Here are a few people I would like to have conversations with about their experiences and why:
Turnarounds seldom turn.
However, Ford Motor Company did under Alan Mulally's leadership. And he did it during the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. As the person elevated to global head of product development, Kuzak's name is sprinkled throughout Bryce Hoffman's chronicling of Ford during these years. This book shows the tip of Kuzak's work with an iceberg lurking underneath.
With Kuzak I want to see that iceberg.
At the time Ford was filled with fiefdoms. Even when staring down the barrel of bankruptcy, many Ford executives were more concerned with protecting their turf than cooperating to save the company.
During this time Kuzak managed to globalize design and engineering enabling Mulally's “One Ford” idea to become a reality, an unprecedented accomplishment. How did Kuzak beat the odds to do it?
How did someone described by Hoffman as understated, with little ego thrive in the cut throat world of Ford during those years?
For decades the Human Resource function has been trying to break free from its roots in administrivia and compliance. David Ulrich came on the scene in the late 1990s with the HRBP revolution. Ulrich looked to instigate a paradigm shift from HR as an administrative and compliance cost center to HR as a strategic business partner focused on results. HR has also been shaken up by tech's rebrand of it as the People function. The terminology of both took hold, new ideas came about, but overall, HR's administrative and compliance roots still have a stranglehold on the profession.
Let me segue for a moment before I steer back to HR.
Talking about scientists, Richard Feynman once said: the first rule is, you must not fool yourself. The second rule is, you are the easiest person to fool. Feynman had a keen understanding of human psychology that extends far beyond practicing scientists. In my experience, the higher up the ranks someone goes in an organization the more detached they become from reality. There are a number of reasons that executives and higher ups at Big Co's live in an alternate reality from the rest of their organization. Running afoul of Feynman’s first rule about what they see and hear is a big one.
Why does this matter? If you're a monopoly, oligopoly, or a tech company with a moat a mile wide, it doesn't. You can likely do anything, and watch your charts go up and to the right. If you're Ford Motor Co. under Alan Mulally, who was steering the ship during the 2008 financial crisis and could see the death date when Ford would run out of cash–then truth is life or death.
For years I have looked at the HRBP function that came out of Ulrich's revolution with interest. In it I saw the closest thing an organization could have to a neutral third party embedded on the inside. In Chris Voss' Never Split the Difference he talks about how and why FBI hostage negotiators work in teams. One to do the negotiating, another to focus solely on listening and observing. I’ve envisioned those embedded HRBP's as that second FBI agent, focused on listening and observing. Toyota’s Production System got a lot right. One key idea is go to the source. HRBP's are at the source in every organization that has them, mostly dormant, wallowing, but in a position to uncover organizational truth. Truth that could be make or break for strategy and execution.
I can see the ways this could fail. I can also see how this could be abused (more on this below). Yet I thought for the right org, this could be a competitive advantage. Why don't the monopolies and oligopolies of the world need this? Because their truth is that they have a lock on their market and until some massive sea change happens, they will steam ahead. For everyone else, truth is what lets you see your internal realities and execute successfully on a strategy in response to external realities. It hurts to watch a strategy be dead on arrival because executives don't understand their own org and by extension can't execute.
Back to Spotswood—imagine my surprise when someone floats a job posting with a role that at its core is what I had envisioned the HRBP role could be. From her seat as Chief of Staff at Thumbtack she has created a Business Operations Program Management Team that appears to be doing just that.
The role as described by Thumbtack:
The Business Operations Program Management Team is a highly visible team that works closely with senior leaders across the organization with the goal of up-leveling organizational effectiveness in a hyper-growth organization. Our Business Operations Program Managers combine a creative, human-centered approach to designing processes, experiences and solutions with a dedication to consistent, effective, and attention-focused execution. Centralized under the Chief of Staff, Business Operations Program Managers are embedded within functional leadership teams in order to drive strategic initiatives, growth and business operations.
We now have some thorough documentation on how this type of truth-seeking can be abused thanks to Ray Dalio at Bridgewater. A wave of articles came out about the way he ran and still runs the firm. Dalio hired James Comey, yes that one, and put him to work as his own internal inquisitor. If there's a healthy way to carry out organizational truth-seeking, Bridgewater ain't it.
The easy critique is that this only adds more bureaucracy and complexity. I don't disagree that those are probable.
Nonetheless, I'd like to see what Spotswood has been able to do at Thumbtack, and to see if her efforts resemble something other than Dalio's KBG-esque impression at Bridgewater.
Stack ranking is an evaluation system born out of the Jack Welch era at GE in the 1980’s. It was known there as “rank-and-yank” and functions as it sounds.
"If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review.” “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies."
"At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process."
These quotes aren't from GE employees in the 80's. Instead they are about Microsoft two decades later. A time period in which Microsoft missed out on the three seismic technology shifts of the early 2000's: search, mobile, and social. In 2012 Kurt Eichenwald wrote a nearly 10,000 word review on Microsoft’s “lost decade” shining a spotlight on the way stack ranking led to a culture that made Microsoft incapable of competing or innovating.
For the few people who may not be aware, Bill Gates is a co-founder of Microsoft. While he left the CEO role during Microsoft's anti-trust issues in 2000 to focus on his philanthropic foundation, Gates remained as chairman of the board at Microsoft until 2020.
So why is it that I would like to have a conversation with Bill Gates?
It's because in 2009 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation became involved in something near and dear to me—K-12 education. Their foundation kicked off what would be a $500 million experiment in “school improvement.” The method? Evaluate teachers, identify the low-performers, and remove them.
This should sound familiar. Gates brought stack ranking, the practice that had been wreaking havoc in his own company for the past decade, to teaching.
Working across schools in the country, I watched them enter a Race to the Past. Already overburdened administrators spent their days chasing the ghost of Jack Welch wasting their days doing busywork for evaluations. Teachers, instead of thinking about and doing what was best for the students in front of them, had to figure out how to play the game to be rated as effective.
This was maddening to see. I try to put myself in Gates' shoes. What did he see that I didn't? I truly don't know, and that's why I would like to sit down and learn about his perspective on this.
A few things I read to try to put myself in Gates' shoes have only added to the confusion.
One source I went to was Gates' 1995 book The Road Ahead.
An excerpt that grabbed my attention:
"Companies investing in the (internet) highway will try to avoid repeating the mistakes made in the computer industry over the past twenty years. I think most of those mistakes can be understood by looking at a few critical factors.
1) Among them are negative and positive spirals."
Gates wrote the above in 1995. In 2012 Eichenwald showed Microsoft had been stuck in a negative spiral for the previous decade. By the time Microsoft unveiled the Zune to compete with the iPod, Apple was about to launch the iPhone. Bing posed no threat to Google, and Microsoft's attempt at the Windows Phone was a failure. Eichenwald's reporting shows all of these as playing catch up but under a toxic cultural constraint that made shipping, let alone innovating nearly impossible.
In the end, the stack-ranking system crippled the ability to innovate at Microsoft, executives said. “I wanted to build a team of people who would work together and whose only focus would be on making great software,” said Bill Hill, the former manager. “But you can’t do that at Microsoft."
In 2021, Gates wrote on his website commentary regarding a book he read about GE's downfall. In this note, Gates says:
"In many companies, bad news travels very slowly, while good news travels fast. We [Balmer and I] tried hard to combat that." "I wanted to catch negative trends early, when we could still do something about them."
It is hard for me to square this with the huge misses that Microsoft suffered throughout its "lost decade." How did Gates not see the negative trends and the negative spiral Microsoft was stuck in?
Seguing back to K-12 education, it is an industry perpetually trying to reform. I call the past 60 years the modern era of reform. A classroom teacher sees an average of 3-5 change efforts every school year. Some die on the vine after announcement, others are seen through until they aren't. In the face of this teachers respond as one would expect in a system. They either distort the system, distort the data, or do nothing and continue to try to do their best to teach. The constant reminders that teachers are failing, schools are failing, and the demand for change has taken its toll.
Using Gates' lens, K-12 education has been in a negative spiral for 60 years. This history isn't a secret, and it shows up quickly when you spend some time in schools.
Knowing this, I can't reconcile how adding a teacher evaluation system that mimics stack ranking to an education system already in a negative spiral was ever supposed to succeed.
In 2018, the RAND Corporation and the American Institues for Research who had been funded by the Gates Foundation to track and report on the initiative issued its final report.
Did the initiative improve student outcomes? No.
Regarding student achievement, the report admits that the project failed to meet its improvement goal. The conclusion is, in my opinion, understated. The graphs and charts in the report tell a story of the participating public districts’ and charter chains’ students often falling behind students in similar schools that did not engage in the project.
In the case of the Tennessee school district (Table 13.3), across every grade level in every year of the project, scores had negative effects or no effects on student achievement.1
Did the initiative improve the quality of teachers? No.
Did the initiative result in more effective teachers for disadvantaged students? No.
There was statistically significant evidence that the project decreased low-income minority students’ access to effective teachers in Hillsborough County Public Schools — both between schools and within the same school — as teachers sought to flee to the honors classes to avoid low VAM scores, which under the new evaluation system, could cost them their jobs.1
Did the initiative do more harm than good? Yes.
Was this an effective or responsible theory of action? No.
None of the above should have come as a surprise. The New York State Principals letter of 2011 predicted what would happen: teachers who did not want to teach the most disadvantaged students; no improvement in student achievement; inordinate demands on teacher and principal time and a waste of the limited resources of the school.1
As with every failed initiative in education, teachers and administrators lose out, while students lose the most. And our most vulnerable students? They are always the ones who bear the worst brunt of our failures.
The original quote that put Gates' book The Road Ahead on my radar many years ago was, "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose."
In this instance, it appears that failure is also a lousy teacher.
Bill Gates exists in an orbit I can't fathom. He has experience beyond compare.
Yet I have strong opinions that this was a predictable failure. I would also have an open mind to hear Gates' side of the story.
Did I stumble across the greatest educational study of all time?
Carrell and West put out a blockbuster study with the best design I have ever seen in educational research.
Those who know me well know I have strong opinions about education and even stronger opinions about educational research.
Bad study designs with major limitations are the norm. And if you’ve ever seen the sausage being made, it’s hard not to be skeptical of the validity of your average educational study.
Look at what Carrell and West handed us with this study:
Immaculate!
The title is about professor quality, but its most profound implications are about what effective teaching does and does not look like. I know a lot of people in education. People who love talking about effective teaching, and yet they either don’t know about this study or aren’t talking about it.
So I would love a sit down with Carrell and West to dive into the meat of this study and put to the test whether it is as profound as I think it is.