Is a Business Exit Consultant Worth the Time & Money?

“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?” 

Aaron Toresen, Managing Director, LINK(NZ) poses those questions and  answers them in his LINK Business email Newsletter 14 May 2013.  

In answer, he baldly claims: 

“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.” 

“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 . . . . . .”

It turns out these claims are mainly a straw man for then claiming that his firm can prepare a business for sale in within 2 or 3 months.

What he doesn't say 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. 

A broker’s main interest 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. 

However, he is right about most business consultants, 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). 

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.  

The project will take at least two years with business-savvy, trustworthy people helping you lead it. They’ll be educated, experienced business owners with wisdom, passion and expertise to share. They'll quickly, deeply understand you and your business, empathise with your situation and work comfortably within the messy reality of your business.  

The project isn't so much about planning as it is about acting strategically;  about changing the way your business is organised and operated; so that you have time to work on it instead of only in it. 

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. 

So don't sell yourself short. You and the nation need you to realise the full value in your business and for it to continue to flourish for it's new owner. 

Take care in selecting your strategic change support and your broker. 

Sailboat does 40 knots in 25 knot breeze. Why?

Collaboration is good if you’re not in a hurry. Yeah, right (Not). Surprisingly for many, collaboration is essential when you're in a hurry to win.

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.

It’s especially amazing to dyed-in-the-wool corporate managers like former Energy Company CEO and now corporate Chair, Keith Turner. (Keith Turner. Innovation the key for Team NZ. The New Zealand Herald, Thursday May 2, 2013)

To his conventional corporate eyes, it’s miraculous:

“The speed of learning that [NZ’s] team has generated in transforming an idea into world-leading practice is quite extraordinary”

“The culture of the team is outstanding”.

“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.”

To my eyes what he describes is the power of collaborative learning; failing fast and falling forward in unity. My question is how do they get to be like that; why do they behave so differently to common corporate practice?

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: 

“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.”

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:

“the [men] are so committed, together they are [learning]”  

 “the [men] are so committed together, they are [learning]”.

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”: 

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

If it’s going to work, building and delivering the programme itself will be an experiential case in learning to collaborate.. 

How 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:

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.

Step 2: decide up to three main 3-5yr thrusts that will take you towards that 10yr vision.

Step 3. set an goals for 2012 that will addresses the highest priority action within those 3-5 yr. thrusts

Step 4: set up to five actions for the first quarter

Step 5: Take action and monitor your progress and focus weekly, monthly quarterly and review your goals annually.

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? 

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.

We discovered, as you might expect that personal notions of success seem strongly affected by life experience.

According to one summary circulating in the email, notions of success are broadly age related and a kind of cycle of life:



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.

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.

Some argued that success is belonging, contributing and growing according to one’s strengths. (Liberal).

Others argued that success is to do God’s will to further his kingdom on earth. (Religious).

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
.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!
  
If we act quick enough, 2012 can be a huge success for everyone! ;-)

How to Radically Change Business Teaching and Learning

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.

To get a feel for the problem, go to Fernando Reimers on HBR  and the  TED LinkedIn discussion, Our Education System is Failing . . . .  (more popular than WikiLeaks).

There is no shortage of ideas, research and recommendation on what should 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.

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.

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.

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.
 
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 . . . . . . .  

The Restructure Ritual

I found out from my hairdresser why corporates  continually restructure: it’s a ritual!
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:

• Reconstructing Ritual (for after restructure)
• Strengthening Ritual
• Rejuvenating Ritual
• Clarifying Ritual
• Replenishing Ritual

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.
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.
Some corporate rituals involve brutal sacrifice for purification and to appease the gods.
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.
Despite overwhelming evidence that restructuring almost never achieves improved ROI, corporates keep on doing it.
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.
It’s time to question ritual and make detailed, deliberate changes in the way we interrelate and what we interrelate about.

How to be understood

Rule # 1: expect to be misunderstood. Mostly, we assume that understanding is normal. Wrong. Ask any spouse, sibling, parent, or lover. 

Successful service-sales and service-delivery people for instance, have woken up to this through competitive pressure, grinding experience, and objective analysis. Then by deliberate, focused action they have changed their assumptions and their behaviour.

They know the cost and risk of misunderstanding is high. They manage that risk by specialising and standardising their processes; by building durable interpersonal customer-relationships for learning and forgiveness; and continually seeking to delight the customer.  It becomes second nature – tacit.

But put those same sales and service people in a changed environment, even slightly different, and they can easily come unstuck. That now-tacit knowledge that has served them so proudly may well not work in the new environment.

This has been highlighted for me in my health service business development work. The New Zealand health services sector is in turmoil: yet another major government policy driven re-organisation; around the sixth in eight years.

This time it’s to vertically and horizontally merge and integrate health services. This when competition has been king and professional collaboration suspected as feather bedding; fear and loathing have become strong undercurrents in relationships between health professionals and their managers, between managers and between the managers of different organisations.

Competitors have become entrenched in their niches, adapted and fine tuned to the bureaucratic motivations and behaviour of their health sector customers, while the health professionals immersed themselves in their consumer relationships. 

Suddenly these competitors have to merge and join up.  Can they communicate to achieve that productively and innovatively? Fat chance! Misunderstanding reaches new heights: evidence, real and imagined, of defamation, misinformation and skulduggery is everywhere in an environment of fear and loathing. Even longstanding trusting relationships are suspect.

Mergers and join-ups that do occur are suspected as, and at least some are, driven by self interest and political gain, and as a result are slow to be productive in the essentially collaborative, professional, vocational world of health service.

So what can be done? Answer: expect to be misunderstood and take the time and trouble to find shared understanding in shared metaphor (stories) and experience; shared purpose; joint projects. Trust is found in action not argument.

Share your perspectives and reflections on that joint action by sharing stories. Be more than two dimensional “role holders.” Share stories about yourselves.
Remember you are dating with marriage in mind. The time to invest in the durability, mutual productivity, and enjoyment of that potential relationship is at the outset. Sacrifice “task” progress to build shared understanding.

The guy/woman you find so frustrating may not be a linear analytical, task oriented, conventional high achiever like you. He/she may think in pictures, think laterally to solve puzzles and make sense of seeming confusion; thinking that’s likely not crucial in the production environment that you have excelled in, but is crucial in a fast changing environment.

What to do about workplace bullying

The other day a prospective business-owner client asked me what to do about workplace bullying. My advice: act immediately to change the culture and isolate the bully. Bullies kill engagement, big time. They cost you heaps in diverted energy and focus and unnecessary staff turnover. They drive their victims, potentially your most promising people out, or mad, or both. Though they may seem competent and nice as pie they are typically operating well beyond their competence and their influence is effectively evil.  You can’t fix a bully. They have to go. Here’s a strategy that works:

Start MBWA (Managing By Walking About)immediately .

Bullies thrive in bureaucratic hierarchies where they can control the flow of information both upward and downward. Bureaucratic hierarchies aren’t the preserve of large organisations. They are common in organisations of all sizes and kinds. Open up communication and loosen up the hierarchy by establishing direct, focused conversation with a range of individuals at different levels in the organisation. Share your knowledge with them. They’ll return the trust.

Establish purposeful responsibility.

Bullies manipulate roles and expectations to their personal advantage, typically to obscure their own incompetence. To counter that, execute a strategy to clarify the organisation’s values, purpose and long term goals. Within that framework, work with individuals and teams to clarify responsibilities, accountabilities  and action priorities. Make them widely known (including yours).

Establish a widespread habit of regular, frequent meetings to openly discuss individual and team progress and blockages in executing those priorities. People thrive on shared purposeful responsibility plus frequent open discussion of progress foils a bully’s manipulative strategy. Expect the bully to resist and attempt to subvert this regular, open reflection and review process.

Isolate the bully.

Regular, frequent open review of progress on personal and team accountabilities will isolate the bully’s performance and break the bully’s hold on information flow. Better informed, other team members will become more bold, convincing and successful in their arguments and actions. The bully will become clearly and contrastingly less competent and isolated.

You may be surprised who the bully turns out to be. After all they’ve been making a career of ingratiating themselves with you: agreeing with you, bolstering your ego and maybe even dealing with a few of your tough HR issues, while creating an engagement-killing climate of fear and favour to isolate and silence their critics. Bullies are experts at hiding their incompetence and bad behaviour. Victim’s attempts to draw attention to the bullying  will likely be cast by the bully as whinging justification for poor performance.

Openly confront the bully.

When you have plenty of solid evidence of the bully’s incompetence and lies,  personally confront the bully.  Be  ready for  angry denial and counter attack.  They will attempt to bypass you and ingratiate themselves with a higher authority. The bully will be very reluctant to admit their bad behaviour and incompetence even to themselves, even though it is by now widely and openly known.

If the bully doesn’t leave on his/her own accord then you already have clear justification and support to dismiss them for unsatisfactory performance in their specific role.

Goals for Change

Sign of the times?: Missed achieving the quarterly goals again. Individuals’ performance on supporting actions weak again?

The goal’s good – revenue; profit; prospects in sales pipeline. The supporting priority actions are logical.

So what’s wrong? Lack of focus? Lack of accountability? Lack of leadership? Unrealistic goals? Lack of buy-in?

Could have been any or all of those. Or it could be that the world’s changed and the assumptions that used to apply, the relationships that used to work, the habits that used to be effective aren’t/don’t any more.

The reflex response is typically to increase the focus and accountability; increase “buy-in” by consultation; do it harder! WRONG.

If your firm’s past the 1st flush of pioneer passion and settled into routine with a dollop of cynicism born of frustrated aspirations and broken promises, and on top of that the world has changed, doing it harder won’t work.

It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it: you have to change the way you do it; do things in new, unfamiliar ways that feel as strange as a new golf swing. How do you achieve that when you don’t have a clue what those new ways feel like!? Even understanding those new ways won’t do it. You have to know them (deeply)

You need to experience new ways of behaving; to surface and examine assumptions; to develop and experience new ways of interrelating and repeat them until they are new habits.

It’s not buy-in you need, its engagement.You need a change-project: NOT simply a sequence of agreed tasks with time/quality/cost KPIs. You need a project where the learning is achieved by the whole team; to together develop and practice new ways of achieving those same simple goals.

You need a project with scope that’s wide enough to provide real, strength-fitting action for each team member and a compelling shared purpose that increases your capability to adapt to change and achieve your simple goals at the same time.

If it feels strange then you’re probably on the right track. Most managers, including project managers have never experienced an organisational change project. That’s OK. Don’t pretend. Bullshit kills learning.

A Tasteful Fable of Leading Change

Thanks to the leadership of Penfolds employee Max Schubert, Penfolds Grange survived for me and my wine-aficionado friends to taste the 20 year old 1989 vintage last week, along with seven other reputable 6-11 yr old South Australian reds.

Even though 1989 wasn’t an exceptional year for Grange, and this bottle had been cellared roughly, the wine had all the colour and fruit of its youth plus the richness and subtlety of advancing age. The younger (1998-99) worthy competitors in the line-up had, comparatively prematurely, lost their youthful qualities.

What do they do at Grange, I wonder, that gives their wine such outstanding, durable qualities?

Clearly there is more to it than a recipe; more than process control; more than operations management. There is a long established culture of leadership that survived the machinations of Management.

Grange was born of the vision, passion, skill, and persistence of an employee of Penfolds wines: winemaker Max Schubert. A bottle of his original vintage sold at auction in 2004 for just over A$50,000. However back in the 50’s, when Aussies thought wine was port or sherry, this powerful still wine was panned by the wine critics and in 1957 Penfolds management forbid Schubert from producing it.

But Schubert persisted in secret through 1959 and as the initial vintages aged, their true value came to be appreciated. In 1960 the management instructed Schubert to re-start production, oblivious to the fact that he had not missed a vintage.

Unlike most expensive Old World wines, which are from single vineyards or even blocks within vineyards, Grange is made from grapes harvested over a wide area. Yet despite the vagaries of grape sourcing and vintage variation due to growing conditions, there is arguably a consistent and recognisable "Penfolds Grange" style and quality.

The renowned Penfolds Grange brand is the result of Max Shubert’s passionate, visionary and persistent leadership as an employee.

This story brings to my mind Peter Senge’s comments in The Dance of Change (p. 15):

“In business today, the word “leader” has become synonymous for top manager. . . . Those who are not in top management positions . . . . . . don’t become leaders until they reach a senior management position of authority.”

Senge’s links this view of leadership to change-failure. He prefers to view leadership as:

“the capacity of a human community to shape its future, and specifically to sustain the significant processes of change required to do so.”

Max Shubert was clearly a leader in the Penfolds community.

Reference for history of Penfolds Grange: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penfolds_Grange 22-08-2009

It’s all about interpersonal and organisational communication

Have you read any of Steve Denning’s books? More particularly are you following his latest campaign towards his forthcoming book on High Performance Teams? I bought and read his previous most recent book The Secret Language of Leadership. I have to say the word “secret” in the title put me off, but it sells books. . . . . . .

I’m drawn to Denning because of his communication-based perspective on leadership and change. I don’t think he has all the answers though he perhaps pretends to because that’s what the Business book market wants.

To me it’s the communication angle that’s the key. Denning’s big thing is deliberate, designed story telling. I have coached clients in his basic story telling process and they almost always find that it’s very effective. I use it myself with success.

I like Denning’s confronting conventional Management wisdom such as when he states outright that Richard Hackman is wrong in asserting (in a May 2009 HBR interview) that leaders can’t guarantee to produce a high performance team. Denning admits that it’s hard and a radically different way of acting from the way most organizations are run today. Interactive communication is an essential ingredient and so is not-Management.

He sums up “[It’s about] creating exhilaration in the workplace, igniting lots of shining eyes and delight, and in the end inspiring people to reinvent themselves. Because of the results it is producing, a radical new way of managing work is emerging. It involves a different way of thinking about work, a different way of managing work, and a different way of participating in work. It isn’t a quick fix. It isn’t an incremental change or a shift at the periphery. When fully implemented, it affects everything in the organization. It entails fundamental change.”

Denning to me is one of the current applied versions of the seminal 1970s and following work of Chris Argyris, further developed by the likes of Peter Senge in the 1990s. It clearly takes a long while for a new good idea to get traction! Maybe GM’s bankruptcy will add weight the sea-change in Management thinking and practice. I hope so but I'm sceptical.

I’m re-reading Senge and Co’s “The Fifth Discipline Field Book” and subsequent “The Dance of Change” - good "how to" in there but not a pop read for the busy executive (the one who needs to change first).

For heavy-weight logic and argument I like Karl Weick. His latest book (2007) is Managing the Unexpected. I like the way Weick is comfortable with "un-organisation". That, to me, is real project life: real business life; especially small business life.

It’s no secret: mantras, slogans and recipes don’t work!

In his May 28 Business Growth Tip , RESULTS.com COO Stephen Lynch says that he’s “become a bit jaded” with the many business books he reads. “Gimmicky book titles that promise much but deliver no actionable value, empty platitudes presented as if they were profound and original ideas, the so-called “secrets” of celebrity leaders. . . . . . . ”

I’m with Stephen. To me the popular literature on business, leadership, and management seems to pander to the gullible market for success-magic. It has little effect on actual organisational behaviour; on business execution; on actually doing things differently to get a different result.

The academic literature isn’t helpful either: typically descriptive with narrow causal analysis, it may be fine for increasing understanding (amongst academics at least) but if there was any direct link between understanding and changed behaviour then university Business Schools would rule the business world.

Even the best of the popular Business Management literature seems to bang away monotonously at the KPI mantra –repackaged management-by-objectives (MBO).

Mantras, slogans and recipes don’t work! There is no short list of steps that will actually change your business. That’s because change is opportunistic: the opportunities are in the chaotic, ambiguous reality that surges and flows around and under the apparently orderly surface of conventional business practice. That’s the world of interpersonal communication.

In a recent professional coaching conversation we discovered, once we got beneath the stock answers and platitudes, that the keys to business coaching success are in insight and transformation (discontinuous shifts in perception and behaviour). These phenomena are serendipitous, not the product of hard-grind managerial planning and control systems.

That’s not to dismiss planning and control. It’s to say that if business success lies in change then the key is in whatever enables us to swim gracefully and purposefully in comparative chaos and ambiguity.

And that’s where the management literature, popular or otherwise, doesn’t seem to go. It’s stuck in a simplistic model of science: of laws and formulae, of controlled, deductive, causal reasoning. That’s not sufficient in the dynamic, complex world of interpersonal relationships that are at the heart of business and change. It’s interpersonally that people actually make new sense of chaos and ambiguity.

But how often in “Business” books do you see any mention of interpersonal communication strategy? Seldom, I reckon. There’s plenty of attention to ‘positioned’ communication in sales and marketing, but scant attention to interpersonal communication at home except perhaps in putting policies-and-procedures-in-place.

Here are a few tips: pay attention to the verbatim detail of communication behaviour. Reflect together on the detail of what people said compared to what they thought. Learn to communicate assertively. It’s an art that's not normal in Management. Assertive communication behaviours can be learned but the process is slow and determined and you'll need all the help you can get from your work-mates.

How to get a breakthrough idea and make it happen

Want to stand up and stand out with an offering that’s special and rare?

Want the energy and focus of people keenly doing really excellent, standout stuff together?

Had it with a work climate that’s impersonal, dispassionate, routine and closely structured; where there’s little real pride and people aren’t really doing it together?

You need to breakthrough to a new passionate, personal, exciting, shared understanding of what you collectively are and do, who you do that for, and how you do it. You need transformation: collective breakthrough understanding of the uniquely special aspects of what you can do and of doing it together.

And the same time you need to imbue the whole organisation with the new understanding so that everyone eagerly learns to live it normally, naturally.

That’s a tough call for most organisations because they aren’t set up for transformation. They’re set up to efficiently replicate a product or service; where managers know the answers, hold the power and authority, use it to gain compliance, and people do jobs rather than live roles.

Even incremental change is hard to achieve in a climate like that – let alone breakthrough. An ideas competition won’t produce do it. A management think tank won’t do it. A consultant won’t do it. Brainstorming won’t work either, because the managers will want to control it and the rest will expect them to.

Nevertheless brainstorming is the key because it can allow the unspeakable, the outrageous, the boring, the weird, and the stupid – the new ‘answers’ - to be spoken and heard along with the ‘right answers’. It can enable people to get to know each other deeper: to strengthen the relationships that will be crucial to implementation. It can lead to a widely supported “best answer”.

To brainstorm your way out of mediocrity and get run over in the rush to do really excellent, standout stuff together, try this:

1. Get an outside facilitator to lead the brainstorm
2. Make a team competition of getting the most unique ideas on the board.
   Give each team its own colour pad of post-it labels to stick its ideas on the board. No duplicates
3. Make a time limit.
   The effect is a chaotic environment where new ideas can emerge through word association and lack of boundaries. Managers should risk looking stupid early as runners rather than writers or thinkers.
4. Together, move the post-its into emergent clusters.
   In this process the meanings of words, ideas and concepts are discovered and explored.
5. In teams generate sentences and paragraphs that express the concepts, ideas and sentiments of the clusters.
6. Share the teams’ ideas and reach consensus on single outcomes.

Run separate brainstorms to achieve breakthrough, in your own words, on “who we do it for”, “what we do” and “how we do it”; look for the unique, special aspects that your customers will love you, and no one else, for; then get specialist copywriters to translate into marketing speak.

You’ll get better with each brainstorm; as people risk trusting the process.

The process itself is the transformation.