Aug 29, 2010 | Alliance management, Leadership
This hung election has generated a tsunami of comment, but nothing I have seen on the mechanics of collaboration, a key factor in any lasting resolution to the impasse I would have thought.
The idea of a “party” is simply an expression of the need for group action to get anything done. In the case of the two major parties the early collaboration around an idea has long been replaced by the institutional battle for survival, the original reason for the formation of the party forgotten.
By contrast, consider the Greens. They evolved from a protest group coalesing around opposition to the Franklin dam in Tasmania, through to political group with the power to protest in a wider forum of proportionally elected houses state upper houses, (Federal senate, NSW Legislative Council) from which all we expected was protest, to a party that now carries a veto over all legislation, which is a far wider remit than a one issue protest.
This last step is a game changer, one the Democrats failed. But what of the three independents in the house of Reps? Almost by accident they have the power of veto if they act collaboratively, but it seems to be emerging that consistent collaborative action may fail them just because the rallying point around which they can coalesce is far more ambiguous than the Greens “save the Franklin” and the Democrats “keep the bastards honest” and therefore the collaboration lacks some of the “glue” essential to a collaborative effort, and they lack the institutional organisation that is the alternative.
It will be interesting to watch, and I suspect that there will be an agreement that sees the “Mad Monk” as PM with the nominal support of the three independents, which will become very fragile as the next full moon impacts on Bob.
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!
