A company finds great success with a product or service. Makes loads of cash. Builds a seemingly strong brand. Settles in to a satisfying position of dominance. A couple of years pass and then, out of nowhere, a new player swoops in and gobbles up most of the customers, leaving little but scraps for the once dominant firm.

Why does this happen? Most such failure can be traced to the hubris that often accompanies great business success, says Tuck School of Business professor Sydney Finkelstein. Dominating a market can cause close-mindedness. Rigor mortis sets in, and the company stops doing all those things — like responding to customers and out-innovating the competition — that made it successful in the first place.

Finkelstein calls it “The Zombie Syndrome.” To avoid this predicament, leaders

need to dedicate themselves to a continual reassessment of their market position.

And to keep company policies intended to promote high performance from hardening into feelings of invulnerability, it helps to adopt what Harvard Business School professor Amy. C. Edmondson describes as a learning frame: casting new challenges or situations as opportunities to learn from outsiders.

Make sure key executives are given responsibility for a few individual customer relationships. “By baking customer needs and preferences into key decision-making processes, this tactic helps ensure that the company never creates new offerings simply for the sake of creation,” writes Finkelstein. 

***

Perfectionism can fuel the zombie syndrome. Companies may aim for “high standards in every operation without stopping to ask if these standards are appropriate,” Finkelstein holds. During the 1980s, Barney’s clothing store brought

in European craftsmen to lay Italian marble mosaics in the Madison Avenue location—despite the fact that such lavish appointments were no longer translating into higher sales volume. By the 1980s at IBM, a long track record of success in the pursuit of perfection had led the company to stop comparing itself to competitors and to rely instead on internal measures.

To protect against the ravages of excessive perfectionism, “when an old goal is being met, don’t just raise the bar, change the goal—this will help prevent you from focusing obsessively on standards that are becoming increasingly irrelevant,”

Finkelstein says. External benchmarks for routine operations and centralized support services will also help. 

***

That doesn’t mean companies shouldn’t be committed to perfection or to the organization’s vision, Finkelstein says: Those norms help foster high achievement. The trick is to recast them so that they don’t promote insularity.

Edmondson suggests distinguishing between learning frames and performance frames. A project viewed through a learning frame has three characteristics: It’s seen as aspirational—an opportunity to help team members accomplish compelling goals for themselves and their stakeholders.

The leader emphasizes her dependence on the help and input of other team members. And the other team members see themselves as essential partners.

By contrast, when a project is viewed through a performance frame, it’s seen as defensive — a necessary requirement for keeping up with the competition.

The more that you as a group leader can recast commitments to perfection or to the company’s vision as motivators, not burdens, the less likely your unit will succumb to the zombie syndrome. Seen through the learning frame, those ideals provide compelling reasons to treat each new challenge as an exciting opportunity, with outsiders — customers, partners and even competitors — providing vital pieces of the puzzle. Then the team is much more in tune with the realities of the market 

***** 

Online lessons for offline copy 

By Suzan St. Maur

The early days of reading on the Web were painful ones: squinting at fat, gray chunks of verbiage obviously lifted wholesale from dense, dry corporate brochures. Happily, times have changed, and Web copy has greatly improved — so much so, in fact, that the principles that make for good Web copy can profitably be applied to print:

§          Have clear objectives. To be taken seriously, organize your thoughts into lucid, understandable points.

§          Create text that can be scanned. Highlight and organize text so readers can quickly get its gist.

§          Generate copy that can be read out of sequence. We don’t expect people to read Web site content in sequence, but forget that people often peruse offline print in nonlinear fashion as well — for instance, glancing through brochures in no particular order.

§          Separate out technical information. Web sites often place technical details off on the side of the screen or on another page entirely, so they don’t obscure main marketing points. Offline messages gain a similar clarity when you box off or append technical data.

§          Remove visual clutter. Just as people loathe Web sites that bristle with headlines and graphics, they also hate cluttered print ads. If your message is hard to discern — online or offline — readers will just click or flip over to your competitors’ information.

§          Get to the point. Online copy needs to be economical and uncomplicated. Short sentences and paragraphs work best. And that’s a sound approach to enlivening your print communications, too.

**** 

Build rapport before the negotiation starts 

By Susan G. Parker

If you’re likely to be on the receiving end of difficult tactics, work to build rapport before you sit down to negotiate. People are more inclined to help people they like, says negotiation consultant Eric C. Gould.

Adam Levy was a Silicon Valley attorney who was anxious to get out of his law firm and work for a high-tech startup. He set his sights on DigitalThink, a San Francisco firm that he was providing legal service to.

The problem? The people at Digital Think hated lawyers. They could not imagine bringing one in-house.

Levy figured that the key to getting hired was to persuade the CEO, who was relatively new in his position and was still getting used to the fact that he had

authority to hire people.

“My focus was to make him laugh and smile,” Levy says. “We would get together

for breakfast and lunch. We would commiserate about what was going on in

business and talk about golf and sports.”

While building the personal relationship, Levy also made the business case about why it would be less expensive to hire an in-house counsel. To answer the

CEO’s distaste for lawyers, Levy pointed out that it was better to deal with one lawyer than several. Levy’s persistence paid off, and he was hired.

**** 

Balancing styles of team members  

By Loren Gary

One of a manager’s most important tasks is balancing the optimistic and pessimistic tendencies in a group, says University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. “Generally, there’s a division of labor that makes for sound functioning. Optimists tend to do best in jobs that call for high vision and initiative — for example, the sales, planning and marketing functions. The financial, safety and risk-assessment people are the pessimists.”

To the extent that you can, try to match a person’s style with job responsibilities that take advantage of it. And use your knowledge of each member’s style to help you evaluate his recommendation about new ventures under consideration. When, for example, the typically gung-ho member of your group is very wary about launching a new product, that’s a sign worth paying special attention to.

How to Zap the Zombie

A company finds great success with a product or service. Makes loads of cash. Builds a seemingly strong brand. Settles in to a satisfying position of dominance. A couple of years pass and then, out of nowhere, a new player swoops in and gobbles up most of the customers, leaving little but scraps for the once dominant firm.

Financial sequel

Neoclassical finance was just beginning to revolutionize markets when Peter L. Bernstein began writing his landmark text on the subject, Capital Ideas.

Winning: Every layer is a bad layer

Q: We’re constantly being told that hierarchies are bad and we must flatten companies to make them more effective. But don’t companies need some layers in order to organize for success? David Gionet, Toronto

GREED IS BACK

Earlier this year, someone was confident that Hydril Co.’s stock was due to take flight—and very soon. During the two days ended on Friday, February 9, investors purchased options conveying the right, through February 16, to buy more than 160,000 Hydril shares for $90 apiece.

What is the color of gold?

I lost my appetite for shark’s fin soup when I learned how the shark was skinned alive and thrown back into the sea. But not entirely, for it tastes good. Some of the good and precious things in this world—including such wonders as the Pyramids of Egypt and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—have a cruel history. It seems that civilization is built on blood for the most part. But time and the hunger for precious, wondrous things blurs the history of the process.

Toward An Independent, Fair And Fast Justice System

Adrian Cristobal: The Supreme Court has been in the news lately, principally because in these perilous times, we think of the Supreme Court as “the enemy of political persecution.” We tend to think of the three branches of government—Executive, the Judiciary and the Legislative—as contradictory to each other.

Real Leaders Negotiate

Good leaders are invariably effective negotiators. After all, authority has its limits. Some of the people you lead are smarter, more talented and, in some situations, more powerful than you are. In addition, often you’re called to lead people over whom you have no authority, such as members of commissions, boards and other departments in your organization.

Set Up To Fail: Economist Paul Ormerod on strategy and extinction

In his recent book Why Most Things Fail, theoretical economist Paul Ormerod argues that failure is the defining characteristic of biological, social and economic systems. But Ormerod, a former economic forecaster and now principal of Volterra, the London-based consulting firm he cofounded, doesn’t think that’s a bad thing.

Tubbataha dreaming

My initiation to Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park started with a back-roll, one day in May, into Jessie Beazley Reef. The first sharks of the trip were close enough to make out the white on their tips. Grey reef sharks were on active patrol, too, and we spotted no less than three pregnant sharks, bulging at their sides.

The ethics of revolution

THE death of Elias achieves revolutionary significance the moment society is recognized as a creator of victims in order to execute them. Elias had been condemned even before he was born, and it only remained for society to carry out the death sentence.

Down in the Valley

SAN JOSE—Silicon Valley, says San Jose/Silicon Valley Journal editor Norman Bell, is more of a state of mind than a piece of geography.

3 habits that hold leaders back–and how to overcome them

In my 10 years as a board member of the Peter Drucker Foundation, one of the wisest things I heard him say was, “We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do.

Help newly hired executives adapt quickly

The main reason why newly hired outside executives have such an abysmal failure rate (40 percent, according to one study) is poor acculturation: They don’t adapt well to the new company’s ways of doing things. In fact, some three-quarters of 53 senior human-resources managers I surveyed cited poor cultural fit as the driver for onboarding failures.

Chip off the old block

Developing a good work ethic at a young age proved to be beneficial for Intel Technology Philippines managing director Michael Wentling.

Help wanted: HK banker soaks Indian call centers in black humor

Shyam Mehra, 26, is a self-professed loser in New Delhi. When he dons a telephone headset each night, though, he becomes Sam Marcy, a polite troubleshooter for Americans angered by their home appliances.

Seeking a sea change

It was—and still—is considered the country’s southern backdoor, a way out for Filipinos caught in the grip of poverty and conflict, and a way in for Filipinos wanting to free themselves of that grip, through the power of smuggled goods and smuggled ideologies.

The rise of confessional politics

THREE centuries and a decade have changed America’s image of itself, it seems. In 1797, under George Washington, John Adams signed a treaty with Tripoli with the following disclaimer:

At Your Service

ALTHOUGH the Philippines’ tourism industry is now assessed by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) as the best-performing in Asia, the number of local manpower shifting to work in the tourism industry abroad also continues to rise.

The Force of the Weak