tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45013618218225410992024-03-06T06:57:41.556+13:00TutaetokoObservations, reflections and stories on doing, organising and coaching communication for innovation and growthTutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.comBlogger84125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-14647839028552566682017-11-16T20:15:00.002+13:002017-11-16T20:49:41.295+13:00Do university Business lecturers know how to educate? <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">If </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Senior Lecturer in Marketing, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Dr Mike Lee's opinion piece , "</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span id="goog_200099058"></span><a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11943854">Done properly, exams stimulate<span id="goog_200099059"></span> learning</a>" (</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">NZ Herald, 15 Nov 2017)</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">represents the general level of knowledge and understanding of effective education within the University of Auckland Business School, then is seems clear that they need to "get a life" educationally. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">He argues the case for exams, not only for assessment but for teaching too. He's been a course coordinator for nearly 50 university papers and written more than 100 exams so he clearly has extensive experience of conventional teaching and assessment but apparently not beyond that. If he did, he would realize that although such methods may work for the closed university system, they don't produce high quality, work ready practitioners. And that's surely the objective for all graduates except perhaps for the minority who, like him, join the academy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">University Business schools rely on processing large numbers of students, few of whom proceed into academe. Most graduate both </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">as</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">failed researchers and failed practitioners. It typically takes at least couple of years to make something useful of a Business graduate. Maybe that was accepted in the past but not now. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">University lecturers must progress beyond repeating the teaching learning processes of their student experience. That's easily said but hard to achieve because they</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> like us all are, to a greater or lesser extent, prisoners of their experience. They </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">can't imagine much beyond what they've experienced. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We could exhort them to get out more, risk trying radical new methods. But what's to encourage or push them to do that? The University organisation is essentially a slow-learner; designed to be conservative, insular, superior, bureaucratic, and typically populated by a toxic combination of brittle experts defending their egos and expertise, and rule-bound administrators defending their power and position. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Dr Lee isn't entirely mistaken: conventional exams do achieve focused learning but not learning for effective collaborative practice. The artificial c</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">risis created by exams strongly </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">motivates students to competitively cram and retain information long enough to survive the exam. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Crises are great opportunity for deep needs-based learning that transforms understanding and behaviour but exam crises reinforce compliance and build expertise at the individualistic task of doing exams. I doubt those qualities are useful in contemporary academia. They certainly aren't in NZ Business. That's why <a href="https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/97253320">100 major NZ companies have stopped hiring on university qualifications</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Dr Lee argues that exams are good for sorting people: that those who do well at high school exams, do well at university. That looks like closed-loop thinking. Of course students who become skilled at doing exams in high school are going to be good at doing them at University. And if the University qualifies people on their skill at doing exams then its all very cozy until they step outside that closed system into the contemporary NZ commercial and industrial world. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I've taught in Universities and other Tertiary Business Schools and my business is working with privately owned businesses to change and grow. I've never seen a business sort or educate it's people by exams. There are ample actual emergent business crisis-based opportunities for learning. But conventional university education doesn't prepare people for that mode of learning. The opposite actually.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That's why it fails and we need to wake university teachers to that. Which probably means changing the funding model to drive tertiary education organisations to innovate teaching. They will claim that they are already doing it, and no doubt a few individuals are, but Dr Lee's view suggests that conventional methods prevail. So too, do my direct experiences contracting in tertiary Business education during the last several years. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-86345615203288221942017-10-20T16:23:00.001+13:002017-11-16T20:30:41.715+13:00Opportunity at last to prune tertiary Business Education?<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: 0px 0px 0px(255, 255, 255); line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #444444; font-size: 14px;"><a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11933684">Justine Munro, Director, Z Energy and founder of 21C Skills Lab</a> wrote in the NZ Herald “New work order requires education shake-up.” "On September 26, over 100 Kiwi companies wrote an open letter that made it explicit a "new work order" is here. In this new world of work, many tertiary qualifications are not seen by employers as preparing young people for real world roles.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #444444; font-size: 14px;">Increasingly, employers value generic skills, such as critical thinking, collaborative problem solving and global literacy not typically taught or assessed in school or tertiary courses. "</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">The “New work order” and the redundancy of Business degrees was echoed the same day (7 Oct 2017) by <a href="https://thespinoff.co.nz/featured/17-10-2017/the-new-work-order/">Rebecca Stevenson in The Spinoff</a>.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">This is music to my ears. Good even, that self-styled education “futurists” such as Mind Lab’s Frances Valentine are investing in developing education methods that leave graduates with the elusive “generic/soft skills” that make or break governments and enterprise these days. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">I’ve been hoping for over a decade that the employer market would wake up to the inadequacy of tertiary education for business, then demand better and apply market pressure to the insular, self-satisfied qualifications industry that has monopolised and commodified so-called education. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">During that time, I interspersed coaching change in NZ SMEs with spells in the tertiary education sector developing learning contexts and learning management processes that actually, intentionally, and successfully developed the “generic/soft skills” that are now acknowledged as a prime competitive advantage for innovative organisations in the globalised economy. That includes the current new coalition government in NZ. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">However, my efforts to propagate those methods within institutions were, like those of my local and international network of like-minded tertiary educator colleagues, stymied at pretty well every step. Typically, through inability of most managers, administrators and many academic colleagues to imagine or risk anything much beyond their personal memory of tertiary education context and process. I know first-hand that this closed-loop thinking and practice dominates even NZQA Category 1 (certified self-monitoring) tertiary institutes in 2017. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Waves of e-learning (read low cost mass delivery of the now discredited qualifications), code writing and open plan learning spaces have washed through, stripping the landscape and adding little of value. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">The tertiary industry focuses on the student market which still chooses providers on brand and NZQA categorization. Especially the international student market. It’s not surprising then that so many international students, seeking work visas and eventually permanent residence, graduate to find that their qualifications win them little more than menial employment. And not surprising either that the newly elected coalition government intends to shut that door. The tertiary industry will do it hard without the easy cash that channel provided, and the change in the employer market will squeeze local enrollments too. Good!</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Here’s opportunity for a hard pruning and fruitful re-growth: root out narcissistic managers and sly, sycophantic acolytes, who rode the wave, took the credit and drove quality into the ground. Time to give the real creatives room to make a difference. </span></span></span></div>
Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-87435765310132057632017-10-02T20:04:00.000+13:002017-10-02T20:39:27.461+13:00Your SME’s not a peg-board of positions to plug people into. It’s a group of people who want space to grow.<div style="background: 0px 0px 0px(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 1em; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Back in Sept 2013 when I was blogging a lot I wrote about increasingly disruptive effects of social media on management in “Change your Attitude or Die Like a Frog“. That title, by the way, was a reference to the “boiled frog syndrome” where it’s said that frog in a bucket of water over a fire doesn’t realize, until it’s too late, the dire implications of rising temperature. Apparently, frogs are actually cleverer than that, but are aging SME owners?</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Since then the social media phenomenon has “heated up” somewhat and companies are mainly concerned about controlling time employees spend on it and what they say about the company and its managers. But the hidden effect is on attitudes to authority and expertise and on formation of personal and collective identity: how people see themselves and the organisation they work in. Evidence of unprecedented dissatisfaction with authority and establishment figures and systems is conspicuous in politics (Trump and Brexit are the extremes) and it’s affecting management too.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Personal identity is no longer mainly determined by job or career. People increasingly curate their identities and their connections in social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Furthermore, jobs, workplaces, and the employment market are changing so fast that stable job-based identity is history. So are the patriarchal, static, mechanistic, hierarchical structures typically pictured in those box-and-wire-pyramid diagrams. Yet most managers still see themselves as running such an organisation: plugging people into the pegboard of positions, as if they’re process machine-parts.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">The Seek and Trade Me job adverts may pay token attention to the changing employment market by candy-coating job opportunities. But when it comes down to it, they’re typically just looking for the right part to plug into their organisational pegboard. The give-away clue is the typical list of tasks called a job description. Finding the right person to fit the position becomes a major problem when its the hole left by the aging owner of a successful SME stepping back from the operational centre where they’ve probably have been since the beginning. Where do you find such a matching part?</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">You’re on a hiding to nothing in that search because that owner is an outlier in an outlier organisation: less than 2% of start-ups last that long and when they do it’s probably because of a lucky fit between the idiosyncratic mix of owner attributes and market opportunity. The chance of finding a replacement for such quintessential Kiwi business owners with their cultural heritage of self-reliance, broad competence, resourcefulness and hard work, is close to zero That’s why most GM appointments to Kiwi SMEs fail, proving to the owner yet again that “you can’t trust anyone to run your business”.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Extracting the aging owner from their (probably his) business isn’t a matter of tidying up the accounting systems and plugging in a GM. It requires a transformation of the way the owner and the employees perceive and behave in the organisation. The owner’s attempts at withdrawal typically trigger confusion, stress and conflict among employees whose established identities and relationships are disrupted when long-established tacitly understood roles, co-dependencies and systems begin to unexpectedly fail. So, the owner is drawn back in to settle disputes and repair failed systems.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Maybe the solution strategy is suggested by the ways that organisation and identity emerges on social media where there typically aren’t any pre-defined box-and-wire pyramids; people choose who they associate with, and curate their personal and group identity in the process of working out useful and fulfilling roles where they can do what they do best. In the SME context that would mean creating such space, and in that space, facilitate new and altered working relationships. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">That may seem like inviting chaos but, with wise guidance, the space left by the owner’s withdrawal is potentially space for people to step up; for new combinations of responsibilities to emerge; new work relationships to form and flourish, and previously undiscovered talent to shine, so that the organisation organically adjusts to fill the hole in new ways. Remaining emergent gaps can be filled by new recruits, selected for their relational rather than simply functional fit.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">SME owners may be sceptical at first that their employees have sufficient interest or capability to accomplish such a transformation. The early stages may tend to confirm that for them, but with perseverance, wise guidance and coaching, it works. The alternatives are dying in the traces, selling for a song, of simply handing it to family when they have as much chance of success as the last GM.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "open sans" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">Where would the aging SME owner get such wise guidance and coaching? Chose people who understand the context and the dynamics. They’re probably older, experienced SME owners too, who by fortunate fit of their idiosyncratic personal attributes, experience, education, with the market opportunity, together they are effective, wise guides and coaches. Talk to <a href="https://www.omnicomocc.co.nz/">Omnicom OCC </a>and associates of course.</span></span></div>
Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-31935631813523429022013-09-15T15:59:00.000+12:002014-03-10T17:54:21.598+13:00Change Your Attitude or Die Like a Frog<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">No matter whether or not you've
got a smart phone or tablet, whether or not you blog, tweet, are on LinkedIn or
Facebook, if you ignore their effect on your management environment then you
risk dying like the proverbial boiled frog. It dismissed as nonsense dire warnings
of the consequences of the slow flame under its tub of water. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The changes
may be so slow that they’re hardly noticeable. Yet social and mobile internet
technologies are steadily, inexorably freeing people from the mushroom farm -
from being kept in the dark and fed on bullshit; freeing them to create,
speak up, challenge, push back and rise up; freeing them to connect with anyone
anywhere, to contribute and impact on merit rather than position; freeing
them to expose bullying bosses whose power depends on concealed incompetence
and hierarchical authority. On the web, no one knows whether you’re a dog or
the senior vice president. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That’s why it’s imperative for
managers and managed to learn fast how to get things done in a world where
authority is the reciprocal of followership (for refugees from mathematics,
that means: as authority increases, followership decreases). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Carol
Rozwell argues in <a href="http://www.mixprize.org/blog/boiled-leader-digital-freedom-work?">T<i>he Boiled Leader – Digital Freedom at Work</i></a> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">(September 13, 2013) </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">posted on Management Innovation Exchange’s </span><a href="http://www.mixprize.org/tags/digital-freedom-challenge" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Digital Freedom Challenge</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> , that workers who aren't</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> effective collaborators will surely be
exposed. They are the people we avoid working with. Everyone in the peer group
knows who they are, yet management takes no action. Frequently because those
people </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">are</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> management.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You
don’t have to join the twittering classes, plaster the details of your life all
over Facebook, or push your profile on LinkedIn and blogs to survive. But you
do need to change your attitude to fit a world that expects freedoms that you
may intuitively see as threats to your authority. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The
message for Managerial “Frogs” is abandon that authority or die. The good news
is that the rewards for abandoning it are, productive, profitable, satisfying collaborative
<i>life.</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<h3 class="post-title entry-title">
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Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-3798412003393832032013-05-15T16:20:00.000+12:002013-05-15T17:06:56.461+12:00Is a Business Exit Consultant Worth the Time & Money? <br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“Is the money, time and distraction of an Exit Planning Consultant really necessary? And does it really add any value at the end of the day?” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Aaron Toresen, Managing Director, LINK(NZ) </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">poses those questions and answers them </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">in his LINK Business email Newsletter 14 May 2013. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In answer, he baldly claims: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“The truthful answer is only occasionally. More often than not the whole "Exit Planning" nonsense is no more than fee generation by well meaning but ultimately misguided advisers.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“Almost every business consultant, coach, or mentor has screeds of information, manuals and guides that they will happily take a business owner through, on an hourly rate, to prepare them for the sale of their business. The more complex and esoteric the adviser can make the process, the better. Often these advisers have never sold a business or indeed owned one, but nevertheless confidently march their clients through various business plans, strategic plans, checklists and milestones . . . . . .”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>It turns out these claims are mainly a straw man </b>for then claiming that his firm can prepare a business for sale in within 2 or 3 months.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>What he doesn't say</b> is whether those businesses sold for their full value to the exiting owner. The truth is, very probably not. 90% of businesses sell for less than half what they’re worth to the exiting owner. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>A broker’s main interest</b> is typically efficiency of effort to achieve increased turnover, not selling price. Most brokers want you to sell within four months for whatever the business will fetch. They want you to be grateful that they found you someone who's willing to pay to take your place in the hamster wheel. 90% of the time that’s what business owners do. Brokers typically depend on it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>However, he is right about most business consultants</b>, coaches and mentors. That’s why, if you really do want to sell for an earnings multiple of 4-6 you need to be particular about your choice of help (and your broker). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You’ll need to establish a profitable growth curve and extract yourself from the centre of operations. Unless you've already achieved that, it’ll be impossible to achieve in 2 or 3 months, even with Aaron Toreson's personal help. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>The project will take at least two years with business-savvy, trustworthy people helping you lead it.</b> They’ll be <a href="http://www.businessexit.co.nz/">educated, experienced business owners with wisdom, passion and expertise to share</a>. They'll quickly, deeply understand you and your business, empathise with your situation and work comfortably within the messy reality of your business. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>The project isn't so much about planning as it is about acting strategically</b>; about changing the way your business is organised and operated; so that you have time to work <i>on</i> it instead of only <i>in </i>it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By the time you complete the project you may have changed your mind about selling because the business will be a profitable pleasure to own. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>So don't sell yourself short.</b> You and the nation need you to realise the full value in</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> your business and for it to continue to flourish for it's new owner. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Take care in selecting your strategic change support and your broker. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-47508620938254462452013-05-05T11:27:00.000+12:002013-09-16T16:45:43.100+12:00Sailboat does 40 knots in 25 knot breeze. Why?<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Collaboration is good if you’re not in a hurry. Yeah, right (Not). </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Surprisingly for many, collaboration is essential when you're in a hurry to win.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Take for example the speed of the New Zealand team in
designing and proving its AC72 hydrofoil catamaran (a sail boat, but not as we
know it Jim) for the 2013 America’s Cup in San Francisco. Amazingly, the cat
can do more than 40 knots in less than 25 knots of breeze. But more amazing
than that is the speed of their development programme</span>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">It’s especially amazing to dyed-in-the-wool corporate
managers like former Energy Company CEO and now corporate Chair, Keith Turner.
(</span><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10880939">Keith Turner. Innovation the key for Team NZ. The New Zealand
Herald, Thursday May 2, 2013)</a></span>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">To his conventional corporate eyes, it’s miraculous:
</span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">“The speed of learning that [NZ’s] team has
generated in transforming an idea into world-leading practice is quite
extraordinary”</span>
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">“The culture of the team is outstanding”. </span>
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: x-small;">“I was also amazed to see a team assembled from all
corners of the world, working on a common cause like there is no tomorrow.
Designers from the world's leading experts coming together, not just for money
but to participate in something truly great but with a tremendous sense of
humility. That is a great lesson for corporate learning.”</span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To my eyes what he describes is the power of collaborative
learning; </span><a href="http://tutaetoko.blogspot.co.nz/2013/02/success-stops-learning-fail-fast-and.html" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">failing fast and falling forward</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> in unity. My question is how do they
get to be like that; why do they behave so differently to common corporate
practice?</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Turner seems to pay attention to the “what” and make
assumptions about the “why”. He notices that they “learn on each other’s
shoulders” but is unclear about whether that’s because they are committed or
that they are committed to collaborating: </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: x-small;">“The sailors, the designers, the weather men are so
committed together they are leaning on each other's shoulders working out what
they learned the day before, how they can change the design tonight and how they
can make the boat go faster tomorrow.”</span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Awareness of the distinction between commitment and
commitment to collaborating can be indicated by adding a comma to the first
line of the above sentence: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">“the [men] are so committed, together they are [learning]” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> “the [men] are so
committed together, they are [learning]”. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Though Turner notices that the pace at which the team “catapult
their ideas forward” and attributes it to an “extraordinary learning culture”, he
seems to attribute that culture to the usual suspects: commitment to purpose
and “extraordinary leadership”: </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">“The team has been able to catapult their ideas
forward at such a pace, despite the multitude of cultures present, to innovate,
to spring off each other's dumb questions and to learn so quickly that in three
years they have gone from knowing virtually nothing about AC72s to being now one
of the best in the world. What an extraordinary learning culture.”</span>
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: x-small;">“What extraordinary leadership to engender such
culture. Grant Dalton lives with his heart on his sleeve. He's frank, he's
unassuming and he's driven. He's intense. Dalton is very much a what you see is
what you get and no frills. He has welded a world-performing team together in an
incredibly short space of time to achieve extraordinary performance.”</span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Are commitment to purpose and extraordinary leadership
sufficient to replicate such fast and effective learning? I don’t believe so. In
order to replicate this exceptional learning organisation we need to go much
deeper than simply describing purpose and leadership. </span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">We must delve into questions like, where does this
cultural ability to spring off others’ dumb questions come from, and how do we
learn to do it? How is that ability related to the leader’s candour? What is it
that bonds the team? Did the leader “weld” them together or is the bonding much
less rigid, less orderly and less mechanical? Much softer, fuzzier and flexible,
yet far more powerful? </span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To transform organisations to achieve like Team NZ it’s not
enough to describe and understand the general effect and generalised causes. We
must learn to perceive and behave in specifically different ways from the way
we normally do in organisations. The difference is fundamental. Unless we begin
to personally experience changed behaviour, even our understanding is unlikely
to go beyond conventional corporate perspective such as Keith Turner’s – we won’t
have a clue what it might feel like to be in Team NZ let alone how to do it
ourselves.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The guys (and girls) in Team NZ have experienced something
very different - effective collaboration. They’ll have a hard job communicating
that experience to others unless those others get to experience something like
it. Until then, there’s nothing much to productively talk about.
</span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The problem is to devise and operate ways to enable people
to experience deep collaboration when they have no practicable notion of what it
is, having never knowingly experienced it; how to get them to risk attempting
something that seems odd, uncomfortable and stupid then collaboratively fail
fast and fall forward; how to get high achievers to risk failing in order to
learn something that they can’t understand? </span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The best place to do that is on-the-job; opportunistically in
the semi-structured messiness of business, dealing with actual business events.
Some educational institutions are beginning to wrestle with this, against the
flow of conventional market expectation and against their own institutional
cultures, structures and practices. The University of Auckland, Graduate School
of Business is one. Having spotted that there’s an international market for
business people who can collaborate and generate collaboration, they’re
building a practice orientated Master’s programme aimed at doing that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If it’s going to work, building and delivering the programme
itself will be an experiential case in learning to collaborate.. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h3 class="post-title entry-title">
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Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-69942264488328484182013-04-26T14:08:00.001+12:002013-05-05T11:30:43.527+12:00Millennials less entrepreneurial than their olds. Why?<span style="font-family: Verdana;">“The whiz-kid with an idea who vigorously taps out code while hyped up on energy drinks then launches a business to astronomical success is the exception, not the rule.” (</span><a href="http://qz.com/75316/dont-let-silicon-valley-fool-you-millennials-are-the-least-entrepreneurial-generation/"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">David Yanofsky in Quartz</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;">)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">New data from the </span><a href="http://www.kauffman.org/"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Kauffman Foundation</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> in the US shows that in 2012, 20-34 year olds were 30% less likely to start a new business than 35-65 year olds. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><img alt="20-34-35-44-45-54-55-64_chart_002" src="http://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/20-34-35-44-45-54-55-64_chart_002.png?w=1024&h=576" height="226" width="398" /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The gap’s been steadily widening since 1996, mostly due to increasing entrepreneurial activity by the olds but with a discernable decline amongst the youngsters. Especially in the closing years of the millennium. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">There are many possible reasons including comparative lack of available capital amongst the youngsters, and olds needing to create jobs for themselves because they can’t get a job and can’t retire. But a third one, the effect of contemporary schooling on the youngsters, is potentially far more pernicious. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Over the western world generally major education reforms were introduced in the late 1980s and early 90s. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">In New Zealand the reforms were signalled by the 1990 major report on education “Tomorrow’s Schools”. From that, the movement to de-professionalise teaching and heavily emphasise qualifications got traction through the new Qualifications Authority (NZQA) that administered the atomisation of knowledge by the Unit Standards based assessment and qualification. New Industry Training Organisations (ITOs) administered the related institutionalisation of apprenticeships. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">By 2003, when I began a stint of teaching in a University Business School, the shocking effect of the reforms was well established. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">As University teachers we were warned that secondary school graduates entering university could be expected to demand to know in detail, before they commenced a unit of learning, exactly what they were expected to know as a result, the process by which they would know it, and the reward structure for knowing. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I recall wondering how any of them would learn anything new, unexpected, or surprising with such restriction on insight, or risk.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Even so, I was dismayed and amazed at how risk averse my students were. They seemed to have been trained to expect surety of outcome for their efforts; unable to cope unless the expected result, the process and the reward were fully mapped out beforehand; schooled that such information was their right and anything less, bad teaching.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I refused to comply and pushed them to cope with uncertainty and risk by collaborating. I coached collaboration. The process was nerve wracking at times but the result was widespread joy at experiencing collaborative entrepreneurship. Graduates from that approach proved to be fast learners (effective in employment 3 x faster than conventionally taught grads) and natural leaders in changing contexts and emergent practice.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">But my approach was unusual. The conventional undergraduate teaching methods that predominated, and still do, are effective schooling for career corporate-managers and researchers, not entrepreneurs. Post graduate teaching methods are too; maybe that’s how MBAs came to be blamed for the 2008 GFC.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Little wonder perhaps, that entrepreneurship has declined amongst schooled youngsters. </span><br />
<a class="a2a_dd" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save"><span style="font-family: verdana,sans-serif;"><img alt="Share/Bookmark" border="0" src="http://static.addtoany.com/buttons/share_save_256_24.png" height="24" width="256" /></span></a>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-43719211080353587622013-04-16T12:18:00.001+12:002013-04-16T12:20:52.212+12:0020 yrs Advice and Advisors Changed Nothing Much.<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px;"><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">There’s no shortage of advice and advisors for Kiwi SME owners: plenty of “should do this” and “should do that”; “should use TOC” or “should do a one-page-plan; “shouldn’t be satisfied with the 3Bs (boat, BMW & batch)”; and “should be aiming to be global magnates”. And why should they do these things? Because NZ needs them to create wealth, that’s why. </span><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">But 20 years of advice, advisor, mentors, consultants, coaches or whatever hasn’t done the trick. Why? </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px;"><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">At least part of the reason is that SME owners don’t have the time or patience for advice unless it’s immediately, practicably useful. Regardless of how justified, well meaning or authoritative it is, or how virtuous or good, it’s unlikely to have the prescribed effect unless it pops up at the right moment coming from the right person. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">Advice works when, for some reason, the owner is unusually receptive and keen to change, and when it comes from or through someone that the owner trusts to produce the change. It’s an opportunistic, entrepreneurial process. Not a corporate planning exercise.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">Trouble is most advisors aren’t business experienced entrepreneurs. They’re more likely ex-corporate executives or experts who, though they think they understand the SME owner, have never experienced actually having their own tender parts on the line; have always spent someone else’s money with only a salary and bonuses at risk. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">And that’s not all. 50% of current SME owners are 55-70 yr old baby-boomers whose success in business is largely due to an exceptional coincidence of market opportunity and technical and entrepreneurial talent. Over 90% of SME start-ups disappear within 3 years. Only about 2% grow to be more that a job for the owner. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">That 2% aren’t successful because they went to university. More likely they left school early. They’re not successful because they read endless business books or adopted every new TQM, Zero Defect, Process Re-Engineering or whatever Management fad that raged virus-like through the corporate world.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">They’re successful because of who they are, what they’re naturally good at, what they happened to do, and when they happened to do it. Why would they be keen to change, especially when the advice comes from a stranger claiming to have the answer?</span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">A current example from my experience is a substantial client whom we met through a long trusted agent/advisor of his who is also a trusted business friend of ours. The introduction coincided with the client facing unexpected demand for a new product he’d developed. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">In conversation we learn that although 70 next birthday, he’s tired of being the general and operations manager - at the centre of everything – because he wants to focus on what he loves and is good at – developing new products and processes. He has a list of possible projects. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">I ask him, “In the best of all possible worlds, how many of these projects would you like to take to fruition.” “All of them,” he says. “What’s stopping you?” I ask. He’s silent for a moment then replies, “No one asked me that before. My bank manager, accountant, solicitor and friends all ask “What would you want to that for (at your age)?”” “Look”, I say, “there isn’t much you don’t know about your industry and we personally know very little. So we're not proposing to teach you to suck eggs. But we do have the skills, knowledge, direct experience and network to help you remove the barriers to achieving your goal; to profitably exit what you don’t like, profitably get into what you do. It’ll take 3-4 years and involve a lot of change, including you.” </span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">To cut the story short, we’re eight months into the project on his condition: that we complete it in 2 years not 3-4. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">We aren’t “doing TOC” with him per se, or “one-page-plan” or any other “tool” or programme. But we are using those and many other approaches and techniques in a rolling-wave project to achieve his goals. In the process we're engaging with him and his people experientially so that in two years that knowledge and skill will be “built into” the organisation(s). The bits he then sells for a high price will be a great buy for new owners who likely are or want to be global magnates. He can keep the other highly profitable bits he likes. </span><br /><br /><span style="color: #666666; line-height: 1.5;">The thing is we met him at that right time and through connections he trusts. Notice also that like him we are also baby boomers and like him we are also SME experienced entrepreneurs. Unlike him we have high-level specialist business skills and knowledge that he knows he lacks. He trusts us and we trust him too.</span></span><br />
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Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-36426055265089824782013-02-22T11:54:00.000+13:002013-02-24T07:26:22.760+13:00Success stops learning – fail fast, fall forward: celebrate failure<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The key to competitive advantage in changing and deeply uncertain
times is to discover new "right answers" and get them to market first. Previous
answers won’t do. No one, not even the boss!, knows what the new answers are.
We have to find out by experimenting together and learning fast from failures. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That may make simple sense, but doing it is hard because failure
is typically not allowed. We know that if we want to be successful we have to
look successful; associate with winners not losers. Failing is losing. Success
is winning. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Bosses and teachers are expected to know the answers.
Subordinates and students are rewarded for doing what bosses and teachers want.
To question the boss’s answer is not a good career move. With some bosses, it’s
OK to question provided you already have a convincing alternative answer. Some bosses try to look like they know by pinching subordinates’ answers for their
own and taking the credit. That’s how they got to be bosses. "Everyone knows" that’s how promotion works.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The result of this emphasis on success and knowing is that
organisations and individuals stop learning; thinking happens in interminable closed
loops; workforces become cynically compliant and/or aggressively self-serving. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">How do we break that deadly loop? The answer seems to be in the
process of deliberately celebrating failure.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For instance, a Canadian Engineering NGO, Engineers Without
Borders, is an organisation that seems to have broken the loop with a process called
The Failure Report. Of course they didn’t get it right straight off. They failed
plenty along the way. Basically it’s about open admission and shared reflection
on failures.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What they learned* is:<span style="font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ol>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Failure Report is a dynamic tool for
learning but the real power is its ability to shift organizational cultures.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is absolutely critical to have buy-in and
support from the highest levels of management - the boss must risk reporting failure
too.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Understand your organization's unique failure
foundations – identify and actively remove the blockages to people speaking
openly about failure.</span></span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Decouple ego from activity - maximise and
acknowledge learning from failure so that ego can remain intact though failure</span></span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Tell stories but don’t paraphrase them into
simple lessons for others - tell them in full and in context and leave
discussion and interpretation to individuals and groups. (I just failed that by posting this list*)</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 7pt; text-indent: -18pt;"> </span><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Go big or go home. No sugar-coating allowed - be
dedicated to honesty and humility and deal with the elephants in the room.</span></span></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-indent: -18pt;">*For the full story click </span><a href="http://www.mixprize.org/story/fail-forward" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; text-indent: -18pt;">here</a>.<br />
<br />
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Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-49906306775554095512013-02-18T13:07:00.000+13:002013-02-22T12:09:54.272+13:00What’s changed in 12 months?<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Maybe it’s now obvious that the economy isn’t going to simply “bounce back”; maybe the pressure for enduring radical change is closer to tipping point.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Nevertheless, so long as our circumstances allow us to ignore or deny that - allow individuals and organisations to simply blame others for failures and claim credit for fortunate successes, nothing new is learned and nothing changed. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">National politics is obviously dominated by that sort of behaviour. It’s less publicly obvious in business where executives, earning 50+ times their employee’s average wage, continue to take bonuses and repeat their sorcery for the next anxiously credulous company. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The most likely place for transformational change to break out is on the fringes of markets and industries, in outlying parts of larger organisations and in smaller firms (SMEs). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">However, though SMEs don’t have the bureaucratic burden and organisational inertia of big firms, they are likely locked into their own historical co-dependent behaviours and relationships. Those behaviours and relationships developed around and out of the founders personality and skills coupled with complementary market opportunity. Through them the firm survived and grew – succeeded. That success, perversely, shuts out new learning and change. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">An army of conventional mentors, coaches, consultants, and educators won’t change that because they’re locked into their own conventional histories. To have transformative effect they must first transform themselves and their organisations. But they have the very same impediments that their clients have. How then do we break this single loop control circuit?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I’m writing about this in a series of posts in another blog </span><a href="http://www.businessexit.co.nz/_blog/My_Blog" title="http://www.businessexit.co.nz/_blog/My_Blog"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">http://www.businessexit.co.nz/_blog/My_Blog</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Business Exit Ltd is a collaboration of mature business people who, for one reason or another, have been fortunate to experience transformative change and to experience leading it too. Our passion is to collaboratively exercise and develop our unusual experiential knowledge and wisdom, for good. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Although we are mature (old dogs), we are keen and effective learners, putting the lie to assumptions about change being the preserve of youth. To the contrary, we observe that young, educated people these days are strongly risk (change) averse. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">We are interested to hear other’s stories as well as share our own. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /></span>
<a class="a2a_dd" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save"><span style="font-family: verdana,sans-serif;"><img alt="Share/Bookmark" border="0" height="24" src="http://static.addtoany.com/buttons/share_save_256_24.png" width="256" /></span></a>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-32085964241859686992012-02-24T16:39:00.001+13:002012-02-24T16:45:05.547+13:00Is Depression Costing Your Business? Probably!<p><i><i>The cost to UK business alone of poor mental health management is in the region of £25 billion per year (Centre for Mental Health, UK); </i></i></p> <p><i>Depression is soon set to become the second most common cause of disability globally, after heart disease (World Health Organisation) </i></p> <p><i>One in four adults will suffer from a mental health problem <b>in a given year</b> and the majority of these people will suffer depression (British Office of National Statistics) </i></p> <p>(<a href="http://www.gbmonline.net/web-articles.cfm?theCID=2F88F868-B059-941B-1025C0A4352CD835">Global Business Magazine</a>, February 2012)<i></i></p> <p>And guess what? <i>The most significant impact on workforce stress and depression is the way work is organised and managed! The latest findings on workplace depression suggest that the solution is to ensure that people </i></p> <ul> <li><i>Are able to see how their output makes a valuable contribution to the organisation.</i> </li> <li><i>Are allowed as much variety as possible in the tasks they carry out, the speed at which they work, the way in which they work and even the place in which they work if possible.</i> </li> <li><i>Receive regular performance feedback – repeated studies have shown that uncertainty about performance is a major stress factor.</i> </li> <li><i>Are given ownership of their responsibilities.</i> </li> <li><i>Are provided with suitable opportunities for learning and problem-solving</i> </li> </ul> <p>In short,<i> workplaces that have </i>[open]<i> communication and that allow their employees greater flexibility and control have fewer instances of depression.</i></p> <p>Hardly rocket science! But despite manager-talk, few organisations get anywhere near approaching such a climate. Most are so interpersonally dysfunctional (mad) that they could hardly be better designed and operated to intentionally produce depression and anxiety. </p> <p>The secret is to transform the context: the members’ shared unconscious and conscious assumptions about the way the organisation functions. </p> <p>So how do we do that? The best time to do it is when the organisation is in crisis. The current global economic climate offers many exceptional opportunities. However, most such opportunities are squandered with conventional restructure, cost cutting, and consequent reinforcement of what’s bad about the way we typically organise and communicate. </p> <p>The best way to do it is to engage in widely inclusive strategic planning and execution along lines advocated by</p> <p>· <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_19?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=the+leader%27s+guide+to+radical+management&sprefix=The+leader%27s+guide+%2Cdigital-text%2C204">Denning(2010) <i>The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21<sup>st</sup> Century</i></a> (available on Kindle from Amazon USA for NZ$18) </p> <p>· <a href="http://www.managementexchange.com/video/gary-hamel-reinventing-technology-human-accomplishment">Hamel (2011) <i>Reinventing the Technology of Human Accomplishment</i></a> (Management Innovation Exchange Video)</p> <p>· <a href="ttp://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Uncontested-ebook/dp/B004OC07F8/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1329880757&sr=1-1">Kim and Mauborgne (2005) <i>Blue Ocean Strategy</i></a> (available on Kindle from Amazon USA for NZ$11) </p> <p>· <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html">Sinek(2010) How Great Leaders Inspire Action</a> (TED Video)</p> <p>· <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=managing+the+unexpected&x=0&y=0">Weick and Sutcliffe (2007) <i>Managing the unexpected: Resilient Performance in and Age of Uncertainty</i></a> (available on Kindle from Amazon USA for NZ$18)</p> <p>All write about strategy for organisational transformation.</p> <p>These aren’t “tool boxes” for managers to apply to the managed. The transformation begins with managers’ open commitment to first transform their own behaviour, despite the perceived risks of loss of authority and chaos. Most managers fail at this first hurdle.</p> <p>To succeed they’ll need the full support of their board of directors and accountability, with education and encouragement, to a coach skilled in such transformational process. That way they can learn experientially - the fastest most effective way - to lead the transformation process. </p> <p>The benefits: market leadership, unimagined high levels of client and employee satisfaction, amazing technical innovation, reduced costs, higher profits. </p> <p>The most powerful determinant of NZ business success today is all in the mind.</p> <a class="a2a_dd" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save"><span style="font-family: verdana,sans-serif"><img border="0" alt="Share/Bookmark" src="http://static.addtoany.com/buttons/share_save_256_24.png" width="256" height="24" /></span></a><script type="text/javascript"><br />a2a_linkname=document.title;a2a_linkurl=location.href;<br /></script><script src="http://static.addtoany.com/menu/page.js" type="text/javascript"><br /></script> <span style="font-family: verdana,sans-serif"></span> Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-70367862317512648082012-01-02T17:11:00.001+13:002012-01-02T17:11:32.147+13:00How to be successful in 2012 and beyond (II)<p>Pervasive belief in individualistic self-improvement, goal achievement, profligate consumption and bullshit opulence was the target of my previous post: the tongue-in-cheek rant “<a href="http://tutaetoko.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-to-be-successful-in-2012-and-beyond.html">How to be successful in 2012 and beyond</a>” .  </p> <p>The satire was too subtle (or maybe too long) for some. For instance a friend commented on Facebook, "Hey Steve, it's not that I don't believe in what you say... but I've had one hell of a 2011, and none of it was planned. Happy New Year and very best for 2012, planned or not."</p> <p>I replied, “ My (satirical) point precisely. I'd say you have had a very successful year "dancing in the moment".</p> <p>The thing is that he and we all seem to have become so accustomed, so programmed to the mantra of individualistic self-improvement and goal achievement that we tend not to see or value other forms of success. </p> <p>This was highlighted for me in 2011 when as business development coach I “went back on the tools” a couple or three days per week to provide some flexible trades capacity in a client’s property maintenance business while we set it up for growth. </p> <p>Not surprisingly the growth strategy includes niche-focusing, differentiating, and enhancing the value of his services, so to increase the price.  </p> <p>Turns out that the first task was to rebuild his concept of the value of what he does.  His belief was that his service is manual work and therefore low status, low value, competing on price. </p> <p>I can understand his belief. You don’t have to look far to see that success is widely regarded as not-doing manual work. It’s indicated by graduating from manual to administrative work. The further you are removed from the manual work into administrating it the higher the financial rewards and status. High paid people don’t get their hands dirty. This is I think grotesquely apparent in the differential between shop-floor and CEO remuneration. </p> <p>I set out to convince him that despite the virtualisation of many aspects of contemporary life and the reification  of financial services, administration  and “knowledge work”, people still dwell in bricks and mortar. They depend on built-in utility equipment and services that suffer wear and tear. At the same time, the skills and knowledge needed to maintain and renovate these things, or even to install them properly in the first place, are increasingly alien to most.</p> <p>The value of that skill and knowledge becomes acutely apparent with hard times, natural disaster, and environmental degradation when maintenance and renovation become a favourable alternative to profligate consumption. </p> <p>Another thing I discovered with working on the tools was that I quickly got fit. There’s something about sustained physical activity that can’t be achieved in a thrice weekly, intense, hour-long gym workout, no matter how hard you go. </p> <p>It wasn’t only the physical health but also the mental health of directly creative activity and tangible product – such a contrast to sedentary intellectual work in a typically manipulative bureaucratic setting. </p> <p>I mentioned my re-evaluation of manual work to a surgeon friend who replied that surgery is labour. This was confirmed when a paediatrician friend confirmed that surgeons have lower status in medical circles than other medical specialists because they are the plumbers, fitters, carpenters and decorators.   </p> <p>To return to the opening topic: in contemporary life it seems that success has become such a narrow and distorted belief that it rules out pretty much all people and activity except being on target to become or being a Glossy-model-looking CEO in “knowledge work” living at peak-consumption.  </p> <p>That has got to be sick. My successful business clients, in terms of profitability, health and contribution to society, have overcome that programming to find a much more fruitful concept of success. It’s about finding hope, joy, and peace in doing good things together: in collaborative enterprise.  </p> <p>That’s practically the antithesis of individualistic self-improvement and goal achievement.</p> <a class="a2a_dd" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save"><span style="font-family: verdana,sans-serif"><img border="0" alt="Share/Bookmark" src="http://static.addtoany.com/buttons/share_save_256_24.png" width="256" height="24" /></span></a><script type="text/javascript"><br />a2a_linkname=document.title;a2a_linkurl=location.href;<br /></script><script src="http://static.addtoany.com/menu/page.js" type="text/javascript"><br /></script> <span style="font-family: verdana,sans-serif"></span> Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-416631239202179602011-12-31T11:44:00.010+13:002012-01-01T10:32:41.114+13:00How to be successful in 2012 and beyond.According to many who (by the popular definition) are successful and according to the many popular analysts of success, achieving it is as “simple” as sticking to a regime like: <br />
<br />
Step 1: (re)picture what success will look like in 10 years. Be sure to think Big, Hairy, and Audacious (Thank you Jim C) ; beyond your imagination of how to get there.<br />
<br />
Step 2: decide up to three main 3-5yr thrusts that will take you towards that 10yr vision.<br />
<br />
Step 3. set an goals for 2012 that will addresses the highest priority action within those 3-5 yr. thrusts<br />
<br />
Step 4: set up to five actions for the first quarter<br />
<br />
Step 5: Take action and monitor your progress and focus weekly, monthly quarterly and review your goals annually. <br />
<br />
Interestingly, by this definition most people are not successful, arguably because in reality they don’t stick to the regime. This begs the questions: 1) Are most people therefore failures? 2) Are there grades of success? <br />
<br />
At dinner parties and other gatherings this summer we’ve played the game “Who’s the most successful?” That game is always on, but seldom explicitly. So we decided to put it on the table. <br />
<br />
We discovered, as you might expect that personal notions of success seem strongly affected by life experience. <br />
<br />
According to one summary circulating in the email, notions of success are broadly age related and a kind of cycle of life:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuuqw0DYHDn2FVY6IB8gFGQhIyajkbxhA6DW40FA9TL6ahlGWvXzYy6V9CJW6pT5bgZdDQ7nckeSVjSqGbZQRj52FsN49YpDE_mYtl7AZuxmQI5Bz76WYFC2EeknT51jcloJGZ9YYWJvfK/s1600-h/image%25255B4%25255D.png"><img alt="image" border="0" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixKiOOOKYVn_1PxFpJ5y2wX94d4O37OlyOUiaPErDTxMoMJKsoBvmSFdKmBxPzKxyylXUgjDl4VA4LeUZyzHgQGCgmVfobyiLdvwngi9eP2vFlTVfLYFWDpG6wYKR-EG6Y8HCFo4RgvBmD/?imgmax=800" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="400" /></a><br />
<br />
We found that politically, people seem to vote for government that they believe will assist them to achieve success on their terms and thus increase their chances of winning – or at least getting a good grade. <br />
<br />
We found that people whose children are "successful”, but are “unsuccessful” themselves tended to measure their success in terms of their children’s material success if the kids are rich, or creative success if they’re artistic, or got “good jobs” if none of the above. Or it might be reproductive success if they’re producing lovely children. <br />
<br />
Some argued that success is belonging, contributing and growing according to one’s strengths. (Liberal).<br />
<br />
Others argued that success is to do God’s will to further his kingdom on earth. (Religious).<br />
<br />
Success seems to vary between cultures. For instance a Chinese lad from Taiwan observed that in his community the “top dog” has the biggest house and flashest car. He observed that in Kiwi culture the “top dog” cooks the BBQ. Maybe that’s why Kiwi’s are regarded as less commercially aggressive<br />
. <br />
Anyway, it quickly became clear that people tend to define success pretty much to suit themselves (or get very depressed). This can be a problem when a modern economy, especially in the current recessionary climate, needs economic growth to prosper; needs people produce and buy more stuff: needs success to be materially measured.<br />
<br />
We figured therefore that the best policy is to foster materially measured success by nationally standardising success measures along materialistic lines: to have National Success Standards; that these be administered by a dispassionate bureaucracy, preferably an already established one to avoid set-up costs.<br />
<br />
In New Zealand, achievement standards are administered by the New Zealand Qualification Authority (NZQA). NZQA administrators will likely be very pleased to acquire the increased span of control.<br />
<br />
NZQA’s hold over NZ education is also an advantage because if we have National Success Standards and we want everyone to have equal opportunity to be successful (egalitarian) we must have widely available education for success.<br />
<br />
Because we need a quick return on the education investment we can’t wait for kids to qualify in Success and work their way into the corporate workforce. We must educate the existing workforce starting NOW. <br />
<br />
So we must rapidly develop and deploy a programme of tertiary level courses in Success which would necessarily be night classes at universities and polytechnics.<br />
<br />
That way working people could study to qualify in Success while they continue to work during the day. Along the way they could apply their learnings to their workplace and families and whole workplaces and families could become successful!<br />
<br />
If we act quick enough, 2012 can be a huge success for everyone! ;-)<br />
<br />
<a class="a2a_dd" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img alt="Share/Bookmark" border="0" height="24" src="http://static.addtoany.com/buttons/share_save_256_24.png" width="256" /></span></a><script type="text/javascript">
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</script> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-12020923690306434822011-08-05T11:14:00.003+12:002011-08-05T11:28:40.262+12:00Manager or Leader: red-herringShould bosses be managers or leaders? Is there a difference? Can leaders be managers? Can managers be leaders? Whatever, it’s irrelevant. The debate’s a red herring. <br />
<br />
It was maybe relevant in industrial-age 20thcentury when the boss’s prerogative was simply to control workers either by inspiring (leading) or manipulating (managing) them; when leaders and top managers (executives) were the unquestioned priests of the church of Industrial Management. <br />
<br />
It’s time to break the spell. It served the industrial age well but it’s an albatross round the neck of business in the post industrial age: where rates of change are exponentially increasing and high-wage economies and maybe ecological survival depend on people being radically creative, passionately engaged, deeply committed and highly collaborative; where <a href="http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Strategy/Were_all_marketers_now_2834">everyone’s a marketer</a> because everyone in the organisation vitally affects the customers’ experience. <br />
<br />
This new world needs a fresh understanding of leadership that enables diverse personal strengths to flourish in rich, close, open collaboration; that enables each member to lead according to their strengths. <br />
<br />
We need a new understanding that charismatic leadership is just one of many forms of leadership: that, for instance, an introverted analyst can lead precision and attention to fine detail; an independent egotistical salesperson can captain sales effort; a systematic, reliable process improver can lead quality assurance. <br />
<br />
It’s time for the “leaders and drivers” to allow the rest to actively and vitally engage in leadership. Trouble is, everything in conventional experience tells us, leaders and led, that that’s courting disaster: inviting anarchy; presiding over descent from control into chaos. <br />
<br />
Yet conventional leaders and managers who deliberately learn to allow other forms of leadership to flourish, experience almost miraculous results. The learning’s not easy. It feels risky: like managerial suicide. It’s counter intuitive. But with wise support and professional coaching it happens. Not overnight but typically over 2-3 years with early signs of success clearly evident in 12 months. <br />
<br />
This change isn’t something that leaders and managers do to others. It’s fundamentally what leaders and managers do to and amongst themselves. It’s about the systematic changes they make to their interpersonal behaviour and expectations. <br />
<br />
It’s about the changed responses that they receive in a spiral of change from mechanical co-operation to dynamic, interpersonal collaboration. It’s about organisation changing from “boxes and wires” structures to rich webs of interpersonal relationships between people with diverse talents and strengths and deeply shared purpose. <br />
<br />
This is the new key to competitive success in the 21st century. Are you up for it? <br />
<br />
Will you dismiss it as “crazy-idealistic” dreaming considering the sort of people you have to work with? OK. Carry on as usual. Maybe your market will stay locked in the 20th century. If it doesn’t, get ready to eat the dust from your competitors who make the change. <br />
<br />
Also published on <a href="http://www.mpspegasus.co.nz/blog.html">MPS Pegasus</a><br />
<br />
<a class="a2a_dd" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img alt="Share/Bookmark" border="0" height="24" src="http://static.addtoany.com/buttons/share_save_256_24.png" width="256" /></span></a><script type="text/javascript">
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</script> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-109352601304360892011-04-18T12:04:00.003+12:002011-04-18T12:10:11.730+12:00Who do you think you are?<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Who you think you are is affected by the context you’re in and it affects the behaviour of those around you. Who you think you are at work is affected by your assumptions about what your work role means and the cultural dynamics of the organisation.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">This was highlighted for me recently by a client’s story:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">For as long as I’ve known him my client’s been disappointed with the performance of his sales manager. The sales manager hasn’t achieved the potential indicated by his personality profile and successes outside work. He’s good but not great. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Yet recently he showed brilliance, but not in the usual work context. He and my client were at a supplier’s international conference. My client, unable to cope himself with all the relationship building opportunity and expectation, totally delegated half of that to his sales manager. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The sales manager’s performance in that context was vastly improved from normal. Had my client not known the sales manager’s underlying personality profile, he’d have been worried that his sales manager was on drugs of some kind. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">My analysis: that goes to show what’s possible if you can change the organisational context. Next step is to raise the experience to consciousness and deliberately seek to change the local (internal) context to enable that brilliant performance back home. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I recommended my client tell his sales manager how amazingly effective he had been in that outside setting. Then ask him how they could together work to change their behaviours and assumptions to enable the sales manager to tap that previously hidden strength. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">He’s done that. The sales manager was surprised and pleased to have been caught being brilliant. They are deliberately working to change their relationship and the organisational dynamics. My client is taking the lead by being accountable to his sales manager for changing his own behaviour. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Who you think you are can turn innovative, curious, dynamic and effective people into comparatively conventional, apathetic, dull and ineffective drones; turn considerate, reflective and humane people into insensitive, bullying manipulators (and vice versa). (For more on bullying see </span><a href="http://tutaetoko.blogspot.com/2009/11/what-to-do-about-workplace-bullying.html"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">What to do about workplace bullying</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;">)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">You are just as susceptible to those affects as those around you. Reading about and understanding that effect won’t immunise you. If you’re the boss and your people are behaving badly or unproductively then the change starts with you deliberately changing the way you behave. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">That’s probably going to be difficult because who you think you are is deeply engrained. (For more on that see </span><a href="http://tutaetoko.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-good-people-behave-badly-in.html"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Why good people behave badly in organisations</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;">). The good news is that it’s difficult for everyone so you don’t have to become a saint overnight to steal the march on the competition. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"></span><br />
<br />
<br />
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</script> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-39713416373799174032011-03-21T15:00:00.003+13:002011-03-21T15:02:50.136+13:00How to Radically Change Business Teaching and Learning<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Public education is failing to produce people skilled at collaborating in enterprise; at bringing their particular strengths and passions together to collaboratively, dramatically exceed the possibilities of their individual strengths and limitations. Conventional organisation, management and research have failed to produce new practice. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To get a feel for the problem, go to </span><a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/innovations-in-education/2011/03/educational-innovation-technol.html"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fernando Reimers on HBR</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> and the </span><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=138801&type=member&item=37901590&commentID=34446712&report%2Esuccess=8ULbKyXO6NDvmoK7o030UNOYGZKrvdhBhypZ_w8EpQrrQI-BBjkmxwkEOwBjLE28YyDIxcyEO7_TA_giuRN#commentID_34446712"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">TED LinkedIn discussion, Our Education System is Failing . . . .</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> (more popular than WikiLeaks). </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is no shortage of ideas, research and recommendation on what <em>should</em> be done about it. There’re even maverick teachers creating and delivering programmes that can and do produce people who know their passions and strengths and naturally, actively collaborate instead of merely (dysfunctionally) co-operate. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The barrier these mavericks face is to sustain and grow their innovations in organisations and markets that have little concept of education other than as experienced: typically industrial age, conveyor belt, control focused, uniformity and standardisation by process and qualification. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The good news is that sooner or later opportunities pop up to achieve deep, widespread change. One such opportunity may be in New Zealand high school Business education. There is an acknowledged need to produce graduates with the skills and behaviours to radically improve the effectiveness of New Zealand business enterprise. In response, the high school Business curriculum is in process of radical revision with radically different teaching an learning processes in mind. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The challenge is to spread the experience of the radically different ways of managing learning that bring this new curriculum to life. That’s not only about making room for teachers to experience new ways, then enact them. It’s also a matter of addressing the typically conventional assessment models and other education management systems and processes designed to control teachers in much the same way as they are expected to control their students.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A collaboration of organisations and people passionate to achieve such a transformation was recently formed to tackle this set of problems in a radically different way. It came together from concept to action over the first three months of 2011, with initial financial support and international research interest confirmed in mid March. It doesn’t even have public website yet and intentionally probably won’t for a while yet. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's a collaboration of Omnicom OCC Ltd with the Faculty of Creative Industries and Business of Unitec Institute of Technology, and Unitec Falkenstein Trust, a Business education trust associated with Unitec but established by successful business entrepreneur Tony Falkenstein. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The collaboration’s first project, a pilot weekend-intensive workshop with follow-through coaching for a diverse range of invited participants, is booked for early May. Although the focus is initially local, the hope and plan, if the pilot is successful is to go national, and eventually international. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The intention is to generate transformative change by exposing seasoned (in this case, high school Business) teachers to the new experience and possibilities of a radically different way of managing learning; then to coach them in their efforts to collaboratively enact their new experience within their respective institutions.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The way that the process is organised and operated is crucial because the purpose is to interrupt conventional behavioural loops: to achieve a transformation, not an intellectualised, incremental modification in teacher and learner behaviour. One way of seeing the transformation is from control-centred management and experience of learning to learning managed and experienced collaboratively.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The teaching and learning model that initially influences the thinking and action in this teaching and learning transformation process was conceived and developed by Roger Putzel, St Michaels College, Vermont and subsequently further developed and operated in multiple sites around the world including in New Zealand.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Putzel’s approach, called XB, was developed for transformative teaching and learning in Business related subject areas. So it seems an ideal platform to transform Business teachers, Business teaching, Business students and the business of education for business. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But that’s not all. The same basic model can be applied to teaching and learning anything, anywhere: even in a commercially focused learning organisation. In fact it can be easier to implement there than in institutional education . . . . . . . </span><br />
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</script> <span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-26059630778985994322011-03-14T10:58:00.006+13:002011-03-14T11:04:51.693+13:00Measuring a “pound of flesh”<span style="font-family: Verdana;">TEU’s Nigel Haworth is probably right to pejoratively call University of Auckland VC, Stuart McCutcheon a Managerialist. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">In this latest stoush with the Tertiary Education union McCutcheon claims the rational high ground (</span><a href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10712204"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">NZ Herald</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;">). But to Haworth and many others he’s behaving like an industrial Shylock demanding his pound of flesh; his stance smacking of conventional managerial thinking and arrogance: underpinned by a particular set of unquestioned assumptions about how to measure and get better performance. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Of course in his mind McCutcheon is simply being rational; more rational than fellow academic Haworth, and denies wanting a “pound of flesh”. But to Harworth and the significant proportion of university employed academics in the union it clearly feels like that.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The thing is, there are far more productive measures of performance and satisfaction than those that demand or seem like they demand “pounds of flesh”.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Steve Denning commented in a recent communication:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">“As I look back on my many years as a manager, I can see that one of the things that kept management grinding along on its death march was the measurement system. So long as the managers used a measurement system that kept tracking "things", it meant that "people" and "teams and "storytelling" inevitably got the short end of stick. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">So managers often talked a good game about people and teams, but at the end of the day, what really mattered was whether you made your numbers.”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Traditional management will keep grinding onwards unless and until we change the things we measure and crucially, the way that we measure them. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">We must pay attention to the people elements, not just the "things" or "outputs" that an organization produces. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Steve’s doing a 5 part series in his Forbes blog on measuring what really matters. </span><a href="http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/2011/03/09/part-4-measuring-the-worlds-most-neglected-competitive-weapon-time/"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Part 4</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> on measuring time has links to the previous 3 parts. Part 5 is in the pipeline. </span><br />
<br />
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</script>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-19890802456242095162011-02-25T12:34:00.008+13:002011-02-25T12:43:34.763+13:00And the forecast is: Wrong<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Business Herald in the New Zealand Herald this morning (Friday 25 Feb 2011) features an edited extract from Dan Gardner's new book "Future Babble". In the excerpt Gardner writes mostly about how "we" continue to believe experts' predictions about the future when they are notoriously, conclusively, consistently wrong. According to Gardner this is because our minds are hard wired to seek simplification and certainty. But it doesn't work! Gardner's excerpt ends where I think the real problem lies:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"And that leads to the ultimate conclusion, which is one we do not want to accept but must: There are no crystal balls, no style of thinking, no technique, no model will ever eliminate uncertainty. The future will forever be shrouded in darkness. Only if we accept and embrace this fundamental fact can we hope to be prepared for the inevitable surprises that lie ahead."</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The excerpt offers no clue on how we might "embrace" this uncertainty but the Christchurch earthquake and aftermath this week and ongoing, dramatically indicates how. The key to survival, recovery and prosperity lies in our capacity to collaborate.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But command style management, focus on dispassionate information, and individualistic reward systems ensure that most of us seldom, if ever experience collaboration. At best we experience co-operation only.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The key to thriving in a climate of uncertainty is unity through shared vision in culture that constantly questions and tests its assumptions. To get that we have to engage diverse perspectives. Conventional management practice requires compliant uniformity, often called "alignment".</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It seems pretty clear to me what has to change. Education, especially Business education, for one, has to change: not so much what is taught and learned, but HOW it's taught and learned (and assessed): collaboratively.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That said, the problem then becomes how to change education. How do we do that when bad education is endemic:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Students expect “add water and stir” education. They just want a recognised qualification at lowest cost.</span><br />
<ul><li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Universities want to deliver recognised qualifications at lowest cost. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Employers want recruits with recognised qualifications, like they got when they were at university because that’s the easiest criteria to winnow the applicants. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">University teachers are up to their eyes administrating and researching. Why would they upgrade their pedagogy when the markets accept what they currently produce?</span></li>
</ul><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It’s a single loop system. It can’t learn/change because there is no way for disconfirming data to enter the control process. The system has no concept of what could be. The individuals within it possibly do, but the organisational system is self-sealing, impervious. The way it is managed has got to change.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Industrial era management practice is the main blockage in commerce too. Take the Borders failure. Check out </span><a href="http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/2011/02/16/another-familiar-firm-falls-borders-files-for-bankruptcy/"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Forbes blog</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> for more on that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Industrial era management ideology and practice is so endemic it doesn't get questioned. It's like water to a fish. We're immersed in it - hierarchy and compliance. Question it! Encourage others to question it. If you're a manager, encourage them to question you. </span><br />
<div><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Stop investing in what was, when the answer is in what could be. Stop using tools and technology to shore up the status quo. Together risk finding a radically new way to manage.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">To manage the risk and grow your courage, hire an experienced change-coach, learn from people and industries that have already done it. Start with books like: Umair Haque </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">The New Capitalist Manifesto</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;">; John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465019358?ie=UTF8&tag=stevdenndotco-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0465019358#reader_0465019358"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">The Power of Pull</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;">; Ranjay Gulati </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422117219?ie=UTF8&tag=stevdenndotco-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1422117219#reader_1422117219"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Reorganize for Resilience</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;">; Rod Collins </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Wiki-World-Extraordinary-Performance/dp/160844466X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297253560&sr=1-1#reader_160844466X"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Leadership in a Wiki World</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;">; and Carol Sanford </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470648686?ie=UTF8&tag=stevdenndotco-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0470648686#reader_0470648686"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">The Responsible Business.</span></a></div><div><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For a comprehensive account of the rise and fall of 20th Century management as well as an account of the principles and practices underlying the reinvention of management, read Steve Denning 's </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470548681?ie=UTF8&tag=stevdenndotco-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0470548681#reader_0470548681"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> (Jossey-Bass 2010).</span></div><br />
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</script>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-38256388531650760652011-02-02T12:02:00.006+13:002011-02-02T12:46:04.116+13:00The rare joy of collaboration at work and how to get it.<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For me, one of the biggest joys summer holidays is collaborative living: together engaging in expeditions, construction projects, food preparation, and eating all organised through conversation; a fluid interaction of strengths, talents and giftings born out of established, open relationships, valued difference and shared expectations; the lead taken by various individuals depending on the situation. I seldom experience such collaboration anywhere else. Cooperation yes: operating alongside others; interacting in standardised ways to complete tasks, but very seldom the joy of collaboration. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Increasingly such collaboration is acknowledged as the secret to personal joy and individual and organisational effectiveness. People learn, grow and contribute best in relationship with others: collaborative relationships of mutual trust and respect within shared understanding and aspiration. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The problem is that the way we typically organise and manage our education and industrial systems and processes didn’t evolve for that. It evolved for industrial-age efficient mass production and replication. It doesn’t work for the innovative, highly adaptive, knowledge intensive collaboration that’s the key to success in the world today. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Management (practice and ideology) as-we-know-it is stuffed, but few can envisage even the possibility of something different. It can be a difficult slow process to begin to conceive that it could be different, let alone conceptualise what it could be. Concepts of how to organise and manage are deeply engrained in our unconscious through our experience of education and work life. But achieving that breakthrough in understanding, difficult as it usually is, is less than half the battle. The main challenge is to achieve the change: to transform to management not-as-we-know-it.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Steve Denning puts it very nicely in a recent post to the open discussion Revolutionizing the World of Work: a criticism of Management guru John Cotter’s 2007 list of eight things that leaders who successfully transform businesses do right and do in the right order. (Harvard Business Review - Jan. 2007 pg. 96-103). Here’s the list:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">1. Establishing a Sense of Urgency </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">2. Forming a Powerful Guiding Coalition </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">3. Creating a Vision </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">4. Communicating the Vision </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">5. Empowering Others to Act on the Vision </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">6. Planning for and Creating Short-Term Wins </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">7. Consolidating Improvements and Producing Still More Change </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">8. Institutionalizing New Approaches</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Denning points out that recipes like this, interpreted and enacted by managers, are what got the world economy into the crap that it’s currently in. He not only calls for and describes the desperately needed radical change from that kind of management but also describes how to achieve it. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Referring Chapter 11 of his 2010 book The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management he writes:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Thought therefore must be given, before heading pell-mell into the implementation of radical management, not only to the principles of radical management, but also to the principles of radical change management. If you have mastered the arguments of this book so far, you will have already guessed that radical change management is not an eight-step top-down hierarchical rollout of a program, embodying a preconceived idea, articulated in some back room by outsiders, and then imposed with one-way communications that tell people what to do.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">You will know that that kind of thinking and acting is precisely what has brought us to the current impasse. You will expect it to be a process that gives due respect to the interests not only of the organization but also of those doing the work and of those for whom the work is done. You will intuit that communications will be interactive and respectful of the individuals involved while giving due attention to productivity and innovation. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">And you will be certain of one thing: that radical change management will not be a simple recipe that you can wrap up and take back to your organization to apply without modification tomorrow morning, with any expectation of success. You know that you will have to create a story of your own—one that fits your own context—its possibilities and its constraints. You also know that you will have to adapt the story on the fly as conditions shift. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">What's wrong with Kotter's stuff is not the eight step program per se. It's the top-down spirit with which it is articulated and often implemented. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">If you took Kotter's eight step program and implemented it with "due respect to the interests not only of the organization but also of those doing the work and of those for whom the work is done" and with communications that are" interactive and respectful of the individuals involved while giving due attention to productivity and innovation", you might still get a good result. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">It's all about the heart. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Yet if you say that to managers, they tend to think that you are soft in the head. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Denning doesn’t leave it there. He gives his most recent summary of the “spirit” of what’s needed for successful change process: 18 specific practices. Not three, or eight or 10, and not in any particular order: a list of almost “Tom Peters” proportions: definitely not conventional Management!</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">1. *Make the change happen organically*: Change begins when a single individual takes responsibility for the future and decides to make it happen. The individual may be the CEO. In a large organization, it is more typically someone in middle management. The individual begins inspiring other people. In turn, they become champions and inspire still others. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">2. *Launch a small high-performance team: *A small high-performance team will be needed to inspire and guide implementation. Dutiful or representative performance won’t get the job done. This will be a group that is creative and energized, trusts one another, passionately believes in the cause and is willing to do whatever it takes. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">*3. **Do it quickly*: The change happens quickly or not all. Once organizational change takes off, the process will be viral in nature. The idea is either growing, spreading, and propagating itself, or dying and de-energizing people and spawning new constraints. A top-down process that is grinding it out, step by step, unit by unit, is usually generating antibodies that lead to mediocre implementation or total failure. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">4. *Let the change idea evolve*: The change idea itself will steadily evolve. This is not a matter of crafting a vision and then rolling it out across the organization. This is about continuously adapting the idea to the evolving circumstances of the organization. As the organization and everyone in it adapts the story of change to their own context, each individual comes to own it. The process of adaptation never ends. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">5. *Run the change process on human passion: *The change process will run on human passion—a firm belief in the clarity and worth of the idea and the courage to stand up and fight for it. No template or detailed rollout plan can inspire the energy, passion, and excitement that are needed to make deep change happen.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">6. *Focus the passion*: It will be focused, disciplined passion. This is not an approach where anything goes. There will be a tight focus on the goal and continuing alertness to head off the diffusion of energy into related or alternative goals. Progress is assessed and adjustments made based on what has been learned. There will be systematic feedback on what value is being added. There will be freedom to create, but within clearly delineated, adjustable limits. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">7. *Get outside help but don’t rely on it*: Outside help will be used but not depended on. Intellectual energy is generated by cognitive diversity and interactions with people with different backgrounds and ways of looking at the world. The external advice will be received, evaluated, and adapted to local needs. In the process of adaptation, the idea will become owned. Things are not done simply because outsiders say so; they will be done because they make sense for this context. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">8. *The top of the organization must support it and be supported: *Although implementation cannot be accomplished by top-down directives or rollout programs, the support of the very top of the organization is key to creating the umbrella for change, for setting direction and heading off the inevitable threats to the idea. Yet the top alone cannot make it happen. In a large organization, the top will need many others to communicate the idea throughout the organization in an authentic way. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">9. *The idea is more important than any individual*: Top-down change programs typically die when the manager leaves. The replacement manager sweeps clean what has gone before. By contrast, when a change has taken root in an organic fashion, the idea continues to live because it is owned by wide array of people. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">10. *Form a strong nucleus to lead the charge*: A high-performance team will be needed to inspire and guide implementation. Dutiful or representative performance won’t get the job done. This will be a group that is creative and energized, trusts one another, and is willing to do whatever it takes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">11. *Proceed through conversations: *One person starts talking to and inspiring other people, who in turn have the courage, determination, and communication skills to fire up fresh groups of people to imagine and implement a different future. In turn, they become champions and inspire others. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">12. *Establish a beachhead*: All of the successful large-scale implementations had at least some people on hand who had seen it and done it before and could say, “I’ve seen this work!” Creating a beachhead of such people is thus an important early step. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">13. *Begin in a safe space*: In the first few iterations, bumps and bruises are to be expected. Until people get the hang of it, some missteps are likely. It is therefore prudent to try it out in the first instance in a relatively safe and low-profile space. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">14. *Agree on a common terminology*: When fundamentally different ideas are being introduced, confusions and misunderstandings are inevitable. To the extent that a common terminology can be defined, made easily accessible, and consistently used, the transition will be easier. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">15. *Communicate the Idea through stories*: Springboard stories communicate the spirit of an idea and generate new stories in the minds of the listeners, which drive them into action and spark more stories that are told to others. Rehearse your story before you get to making a presentation. Be ready when the opportunity calls. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">16. *Practice total openness*. Just as the workplace depends on radical transparency, so does the change process itself. For example in the transition at Salesforce.com, all of the daily meetings were held in a public place so that everyone could see how things were progressing. A task board was displayed on the public lunch room wall so that everyone had access to what was going on. The willingness to share information with everyone enabled people to adapt on a daily basis to what was happening. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">17. *Generate dramatic surges in progress*: As Seth Kahan explains in *Getting Change Right*(2010), creating high-profile face-to-face events can accelerate progress. Creating gatherings that bring players together in high-value experiences can push the transition forward in leaps and bounds. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">18. *Work sustainable hours*: Although occasional crises may require extended working periods, regularly working long hours is highly unproductive and leads to low-quality output. Long working hours are a sign of serious management malfunction. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">In the end, the gains are accomplished by a transition from a focus on processes that produce things (goods, services, money) to a focus on people. A successful transformation requires the firm to adopt a people-centered goal, a people-centered role for managers, a people-centered coordination mechanism, people-centered values and people-centered communication–so as to focus the firm on the people who are its customers.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You may think you’re already people centred. Most managers do. If you do, then you’re probably deluded. It’s endemic. Recognise that and get deliberate about radically changing. Read The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management for a start and get help!</span><br />
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</script>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-10330116961718960692010-12-17T09:53:00.001+13:002010-12-17T09:54:55.900+13:00What is & what produces organisational health?<p><font face="Verdana">The GFC highlighted that what we measure, for organisational health, determines what we get. As Colin Price, Director, McKinsey & Company, puts it in his Dec 14 2010 blog on </font><a href="http://www.managementexchange.com/blog/what-organizational-health"><font face="Verdana">MIX</font></a><font face="Verdana">: “Focusing exclusively on performance  simply does not produce long-term shareholder value,  sustainable competitive advantage, or an ability to achieve the mandates of the organization in the public sector.” </font></p> <p><font face="Verdana">Price proposes instead that organisational health is: “the ability to get aligned, to execute at a world-class level, and to renew.”  I’ll go for that. Those are the abilities I want, but I’m still left with the problem of what to do to produce that kind of health.  </font></p> <p><font face="Verdana">Achieving that health requires us to see our organisations in a revolutionary new way: not as bureaucratic hierarchical machines but as communities of collaborating people. Seen in that light, the fundamental purpose of all the policies, procedures, systems, processes is to enable, to free people to collaborate better. </font></p> <p><font face="Verdana">Thus organisational health has its roots in the health of the interrelationships between the people that comprise the organisation.  So what are healthy interrelationships and how do you get them? </font></p> <p><font face="Verdana">Some useful perspectives can be drawn from the field of population health: the qualities of interrelationships that produce community wellness and productivity, and conversely illness and dysfunction are fairly well known and are evident, for instance, in the recovery approach to mental illness. </font></p> <p><font face="Verdana">To achieve the kind of organisational health that Price proposes we have to revolutionise the way we see and manage our organisations: the purpose, nature and content of our organisational communication and interrelationships. That requires concerted, deliberate action to change the detail of the way we communicate with each other  at work.  </font></p> <p><font face="Verdana">For more on this see </font><a href="http://tutaetoko.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-fix-mental-organisation.html"><font face="Verdana">How to Fix a Mental Organisation</font></a><font face="Verdana"> (December 2009) and my more recent blogs (December 2010). </font></p> <a class="a2a_dd" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save"><img border="0" alt="Share/Bookmark" src="http://static.addtoany.com/buttons/share_save_256_24.png" width="256" height="24" /></a><script type="text/javascript"><br />a2a_linkname=document.title;a2a_linkurl=location.href;<br /></script><script src="http://static.addtoany.com/menu/page.js" type="text/javascript"><br /><P></P></script> Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-85294418407447368022010-12-16T13:21:00.003+13:002010-12-17T09:50:38.090+13:00Communication compulsory in only 50% of NZ undergraduate Business degrees when employers want skilled communicators<p><font face="Verdana">Research by Sandra Barnett & Susan O'Rourke, published in the December 2010 issue of the Communication Journal of New Zealand, shows that although employers want graduates skilled in communication, business communication is compulsory in only 50% of Business degrees from major NZ tertiary education institutions. On top of that, it's very difficult for employers to gauge what graduates may have gained from any communication courses that they did complete.</font></p><p><font face="Verdana">In contrast to USA & Europe, New Zealand undergraduate business education grew largely out of the accountancy field. As a result most Bachelors of Commerce have not included business communication. It has long been included in the NZ Diploma of Business but focused on skills seen as appropriate to the relatively narrow requirements of the accounting profession rather than to business in the wider sense.</font></p><p><font face="Verdana">With recent writers in the business management field calling for a transformation in management and organisational communication (see Stephen Denning, </font><a href="http://stevedenning.typepad.com/steve_denning/2010/11/the-deathand-reinventionof-management-a-draft-synthesis.html#_edn2"><font face="Verdana">The death & reinvention of management</font></a><font face="Verdana">. Nov 2010) it seems clear that a transformation in communication education is overdue. </font></p><p><font face="Verdana">Further indication of the importance of sophisticated communication skill is in the December 2010 McKinsey Quarterly.  In “</font><a href="http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Strategic_Organization/The_rise_of_the_networked_enterprise_Web_20_finds_its_payday_2716?pagenum=2"><font face="Verdana">The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday</font></a><font face="Verdana">” McKinsey report research showing that firms are experiencing measurable benefits in increased speed of access to knowledge, effectiveness of marketing, reduced communication costs and increased customer satisfaction. </font></p><p><font face="Verdana">I issued a challenge to communication educators at the December 2010 annual conference of the New Zealand Communication Association, to transform the way they organise and do communication education. Actually I challenge them to transform the way that business education generally is organised and done. Read my challenge here: </font><a href="http://tutaetoko.blogspot.com/2010/12/wanted-communication-educators-for.html"><font face="Verdana">Wanted: communication educators for management revolution. </font></a></p><br />
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</script>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-17914443881363559032010-12-02T11:54:00.007+13:002010-12-13T10:15:19.389+13:00WANTED: Communication educators for management revolution<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Being able to collaborate better than the competition is gold in today’s globally competitive market: the most valuable differentiator; the greatest competitive advantage a firm can have; hard to copy or replicate. But such collaboration is pretty well impossible for conventional firms to achieve because the essential behaviours and attitudes are culturally alien; beyond the experience of people in most modern workplaces; contrary to the assumptions and practices of management. To achieve collaboration requires the end of Management and the key to that is in transforming the way that people communicate at work. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As Garry Hamel says: </span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“Management was originally invented to solve two problems: the first—getting semiskilled employees to perform repetitive activities competently, diligently, and efficiently; the second—coordinating those efforts in ways that enabled complex goods and services to be produced in large quantities. </span></em><br />
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<em><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In a nutshell, the problems were efficiency and scale, and the solution was bureaucracy, with its hierarchical structure, cascading goals, precise role definitions, and elaborate rules and procedures. Equipping organizations to tackle the future would require a management revolution no less momentous than the one that spawned modern industry.” </span></em><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If we accept that Garry Hamel is right, and I most certainly do, then the problem is how do we achieve that revolution; that transformation? The firm conclusion I’ve come to over a couple of decades of leading learning in Business Schools and coaching business owners for change and growth, is that a large part of the solution lies in transforming the way we manage and do education; transforming it from what it has determinedly become over the last couple of decades. That’s the opportunity for Communication educators: their mission, should they accept it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As change leader for university business students and SME owners and managers I realised that deep learning and change was continually derailed by deep seated tacit assumptions about knowledge and how to behave in organisations; how to behave at work; how to organise work. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I realised that I and my students, colleagues and clients are deeply imbued with a picture or organisation that is imprinted, learned and reinforced through industrial-age, synchronised education where experts have authority over “children”, requiring compliance in prescribed, synchronised, trivial ‘work’. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What we learn most powerfully from that education: what remains after we’ve forgotten everything we were taught, is how to organise and behave <i>at work</i>. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That unconscious imprinting, which begins at around year 7 at school when children leave the ‘learning nest’ environment of pre-school and primer years, is reinforced and ingrained right through University. It’s a major reason why we unthinkingly perpetuate the mechanistic bureaucratic, hierarchical systems in which people are cooperating, synchronised machine parts; organisations are structures; and processes are engineered sequences. This is absurd when we increasingly need people to be highly engaged collaborative agents for change and innovation, dynamically linked through rich, diverse interrelationships in pursuit of shared aspirations and goals.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To be a successful entrepreneur it apparently pays to leave the industrial education process early. Many successful entrepreneurs did: before the imprinting process was complete; likely because they didn’t fit that process.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the academic world, Business Schools have long been criticised for perpetuating outmoded, ineffective organisational behaviours, assumptions and practices. It’s only recently however, most noticeably post 2008 crash, that the more popular literature, The Wall Street Journal for example, has pronounced the “End of Management” and begun to seriously criticise and question the underpinning assumptions and the revered Harvard MBA model of business education has come in for public scrutiny and even some scorn.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Steve Denning, an author whom I stumbled across a couple of years ago and have since become a big fan of, even participating in the editorial process of his latest book </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Guide-Radical-Management-Reinventing/dp/0470548681"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> (Oct 2010), puts it well in his draft article on </span><a href="http://stevedenning.typepad.com/steve_denning/2010/11/the-deathand-reinventionof-management-a-draft-synthesis.html#_edn2"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Death and Reinvention of Management</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">. Here I summarise some of the main points with excerpts from that draft:</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What are we to make of a rash of recent books suggesting that management as we know it today is seriously problematic? According to Matthew Stewart, management is “a myth”. Professor Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School tells us that management has “failed”. According to Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, we are looking at “the end of management”, while CEO Jo Owen has written about “the death of management”.</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“[In the USA] ROA is 25% of what it was in 1965; life expectancy of firms in the Fortune 500 is down to 15 years, only one in five workers are passionate about their work. Moreover established firms are not creating new jobs: Friedman, T. “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts” New York Times, April 3, 2010”</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“This is why business leaders and writers are increasingly exploring a fundamental rethinking of the basic tenets of management. Among the most important changes proposed are five basic shifts, in terms of the <b>firm’s goal</b> (a shift from inside-out to outside-in), the <b>role of managers </b>(a shift from control to enablement), the <b>mode of coordination </b>(from bureaucracy to dynamic linking), <b>the values being practiced</b> (a shift from value to values) and <b>communications</b> (a shift from command to conversation).”</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“Individually, none of these shifts is new. Each shift has been pursued individually in some organizations for some years. However what we have learned is that when one of these shifts is pursued on its own, without the others, it tends to be unsustainable because it runs into conflicts with the attitudes and practices of traditional management.”</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“When the five shifts are undertaken simultaneously, the result is sustainable change that is radically more productive for the organization, more congenial to innovation, and more satisfying both for those doing the work and those for whom the work is done.”</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“The challenge for managers today is that in trying to elicit the energies, imagination, and creativity of their workers, they need to communicate predominantly through the language of social norms, against a history in organizations of relationships dominated by hierarchy and to a lesser extent by market pricing.” </span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“. . . . . management in the 21st Century requires a shift in the mode of communication from command to conversation, with adult-to-adult interactions, human being to human being, using stories, metaphors and open-ended questions. Authentic leadership storytelling has an important role to play, particularly in dealing with social media.”</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So, on the one hand we have a dawning realisation that high collaboration is crucial to competitive advantage, but on the other a generally weak experience and scarce knowledge of what it is, could be, and how to get it; and organisational settings that militate against that learning. Ironically, education institutions are among the organisations where this problem is most chronic. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But here’s the thing: Communication educators, researchers and practitioners as a profession are potentially among the best equipped to lead this transformation because they presumably know of what collaboration is, can be, and how to get it. That’s because, by my understanding at least, Communication is about what happens <b><i>between</i></b> individuals: the shared meaning that they create. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That’s the key to the transformation. Communication educators, this is <b><i>your</i></b> opportunity. Your mission, should you accept it, is to focus on enabling people to experience collaboration through changing the detail of their communication behaviour; changing the way they communicate with each other; the way that they generate shared meaning; the way they produce and implement organisational knowledge. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So that’s the opportunity. That’s the challenge. Now let’s consider the organisational and pedagogical detail of how you might go about that: how you can be and produce organisational Recovery Support Workers in the recovery of organisations, currently so dysfunctional that they are effectively insane, to competitive advantage (see previous blog: </span><a href="http://tutaetoko.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-fix-mental-organisation.html"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"How to Fix a Mental Organisation" </span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I’m not talking about a Communication course or even a Communication programme. I’m talking about the pedagogical foundations of all courses and programmes including Communication programmes. I’m talking course process, not content. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to Communication professionals. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The aim is to radically change the learning context, which is the organisational experience, from individualistic to collaborative. Remember that student’s individualistic and content-based assumptions about achievement and learning will be deeply engrained and largely unconscious. They will find the transformation process deeply disturbing, at least initially. Expect them to project their anxiety, confusion, anger, and blame on to you. This anxiety and confusion is a necessary precursor to the transformation you aim to achieve. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Expect to feel and behave similarly yourself as you learn to collaborate deeply with your colleagues. You aren’t just going to do this to your students. You’re doing it to yourself too. Denning’s five shifts have to occur simultaneously at both levels.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So if you’re highly averse to conflict and have a history of conflict avoidance, maybe don’t try this approach. Whatever, you need a well informed process plan and supporting supervision; you need to collaborate. That will be a learning experience for you too. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because students (and employees) typically adopt a highly instrumental approach to their work (that’s the way they’ve been trained) you must radically redesign the tasks and measures to specifically reward collaborative behaviour (as mutually assessed by team members). The effect of this is to motivate teams to move beyond the usual fake-team division of tasks. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-HrRHxSgYcSnAc1rav5jmsAGClDg9_tawrwcw11_F6BDsM0q27tBGo1-XiyEwUcez8r1mhHfnY8R83D4U6ZI9NsTKJC3D_Fyx8vyP7Pqyhkr4GuwC0K-_BeijHMbzSJMbFMYERQ-ZdphK/s1600-h/image%5B7%5D.png"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img alt="image" border="0" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtR9GYlJM05-_5RkNlRxiWtmB0ujftq1tSGd06X6_PREROhL4Nb7FYjN2FGAHVwS2tqj89s7hMimYi2d9xHP8ijZX6g1s_WKBDHTOghhPWUpQh5agsD3MIrj9xMpddPkVlIf2JBnaAZkQU/?imgmax=800" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="400" /></span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because students (and employees) will tend to revert to accustomed child, instead of adult behaviour, wanting to be spoon fed processed information, remove yourself from the direct teaching (management) process and ban trivialised information.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN-w2tNGALqd1Uig0FtIeRgJ95yuuIhdOQ_ub4xvpgupKUU8NsCVUK71HJpvULGsxfYzjdyxwGMSB1GE8sGvp2njS67wZIE9y8ic3Hz5autpKfffaJBqXh6OrGRyZgfSER0HPc30Kj00MX/s1600-h/image%5B13%5D.png"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img alt="image" border="0" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwoni3HZH5ak5jO8VH2qdYzvcNBbVLkGQmlNS-g-fPgLqkq13SCmXjwLN74H7wFEDH6h5qR3zsyIfMzK41aFUyvHtDIe70sD6spRZawWRWJd1yUeMtHxlpg0fn5Q3bWLiKaoqzvvq_W4j0/?imgmax=800" style="background-image: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" title="image" width="400" /></span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I predict that you will find, as I did, that students (and employees, and you) will be amazed at the quality they (and you) can achieve together and that they become natural collaborators without realising how different they are from conventional graduates. Issues such as racial bigotry, dependence of trivialised information (PowerPoint), passive/aggressive behaviour, withdrawal, boredom, laziness and shallow instrumentality, melt away and behaviour actually changes (real, deep learning). Students achieve real insight.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You will find that when your graduates enter employment their employers credit them with exceptional “intuition”, marvel at how rapidly they become project leaders and how engaged their project teams are. They seem to adapt to and flourish in their workplaces three times faster that A grade honours graduates in their fields: in 6-8 months they are achieving what conventionally taught graduates take two years to achieve. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When they enter a new situation they don’t look to the boss for a clear set of instructions. They assume that they’re to figure that out through collaboration. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It’s those radically different fundamental assumptions about communication that make these people so valuable. Yes they need subject specific knowledge, but it’s organisationally useless unless it can be productively, collaboratively shared.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As Noshir Contractor posited in The New Handbook of Organisational Communication (2001), knowledge doesn’t exist in the nodes; it exists in the web. In other words, organisational knowledge exists only between individuals as shared understanding. The most crucial skills are in generating a rich and productive shared understanding in the messy dynamics of interpersonal communication relationships. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That’s your opportunity and your challenge. You can do it.</span><br />
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</script>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-37328036524338035262010-10-04T15:00:00.004+13:002010-10-04T21:50:30.159+13:00The Restructure Ritual<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I found out from my hairdresser why corporates continually restructure: it’s a ritual!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I saw the writing on the wall while I was lying back having my shampoo and colour. Kerastase, Paris offers range of rituals. Here’re just a few:</span><br />
<ul><li><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Reconstructing Ritual (for after restructure) </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Strengthening Ritual </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Rejuvenating Ritual </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Clarifying Ritual </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Replenishing Ritual </span></li>
</ul><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Judging by the ecstasy on the faces of the photographed models, these rituals are stunningly effective therapy for people who are at their wits end trying to make something great of hard-to-manage, unruly, dull, lifeless, worn out human assets. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">There’s comfort in rituals and they buy time. They’re what you do when you have to do something but can’t think what else to do. They are time honoured practices, their origins typically forgotten, that bring kudos to the priestly caste who administer them: high managers and hairdressers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Some corporate rituals involve brutal sacrifice for purification and to appease the gods. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The metaphor has many more possibilities which I leave to you to explore. For the moment I simply reaffirm two long-known things: you can learn a lot from your hairdresser, and organisational life is rich in unquestioned rituals that look like action, bring short term gratification and superficial improvement but fail to address the underlying issues. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Despite overwhelming evidence that restructuring almost never achieves improved ROI, corporates keep on doing it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Let’s face it, long term success depends on the quality of our interrelationships, but ritual clearly helps us feel better about things without having to actually fundamentally relate any differently. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">It’s time to question ritual and make detailed, deliberate changes in the way we interrelate and what we interrelate about. </span><br />
<br />
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</script>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-31882356061291567912010-08-20T15:49:00.006+12:002010-08-20T15:56:54.120+12:00Ten truths of leadership<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Of course there’d have to be ten, not nine or 13 or a Tom-Peters list of around 37. Ten is nice and neat; makes a tidy package; one tattoo for the back of each finger to remind us as we type our emails. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">A recent LinkedIn Group update featuring </span><a href="http://www.leadershipnow.com/leadingblog/2010/08/ten_truths_about_leadership.html"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Ten Truths of Leadership</span></a><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> got me going. James Kouzes and Barry Posner have published another book on leadership. I guess they have to make a living. Their ten truths are true all right. No doubt about that. And yes they’re almost as old as the hills; Biblical even.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">A leader who consistently achieved all of them would doubtless be absolutely inspiring. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">But I doubt “Ten Truths” will change anything much. They will be tweeted and quoted and everything will go on pretty much as normal. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">It’d be interesting to see how many leaders do consistently achieve even half of them, in the eyes of their supposed followers that is. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I’ve worked with many leaders who truly believed that they behaved or at least earnestly, consistently tried to behave like that. I used a very simple method to show them very clearly that they were dreaming. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I got them to record a work conversation with a peer or report, transcribe ten minutes from that tape into the right hand column of a page with their corresponding thoughts on the left hand column (an approach devised by Chris Argyris for his seminal work back in the 70s). Then we’d take a look at the variation between what they were thinking and what they actually said at that time. We invariably found significant contradiction, betraying that they were manipulative, controlling, closed minded, distrusting, and their ‘values’ conveniently flexible. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">They were predictably aghast and embarrassed. I assured them that they were normal but that that norm isn’t acceptable in a successful contemporary learning organisation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">As we began the process of change, the biggest obstacle was that they knew, from hard experience, that actually behaving as “Ten Truths” suggest is very risky because the first one to do it risks being done over by “the others”.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">I assured them that unless the leader takes that risk, then no one else will. Then tentatively I coached them to risk new communication behaviours then reflect on the process and the results. Slowly they became more confident to break the mould; to become conscious of the gap between their espoused behaviour and their behaviour-in-action and with the help of their peers and reports, close the gap through changed communication behaviour. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">It’s a slow process, but it consistently works where lists of truths consistently fail to make a difference. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Impatient? Go get a new leader. Tempt him with an obscenely high salary and benefits. He’ll likely screw you over just the same. </span><br />
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</script> <span style="font-family: verdana;"></span>Tutaetoko (Steve B)http://www.blogger.com/profile/04710409079069573959noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4501361821822541099.post-22536625455948469462010-08-14T18:49:00.005+12:002010-08-21T09:10:50.250+12:00Why good people behave badly in organisations<span style="font-family: Verdana;">We behave badly because we’ve been trained to behave badly from about age 11 in industrial education processes for industrial work. <strong>We’re imprinted</strong> with that classroom model of authority, hierarchy, knowledge, expertise, compliance, manipulation, control and work, right from when we leave the nursery school for the conventional school classroom. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">That <strong>imprint is then reinforced</strong> at every level of education and on into employment. No wonder we find it difficult to conceptualise, let alone <i>be</i> anything else. We perpetuate the model unthinkingly. There is a saying that education is what’s left after you forget all that you (explicitly) learned. Entrepreneurs typically leave formal education early. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">That industrial concept of organisation is very sticky and there’s little reason to challenge or change it unless the world changes and innovation becomes the key to survival. Then it becomes imperative to access and maximise individual and collaborative potential that is unwittingly squandered, eroded and destroyed by industrial organisation and management. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">To survive we need to dispel the climates of fear, cynicism and disengagement that so often prevail; break the cycle of bad behaviour that is so toxic for emotional and mental health and sabotages engagement and productivity. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">We need to resolve our double lives: <strong>break the spell of industrial age thinking</strong> and open our work and institutional life to what we know from that life beyond work. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Since the industrial revolution, when work arguably became seriously separated from the rest of life, most working adults live second lives at church, school, or home. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The question isn’t so much whether we lead double lives but how can we translate our knowledge of that ‘other life’ into our work and institutional behaviour? That’s difficult because much of our organisational behaviour is driven by unconscious assumptions and reflex behaviours tacitly learned during ‘industrial’ schooling and tacitly confirmed by our experience since. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The roots of industrial age production and education are in the thinking and practices that became prominent in the <strong>1940s through 60s</strong> and still dominate many business improvement books. Industrial organisations had many characteristics of <strong>machines</strong>. They were formed around machines. Machines have since replaced many of the jobs in those organisations. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The machine model of organisation, still appropriate in some contexts, is characterised by structures; job breakdowns; lines of communication, job delineation; objectification; linear causal thinking. There is a sense of un-emotional rigidity and inexorability about it. Performance failures are fixed by replacing parts (people) or in extreme, restructuring. The ‘system’ reigns supreme. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">In the <strong>70s</strong> a new image of organisation emerged: organisations as intelligent <strong>organisms</strong> with interdependent functions and organs, striving to survive, responding to stimuli, adapting to changing environment, evolving to fit niche environments, the fittest surviving. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">In the <strong>80s </strong>people became the focus in the notion of organisation as culture comprised of <strong>cultures</strong>. Values, attitudes, beliefs, rituals, artefacts, normalised and normative behaviours became the centre of attention. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The <strong>90s</strong> saw a return to the machine metaphor but this time the machine is a computer and <strong>computer networks</strong>: a hi-tech version of the earlier industrial machine. “Process re-engineering” was all the rage. People were mysterious, unreliable repositories of knowledge which is best extracted, digitised, then stored and managed in computerised files and networked information systems. Restructuring resurges, sometime dressed as process re-engineering. People are nodes in networks. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">In <strong>the new millennium</strong> the World Wide Web enabled an explosion in relationships, shaking knowledge structures. The notion of knowledge and organisations as <strong>webs of relationships</strong> takes form. Hierarchy dissolves in the web and industrial style surveillance and control is impossible (Contractor, 2002).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">The image of organisation as a web of relationships begins to make sense. But still the sticky industrial structures and controlling behaviours persist. People see the seeming ambiguity, openness, absence of command structures, and reliance on relationships as risky. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Leaders must <strong>risk openness, admit not knowing, focus on the detail of interpersonal relationships, build trust in long term relationships for mutual learning and growth</strong>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Most bosses would claim that they do this already. Ask their reports. Most reports would claim that they can be trusted with responsibility. Ask their managers. It’s time we all stopped blaming, shaming and justifying and collaborated to change -bosses first. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana;">Start by seeking honest, open feedback about your own behaviour. Talk to people other than your direct reports. Then deliberately and openly attempt to change your behaviour. Invite observations of your progress. Then expect your reports to do the same. Help and encourage them. They will be sure that this is managerial suicide.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana;">For more in this radical vein go to </span><a href="http://stevedenning.typepad.com/steve_denning/2010/08/does-asking-questions-make-you-a-radical-manager.html" title="http://stevedenning.typepad.com/steve_denning/2010/08/does-asking-questions-make-you-a-radical-manager.html"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Steve Denning: Does asking smart questions make you a radical manager?</span></a><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: xx-small;">Contractor, N. S. 2002. New media and organising. In L. Lievrow & S. Livingstone (Eds.). The Handbook of New Media (pp. 203-205). London: Sage.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: xx-small;">Tse, S. & Barnett, S. 2009. Recovery Oriented Services. In Chris Lloyd, Robert King, Frank Deane, and Kevin Gournay (Eds.). <i>Clinical Management in Mental Health Services</i>. Chapter 7, (pp. 94 -114). Blackwell: London.</span><br />
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