What’s changed in 12 months?

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.

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.

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. 

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).

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. 

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?

I’m writing about this in a series of posts in another blog http://www.businessexit.co.nz/_blog/My_Blog  

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. 

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.

We are interested to hear other’s stories as well as share our own.

Manager or Leader: red-herring

Should 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.

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.

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 everyone’s a marketer because everyone in the organisation vitally affects the customers’ experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is the new key to competitive success in the 21st century. Are you up for it?

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.

Also published on MPS Pegasus

99.9% of the time a miracle will happen

99.9% of the time a miracle will happen – says a mathematician acquaintance.

Trouble is, 99.8% of the time we don’t see, don’t recognise, don’t make room for miracles, little or big – too driven by managerial accountability systems, individualistic endeavour, and social mis/disconnection (despite ‘social media’).

Stressed out we anxiously push, drive, and control to achieve success. The greater our responsibility and desire to succeed the more we stress and the fewer miracles we experience.

The thing about miracles is that we can’t make them happen, least of all by ourselves.

I’m excited that I seem to be developing ‘miracle-sight’: I’m seeing the recent tipping point; peripety; watershed in my work life as the product of a of complex continuum of interacting stories, events and relationships that I could never have achieved myself; a miracle, out of a web of miracles that I would doubtlessly have confounded by engineered efforts.

My story seems to turn on a long-planned 10-day wilderness adventure with old (in every sense) friends in the pristine coastal forest near West Cape, Fiordland, New Zealand.

In a brief hour from nearly-nowhere we fly: a flimsy shuddering noisy spec thwacking across the grand diorama of massive monoliths; skimming stag-lined razor ridges rising rapidly to meet us, then cutting straight to gut-dropping, sphincter clenching precipices.

When the mountain fortress opens to coastal plain we yaw and swing along the unnamed gorge finally slewing and settling on our Google-Earth-familiar gravel bank; the storm-surged, crashing cove’s tide stained red-amber by the tannin-rich river.

Abruptly abandoned by the clattering chopper, the noisy silence of our ancient new world’s a rough cut from one life to another.

The prospect and consummation of this adventure are lever and fulcrum into a new narrative phase where past work-life loose ends and abandoned threads seem touched with new meaning, new possibilities, and an excitement of renewed hope.

Chapter end; new chapter; watershed; new terrain; new horizon; new life in a new organisational setting, renewed purpose anchored in deeply held values, ruled by passion for service over personal success.

It’s with Challenge Trust. There’s hope in that name.

Opposing views:




Top: View from the river mouth, tide out, over the shingle-bank across our cove during a gale at sea.

Bottom: View on a brighter, calm day, half tide on the flow, from a promontory at mid-right in the top photo across our cove towards the shingle-bank. Our base-camp (not visible) is centre right amongst the larger trees behind the foreshore scrub. The beach is about 300m long.

Will 2010 Be As You Like It?

‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” says Bill Shakespeare’s character Jacques in As You Like It, Act II Sc vii,

To what story, what climax, what denouement have you renewed your commitment, passion and determination this year?

The evidence is clear that if you set your goal then commit to it by focusing on completing specific actions towards that goal, then you have a very high probability of achieving it. It gets messier if you can’t do it on your own; if you need others to commit and focus on it too.

How can you get those others to want what you want? How can you get them to “buy into” it; to play your game, run your race, act in your theatre; accept your rules and judgement?

Typically you cast yourself as the master puppeteer: as lord of the dance; you pull the strings. A lot depends on your skill and alacrity at manipulating strings: at management.

No wonder then that managers have such a major influence on businesses: by some reports over 70% of employee behaviour is determined by the actions of managers (I wonder who determines managers’ behaviour).

So if your marionettes are not responding as planned, do you become an even better puppeteer: do you contrive with the latest tools, systems and processes to increase control by adding more ‘invisible’ strings?

Or do you seek to breathe life into your marionettes; into their wooden minds, hearts and limbs; risk letting them influence the dance, the narrative, and the score? Do you risk letting them be the stars?

Will they want to stay with your small show? Will they perform like you? Will they covet your role?

Do they understand the play? Does it speak to them? Do they relate emotionally to their roles and to each other. Are the roles shallow, 2 dimensional or are they ‘character’ roles.

Does the play have a universal quality that appeals on multiple levels to different players and its audience? Or is it a cheap circus that abuses its talent?

What are you playing at?

Poetry at Work.

Last week lone-sailing Seascape, my 12 foot, clinker-style dinghy; hushed breeze rushing, bow splashing and wake boiling, I slipped and sliced, suspended on chrome-smooth sky-tinted surfaces, ruffled, disturbed, even annoyed by mercurially agitated warm humid breezes. Mind in neutral, senses wired for sudden shifts, body and boat commune, response-merged pursuing purpose.

Then suddenly I plunge into turbid work-waters, seeking uncontrived rhyme, rhythm, and reunion. Instead jolted by proudly, profoundly prosaic hard harsh habits, I struggle to rescue the dream from resigned remembrance and to surface, to breathe.

Now thankfully buoyed by miraculously new-found and re-found relationships, carried by the tidal flows that touch and disturb even dammed work-waters, I find poetry resurgent enough for shade and sustenance.

Good Bastards & the Spirit of Christmas

The Christmas message of joy in discovering new life and new hope came together surprisingly for me last week in a business meeting of diverse minds, perspectives and strengths in a common purpose.

I opportunistically (for that is my way) introduced my friends and clients at Challenge Trust (Mental Health Service providers) to my friends and former colleagues at The Social & Community Health Section of the University of Auckland (UoA) School of Population Health (SoPH). My hope and expectation was of new and exciting collaboration.

My role with Challenge Trust is about achieving business growth & development. My connection with SoPH stems from collaborating with them as a faculty member of UoA Business School when it had a division on the same Tamaki campus as SoPH. That collaboration grew out of a sense that the issues in social and community health are congruent with those in businesses and institutions and a passion to do something with that.

The meeting confirmed the expected and discovered unexpected potential for new, exciting collaboration and relationships in common purpose and passion: to make social and business communities healthy and therefore sustainably more productive places to live and work.

We got to talking about Challenge Trust’s dramatically successful model for recovery that they apply to themselves and their professional interrelationships as well as to their clients and their client communities. Their model has six essential elements that must be addressed together:

1. Clinical Health

2. Emotional Health

3. Spiritual/Cultural Health

4. Environmental Health

5. Physical Health

6. Economic Health

We got to talking about how organisations are inherently fundamentally dysfunctional and how through a recovery approach they can become “high functioning”. We got to talking about how individual and organisational recovery relates to resilience and “human resource” sustainability.

This brought to my mind a story that I told them to illustrate how a firm without specific knowledge of Recovery, but seeking to sustainably engage it’s employees and delight its customers, had begun to implement what in many ways amounts to the Recovery model:

A labour hire firm were seeking to identify an inspiring, engaging common purpose or goal; one that would profitably differentiate them from their competition. They tried typical business goals like being the preferred supplier to the top/largest/best operators in the construction industry with decade-spanning interpersonal customer relationships. But it didn’t catch on. Too much bicycle, not enough frog?

So back to the drawing board they went and realised that what they would really like to be is “Good Bastards who do business with Good Bastards”. A good bastard is NZ vernacular for a rugged individual with a good heart, who looks out for his mates and, all said and done, loves them, has their welfare at heart and would do anything for them.

They then imagined what a firm of good bastards would be proud to look like in 10 years if it was a raging success. They decided that they would be proud to be in the news for having flown an A320 full of their people (150) into a disaster zone for a week long recovery mission where their people volunteered their time and the firm paid the rest of the costs. That would require them to be a successful business, largish and most importantly be a community of really good bastards. This big hairy audacious goal (Jim Collins) caught on fast.

Building the capability to respond at the drop of a hat to such a disaster clearly required long term action that started right away. So they began by collaborating with their banker’s employees to clean up three local beaches and have a BBQ together.

To begin recognising good bastard behaviour they implemented a quarterly Good Bastard Award for clients and one for employees.

They decided that good bastards are safe bastards: they look out for their workmates; an important behaviour in construction site safety. So they began a programme of sponsored safety promotion events on client sites and included aspects of safety and safety awareness in their quarterly surveys of employees and clients.

This firm is The Labour Exchange and to me that’s the spirit of Christmas in action in business.

The meeting of minds and purpose where I told that story is also the spirit of Christmas in action: joy in discovering new life and new hope.

Best wishes for Christmas: peace & goodwill, new life and new hope.

Steve

Bicycle or Frog? Kiss . . . . .

Did the pricess kiss a frog to get her prince, or was it a bicycle?

To borrow Alistair Mant’s bicycle/frog analogy: we continue to treat organisations as if they are bicycles when these days they are more likely frogs.

You can take a bicycle apart, lay out and polish all the bits, modify and replace them, and when you put it back together and oil it, you have a bicycle. If you do that to a frog, when you put it back together you don’t have a frog. There’s something missing: life. A bicycle is a machine. A frog is a living thing.

Ever come out of a management team meeting feeling disappointed, flat; not excited, but can’t quite put your finger on why. Sure the usual personalities were there, the usual predictable behaviours and perspectives, but you know you can rise above that if there’s something really worth doing together, everyone’s working to their strengths, and the results are blowing you and your clients away.

It’s not that you were intentionally being negative or difficult. You actually wanted to be energised and inspired; to energise and inspire. But the usually effective process of reviewing progress and performance against the various KPIs, reviewing priorities then agreeing who, what and when for the next period somehow lacked life.

Ever felt like that? I have.

Maybe you’re tired and depressed by energy sapping stuff happening in the rest of your life. Maybe some wandering virus is having a go at you. Maybe you lost your sense of purpose. Maybe its just been a long hard year. Whatever, life seems to have gone out of work. It seems mechanical; a job.

Work’s like this for about 55% of the workforce (Marcus Buckingham): The Disengaged. They’d much rather be in high performing teams (if they could imagine what it’d be like). They and/or their managers may even be into the paraphernalia, tactics and techniques of “high performing teams”: but it’s just not sparking.

There’s a good chance that’s because the paraphernalia is little more than a set of managerial tools used mechanically and dutifully in the belief that tools magically transform disengaged workers into engaged ones; even into high performing teams.

I won’t work. Partly because “everyone knows” that these tools are just more management bullshit: for over a century managers have been using systems and structures to get things done as expected; "to control people and play on their fears; systems and processes that suppress rather than reveal and ignite the emotions that energise and inspire" (Steve Denning, see below); that achieve machine like predictability and reliability.

With a frog approach we would use those same tools differently. As the saying goes: it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. So instead of using the tools to increase predictability and mechanical reliability we could use them to delightfully surprise ourselves and our clients: to energise and inspire continual, iterative learning to delight; with each delight revealing new possibilities. Kiss the frog to get a transformation.

If you want the real oil on achieving such a radically different approach to management; such delightfully inspiring and energising workplaces and people, be sure to grab a copy of Steve Denning’s new book when it comes out around November 2010. I’ve had a peek. It’s good! Radical, with it’s roots in his previous work.

Learn fast: things aren’t (ever) returning to “normal”.

New Zealand business managers and educators have got to transform their thinking and practice or NZ can say goodbye to “high” living standards: already down to 23^rd in the OECD and in imminent danger of being overtaken by Czechoslovakia.

That was the main message I took from National Bank (NZ) Chief Economist Cameron Bagrey’s lunchtime address last Tuesday to the national conference of New Zealand Applied Business educators. They’re tertiary (but not university) educators on undergraduate Applied Business diploma and Applied Business degree programmes. I sneaked in on the coattails of my wife Sandra Barnett, an innovator and author in Applied Business education (Communication).

Bagrey confessed he’s embarrassed that his profession’s consistently got it wrong: failed to predict the current recession and doesn’t have a clue how to fix.

He says only one thing’s for certain: we can’t go back to the way it was. Anyone who thinks that things will return to “normal” is stupid. The policy makers are determined it won’t; determined we figure out new ways to do, manage and teach business and the economy. Previous answers are wrong.

He didn’t have new answers except to say that boiled down, it’s the responsibility of individuals to generate and implement new ways. He didn’t have any special advice for business educators.

I agree with Bagrey that the solution lies with individuals, though I add: individuals in collaboration not isolation, generating and learning new ways together.

I seriously doubt NZ Business Education can change from its prescriptive right-answer model any time soon, hobbled as it is by administrators and their anti-professional, centralised rules and controls, and know-no-better student and employer market.

I’m sceptical too that NZ business managers can abandon their manager-knows-best, right-answer approach any time soon: go deeper than recite the superficial lists of “secrets” peddled in popular business management literature.

Actually the answers have been there for more than 20 years (e.g. Drucker and Senge), effectively ignored: except perhaps in Business student essays and Management band-aids, quick fixes, and fads.

Here’s the guts: (really) involve everyone; confess ignorance (starting at the top); spend time together generating a long term goal that everyone’s passionate about but not sure how to achieve; get very clear on the medium term strategy and short term goals that stand to take you towards the long term; openly generate and agree clear individual and collective accountabilities in achieving the change; openly measure progress to keep individuals and groups (at all levels) openly accountable for their contribution; continually review and revise in the light of individual and collective experience; take every opportunity to talk about the long term goal and the actual action and progress towards it.

And another thing: get long-term (2 yr) outside help from experienced change execution specialists. Be sure that they too are accountable for progress.

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.

Business Friday: Grand Brand Bang.

Instead of dressing down on Fridays the creatives at a large successful advertising agency amuse themselves by dressing up and behaving as Business people: they call it Business Friday. An essential element of Business Friday is PowerPoint presentations with bullets, words flying in, fades, sound effects: the whole palaver.

It’s true! PowerPoint is absurd Business uniform!

Since I last blogged, conversation streams about Brand; Ideas that Stick; and Targeting the Message were brought into comic relief by a single PowerPointed seminar failure.

Mark Gallagher’s compilation “Brand is . . . .”

Verne Harnish quoting his Uncle Wally and Chip Heath on Ideas That Stick.

Stephen Lynch quoting Bob Eckert, featured in Fortune magazine, on Targeting the Message.

The seminar, about business planning and implementation, packaged in PowerPoint to standardise delivery in various locations by various presenters, was a tool for building relationships with prospective clients to help sell professional service.

This particular seminar failed because the ideas that stuck - the impression communicated were predominantly though not overwhelmingly negative. It failed to achieve purpose. Yet the seminar had worked fine for the guy who produced the slides.

I’d experienced similar failed attempts to control seminar quality while teaching General Management at the University of Auckland: the course, part of a new innovative degree in Business and Information Management, was delivered on 3 different campuses. The course seminars were packaged as PowerPoint presentations and printed copies of the slides were included in course-books for students.

The presenters and students believed that the knowledge was the PowerPoint slides: linear, hierarchical, shallow, un-provocative, boring. Learning was stumped not stimulated. Read Edward Tufte The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (now in 2^nd edition) to learn how PowerPoint regiments and limits thought, kills presentations and stops learning.

The thing is, content doesn’t make a seminar and regimenting content, especially by PowerPoint, reduces seminar quality. The message, which is bigger than the content, and hence the brand is blunted and distorted by the medium. It becomes Business-like, boring, uniform, more of the same.

Jack Daly doesn’t use PowerPoint in his seminars. People complain about Tom Peters’ slides because they can’t understand them: nothing boring, uniform about those guys.

Never be upstaged by your slides or your other props.

Can you get knowledge off the web?

It’s really cool living the communication media revolution: no packaged answers. Experimenting is everything. Good for entrepreneurs. Not so good for causal thinkers (the rest).

Information’s free - heaps of it. Some enlightened universities even publish their courses free on the web. So, indeed, why physically attend a university to get knowledge when information’s free online?

Because information isn’t knowledge, that’s why. It’s just “stuff” until a person or people make sense of it for and between themselves. The most effective way to communicate knowledge; to transfer it between people, is interactively. (The universities spent a fortune on failed “distance learning” over the last decade or so to begin to realise that.)

An organisation’s knowledge exists in the web of relationships between its people not in the nodes ( the hard drives and experts). It is evident in interpersonal behaviour. It exists as organisational knowledge only in as much as it is communicated.

Learning is a complex interactive process. Rich interaction produces deep (behaviour changing) learning. Rich organisational knowledge exists and develops in rich interrelationships.

So what can we learn over the internet? What organisational knowledge can exist in the internet? Answer: it depends on the richness and depth of interrelationship.

I don’t know about you but for me nothing beats real person 2 person communication on that score. And whatever virtual communication medium best approximates P2P is the next best thing.

So until the internet can fully reproduce a meeting virtually, I’ll go to university, fly to conferences, visit my clients, go home to my wife and kids, go to church, go out to the pub, the theatre and to parties.

In between those real meetings I’ll maintain conversation by phone, Skype, email, blog, LinkedIn, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, whatever. But I’ll go easy on it and try to make my communication relevant and meaningful to my connections or they’ll get sick of my intrusions and I’ll get sick of theirs.

How am I doing? How are you doing? How rich is your personal and organisational communication? Are you leading 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