Martin Lindstrom - The Ministry of Common Sense

Copyright 2021 by Lindstrom Company, Ltd.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lindstrom, Martin, date. author.

Title: The ministry of common sense : how to eliminate bureaucratic red tape, bad excuses, and corporate BS / Martin Lindstrom.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019045700 (print) | LCCN 2019045701 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358272564 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358275015 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bureaucracy. | Corporate culture. | Common sense.

Classification: LCC HD38.4 .L56 2020 (print) | LCC HD38.4 (ebook) | DDC 658.3/12dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045700

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045701

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photographs by timquo / Shutterstock (tape) and Hein Nouwens / Shutterstock (scissors)

Author photograph John Abbot

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For Gail Ursell, who came up with the idea, and Bill Winters, who had the guts to run with it

Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.

J OSH B ILLINGS

Marshall Goldsmith

AS A BUSINESS EDUCATOR, COACH, AND AUTHOR, I typically work with successful people who want to get better at what they do. Sometimes that means counseling executives who have lost their You Are Here map. That blueprint could be internalWhere am I going?or externalHow does what I do fit inside this organization? Usually its a mix of the two. The people I work with often come to understand that the skills that made them successful arent always the same ones that can take them to the next level.

Why shouldnt this same confusion also affect organizations? Many companies have been doing what they do for so long, often so well, too, that they no longer question themselves. People and companies tend to be delusional about their strengths and weaknesses, focusing on the former and brushing aside the latter. (Usually this is obvious to outsiders, less so to anyone inside the company.) What many companies dont realize is that their success has come about not because of but in spite of various entrenched habits, behaviors, rules, policies, and cultures.

Martin Lindstrom has spent years as a pioneering global branding consultant. Thinkers50 has named him among the worlds top fifty business leaders three years in a row. Hes routinely behind so many dazzling innovations that sometimes its a shock to realize they all originated in the same brain. More recently, Martin has repositioned his skills toward transforming global businesses and cultures from the inside out. Wherever he travels, he bangs up against the same problem again and again: the lack of common sense.

As humans, we suffer from the clash between who we think we are and who the rest of the world thinks we are. Spoiler: the world is usually right! I once defined Mojo (the title of one of my books) as that positive spirit toward what we are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outsideone that leads to increased meaning, happiness, and employee engagement. By contrast, its dark twinI call it Nojois that negative spirit toward what we are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside. In the Nojo category we can now make room for the worldwide lack of common sense.

In this very funny, entertaining, informative book, Martin gives us numerous examples of where common sense has gone haywire in all kinds of organizations, whether it centers around dusty rules, endless meetings, poor customer experience, legal and compliance issues, you name it. But as a business and culture transformation expert, Martin doesnt just chop off branches and leaves. He goes deep inside organizations to target the roots of inefficiency, impracticality, and general boneheadedness. He also shows that a companys inner environment correlates with what consumers grapple with. The TV remote control you have no idea how to use and the corporate website that makes no sense link back to bottlenecks inside companies that management and employees are usually too inwardly focused to notice. Not least, where common sense is missing, Martin argues (convincingly too), so is empathy.

In my experience, when employees are doing what they choose to do, we typically see them as committed. If, on the other hand, theyre doing what they have to do, we call them compliant. Most companies have limited systems in place to honor what happens when a bad decision, or bad behavior, is averted. They focus on what theyre doing, rather than on what theyre not doing. In this book, Martin shows us what most companies arent doing and should be doingand offers a concrete solution to restore common sense and empathy to organizations of any shape or size.

Im a longtime believer in 360-degree feedback as a way to help successful people figure out how to get better and improve their workplace relationships. In this book, Martin does his own high-scrutiny version of the 360. Youll be surprised. Youll be entertained. Youll be relieved. Its not just you! Finally, youll be reminded that categories such as B2B or B2C arent all that helpful, that in the end it all comes down to H2H, or human to human. Its common sense.

MARSHALL GOLDSMITH has been recognized by Thinkers50, Fast Company, Inc. magazine, and Global Gurus as the worlds leading executive coach. He is the best-selling author of What Got You Here Wont Get You There, Triggers, and Mojo.

• Have you ever gotten locked out of your computer while youre at work? The good news, according to IT, is that support is available on their websitewhich you have no way to access since, well, youre locked out of your computer.

• Getting ccd means youre part of the conversation, no one would think of leaving you out, and the team assumes you care about the solution to the problem youre being ccd on. But at last count, there are 158 emails in this thread, and youd pay serious money to stop people from ccing you.

• Youve submitted your travel itinerary to your department head but havent heard back from her. Unfortunately, IT is set up in such a way that the travel form resets after twenty-four hours, which means you will have to fill out and submit your travel itinerary all over again.

• A nationwide chain is one of the best-known big-box retailers in the U.S., selling everything from washers and dryers to outdoor hammocks. So why does the company also have an internal policy requiring them to stock snow-removal equipment in their 100+ Florida locations, even though the last time it snowed in Florida was 1977?

TODAY, ITS SAFE TO SAY we all confront one example after another that attests to the extreme want of common sense in our world. I certainly do. As a global consultant, I am ostensibly hired by organizations to create or fix brands. But nine times out of ten, I find myself serving as an organizational change agent, bringing to light and resolving corporate blindness and miscommunication, terrible customer service, products that make no sense or dont even work, packaging that sends us into a rage, and a general lack of intuitiveness both off- and online. I can confirm that the disappearance of common sense is at epidemic levels in companies not just in the United States but everywhere.