“Truemor #1: 24% of the bottled water bought in the US is tap water processed and branded by Coke and Pepsi.”
From Guy Kawasaki’s neat Top Ten Truemors podcast, lasting about a minute and a half and very entertaining, which you can find here:
Phil's blog
‘Know why’ over ‘Know how’
Aug 13th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »
Harvard’s Jim Hesketh is hosting an interesting forum on whether ‘Millennials’ – people born at the tail end of the 1970s – will make good managers and leaders or not. They’re the “Generation Y” who are seen as hard work by the people who manage them because they prize ‘know why’ over ‘know how’ – If they don’t buy into the ‘why’ of what you are doing you won’t get their whole-hearted co-operation.
My thoughts are that the Gen Y, with their lack of respect for authority and constant questioning and tinkering and need for reasons, are shaping up to be a far better crop of leaders than the current lot if this example (below)is anything to go by. It impressed me, anyway…
I just came back from a family holiday in Portugal. I always enjoy these, as it allows me to reconnect with my older son and his wife while lounging around the pool reading and chatting, and I always learn something from them. They are ‘Millenials’, I guess, though I’m never sure about the wisdom of classifying a whole generation with particular traits: it seems based on the same principle as astrology.
Anyway, here’s what I learnt from Chantel, my daughter-in-law, this time around:
She manages the children’s department in a book store. The previous department head had been in post for years and left suddenly. Chantel was promoted into the position. No-one else knew how the department was run. It just ran well, with the department head seen as the fount of all knowledge and the ‘go to’ person to deal with any problems, as is often the case with a long-standing efficient department manager who has been in place for years.
Since no-one expected the department head to leave, there had been no succession planning. So, where do you go when the ‘go to’ person has gone? “I found this hidden world of paperwork and processes that the previous boss had kept away from me, for all the right reasons. This was the secret formula that kept the department running well and I was terrified of tinkering with it,” said Chantel.
Chantel took a deep breath and spent some time figuring out how it all worked. Then she spotted an improvement she wanted to make, made it, and held her breath. Had she messed with the magic formula? Would it all come crashing down around her ears? Suddenly people came out of the woodwork saying how great the change was and why hadn’t they done it before. Emboldened by this, she made some more changes, each of which was welcomed. Nobody had imagined doing things differently before because, well, it had all worked fine before.
A few months on and Chantel has been offered another promotion, managing the children’s department at another store. She is grooming her successor in the old job, introducing her to the paperwork and the processes that the department head has to manage, because she doesn’t want her successor left in the dark and having to figure it out herself, as she had to.
And this is the bit that impressed me: “I said to her, when I come back in a few months to visit, don’t let me find this all the same as I left it. Make changes! Make it better! I don’t want to find when I come back that you are doing the same things I was. I want you doing it better than I did!”
I love that message: “Here’s what you’re inheriting and your job is to change it!” “Change this!” is such a powerful green light to flash at leaders coming into new positions. As ever, that means leaders at all levels, not just the official leader in the hierarchy.
It contrasts powerfully with the old notion of leaders as guardians of the way things have been done and as champions of their own way of doing things, and scared of allowing alternative approaches in case they turn out to be better than their own.
If that’s typical of Millenial generation leadership, then I think we are in safe hands.
Here’s Jim Hesketh’s forum, over at the Harvard Working Knowledge site
I have a name for my pain
Jul 24th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »
I have been tardy in keeping up with Stephanie West Allen and Jeffrey Schwartz’s new initiative, Brains on Purpose.
When I did start reading it this morning, I got immersed in reading back through Stephanie’s material. One of the many things that struck me was the post on naming feelings, following on from a flurry of articles on the subject in Scientific American, The Daily Telegraph and other titles.
One of the most powerful lines in the first Batman film was when Jack Nicholson’s Joker says: “I have a name for my pain.” I was never quite sure why it was so resonant.
This whole emerging area of neuroplasticity , which West Allen and Schwartz explore in Brains On Purpose, with particular regard to conflict resolution, shows the power of naming feelings in helping to damp down unhelpful emotional patterns – patterns that lead to conflict or distraction from purpose – and amplify constructive emotional patterns; kind of a ‘brain, heal thyself’ approach.
I was attracted to this work through Schwartz and David Rock’s work on what they call the Neuroscience of Leadership – based on the new theory that the brain changes shape according to our experiences and thoughts and feelings.
The neurons themselves don’t change, according to the theory. But, the web of synapses between them thickens and grows where our focus of attention is greatest. Which is why, for example, when famously opinionated London Black Cab drivers like to think they have bigger brains than anyone else, it turns out they are right. The hippocampus in their brain is larger than in the average person, because before they earn their cab driver’s licence they have to learn The Knowledge – hold a mental map in their heads of every street in London and the shortest routes from place to place.
I’ve based the Leadership Hub on the principle of the power of attention in building up synapses, borrowing Rock and Schwartz’s principle that we learn best in small doses – maybe fifteen minutes a week.
Nature versus Nurture is beginning to look very much like last century’s argument. As so often, the answer looks increasingly like ‘and’ rather than ‘either/or’.
More, below, on self-organizing systems that shape themselves and grow as they are used.
Revolutions and Flocking
Jul 22nd, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »
Had an ‘Aha!’ moment in Oslo with my friend Marion this weekend when we realised we are both working on self-organising systems, in which usage and participation allow the shape of the system to emerge.
The one I’m working on is The Leadership Hub, which is in its pre-launch testing phase at the moment,while Marion’s is her Star Wards initiative, which has already got almost 100, or twenty-five percent, of the country’s acute mental health wards signed up to it, after only being launched a few months back.
Marion is a social entrepreneur whom I learn an awful lot from. For the Star Wards initiative – which centres on offering 75 clever and practical ideas for improving the quality of life on acute mental health wards – Marion came up with three degrees of change that participants could aim for, depending on how ambitious the participants are – Tweaking, Turning and Transforming – and mapped the 75 ideas for action into the three categories. Very clever and inspiring stuff.
I’m fascinated by how some catalysts for change can, like Marion, reach in from the outside and make a massive change happen very quickly.
Here’s her description of how Star Wards seemed to go viral so rapidly by drawing on the behaviour of Mao and geese: Revolutions and Flocking
Don’t lose your corporate memory
Jul 9th, 2007 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »
We focus so much on change that we can drift away from the origins that made us compelling to customers without noticing it. So, this is a reminder to check that, in the melee of change all organizations go through, you haven’t drifted away from what made customers come to you in the first place:
“The biggest threat to an organization always comes from within. It stems from complacency: losing touch with the customer and losing touch with the outside environment. It is called losing the corporate memory. When a number one brand hits the buffers, its fall from grace can be surprisingly fast. Marks & Spencer, once famed for its 15 per cent share of the women’s clothing market and for selling a third of all women’s underwear in the UK, had a spectacular slump in the late 90s shortly after delivering a record £1.2 billion in profits.
“After that the chain, one of Britain’s oldest, most solid names, stumbled from one turnaround strategy to another, really recovering only in the past few years. One thing you can be sure of now is that the architect of its recovery, chief executive Stuart Rose, is not going allow the chain to become complacent again. He refused to declare a recovery at M&S until January 2007, after months of successive growth, and is determined that his team will not lose focus, despite the admiring remarks of business commentators.”
That’s from Allan Leighton’s new book On Leadership. I’ll post more customer-related snippets here as I come across them.
Don’t make an impact in your first 100 days
Jul 4th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »
There is a raft of leadership literature on how to make an impact in your first 100 days (or sometimes it’s your first 90 days), the received wisdom being that you have to make your mark hard and fast as a new leader.
I’ve always thought this isn’t just slightly wrong; it is totally wrong. I thought it was just me who thought this, so was relieved to hear Michael Eisner, who led Disney for twenty years, make the same point, talking about his first 100 days at Disney:
“The first piece of paper I was given listed nineteen people to be fired. I didn’t fire them. I played it cool…I moved slowly. Some of those nineteen people are still there well over twenty years later.
“In fact I started so slowly I lost the first day trying to find my first board meeting. I’m a New Yorker. I’m driving around California and I had to call my lawyer and ask ‘Where is Disney?’
“The first big meeting I had was on a film set with 3,000 Disney people, where I introduced myself and told them I was interested in meeting everybody.
“Then I asked questions. Again, take it slowly. Then trot. Then run. Then gallop. Then get completely out of control.”
So, new leaders anxious to make an impact in their first 100 days, please note…that you shouldn’t. Making an impact is all about you. Learning first then doing the right thing is all about the context you have inherited.
But, don’t you love that closing line of Eisner’s? If you are looking to make big changes, it’s a powerful mantra:
“Take it slowly.
Then trot.
Then run.
Then gallop.
Then get completely out of control.”
Eisner was talking at ECMW 2007. I’m looking forward to hearing him again at Leaders in London. He’s been largely demonised due to his apparent inability to get on with people, and his critics cite a God complex. But, I think there’s a lot more to him as a leader than just a rampant ego.
Follow my leader
Jul 4th, 2007 | Leadership | 0 Comments »
I hate the classic distinction between leader and follower. Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, neatly dances us out of it with this beautifully-argued passage from Birth of The Chaordic Age:
“In the deepest sense, distinction between leaders and followers is meaningless. In every moment of life, we are simultaneously leading and following. There is never a time when our knowledge, judgment, and wisdom are not more useful and applicable than that of another. There is never a time when the knowledge, judgment, and wisdom of another are not more useful and applicable than ours. At any time that “other” may be superior, subordinate, or peer.
“Everyone is a born leader. Who can deny that from the moment of birth they were leading parents, siblings, and companions? Watch a baby cry and the parents jump. We were all born leaders; that is, until we were compelled to go to school and taught to be managed and to manage.
“People are not ‘things’ to be manipulated, labeled, boxed, bought, and sold. Above all else, they are not “human resources.” They are entire human beings, containing the whole of the evolving universe, limitless until we start limiting them. We must examine the concept of leading and following with new eyes. We must examine the concept of superior and subordinate with increasing skepticism. We must examine the concept of management and labor with new beliefs. And we must examine the nature of organizations that demand such distinctions with an entirely different consciousness.
“It is true leadership; leadership by everyone; leadership in, up, around, and down this world so badly needs, and dominator management it so sadly gets.
– Dee Hock, Birth of The Chaordic Age
Why Deming gave up on TQM
Jul 4th, 2007 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »
In the last few years of his life, W. Edwards Deming, the father of Total Quality Management, refused to use the acronym TQM or the phrase Total Quality Management.
He said he could count on the fingers of one hand the companies that get it and do it right. And that had nothing to do with the thousands of companies claiming they were doing it.
Deming said the problem was that language had replaced action; new words and procedures had been laid down like wallpaper over existing attitudes and ways of doing things, giving an illusion of change but the same underlying reality.
Littering your annual report, your training and your procedural manuals with ‘customer focus’ and ‘TQM’ won’t get you anywhere. It’s the transformation of the prevailing system of management you need.
Peter Senge (see below), knew Deming and was a student of his. He says this gap between what organizations say and what they actually do is prevalent and astonishing. It’s the “Your call is important to us” recorded message that denies the reality that the system is structured to make you wait, because that’s cheaper for the supplier.
The real test of integrity over illusion is if an organization says the same thing in its business plan, in its Board meetings and to its shareholders and investors as it does to its customers. But, in 90% of cases, there are two versions of reality here; one driving the business and one the veneer presented to customers: in the former, the agenda is to achieve maximum ‘share of wallet’, in other words, to take as much of the customer’s money as possible on as regular a basis as possible. The latter is the rhetoric of ‘customer first’ and customer service as lip service.
But, of course you wouldn’t do that to your customers…would you?
What are you selling?
Jul 4th, 2007 | Customer Service | 0 Comments »
I was just reminded of this story:
A consultant at Black & Decker was giving a talk to his clients and held up a drill. “Is this what you sell?” He asked. He got a resounding yes. “So, do you think this is what your customers are buying?” Again, he got a yes. “No, they’re not,” he says. He produces a piece of wood with a hole in it, and points to the hole. “THAT’s what they are buying.”
‘Customer solutions’ not ‘products’ is the way to think of what is going on between you and customers. So, are you selling drills when your customers are buying holes?
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