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Two lawsuits further demonstrate how much some practitioners of law are willing to debase their profession.

In the first, a glamor photographer brought suit against a Web site because it contained a link to another site, which in turn linked to a third site that had illegally published one of his photographs. The judge wisely dismissed the suit.

In the second, an attorney brought a class-action suit against Intuit for damages its customers might experience in the future should it not provide them with a fix for year-2000 problems in older versions of Quicken. The courts found in favor of Intuit, figuring no lawsuit should precede experience of damage.

In both cases the courts made the right decision, but only after the court system accepted a ridiculous suit in the first place. How hard can it be to institute a screening mechanism to prevent this clutter?

Clearly, we rely excessively on a single tool — the law — to resolve disputes. Legal action has replaced scolding, public humiliation, sending to the principal’s office, sarcasm, slaps in the face, lecturing, telling Mommy, and working together to resolve our differences in far too many situations.

Anytime someone relies excessively on a single tool it’s unhealthy, whether they’re using a spreadsheet to write memos, Cobol to write expert systems, a lawnmower to trim hedges, or lawsuits to handle … well, most of what lawsuits are being used for these days.

As a manager, you’re susceptible to the same syndrome — the use of a single tool to handle all situations. Perhaps it’s the threat of termination (remember how often George Steinbrenner fired Billy Martin?). Or maybe you give compliments too freely, expecting a constant flow of praise to energize your staff regardless of their actual performance. Whatever the tool, overuse will blunt it, and using it for the wrong job will ruin it for the right one.

As a manager you have a wide variety of tools at your disposal: encouragement, private warnings, public reprimands, one-on-one coaching, spot bonuses, raises, the cookie penalty, team-building events … the list is, if not endless, at least very long. Just for giggles, make a list of every one you can think of. Then estimate how many times you’ve used each of them in the past year.

I’m guessing you’ve ignored most of them … you’re in a rut.

The next time you’re faced with a “management opportunity” take a moment to plan:

1. Define the problem: What exactly are you trying to solve? Imagine your boss is challenging you, and you have to explain why it’s an issue. Too often, what managers are really trying to solve is, “I don’t like it.” Make sure you’re clear on what the problem is.

2. Define your goals: What constitutes a solution or resolution? Remember, the proper sequence isn’t “Ready … Fire!” If you don’t take a moment to define your goals you’re skipping “Aim”. At times, this means deciding whether you’re going to do what’s best for the company or for yourself. If, for example, you have a talented but insubordinate employee, you have to decide if your goal is to salvage the employee or to get rid of him. Salvaging may be best for the company — this is a talented individual, after all — but getting rid of him maybe the best choice for you since it eliminates a distraction and clearly establishes some boundaries for everyone else.

3. Choose the tool best suited to achieving your goals: Once you’ve defined your goal, choosing a good tool is pretty easy. Since we’re getting you out of a rut, though, choose a tool you haven’t used for a while … or ever. Don’t choose something completely alien to your nature, of course. We’re expanding your range, not turning you into a phony.

Back when I taught people to use software I’d advise them to learn one new technique with every project as a way of painlessly building a big bag o’tricks. It’s just a good an idea when it comes to improving as a manager.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

A month ago I mentioned how the transformation of muscle tissue into an electric organ in some fish exemplifies how evolution works — it morphs existing structures into needed ones.

Several readers challenged the validity of evolutionary theory, describing my acceptance of it as naive. I’m perennially astonished that people who would never dream of challenging the theory of quantum chromodynamics or Einstein’s resolution of the wave/particle duality of electromagnetic radiation are so highly opinionated about evolution — a subject just as complex, even if it’s more accessible.

To be fair, I don’t think there’s a subject taught worse. Every time you hear the phrase “survival of the fittest” you can tally up someone else who learned it wrong. It’s a shame, too, because once you understand how evolution works in nature you understand a lot about how change happens everywhere else. And if you haven’t been keeping track, change has become the one constant in everyone’s lives, so understanding how it works can come in handy.

Once upon a time we designed computer systems to mimic their manual predecessors. Our early systems didn’t change the jobs people did very much, only how they did those jobs. Although we encountered resistance, it was nothing compared to what we experience now, when the systems we deliver are embedded in fundamental transformations of our businesses.

You have three choices when you take on a massive change effort. First, you can think of your task as delivering software that adheres to the specifications. The technical term for this is “dismal failure.” It’s a popular methodology because you get to claim success while everyone else gets to go back to their farms and villages, avoiding the discomfort that goes along with abandoning old ways and learning new ones. If people actually used your new system, you’d risk finding out if it wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Another option is to “manage the change.” This is basically an exercise in successful corporate politics, because the discipline of change management involves analyzing the victims and participants of the coming change and figuring out how to navigate through their sensitivities.

You need to manage change or change won’t happen, because people generally don’t like it. People don’t like it because they’re smart and understand evolution on a personal level. In nature, changes to the environment drive evolutionary change by changing what constitutes “fitness” — traits that used to be adaptive in the old environment become irrelevant or harmful in the new one. Business change is environmental change carried to our day-to-day experience, and as in nature, it makes traits that used to be adaptive irrelevant or harmful to our own future success.

If all you do is to manage change, however, your project will succeed but you’ll make the next change harder. In the long run, you either create a corporate culture that embraces change or you’ll create a corporation of listless and dispirited cynics.

IS leadership can’t single-handedly drive corporate culture, except within IS itself. (A hint: How good have your mainframe Cobol programmers been at adopting object-oriented technology? IS isn’t all that good at change, either.) As part of your company’s executive team, though, you can help shape leadership attitudes on the subject.

What’s needed to create a culture that thrives on change? It isn’t complicated. First, define the behavioral and attitudinal traits you’re looking for — dissatisfaction with the status quo, active interest in making things different and better, an entrepreneurial spirit, and so on. Then make sure you hire and promote people who exhibit those traits. Even more important, find new roles for them when you’ve eliminated their jobs through process redesigns or reorganizations. Employees will adopt the characteristics that help them survive and succeed. The company leadership gets to define what survives and succeeds — that’s how to make the culture evolve.

This, of course, means filling the company with mavericks, trouble-makers, and general pains in the neck. That’s why lots of corporate leaders say they want companies that embrace change but few actually have them.

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