Aug 23, 2010 | Leadership, Management
Leadership is a subject that has filled libraries, kept researchers in businesses, and academics interested for decades. However, anyone who has been around organisations for a while probably sees it a bit more simply if they have given it any real thought.
To me, a leader needs to be able to communicate simply, and intimately (irrespective of the size of any group) a range of pretty basic things with those he/she is supposed to be leading:
This is why we are here
This is where we are going
This is why we are going there
This is how we are going to get there
This is what you can expect of me
This is what I expect of you
This is how, individually and collectively will take responsibility
This is what will happen if we fail at any of the above.
In the event that a leader “lives” all the above, others will follow, but there is little room for saying one thing, and doing another.
So much for the libraries!!
Aug 16, 2010 | Leadership, Personal Rant
Here is something that should scare the pants off any thinking Australian.
Into the last week of an election campaign notable by the lack of anything notable, apart perhaps from the diligent application to the pork barrel to marginal seats in Queensland, and a prominent economist in the US comes out with an analysis of the US economy that calls things as they are, rather than as the political comrades over the last 30 years would like Americans, (and by default, the rest of us) to believe.
The US is bankrupt, services are being cut across the board, and it is becoming clear that the baby-boomers starting to retire will drain anything that remains in the coffers, leaving a debt to their children too big and complex to have been attacked by those who caused it.
Back to Australia, we are not in the hole like our mates in the US, but only because we have been more lucky with the resources we have, and the numbers of people relative to the size of the resources prize , and perhaps the reforms of both parties, starting with the Hawke government, have been prepared to start to address the disease rather than just the symptoms, albeit not necessarily seeing it that way.
I see no discussion of anything I see as fundamental to the type of country we leave our children in the narrative of this current campaign, just spin around petty nonsense, with the occasional intrusion of something important being trivialised and reduced to populist slogans.
Aug 12, 2010 | Change, Leadership, Strategy
There is lots of hand-wringing going on again about gender equality in the executive suite the boardroom, and particularly the political arena.
All thinking people recognise the value of ensuring half our population has the opportunity to maximise the return to themselves and the community from their education, skill, determination, and ideas. The flip side, the one we are not allowed to talk about without being labeled sexist, is the social and financial cost of ensuring that equality, who should bear it, and under what circumstances sanctions should apply.
The initiative by the Australian Institute of Company Directors to mentor “board ready” women is terrific, and should be widely supported, but the regular discussion in regulatory circles of proscribing numbers is badly misplaced if the objective is the performance of our boards, rather than just some objective to achieve numerical equality.
Aug 1, 2010 | Alliance management, Leadership, Management, Social Media, Strategy
Knowledge Management is all about collaboration, making the 3 + 3 equal > 6, but the challenge has always been how do you codify the knowledge for dissemination and re-use, implying the existence of both strategy, and a management mechanism for the knowledge.
By comparison, social networking is largely uncontrolled, and lacks a strategy beyond “to connect”, but it nevertheless has become a source of knowledge management.
Social networking brings to the table two factors not usually prominent in KM systems:
- Humanity, people connecting and interacting for the personal value, not monetary value, it reminds of the notion of “commons” where groups assemble because they can leverage off the social, intellectual and commercial base of the “common”
- Social networking offers the opportunity not just to form horizontal connections as happens in managed KM systems, but for the vertical, and oblique connections that offer the opportunity for insights and capabilities in an organic manner, rather like the organic metaphor for innovation.
It appears to me that an application for social networking techniques that will evolve quite rapidly will be as a new and powerful tool that will enable the rich and varied collaboration so crucial for the innovation process.
Jul 29, 2010 | Alliance management, Communication, Leadership
Contracts are the point of last resort, they define the exit, should it become necessary.
Believing a written contract that details how the dynamics of an evolving relationship will be managed is as dumb as believing the lady in the tent can tell the future with any accuracy.
Relationships are about leadership, collaboration, honesty, and a mutual respect, and a reversion to the clauses in a contract are a clear pointer to the failure of the relationship and the leadership.
A while ago, a business I have had intermittent contact with over a long period set about outsourcing their IT function. It is only a modest business, short of resources, and took the view that the IT people were the experts, and that they should know all there was to know about how to approach their problems, and that the resources freed up could be better used elsewhere. Problem was, they had not adequately defined their processes and expectations, and the vendor saw it as a small sale, perhaps not worth their best efforts.
There were some tough lessons in the exercise, and at their most basic broke down to the simple fact that nobody could know their business as well as they did, and a generic set of solutions sold to a modest business were never going to be successful.
The vendor failed in their duty to meet their needs, once the sales contract was signed, they “moved on” and the company failed badly in the implementation, and the whole exercise ended very badly.
The simple fact is that the “solution” could have, and should have worked, the company’s logic was sound, and the solution had all the fundamentals to deliver a great service, but the relationship failed. Rather than leveraging the skills and experience of both parties to arrive at a successful outcome, they took the easy way out and just fought over who would carry the can. Really dumb!
Jul 28, 2010 | Leadership, Small business
The measure of effectiveness is the extent to which you get things done, and how well they turn out, not how well you theorise, discuss, and promise to “move forward”.
There are lots of highly qualaified, smooth young operators out there who do a great job at the talking bit, but who actually do little, and there are lots of older, (mostly) blokes with years of experience, and innate common sense born of that experience, who may have less in the way of academic qualifications, but who are able to apply their experience and get stuff done.
The great shame is that we appear to value the former, over the latter, and as a result have lots of youngsters with multiple degrees who cannot tie their shoelaces in senior positions, and their older former mentors in many cases out to premature pasture.
Which would you rather have running things for you, an older bloke who has made his mistakes, and is unlikely to repeat them, or a youngster, full of vim, vigor, and testosterone, who will spend your money getting his experience?
