May 8, 2012 | Change, Leadership, Management
With apologies to my economist friends, the notion of demand elasticity can be applied to the status quo in an organisation.
Embedding change in an organisation is remarkably hard, the status quo is capable of absorbing lots of punishment, and when the belting is over, it re-asserts its dominance, simply be being the “way things are done around here”.
It seems that when all the mumbo jumbo is culled, there are only two tools available that ensure you can make changes stick.
- Change processes such that there is no going back. This can mean all sorts of things, but essentially, the option of reverting to the old way must be removed. Weather you do it in an afternoon, or incrementally is just a question of management tactics, so long as doing it incrementally is not a cop-out.
- Change the people. Pretty nasty this, and has all sorts of implications, legal, moral, and the impact on survivors, but it remains that people make organisations work, and if it is not working, some stern action is required.
Apr 3, 2012 | Leadership, Management, Small business, Strategy
A small manufacturing business I work with, operating in a domain now dominated by a few huge retailers, and cheap imported products, is facing a dilemma.
Three key people are leaving at pretty much the same time, for different reasons, just with difficult co-incident timing. This is a small business, there is no “bench” of executives who have been mentored, trained, and nurtured so that they can step in at short notice, no such luxury in an SME to whom every dollar of cashflow is critical to survival .
The purpose for this business to exist is to showcase the great products coming from Australia’s food basket, the Riverina, this is what makes them different, and gives all stakeholders, customers, suppliers, employees, and those who fund the business, a reason to keep on supporting it through the current challenges.
It seems that the opportunity presented by this sudden and unwelcome personnel churn is to start again, almost from scratch, to rebuild the processes, and renew the sense of shared purpose amongst the employees. That task however, is a bit like getting to the top of a sand-hill in a desert, and seeing just another sand-hill rather than the expected oasis.
The key distinction between leaders and managers is that leaders find the grit to climb this extra sand-hill, ways to bridge the gaps between peoples differing experience, expertise, and expectations, so that there is a shared purpose that is larger than an individual. Leaders are not leaders because they are always right, but because they listen, learn, and enable others to do the same. That is the opportunity facing my small client, to be a leader, and to remain one of the very few Australian owned food manufacturing businesses left.
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.
