
The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies  - peter123
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/03/the-real-secret-of-thoroughly.html
======
jcapote
Jeff Bezos also practices this at Amazon, [http://www.shmula.com/987/jeff-
bezos-5-why-exercise-root-cau...](http://www.shmula.com/987/jeff-bezos-5-why-
exercise-root-cause-analysis-cause-and-effect-ishikawa-lean-thinking-six-
sigma)

~~~
Tamerlin
The company'd be much better off if he applied the same standard to the
development side of the company, which has an average tenure of around 12-18
months for developers (more senior devs tend to leave more quickly than junior
devs).

~~~
jamongkad
Really? Why is that? I always thought Amazon was a great place to work in.

~~~
Tamerlin
When I was interviewing for jobs to get out, I encountered close to a dozen
ex-Amazon folks... none were at all surprised that I wanted to leave, and one
even said that he only joined Amazon for the resume pad.

My experience was basically that they hired me because "senior developers
should be good at wading into bad code" rather than for anything vaguely
resembling the sorts of engineering tasks that they grilled me for during the
interview process.

Most of the software I got stuck with was a nightmare of bad design and rushed
hacks. It was also a technological step backward from a government contracting
job.

And then there's the problem of supporting all of that crap...

And the benefits aren't all that good, to boot.

Most of the developers I've talked to who worked there didn't like it, and the
more senior they were, the less they liked it.

------
jodrellblank
Call 10,000 people and give them each a coin. Ask them to toss it ten times.

Chances are one will get ten heads in a row.

This doesn't mean they have a secret you can learn, or that they can teach you
how to flip ten heads in a row straight off, or that they can do it again or
event that they can flip one more head.

We have a world where millions of businesses were started, some are very
successful - most folded - that doesn't mean the successes have a secret you
can copy to copy their success. Or even a non-secret.

I'm not saying business success is as random as tossing a coin, but self-
selecting the successful companies to study is a very biased sample, and that
doing what they do to get the results they get is not a guaranteed strategy.

~~~
davidw
Having read a number of business books, this article fits right in. "The
secret" to write a popular business book is to take one simple idea, and fluff
it up to the size of a dirigible by repeating the point in different ways, and
adding lots of anecdotes to make it a better 'story'.

~~~
yters
Yeah, the financial secret to most financial secret books is to write
financial secret books.

~~~
derefr
People say this sarcastically, but has anyone ever gone down this path
intentionally, _knowing_ they don't have a secret, but pretending they do?

~~~
njharman
Back in the day when magazines were things you read and they had weird little
classifieds sections in the back. I responded to one "Make money blah blah,
send $2 and SASE to..." a few weeks later my get rich "book" arrived it was a
couple photo copied pages that described taking out ads in magazines "Make
money blah blah, send $2 and SASE to..." and sending photo copied copies of
the photo copied pages to any suckers naive enough to send you $2.

I was a child, and $2 was relatively cheap way to learn _that_ lesson.

~~~
whughes
SASE is "self-addressed stamped envelope," if anyone missed that.

------
neilo
Simple and beneficial, but hard for greed-minded people to grasp.

------
shimonamit
Interesting points. It sounds like Michael and Issy have a lot going for them,
and that they have a hard-to-find constellation of virtues, traits, and
skills. It is that constellation that has brought about the atmosphere of
trust, general goodness, and business success to the Four Seasons. It is the
boss's aura that propagates to all levels of the organization, trust being but
one matter.

The key to success is in people, starting with the person at the top of the
pyramid. A bad boss cannot formulate success by inverting his personality or
by adopting a daily "secrets to success" checklist to fervently abide by
because he will fail eventually. That is a guarantee.

So if you want to be successful, you have to be good and hire good people. And
if you can't hire good people it is probably because good people are hard to
find (and probably expensive). That is why success is hard to achieve.

To push it one step further, an organization with lots of (or some) not-so-
good people will not achieve trust, at least not to the fullest extent. A
slacker causes other people to become embittered because they have to
compensate. Slackers are not trusted. Gossipers are not trusted. Liars are not
trusted. Greedy bosses are not trusted. Greedy bosses do not trust.

------
andr
Without even clicking the link I can tell the "secret" is either something
extremely vague as "work hard" or something that wouldn't hold to the simplest
statistical test.

------
blackguardx
Man, this guy really likes staying at the four seasons.

------
utsmokingaces
"Michael practices proximity management. Every month he meets informally with
each employee group. No agenda. No speeches. Just conversation. That helps him
solve problems"

Isn't this basic job of the manager? Why do academics and industry label
common sense with lame terms?

------
sanj
This exactly reinforces the advice from a talk Bob Metcalfe gave a year ago.

The bottom line, and the secret:

 _Great sales people create an opportunity to fulfill a commitment -- even
when one doesn't naturally exist -- and then fulfill it._

~~~
danprager
There have been a few attempts to methodologize a more "consultative approach"
to Sales, notably SPIN Selling, Strategic Selling and Solution Selling.

The last of these has been the most successful, and interestingly it was
cooked up by a tech. support guy, Mike Bosworth, who was "persuaded" to try
his hand at Sales.

I have tried to summarize the essence of Solutions Selling here:
[http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/01/distillation-of-
solu...](http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/01/distillation-of-solution-
selling.html) and have just released a product, bSelling, intended to support
this kind of approach: [http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-web-
based-prod...](http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-web-based-
product-released.html)

------
JabavuAdams
Sound great for a non-technical company.

In the drier example they give, the GM is able to understand the initial
symptoms, follow the chain of inference, and identify the root cause.

What about the case where the chain of problems involves highly technical ones
that the GM is really in no position to answer?

Before you say that tech companies should be run by hackers, consider that
even unfamiliarity with a sub-project can make an otherwise competent techie
give retarded advice.

------
samueladam
That's the real secret between human beings.

What is a friend?

