Mar 28, 2012 | Leadership, Management
“Politics” is a dirty corporate word, but “Organisational Dynamics” appears to be OK, and is gaining traction as a cliché.
What is the difference?
Both describe the process of accumulating the wherewithal to exercise influence, and dictate outcomes.
It is a fact of life that those who have control of resources, the money, people, and information, have the power to deliver should they have the intellectual and personal drive to do so, have at some point exercised political power in some form.
We have all seen the individual with organisational power but who could not tie his/her shoelaces without help, and the one who with little formal power seems to be able to get stuff done. Both find ways to influence outcomes using the same resources in differing ways, differentiated only by the innate capabilities of the individual.
Mar 21, 2012 | Change, Leadership, Strategy
Marketing is all about defining the problem we want to solve, poor definition leads to poor analysis and solution implementation. In the climate “debate” to give it more credit that it deserves, we have absolutely failed to include the capital value of the natural assets we currently have, considering only of the value of the current products that are made.
The whole debate about the need for change in the economy in response to climate change is about the costs that will be imposed as a result of those measures.
The classic narrow minded management mistake of believing the future will be an extrapolation of the past has driven the debate.
The “carbon tax” label has ensured that there is little else considered in the pubs, and around the BBQ’s that determine the public mood, and is a really poor piece of marketing by all concerned, except perhaps the opposition who are just there “to oppose” with no responsibility to be responsible.
In the past I have expressed the view that putting a price on carbon is the most easily managed form of insurance against adverse impacts of climate change should it be a reality. That still seems to be the case to me, even though the bumbling in Canberra ensures compromises that emasculate the cost/benefit, and the public mind is now firmly in opposition to imposition of a carbon price.
However, there is another dimension.
Just ask yourself what is the current value of discoveries that will emerge from natural compounds in the future , all of which come from the forests, swamps, sea, and estuaries around us. What is the value of retaining the natural capital that produces oxygen and water?
Because we have not really considered these things, and because we just assume they will continue to be essentially free as they have been to date, it would be a mistake to believe the past will just continue when we are busily changing everything else.
As a part of the debate, we should spend time considering the value of the natural capital we have, assigning monetary value to the olive tree plantations, as well as the olives they produce, simply because they have values beyond the olives, they produce wood, oxygen, habitat, and even a place to have a picnic. This can get pretty complicated, but the data sets are emerging that enable accurate mapping and assignment of values.
ARies or “Artificial intelligence for Ecosystem Services” is an organisation setting out to develop the methodology of assigning values to natural capital, we would do well to try and redefine the debate from the equivalent of a schoolyard brawl to one that uses our innate capacity to be creative and extraordinarily adaptable when we dismiss the power of current vested interest.
Mar 6, 2012 | Innovation, Leadership
It is pretty easy to avoid making that confronting customer call, stand up and articulate an idea at odds with the boss, conduct an experiment conventional wisdom says will fail. The price for not doing this stuff is pretty low, few will critisise, but there will be little pay-off as well.
It takes intellectual bravery to confront the natural reluctance to stand out from the herd, make yourself vulnerable, be different, but without that bravery, nothing changes, and little new value creation will happen. As George Bernard Shaw said, “all great things start as blasphemies”
Mar 5, 2012 | Communication, Leadership
If you cannot state your mission in a very few words, perhaps less than 10, able to be expressed in 30 seconds, the time it takes for a ride in an elevator to the 30th floor, where the big boys live, try again.
I see many mission and purpose statements that are full of jargon and weasel words, that really convey little but the perceived need to make everybody happy, to conform to the latest fad management book, but by the time it gets to the factory floor, where it really matters, it means nothing.
To be effective, a mission statement should be a reflection of what all those in the business feel, what needs to be built, the answer to the question, “what are we doing here?”
So it is easy to wordsmith a statement, but it takes persistence, leadership, and determination to make any use of it.
Feb 29, 2012 | Communication, Leadership, Marketing
We are pretty well immune to those who make promises, as we have heard it all before, and having been burnt, and burnt, we tend not to believe the hype this time.
Doesn’t matter if it is a colleague assuring us they will meet a deadline, a supplier “guaranteeing” performance of his offering, or a pollie telling us the train line will be built by the end of 2020, we have heard it all before.
The antidote is to stop saying and start doing, and let the performance speak for itself.
Feb 27, 2012 | Leadership
Leadership is often seen as a “soft” skill, hard to measure, and really only obvious with the benefit of hindsight.
Perhaps not, the potential success of leaders can be at least partly assessed by looking at what makes people unsuccessful as leaders.
As a test, when considering someone as a potential leader you could do a lot worse than score the person on the traits listed, and if sitting on a selection committee, get the members to evaluate a candidate separately on a set of scales that reflect the particular requirements of the appointment role, then compare notes. At least then you will see the areas of agreement and those for further investigation and debate.
Equally, within a context of an agreed strategy and expected results, the same scale could be used as a tool to evaluate executive performance.
Perhaps our “leaders” in Canberra should consider some objctive evaluation in about 3 hours, rather than relying on self interest, and allegiences based on all but the long term good of the country. Always the optimist!
