Jun 6, 2011 | Leadership, Management
How do you find the right people to contribute to the growth and prosperity of an organisation? This task is generally recognised as a core management function, but so often a new hire makes little real difference beyond delivering more of the same, if you are lucky.
How come it is so hard??
My view, it is usually easier to find someone with seemingly relevant experience along with the right set of qualifications and contacts than it is to find someone with the right attitude, someone who does not need to unlearn lessons learnt in a similar environment, someone with a contrarian view, who will fit into and contribute to a differentiated culture.
If you want more of the same, then continue as before, but if you want to create excitement, break the mould, change stuff, you need someone with the right attitude, skills can be learned.
Jun 2, 2011 | Collaboration, Management
Setting an agenda for a meeting is a crucial but easily dismissed management tool, although the capacity of the chairman to stick to it plays a role in how effective the meeting becomes.
When setting an agenda, it is useful to consider the interaction of the thee basic reasons for having a meeting:
To impart information
To collaborate and build knowledge
To gain permission for a course of action.
Often meetings have these things mixed up, creating confusion, so being clear about the role of an agenda item, and grouping them together by their function can be extremely useful. Better still, have three meetings, but often this is not practical, as in a board meeting, or complex negotiation, so create breaks in the proceedings as you proceed from one form to another.
May 23, 2011 | Alliance management, Collaboration, Management
It is a bit ironic to think that in the midst of the information revolution that is surrounding us, that we are in some ways reverting to the ways of pre-agricultural humans.
Bit of a stretch? Just think, pre-agricultural humans lived by what they knew, where the water was, how to track an animal, then kill, dress, and cook it, which plants were edible, and so on. There were no personal possessions, everything was shared, and the group succeeded or failed by group effort and their relative position in their environment.
We moved away from this collaborative model as we started to grow things and gain possessions, but in the information revolution we are going through now, perhaps we are going back to some of the foundations of what made hunter-gathers sufficiently successful to evolve into us.
If this is the case, maybe we should be looking at the social and organisational behaviours that made hunter gatherers so successful. Forget the strategists, bring in the anthropologists.
May 16, 2011 | Management, Operations
Last week I attended a seminar run by www.Salesforce.com a very impressive dissertation on the capabilities they and their partners can bring to bear on the CRM challenges faced by all businesses. Obviously, the objective is to sign you up, and the challenge for non IT management is to understand the offer , stripping away the sales pitch, and understanding the value it can bring to your organisation.
Cloud computing is coming at us at a rapid rate, as the costs for installing an IT infrastructure drop, but the costs of maintaining that internal infrastructure increase. This is outsourcing of a capital item that is rapidly becoming commoditised.
When considering the options, there are a lot of opinions that will can be offered, usually from a perspective driven by commercial outcomes, but this discussion by two acknowledged experts is one that lays out a logic without an agenda, other than to acknowledge the reality of cloud computing.
May 15, 2011 | Innovation, Management
This video of Gary Hamel discussing the evolution of management is seriously worth watching.
May 12, 2011 | Collaboration, Leadership, Management, Marketing
I have been surprised a couple of times recently when I realised that two B2B businesses I was working with really had no idea how their ultimate customers used the products they bought from us. In both cases the products were sold through distributors, whose paranoia about both parallel competition and losing the businesses to a slicker option, because the distribution grass is always greener, prevented them sharing information.
Both the clients concerned were spending significant resources dreaming up new products and technologies, considering process, distribution and marketing options, but were flying blind because they had no idea of what was happening currently in the labs of the final customers .
Asking them how prepared they would be to endorse a pilot putting the flaps on the plane down when he did not know how high they were now brought the obvious response, but where is the difference?
OK, you may not hit the dirt in any way other than commercially doing it in a business, but it is just as stupid.
Blind-flying appears to often be a result of the pressure of the “just do something” attitude, appear busy and stressed, and then boss will leave you alone, but doing anything without understanding the starting point is just plain dumb.
