Executives in Science, Business and Society 3

leadership and boards IN SCIENCE,
BUSINESS
AND SOCIETY
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interview that, in fact, she did have
a clear set of simple rules)
While the uses and outcomes of
simple rules have been well studied,
little attention has been paid to how
managers distil them, urging me to
research this process. After interviewing
a few dozen CEOs, the first interesting
thing we discovered is that despite initial
doubt (see the quote above), all CEOs realised
that they actually have a personal set of lessons
learned that they have distilled into simple rules.
Not only this, but they consider these rules crucial
to their role, their growth, and the growth of their
organisations. We have compiled a list of 126 such rules,
some guiding the relationship with clients, others dealing
with strategy, but most of them related to managing people
and teams.
“If you come to me with a problem, you must also bring three
alternative solutions.”
”A good expert with a big salary is worth more than three
average employees with half that salary.”
“For a good relationship with the team, the ratio between
praise and criticism must be 3 to 1.”
These three examples (which all make use of the number
three) make for a short guide of distilled managerial
wisdom. We found that simple rules are born out of an
unexpected problem which induces tension, giving the
manager cause to search continuously for a solution.
Eventually, an external cue (a later observation, a
conversation, something read in a book) acts as a clarifier
and catalyses the finding of a solution in an insight
accompanied by a feeling of relief, like an epiphany. This
constitutes a triple insight, consisting of identifying and
unlearning a flawed assumption, learning a new lesson, and
then generalising a simple rule to be applied in all similar
situations, as illustrated in the example below:
The CEO of a marketing company was confronted with
a puzzling problem: strategic projects, agreed and
communicated at the beginning of the year, were lagging
behind (unexpected problem). She investigated the matter
and observed (clarifier) that the team was only working
on these projects at the end of the day, and only if current
daily tasks were completed. This led to her triple insight:
first, she identified and unlearned the flawed assumption that
just labelling projects as “strategic” does not make people
prioritise them; then, after reflecting on a solution, the
CEO learned the lesson that strategic projects need daily
attention; she then distilled it into a simple rule to be applied
in the future - “Strategic projects need to be integrated into
processes so that everybody can contribute daily.”
“When I share a rule, I also share its story, especially the
mistakes I made. If shared without its story, the rule would be
ignored, but when the team finds out how I discovered it and
how I bumped my head, they pay more attention and remember
it better.”
While the process described so far has an important
intuitive component, the next, more analytical phase
involves testing, articulating, and refining the simple rules.
When appropriate, personal rules are shared within the
organisation. Many studies have positively linked simple
rules shared at the organisational level with various aspects
of management, such as strategy (Bingham and Eisenhardt,
2011), innovation (Manimala, 1992), organisational learning
(Bingham and Haleblian, 2012), monitoring and even the
survival of family firms (Pieper et al., 2015). However, in the
words of another interviewee, the problem with sharing is
that “such rules are easy to hear and hard to implement”. A
way to bypass this problem is to share the simple rule along
with its whole narrative, making it easier to remember and
to adopt. This principle was discovered (and even turned
into a simple rule for sharing simple rules) by another
respondent, quoted in the vignette above.
So, how can managers use our research? First, by
acknowledging that there is value in clearly articulating
the simple rules they learned from experience. Managers
can start identifying and writing down their portfolios of
managerial proverbs. One way they can approach this is
to imagine that they have been promoted and are telling
their competent but less-experienced successor, “Listen,
my years on this job taught me a few rules that you can never
find in any book. They are:” and end the sentence. Secondly,
managers can use these simple rules as coordination
tools in their teams and organisations by sharing the rules,
always accompanied by their determinant stories.