Oct 21, 2010 | Collaboration, Communication, Leadership, Strategy
Achieving transparency is at the core of a lot of what I do in the fields of demand chain development, strategic alignment, and mentoring leaders. Transparency enables emerging problems and issues to be identified, and addressed quickly, efficiently, and with a minimum of waste in the process, and for opportunities to be grabbed.
However, the downside that sometimes evolves, particularly in closely defined cultures, is that it also enables blame to be pinned on an individual or team, and this is hugely counter productive.
Once transparency is used as a finger pointing exercise, it will not get a second chance, as people learn quickly that it will be counter productive to bring problems to the notice of others, when they run a risk of being the messenger that gets shot.
Oct 19, 2010 | Customers, Leadership, Management, Marketing
The scary thing about competition is that someone always loses, even if it is only an opportunity. Many would like to believe that we should all be friends together to save the pain, but outside the public sector, it does not happen like that.
Successfully competing is down to delivering superior value to customers at a cost less than the customers best alternative. To do that in this connected world where transaction costs are disappearing the whole enterprise needs to be focused on what it is that the customer values.
Sounds pretty simple, but how rarely I see it
Oct 12, 2010 | Change, Leadership
Creating change in any organisation is a huge challenge to the capacity of an organsations leadership. Over many years of assisting in all sorts of projects, I observe it often tends to become overly complicated, perhaps over-intellectualised, so I have a simple 3 part framework that seems to work, and when a project wavers, it offers a grounding.
- Determine and articulate what needs to change, and why
- Agree and clearly communicate what it needs to change to, and what the end point looks like
- Build a program based on 1 and 2 against which you can drive the change, and measure progress.
This framework appears to work as well for a small change to a part of a processing line to an organisation wide culture change.
However, the danger is that the change by threes approach is inconsistent with the need to embed a hunger for continuous improvement which is a journey for which there is no end point, into the culture, so leadership is crucial.
Oct 10, 2010 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
This is a term I commonly use to describe a management style that I believe delivers the best results to any enterprise.
In one sense, central management is loose, against a clearly articulated and understood strategic purpose, it allows line management to make decisions, determine activity priorities, encourages mistakes by enabling calculated risk taking, experimentation, and just getting things done that delivers value to customers.
On the other hand, management is very tight, there is a rigorous planning and risk management regime that does not weed out risk, but exposes it to scrutiny, there is a culture of quantification, but equally, recognising not everything, particularly new stuff can be easily quantified, and there is a deep commitment to continuous improvement, and all its associated disciplines.
In these circumstances, creativity will flouish without losing sight of the main game, but it calls for the enterprise leadership to give up a key attraction for many leaders, using the office to get people to do whay you say on a daily basis.
Oct 5, 2010 | Change, Communication, Leadership, Sales
Trying to get stakeholder buy-in for an idea that breaks the mould is very hard in most organisations as it challenges the dominating logic of the organisation, what has succeeded in the past, and made it what it is today.
This process can be helped by breaking the internal selling process into two parts:
- Gain understanding of the idea from a “technical” perspective, the what and why, to ensure the facts are clear, understood, and acknowledged.
- Then, seek to address the cognitive issues, the “do you agree with it” things, but having gained an agreement of the technical aspects, the “do you understand it” issues, it is much harder for someone to disagree when all is left is the emotive stuff.
Sep 30, 2010 | Leadership, Operations
The word “leader” can have a range of meanings depending on the context.
It can mean someone who holds a position of power, and it just defines the position. It can also describe someone who inspires, who points the way, who commands loyalty without asking for it, totally independent of the position held.
Years ago, in a factory I was running, there was a quiet bloke, uneducated, and unassuming, but one who could make or break any initiative management proposed in the factory. He led, not by position, but simply by the force of his presence, and capacity to engage and inspire the others in the factory. He was a “leader” who led.
