throwing in the towel.

Dwell a while on the importance of being ruthlessly constructive, and how you might incorporate it more in your organization's interactions. You will find it a powerful tool in these difficult days.