The Big Questions: Ethics by Julian Baggini

Part of a series of books looking at issues of our time: this one a series of essays looking at various sides of ethical arguments.  In the end it doesn't come out with nice clean answers - more of 'it depends' but then life isn't made of nice clean answers.

this reflects a deeper truth about ethics: values often conflict, not because one is wrong and one is right, but simply because sometimes having more of one good means we cannot have as much of another.Read more at location 83

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movements around the Western world are claiming to stand for the 99 per cent against the 1 per cent, the wealthy minority in our countries who together own between a fifth and a third of each nation’s wealth. But, as Ord points out, this indignation is somewhat selective, since if we look at the world as a whole, many of those protesters are in the top 1 per cent and almost all are in the top 5 per cent. ‘When I was earning £14,000 as a student, I found I was in the richest 4 per cent in the world, even adjusting for how much further money goes in developing countries,’ Ord told the BBC in 2010. ‘Giving away 10 per cent of that, I found that I would still be in the top 5 per cent.’17 ‘It’s not particularly heroic or anything,’ he told another reporter. ‘At least half the people in Britain could probably think much more seriously about how much they could give.’Read more at location 604

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Given that nearly 50 per cent of people worldwide survive on less than $2.50 a day, almost all of us are among the richest people in the world and the majority of us could give away much more than we do and still be relatively wealthy, enjoying a very comfortable quality of life. Still, if we don’t want to do that, why should we?Read more at location 611

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Nonetheless, the argument that most of us do not do nearly as much as we should to help the world’s poor seems strong and compelling. It is no doubt unsettling to conclude this. But why should we expect moral philosophy to provide comfort? It’s role is not to justify everything we do, but to point us to how we might do better. In the case of global inequality, it points the way all too clearly.Read more at location 708

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Equasy is not an obscure drug. ‘It is used by many millions of people in the UK including children and young people,’ wrote Nutt. About ten people a year die of it, serious damage is caused once every 350 exposures and it is associated with over 100 road traffic accidents per year. Nutt concluded that, bearing in mind all its harms, ‘it seems likely that the ACMD would recommend control under the Misuse of Drugs Act, perhaps as a class A drug given it appears more harmful than ecstasy.’ So why does the law allow equasy but ban ecstasy? Because equasy stands for Equine Addiction Syndrome, ‘a condition characterized by gaining pleasure from horses and being prepared to countenance the consequences especially the harms from falling off/under the horse’. No government is going to ban horse-riding, but most do ban drugs that are arguably less harmful.Read more at location 722

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People are often reluctant to accept that rights are not natural because they think that if rights were just cultural artefacts they would be less binding. But perhaps this ‘just’ is misplaced. A non-natural right that is globally endorsed and upheld is surely worth more than a natural right that most people trample over. What matters for upholding rights is that laws and institutions recognize and value them, not whether they are natural or not.Read more at location 876

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Nonetheless, some do argue that life is of such value that it is always worth prolonging, no matter how horrible. But why would one think that? Does anyone seriously believe that it would be better if a person died at midday rather than was tortured for twelve hours from noon onwards and died at midnight? Surely everyone would prefer to die sooner than later in this situation. Although extreme, this example demonstrates the point that simply having more life does not mean having a better life overall. Quality matters as well as quantity.Read more at location 1143

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why is it OK if changes are natural and not if they are human-made? Cause seems irrelevant. What matters is whether changes are good or bad, and there is just no way to make sense of things being good or bad for the planet. The planet just is. For billions of years before humans came along it existed with no life, and will probably exist for billions more years after we’ve died out too. Far from making us humble, the idea that we have the power to hurt the earth is hubristic. From the hypothetical perspective of the earth (since, lacking consciousness, it has no perspective) we are at worst a temporary itch on something bigger and incomprehensibly longer-lived than ourselves. Nature doesn’t care what we do because it doesn’t have any thoughts or feelings, but it would not care even if it did.Read more at location 1681

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In that sense, what we need to protect is not the environment but our environment. What matters is keeping the planet hospitable to human life. It may seem as though respect for nature for nature’s sake is a worthy value which can only do us good. But it can in fact lead us badly astray.Read more at location 1693

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And so murder, infidelity, theft and so on are almost always wrong. But that doesn’t establish rules like ‘murder is wrong’ and it certainly doesn’t mean such actions are wrong because they break a moral rule. In that sense moral rules are more like laws of nature than laws of courts: they describe regularities found in nature, they do not prescribe regularities we ought to follow.Read more at location 2062

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We can identify many things that matter for morality: happiness, respect, equality and so on. But it is impossible to say that one principle is the master principle, from which all other moral rules are derived. In different times, at different places, for different people, moral priorities change. Just as babies, children, adults and the elderly need to be treated differently, so other variations in the human condition require different moral responses. That, I suspect, is the truth that makes some kind of relativism inevitable.Read more at location 2302

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Let’s say, for example, that you are a Christian. In the Book of Leviticus, there are all sorts of bizarre-sounding rules, laid down by God, which Christians no longer feel themselves obliged to follow. These include the death penalty for homosexuals and children who do not respect their parents, bans on eating hares and calamari, prohibitions on men trimming their beards, and approval of slavery. Most Christians believe, however, that the New Testament supersedes the Old and that these rules no longer apply. What this adds up to is the belief that what was wrong for the ancient Israelites is not wrong for modern Christians, on God’s command. That seems to me like a clear combination of relativism and the belief that God’s will underpins ethics.Read more at location 2326

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In many ways this should not be surprising, since many have argued that the trouble with divine command theory – the idea that what is right or wrong is what God commands – is that it leaves open the possibility that God could command what is currently wrong to be right and vice versa. (See the next chapter for more on this.) Christian texts seem to provide evidence that this is precisely what their God has done.Read more at location 2332

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If you put all these things together, you can see quite readily how something like morality emerges. Given brute facts and our desires, feelings and needs, we have good reason to uphold justice, to be fair and honest in our dealings with people, to show compassion, not to kill the innocent, and so on. These four factors together add up to a rationale for morality that is more than just enlightened self-interest, although that too is part of the mix and more often than not doing the right thing is better for us than not doing the right thing, in the long run at least.Read more at location 2426

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Without an effective police force, it’s not that everything is permitted but nothing is enforced.Read more at location 2463

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In morality, as in many other difficult areas of life, we want answers, so much so that we’ll often prefer a clear answer with a weak justification than accept a good justification for why there is no clear answer. Accepting a lack of answers in ethics is particularly difficult, since it seems to most of us that surely there must be some way of knowing what the right thing to do is. But is there?Read more at location 2472

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ethics. If we are looking for clear answers, strict objective rules, then I think we’ll look in vain. If we think that all moral dilemmas can be resolved, we will be disappointed. But if we accept that we can make better moral choices, ones with genuinely better outcomes, by thinking clearly and attending carefully to what we really value, then there is a point to philosophical ethics. The final choice is always your own, and only you can bear responsibility for it. And to take that responsibility requires, I think, giving ethics the serious time and thought it deserves.Read more at location 2587

Makers by Chris Anderson

A fascinating book about the movement of people making things in their own backyards and then transferring the idea into mass production through 3rd party subcontract manufacturing houses.

When you go open source, you’re giving away something in hopes of getting back more in return. Is it guaranteed? No. You also need to build a community, ensure that the initial product is needed, documented, and distinct enough for people to want to join in its development. And even then, managing an open-source community can be a full-time job in itself. But when it works, it can be magical: an R&D model that’s faster, better, and cheaper than those of some of the biggest companies in the world.Read more at location 1654

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Bill Joy, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, revealed a flaw in Coase’s model. “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” he observed, stating what has now come to be known as “Joy’s Law.” His implication: for the sake of minimizing transaction costs, we don’t work with the best people. Instead, we work with whomever our company was able to hire. Even for the best companies, that’s a woefully inefficient process.Read more at location 2141

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As I write this, the hot product at the moment at Quirky is the “Pivot Power” flexible power strip. It’s like a regular power strip, but each outlet can pivot so that bulky power adapters don’t block neighboring outlets. Designed by Jake Zein, a software programmer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it’s classic Quirky: clever, clearly solving a problem, stylishly designed, and slightly inessential. It’s the kind of thing you’d see in the store and think, “Yeah, I hate it when I can’t fit power adapters in all the power strip outlets,” admire its design, and maybe buy one. You don’t need it, but once you’ve seen it you might want it.Read more at location 2698

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As at Kickstarter, there are countdown clocks and competitions everywhere—the whole thing feels like a game. You don’t need to have any ideas of your own to participate and feel as though you’re helping create things, or at least improve them. And it suits everyone from words people (names and taglines) to visual thinkers (design). Top influencers participate in dozens of projects and can earn thousands of dollars. It can be addictive, they report.Read more at location 2716

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Unlike Kickstarter and Quirky, Etsy doesn’t try to help Makers fund or create their products. Instead, it’s simply a way to sell them, with a strong social component that comes from its focus on handmade goods and the crafting and arts communities that make them. Like eBay, Etsy offers simple ways for sellers to create their own listings and handles the payment processing. It charges twenty cents for each listing for four months, and 3.5 percent of the sale.Read more at location 2744

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MFG.com would now remain independent, with Bezos as its main investor. Today it is the world’s largest custom manufacturing marketplace. It has more than 200,000 members in fifty countries and has brokered more than $115 billion in deals so far, with an average of $3–4 billion a month today. The deals that scroll by on any given day are typically pretty prosaic stuff—injection-molded plastic enclosures, machined metal rods, fasteners, specialty cables—but they give Free an unmatched window on the world of manufacturing today.Read more at location 3114

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For a lens into the new world of open-access factories in China, just search Alibaba (in English), find some companies producing more or less what you’re looking to make, and then use instant messaging to ask them if they can manufacture what you want. Alibaba’s IM can translate between Chinese and English in real time, so each person can communicate using their native language. Typically, responses come in minutes: we can’t make that; we can make that and here’s how to order it; we already make something quite like that and here’s what it costs.Read more at location 3176

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Perhaps the best known of these are Ponoko and Shapeways. Ponoko (on whose advisory board I sit as an unpaid volunteer) started in New Zealand as a laser-cutting service, but is now global and offers laser cutting, 3-D printing, and CNC cutting.Read more at location 3223

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Similar services exist for electronics (printed circuit boards), fabrics, and even ceramics. Meanwhile, the grandfather of them all is the Lego company, whose Lego Digital Designer CAD program for kids lets them do exactly the same thing with Lego bricks, creating a design onscreen, then uploading it to the service to be turned into a custom kit that is shipped back to them, looking just like an official Lego kit. Then, if others buy it, the designer will get a cut of the revenues.Read more at location 3238

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And that’s just chemistry. What happens when the tools get powerful enough to extend to biology and genetics? Today we can amplify and identify DNA at the kitchen table. Tomorrow we will be able to sequence it, too. But after that comes synthesizing it, modifying it, and the rest of genetic engineering. The day when only a small number of professional labs can do this, checking and screening every request that comes in, will soon end. At that point, people will start hacking life. We’ve been doing that for thousands of years with cross-breeding and agricultural genetics, but that was always within the bounds of nature. But in the lab, there are fewer such bounds. And the DIYbio Movement aims to create countless new labs. Why should trained scientists have all the fun?Read more at location 3349

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

Written about how to treat customers in the connected age, and how to treat employees so they treat customers well.

What I have come to realize is that without organizational and management innovation, business model innovation and adaptation to today’s fast-changing world rarely happens. To make it happen, we need to build new spaces for experimentation and learning.Read more at location 305

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If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.Read more at location 327

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Customers trust each other more than they trust companies, who have a vested interest in making themselves look good. A 2009 Nielsen study found that 90% of customers trusted recommendations from other customers more than any other form of advertising. And customers have begun to recognize, and exercise, their power.Read more at location 486

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The problem is that the organizations that generated all this wealth were not designed to listen, adapt, and respond. They were designed to create a ceaseless, one-way flow of material goods and information. Everything about them has been optimized for this one-directional arrow, and product-oriented habits are so deeply embedded in our organizational systems that it will be difficult to root them out.Read more at location 587

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A recent study found that Great Britain, where the industrial revolution began, reached “peak stuff” levels between 2001 and 2003 — long before the 2008 recession — and material consumption has been declining ever since (it’s now down to the 1989 level).Read more at location 624

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Fifty percent of the world’s population today lives on 2 percent of the earth’s crust. In 1950, that number was 30%. By 2050, it is expected to be 70%.Read more at location 643

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Furthermore, products are anchors. Investments in manufacturing take time to provide returns, and during this time period, customer needs are likely to change. Investing in physical products “hardens” the offering and reduces the company’s ability to respond and adapt to changing customer preferences. Investing in services “softens” the offering and increases the company’s flexibility. Since costs aren’t sunk into a single product, it’s easier to shift the offering and keep pace with customer demands.Read more at location 761

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The first step to a service orientation is to change the way we think about products. Instead of thinking about products as ends in themselves, we need to think of them as just one component in an overall service, the point of which is to deliver a stellar customer experience.Read more at location 782

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A service is different. While processes are designed to be consistent and uniform, services are co-created with customers each and every time a service is rendered. This difference is not superficial but fundamental. A process has only one customer: the person who receives the final result. A process is rule-bound and tightly regulated. The quality of a process’s output can be judged by the customer at the end of the line. A service, on the other hand, is at its core a relationship between server and served. Service is work performed in support of another person. At every point of interaction, the measure of success is not a product but the satisfaction, delight, or disappointment of the customer.Read more at location 847

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Many companies focus on those costs that are easily identified on the financial statements. But by cutting those costs, they are playing a shell game. In actuality, they are just moving those costs around. They are eating their own future: reducing today’s costs at the expense of long-term customer relationships and customer loyalty. Pissed-off customers won’t stay any longer than they have to.Read more at location 1021

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Of course, the more idiot-proof the system, the more behavior is constrained, forcing people to act like idiots even when it’s against their better judgment. Even when your employees know there’s a better way to do something, they will often be constrained by policies and procedures that were designed to reduce variety in the system. If your system needs to solve problems that you can’t anticipate, then it’s going to fail, because automated systems and employees who are treated like idiots can’t solve problems.Read more at location 1367

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Attempts to standardize the work will make costs go up, not down. This is because standardizing the work reduces the ability of your system to absorb variety. We try to cage variety into nice neat swim lanes — for example, voice menus in an automated voice system. But when there is a lot of variety in your environment, these kinds of control systems are exactly the way to make things not work.Read more at location 1411

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This fast-follower strategy is common both in nature and in business. McDonald’s uses sophisticated market research when deciding to open a new store. But competitor Burger King simply watches McDonalds’ moves and opens new locations nearby. Adaptive moves can also change the environment in which firms operate.Read more at location 1608

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Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” When the world is constantly changing, the speed at which you can learn is the only thing that can give you a long-term, sustainable advantage. The problem is that while today’s companies are very good at processing information and producing outputs, they don’t know how to learn.Read more at location 1683

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Companies are made up of people, who have wills of their own. People can be guided and governed, but they don’t like to be controlled. They prefer to have control over their work, and if you push them too hard, they push back.Read more at location 1841

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The problem comes with scale. As the number of employees grows, the profit per employee shrinks. It’s a game of diminishing returns. Efficiencies of scale are balanced by the burdens of bureaucracy. Divisions become silos, disconnected from each other. Overhead costs increase with size. Eventually, the company reaches a point where the costs of control exceed the benefits of further growth, or the company becomes too internally focused and loses touch with the market.Read more at location 1917

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intent is a style of management used by the US Military when a situation is too complex or uncertain to give detailed orders. Command intent is a set of goals and a vision for possible methods of achieving those goals. It’s sufficiently high-level that it can be broadcast widely to everyone in the system, and front-line troops can then interpret how those goals apply to their front-line situation.Read more at location 1974

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The causes of success are never revenue, cost, profit, or other financial measures; these are lagging indicators or effects. A profit number by itself tells you nothing about the long-term value of a company. What matters are the activities that generate the profits: are they activities that create long-term value? Or are they activities that destroy value?Read more at location 2048

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Marketing’s job is to make realistic promises that help set customer expectations. It’s the job of the rest of the organization to deliver on that promise. It’s all about the match. A company that promises more than it can deliver will disappoint customers, and that’s very dangerous, because today’s customers have the tools to tell the world about their poor service experiencesRead more at location 2172

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Promoters are less price sensitive, they increase their spending faster, they accelerate your growth, and they have a positive lifetime value to your business. Detractors defect at higher rates, complain more, and cost more to serve. They are a drag on growth and have a negative lifetime value to your business. New customers referred by promoters are more likely to become promoters themselves. Another study found that improving your client retention rate by 5% boosts profits from 25 to 100%.Read more at location 2223

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The Net Promoter Score The Net Promoter Score (NPS), developed by Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company, measures the customer perception of quality with a single question: “On a 0 to 10 scale, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” The Net Promoter Score gives you an unambiguous number that can be used to quantify the value you are delivering to customers. Customers fall into three well-defined categories, each of which exhibits a distinct kind of behavior. Promoters, who respond with a nine or a ten, are your most loyal customers and your biggest fans. They make repeat purchases and spend more than other customers. They recommend you to others. They also contribute more, by taking the time to give constructive feedback and suggestions. Passives, who respond with a seven or eight, are not loyal to you. They are likely to defect if another company comes up with a better offer. They rarely recommend you to others, and if they do, the recommendation is likely to be qualified or unenthusiastic. Detractors are customers who give you a score of six or lower. They feel that their lives have been diminished by interactions with you. They are likely to badmouth you to anyone who will listen. They complain and they drive up your costs. Reichheld also recommends a follow-up question: “What is the primary reason for your score?” This question serves as a diagnostic, to help you determine which of your practices have the most impact on customers, for good or ill. It’s a request for feedback about how you can do better. The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customer detractors from the percentage of promoters (you throw out the passives). In 10 years of research, Reichheld and his colleagues have found that companies with high Net Promoter Scores gain more market share, spend less on marketing, and make more in profits than their peers. No other question correlated more strongly with sales and profits.Read more at location 2266

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Logitech tracks NPS alongside revenue in each product category. Every product has a Net Promoter Score and products can be rank-ordered by score. And NPS translates directly into business results: products that are number one in the company’s NPS rankings are consistently number one in revenue.Read more at location 2384

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In many companies today, the people at the top try to design processes with rules and procedures that will predictably and reliably solve any problem that should arise. But processes are brittle. A new process breaks a lot. And when a process breaks, we usually fix it by changing it, or adding a few more rules to handle exceptions. Over time, most processes become rigid, bureaucratic, and bloated with rules, regulations, and procedures for handling this or that.Read more at location 2425

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People at the edge, therefore, have a lot of autonomy, and they tend to make more accurate decisions and take them more seriously as a result. When people who are accountable for decisions encounter uncertainty, they will rely on the more experienced members of the crew, regardless of rank.Read more at location 2558

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Agile development is about small teams that deliver real, working software at all times, get meaningful feedback from users as early as possible, and improve the product over time in iterative development cycles. Developing software in an agile way allows developers to respond rapidly to changing requirements. Agile developers believe that where uncertainty is high, there is no such thing as a perfect plan, and the farther ahead you plan, the more likely you are to be wrong.Read more at location 2636

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Teams are limited in size to about 8–10 people. At Amazon, they call them two-pizza teams: if you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.Read more at location 3225

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In the US, the average Internet user spends more time on Facebook than on any other site. And Facebook provides zero content. Zero. All of Facebook’s content is provided by users. Facebook concentrates on providing a platform for all of its users to interact, start businesses, advertise, and exchange information. Facebook is a city, more than 20 times the size of Tokyo.Read more at location 3328

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The logic of innovation is simple: work with what you have, seek commitments from others, evolve goals from individual to mutual, grow, and gain momentum. If you fail, move on.Read more at location 3629

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Exercise of power in networks requires high awareness of the network’s state, risks, and potential; an ability to influence other nodes; and a high degree of compatibility with existing standards. The greatest power in a network is the degree to which a node can influence or control the platforms and standards that set the rules for connection.Read more at location 4032

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To build momentum for a network, it is often very advantageous to give a lot away to early adopters. The lower the uncertainty and the easier it is for people to join, the faster the network will grow.Read more at location 4057

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The more people and organizations that depend on a platform, the greater its power; but any platform is only as powerful as the people and companies that depend on it. If members decide to abandon a platform, it can become a ghost town. Consider AOL and MySpace. Facebook developers are dependent on Facebook for the platform they use to build, sell, distribute and manage their services. Thus, Facebook has a great degree of power over the network. But even Facebook, as powerful as it is, depends on developers as much as the developers depend on it. If developers abandon Facebook’s platform, Facebook will be in trouble. The best platform approach is to extract enough value from the network members to cover your costs, and then share the benefits with members.Read more at location 4091

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Part Four. How do you lead a connected company? Connected companies are living, learning networks that live within larger networks. Power in networks comes from awareness and influence, not control. Leaders must create an environment of clarity, trust, and shared purpose, while management focuses on designing and tuning the system that supports learning and performance.Read more at location 4118

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Strategy is usually considered the province of senior executives. But senior executives are in some ways the least qualified to envision the future, because they are the most invested in the past and the least likely to be around in the long term. In a connected company, strategy happens at all levels, across diverse groups and different time scales, generating a rich pool of experiments for senior leaders to draw from.Read more at location 4131

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Diversity breeds creativity — ecosystems are richest where habitats and species overlap. With more connections and diversity comes more creativity: diverse communities are more interesting, more provocative, and more stimulating.Read more at location 4181

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Without a lot of exciting new options, managers will inevitably opt for more of the same. That’s why renewal depends on a company’s ability to generate and test hundreds of new strategic options. There’s a power law here: Out of 1,000 crazy ideas, only 100 will merit a small-scale experiment. Of those, only 10 will be worth serious investment, and out of that bundle, only 1 or 2 will have the power to transform a business or spawn a new one. Google gets this. Within its core search business, the company tests more than 5,000 software changes a year and implements around 500.Read more at location 4191

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Many companies solicit innovation ideas from employees and customers, but few are successful in generating a large and diverse enough set of ideas to generate valuable insights. This is partly because in many companies, new ideas must run through a harrowing gauntlet of filters before anyone is allowed to make a move. Companies can increase the number of experiments by lowering the bar. In order to “let a thousand flowers bloom,” you need to make it as easy as possible for people to try things. Diversity requires tolerance for some degree of redundancy and slack in the system. People who are 100% utilized don’t have time to generate new ideas. Google and 3M allow employees to spend 20% of their time — that’s equivalent to one day a week — exploring ideas for new projects, products, and initiatives. W.L. Gore does the same thing. They call it “dabble time.”Read more at location 4208

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For medium bets, you want to think like a venture capitalist, spreading risk around by making a number of medium-sized bets, with the expectation that only one or two of them will really take off. The idea is to create a market for good ideas, so that a person or team with an innovative idea can shop it around. For example, give managers throughout the company discretionary budgets that can only be used for innovation projects. Let them fund ideas across the organization, not just in their own team.Read more at location 4230

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From this, we derive leadership rule number one: attract good people. Good people have more choices about where they go to work. Good people don’t tolerate bad bosses. Good people commit themselves to the work because they enjoy the work, they enjoy the challenge, and they enjoy making things happen. And good people manage themselves, for the most part. The better your people, the better your performance will be. As a leader, if you attract and hire good people in the first place, half of your leadership problems are solved right out of the gate. Your job is to set an example, articulate the strategy, appreciate people, and for the most part, get out of the way. The role of leader is not given or appointed, it is earned. There are leaders in every organization, and they are not always at the top. You are a leader not because you say you are, but because people listen to you and because people follow you. Do people like their bosses and get along with them? Do people feel appreciated?Read more at location 4447

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Prefer richer communication whenever possible. You can reach out via email, but you can only hug someone or put a hand on the shoulder in real life. As a leader, you embody the purpose, and the purpose needs to be not only seen and heard, but also felt.Read more at location 4536

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Principles are liberating, whereas policies are constraining. Principles are rules of thumb that can help people make decisions in all kinds of situations. Principles make use of human judgment. Policies, on the other hand, restrict and constrain and reduce the human element. You know you have a good principle when you can write a simple yes-or-no question that will enable anyone in your company to make strategy decisions at both macro and micro scales. For example, “Will this decision put the customer first?” Nordstrom employees know that they will never be punished or reprimanded for making a decision that puts a customer first.Read more at location 4617

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When principles are at the core of your competitive strategy, you must hire for attitude first. You can train people on skills, but you can’t train them on attitude. Employees must be a good fit. Hire for attitude, orient for values, and train for skills. Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier says, “It really comes down to core values, and we don’t train our employees in core values. Their parents did that a long time ago.”Read more at location 4654

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Waiting time increases gradually until utilization reaches a critical tipping point (around 70%), after which response times start to shoot up exponentially. So incremental increases in efficiency are good up to a point, after which they become a very bad thing indeed. In other words, an ambulance that arrives after the patient has died is of no use at all.Read more at location 4789

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Gore CEO Terri Kelly on how Gore manages incentives: An associate will be evaluated by 20 or 30 peers and will, in turn, evaluate 20–30 colleagues. You rank your peers from top to bottom. It’s a forced ranking. You’re asked to rank only people you know. What we find is that there’s typically a lot of consistency in who people view as the top contributors, and who they put at the bottom of the list…We have a cross-functional committee of individuals with leadership roles who look at all this input, debate it, and then put together an overall ranking, from first to last, of those particular associates. Then, in setting compensation, they ensure there’s a nice slope to the pay curve so that the folks who are making the biggest contributions are also making the most money.Read more at location 4808

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The pace of information flow at 7-Eleven Japan allows it to run circles around competitors. The approach has been so successful that sales at 7-Eleven Japan exceeded sales of the parent 7-Eleven company, and in 1991, 7-Eleven Japan bought the debt-burdened American parent. In 2007 7-Eleven became the largest chain store in the world, bigger even than McDonald’s, with over 40,000 locations.Read more at location 5028

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“When you do innovation in a large company, the immune system will come and attack you. A large company is basically an organism, and it has antibodies and an immune system, and those things will come and attack.”Read more at location 5193

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Do You Work at a Place that Ignites Your Passion? The first step on the journey is to ask yourself what you want. Do you identify with the purpose of your company? Is it a place you want to be? Companies run on passion, and if you can’t find the passion in the work you’re doing today, then you’re in the wrong place. The core of a connected company is a shared purpose that everyone in the company can get excited about. That’s the starting point. Companies are in many ways just like people. They all have their lovable qualities and they all have flaws. If you can’t find something to love about your company, then you are not doing yourself or the company a favor by staying. Even if it is deeply flawed in many ways, you need to be able to believe in a future that’s worth pursuing, or there’s no point. I’m not suggesting you need to quit today, but the world is too exciting and there are too many opportunities out there to stay in a job you don’t enjoy. Start looking for something you can get excited about.Read more at location 5318

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What customers want is not just connectedness. They want people who can serve their needs and solve their problems. If employees have access to social technologies but are still bound by scripts and procedures, if workers can connect with customers but don’t have the power to act, then you haven’t got a connected company. You’ve got a connected prison, and your employees will be worse than demoralized when they find they are connected to customers but unable to do anything for them.Read more at location 5667

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In the future, every company will be a connected company. Although they may be able to survive for some time, eventually every company must give customers what they want — or they will die. And connected customers are already demanding more than divided, industrial-age companies can deliver. This future is inevitable and it’s only a matter of time. Some leaders are rising to the challenge. They are organizing for adaptiveness by distributing control and building platforms to support autonomous teams. They are creating open environments of trust and connection with employees, partners, and customers. They are managing their companies as complex adaptive systems where continual learning and experimentation are part of the game. The challenges are substantial, but there is no choice. As connected company pioneer Jack Welch said, “Change before you have to.”Read more at location 5680