It’s time to pump the brakes.

Yes. We know the year’s not quite over yet. But think about how much is behind us:

• If any of the system changes you might have taken on this year aren’t finished, they’re likely well underway.
• If your budgeting for next year isn’t finished, you only have two choices at this point anyway: (1) Panic. (2) Put a bow on it after the first of the year.
• You either completed all the organizational transformations or reinventions your were going to take on this year — or you realized they were figments of some marketer’s imagination.
• Your holiday shopping must definitely be done; otherwise, you wouldn’t have the time to be hanging around reading this post.

No matter what, the year’s winding down. If you don’t take time to wind down with it, you’ll be back in the race in the first week of January without having taken a deep breath, to say nothing of a rest or a celebratory drink.

Take Two and Call Us in the Morning*

We also know you didn’t ask. But here’s what we prescribe for the Holiday Season fast upon us:

1. Since Christmas is on a Wednesday, try to take Monday and Tuesday off, too.
2. If you can pull it off — or if your boss is going to be away — take Thursday and Friday off, too.
3. Since New Year’s Day is on Wednesday of the following week, see if you can get away with 1 and 2 that week, as well.
4. Since Hanukkah starts on Sunday, December 22, and ends the evening of Monday, December 30, just disappear until January 6 and tell your boss you thought Hanukkah was two weeks because 2019 wasn’t a leap year.
5. If you don’t observe any religious holidays, do whatever you want. The only day you really have to worry about is Valentine’s Day because … well … you know.

If you get in trouble for any of that, to paraphrase Mission: Impossible, we’ll disavow any knowledge of your actions.

Just Joking

Kidding aside, we wish everyone who reads this post — along with our customers, our prospects, and all their loved ones — a joyous, restful Holiday Season and a bright, prosperous New Year.

Seasons greetings from all of us at Finys.

* We’re not doctors or HR consultants. We don’t even play ‘em on TV. In fact, we didn’t even audition. But we think we’re on to something anyway.

One of our favorite slogans is one we saw on a t-shirt years ago. It was worn by a guy who must have been a bodybuilder — or else he was absurdly muscular for no good reason. The t-shirt read, “Get big or stay home.”

This is not a bodybuilding blog. It’s not even a single post about bodybuilding or weightlifting. And while we don’t think executives in smaller-tier insurance companies need to get bigger, they and their companies would benefit if they started thinking a little bigger.

Ante Up

When we were kids, our families had one car. We had one television set. It displayed in black and white. We had no cable service. We had no Internet. We had no cell phones. And we had land-line phone service with just one phone in the house.

Fast forward: Most families have a car for every driver in the house. They likely have smart TVs in every room, most if not all of which have LED LCD displays. Along with cable and Internet services, most homes have streaming devices like Chromecast, Raspberry Pi, Synology Diskstation, Google TV, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Plex, and others. And everyone walks around with smartphones that, by the standards of even 10 years ago, are portable supercomputers.

Why is that relevant or important? It’s relevant and important because the rest of the world has moved on with technology and accepted the additional, initial costs associated with its increased capabilities. Those costs become entry cards, table stakes, and business investments in the adoption of contemporary living.

Has that happened in insurance? Not so much.

The Future is Here

Insurers are people, too. To stay relevant and competitive, they have to move forward. They have to adjust and adapt. That doesn’t mean they have to lead any technological charges. But they do have to adopt the technological capabilities and the processing functionality that will enable them to develop and introduce products more quickly, deliver service to policyholders more responsively, and react to market opportunities more nimbly.

Will there be incremental cost to adopting that technology? Yes. Just like there is with car payments, cable and Internet bills, streaming services, and data plans. But the more important question is this: What will it cost if you don’t adopt new technologies?

The new reality arrived with the future. Smaller-tier insurance-company executives and their boards have to accept this new reality or accept irrelevance.

They don’t have to get big or stay home. But if they don’t think bigger, they run the risk of getting smaller.

This is the fifth and final post in a series inspired by a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”, that posited these five characteristics of effective corporate cultures:

1. Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence
2. Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined
3. Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid
4. Collaboration but with Individual Accountability
5. Flat but Strong Leadership.

In the prior post, which covered collaboration and accountability, we stressed the importance of giving people responsibility — plus authority — for their given tasks. As we wrap up this series, we address the subject of leadership and share our thoughts on the way our organization works best and why.

The Buck Stops Everywhere

To summarize the HBR article’s point #5, which is consistent with much of what we wrote in our last post:

In culturally flat organizations, people are given wide latitude to take actions, make decisions, and voice their opinions … [they] can typically respond more quickly to rapidly changing circumstances because decision making is decentralized and closer to the sources of relevant information … Lack of hierarchy, though, does not mean lack of leadership … For employees, flatness requires them to develop their own strong leadership capacities and be comfortable with taking action and being accountable for their decisions.

In all likelihood, there isn’t one person in our organization who’d say it lacks leadership. At the same time, most if not all of the people in the organization would say they’re comfortable with the extent to which they’re given rein to manage their responsibilities with authority, to call the appropriate shots, and to let their thoughts be known. While ownership is an overused term, all of our people are encouraged to own their jobs. And they’re recognized and rewarded for doing their jobs well.

Connecting the Dots

Logically, all five of the points in the HBR article are related. In this series of posts, we’ve suggested the ways in which those points are related sequentially (each point feeds off the previous point) and operationally (each point strengthens the functional interactions within the organization and of its people). Writing this series has given us the opportunity to grant ourselves some objective distance from the organization, to appreciate the things we’re doing well, and to connect the appropriate dots.

We hope you enjoyed reading this series as much as we enjoyed writing it.

This is the third post in a series inspired by a Harvard Business Review article, “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”, that posited these five characteristics of effective corporate cultures:

1. Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence
2. Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined
3. Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid
4. Collaboration but with Individual Accountability
5. Flat but Strong Leadership.

Last time out, we presented our take on experimentation, uncertainty, ambiguity, and the necessity of discipline. This time, we examine the nature of psychologically safe, brutally candid environments.

Smile When You Say That

By the strictest terms of the article’s point #3, we’re not sure our organization qualifies as psychologically safe or brutally candid. Here are those terms:

Psychologically safe environments … help organizations avoid catastrophic errors [and] support learning and innovation … candor is critical to innovation because it is the the means by which ideas evolve and improve … [people] must be willing (and able) to constructively critique others’ ideas without being abrasive … providing and accepting frank criticism is one of the hallmarks of respect.

We do encourage open, honest, and thorough exchanges of ideas and opinions, knowing our people are competent, willing to take risks, and highly disciplined. But we expect respect and its reciprocation to be precursors to any such exchanges. If all of us in the organization don’t have respect for each other first, it’s not likely to be earned (or back-filled) by providing and accepting frank criticism. Put another way, we engage in frank criticism at Finys because we respect each other.

Two-Way Streets

By the same token, we expect open, honest, and thorough feedback from our customers. Both parties are more rewardingly served when our customers tell us what we need to hear, rather than telling us what they think we want to hear. We try to create environments for them in which they’re comfortable providing that kind of feedback, in which they realize their greatest opportunity is helping us help them. And we take the time to know them, to respect and appreciate their needs, before the word, contract, ever gets mentioned.

Whether we’re talking about employees or customers, if the respect is mutual going in, we all win.

A recent edition of Harvard Business Review carried an article entitled, “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”. At first, we thought it was about Greek yogurt. Then we read it and learned it’s about the five characteristics of effective corporate cultures. Here they are:

1. Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence
2. Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined
3. Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid
4. Collaboration but with Individual Accountability
5. Flat but Strong Leadership.

This is the first in a series of five posts in which we will examine each of those characteristics from the perspective of our own organization.

Fine Lines

Any discussion about the relationship between failure and intolerance has to start with distinctions and balance. The article says this:

A tolerance for failure is an important characteristic of innovative cultures … And yet for all their focus on tolerance for failure, innovative organizations are intolerant of incompetence.

To strike the appropriate balance, we tend to distinguish mistakes from failure. We tolerate honest mistakes resulting from clear thought, sincere intents, and unforeseen eventualities. We don’t tolerate failures resulting from thoughtlessness, carelessness, or recklessness. And we take to heart a conversation we once heard over lunch at an industry conference:

Person 1: I heard one of your people made a huge mistake.

Person 2: Yep. It cost me $50,000.

Person 1: Did you get rid of the guy?

Person 2: Why would I do that? He didn’t piss off the client. And I just paid $50,000 for his education.

As far as we’re concerned, failing to try is a bigger indicator of incompetence than making an honest mistake in a sincere, well-thought-out effort. And lessons hard-learned are often the most effective.

A Calculated Gamble

There’s no such thing as perfection. We neither demand it nor expect it. But we do expect conscientiousness. We do expect honesty, integrity, and thoughtfulness. And we do expect people’s best efforts, even as we recognize anyone’s best efforts may fall short on occasion. It’s the gamble you take in business, in hiring, in being willing to trust and observe before you judge.

That approach has worked for us since 2001. And it’s kept our culture active, even though we’re not in the yogurt business.

Changing our approach now might be a mistake … or worse.