The Leader’s Notebook

Hard questions, ambiguity and opinion for leaders

The Leader’s Notebook header image 1

PonderThis: Accountability for Accountability

February 4th, 2010 · PonderThis, Sliding Down the Razor Blade of Life

If you're new here, or a refugee from the Entelechy Partners blog, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you prefer email- put your email in to the right and Feeblitz will deliver for you. And, although no one will disavow knowledge of your actions, this message will self destruct after your third visit to the blog. Thanks for visiting!

A change leader can delegate parts of an initiative, but ultimately accountability for accountability remains with the leader.

Gartner Group, the tech analysis organization famous for their predictions, is out with their prognostication about the use of Social Networking in business.  (See the whole article here).   One of their pronouncements is unfortunately very familiar:

“Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.”

Through the rise of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) we saw a similar early frenzy for adoption and similar failure rates.  Based on Gartner’s research, we have not learned much.  The main reason they cite is that although these are branding, marketing, PR and even sales initiatives they are launched and/ or driven by IT.

The leaders of an organizational, process or culture change can delegate parts of that initiative.  Communications, planning, software, training and all the parts needed to see effective change.  But only a leader with sufficient credibility and influence can be accountable for the entire initiative.

In one of the most powerful passages in Execution, the Discipline of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy says,  “And never launch an initiative unless you are personally committed to it and prepared to see it through until it’s embedded in the DNA of the organization.”  No technology-supported initiative is a Field of Dreams and anyone who has been involved with one knows:  Just because you build it does not mean that they will come.

But you will still have spent the money and time to build it.

PonderThis is published to arrive in your RSS/ mailbox on Fridays as a concept to ponder over the weekend and goes to thousands of subscribers on 4 continents

  • Share/Save/Bookmark

→ No CommentsTags:

Scylla and Charybdis – Protecting the Brand

February 1st, 2010 · Follow the Leaders, Leadership, Literature and Myth

One of the most challenging issues leaders must face is the balancing of short-term return vs. long-term value.  In ideal circumstances, a leader will strive to balance polarized needs.  The split between short term and long term is difficult territory to navigate.   Deciding for one is too often at the cost of another, especially when the one getting the nod is short term gain.

The classic story of short-term pain vs. long-term sustainability is found in Odysseus’ choice between Scylla and Charybdis. One was a serpent that was going to eat some of his sailors as he passed.  The other was a whirlpool that would consume the entire vessel.  Avoiding the total destruction that would come from sailing too close to Charybdis, Odysseus chose to sail nearer to Scylla, who despite his best efforts, still ate 6 of his crew.  The irony for the modern organizational leader is that one of the ways to avoid short-term pain is by sacrificing a percentage of the workforce.  (Transferring organizational pain to employees is another blog post)

Let’s face it.  The pressure to squeeze cost and drive efficiency has been at the base of managerial thinking since the day that the assembly line was born.  More than one pundit has reduced all managerial science to 3 basic questions: “How do we do this faster?  How do we do it cheaper?  How do we improve quality?”  Even in this simplest of models, 2/3 of the thinking is about efficiency.  But at what cost?

Ask the executives at Toyota.  The current brouhaha about accelerators may be a short-term glitch, but it will have impact on more than just quarterly sales numbers.  Toyota built their brand on quality.  Even their current ads focus on it, stating, “…over 80% of Toyotas sold in the last 10 years are still on the road.”  So this short-term glitch has hit them in the place most important to their long-term sustainability- their brand promise.

I have read a number of articles about what brought about the debacle.  Many business pundits blame a focus on opening new markets for Toyota’s taking their eye off the quality ball.  The WSJ cites Lean Manufacturing practices, originated by Toyota but taken to an extreme, for sacrificing quality on the altar of efficiency.  And I have heard more than one executive cite the old business joke “Quick, good or fast… pick two”.  But I think that the issue may sink to a different level, one more difficult for the leaders of Toyota or any organization to change- culture.

In the current economic climate, even manufacturing environments have been subject to extreme corner cutting.   We have seen what outsourcing has done to customer service and to technical support.  The focus on cost cutting has turned what could be a strategic advantage into an albatross around the neck of brands that depend on service levels and customer loyalty.  There is not much to recommend that the same “out of sight out of mind” standards would not govern the outsourcing of auto parts.  I am not informed enough to know whether it was expansion or Lean manufacturing that distracted Toyota.  But one thing is evident.  Efficiency and scale became more important than the clear focus on quality that took the company to the top.

One thing I learned in my days working with clients on customer centered strategy: each new strategic initiative a company takes on is generally made possible only on the foundation one previous.  Strategic focus on the quality of customer interactions does not negate the need for excellent product.  It must be built on that foundation.  The same must be said for efficiency and scale.  If they come at the cost of the foundation of the company’s brand, then they are merely an attempt to avoid short term pain (usually in the form of poor quarterly reports) that can send the entire enterprise into the clutches of larger and more threatening monsters over the horizon.

Akio Toyoda, grandson of Toyota’s founder became CEO in June of 2009 and has kept a very low media profile in that time.  It will be interesting to see if he has the subtlety to look past the operational part of this kerfuffle to the root cause, and the courage to address it without cutting corners.

  • Share/Save/Bookmark

→ No CommentsTags:

Leading Change: It’s About Friction, Force and Risk

January 25th, 2010 · Organizations at Their Best, Team Notes

I recently spent a half-day with students at the William J. Clinton School of Public Service.  They are a remarkable group of students working on a Masters degree in Public Service.  We spent our time focusing on a framework for personal leadership as well as some practical tools for their teams to use as they engage in service projects as part of a practicum course.   Most of all, we talked about leading change.

Change- any change- no matter how significant or how simple, means upsetting the current reality.  It means incurring friction and risk.  If the change is merely moving a coffee cup from one counter to the other, by definition friction is needed to grasp the cup force is needed to move it.  And the risk that the cup will end up on the floor in shards, no matter how small, is significantly increased from when it was at rest on the counter.

Big organizational and cultural change is not as different as we might think.  Asking people to move to a new reality means leaving behind the familiar.  It means getting them to let go of what is comfortable.  That requires friction and force.  Ideally it is self generated friction and force.  The ideal motivator is a vision compelling enough to create willingness to be uncomfortable.  But the outcome is still the same, friction and force.

In one debate, one of the students was concerned about the unfairness of stress put on people who may not feel that they are in a position to pursue a change.  She argued that not everyone can tolerate the amount of stress or has the resource to pursue big dreams… and that is where the risk part comes in.  No one changes the world by playing it safe.  And no one is promised parity either.

Every change carries with it risk.  In order to seriously pursue any new reality, we must be willing to sacrifice the current one.  Or, as André Gide put is so eloquently “One does not discover new lands unless one is willing to lose sight of the shore.”

  • Share/Save/Bookmark

→ No CommentsTags:

HBR and the Virtuous Circle

January 11th, 2010 · Follow the Leaders

I mark it as a dark day for American corporate leadership when stock options became the fundamental center of executive pay.  Options were meant to focus an executive’s attention on long-term growth.  But a market fueled by ever shorter-term demand for double digit growth morphed the rewards into an addiction for relentless quarter on quarter performance.

Shareholder value became the drug of choice for CEO’s.  And while consultants and pundits have said it for decades, this month, Harvard Business Review finally pointed a finger at the obvious– and with research to back it up.  Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto authored The Age of Customer Capitalism.   Right up front he labels the goal of shareholder value based capitalism as “tragically flawed.”

I highly recommend this very thoughtful article, which centers on an analysis of market cycles and organizational performance.  But I am a simpler guy and look at the world through a leadership lens.

Business operates best on a virtuous cycle:

  • Executives take care of employees
  • Employees take care of products and customers
  • Customers take care of shareholders by spending money
  • The Board (representing shareholders) takes care of executives.

When options fuel the drive for near term results, with a goal of shareholder value:

  • Employees are busy taking care of executives through cost cutting and deal making
  • Executives are taking care of shareholders (and through options, themselves)
  • Which leaves customers to take care of themselves.

Shareholder value is important- but as a artifact of performance, not as its very definition.  And Martin shows us that it is simply not sustainable.

By the way, just in case you think this stuff is new, here is a link to an article I wrote on leadership for DestinationCRM.com almost a decade ago.

  • Share/Save/Bookmark

→ No CommentsTags:

PonderThis: Don’t Buy the Doom and Gloom

January 7th, 2010 · Follow the Leaders, PonderThis, Thoughts on Life and Leadership

I am on the way to Washington DC for meetings today and have been reading the Year-in-Review articles and blogs.  It is a pretty depressing way to pass a flight.  I have never been a glass-half-empty kind of guy. But after reading enough year-end evaluations I could come away thinking that the only possible point of view is that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket at light speed.

Despite the doom and gloom, I decided to look for positive signs as a focus for the new-year.  And with my own first blog post I want to share a few of my favorites.  So, not in denial of our challenges and not with my head in the sand (or anywhere else, thanks) I offer a few signs that we are not altogether screwed going into a new decade.  There are people and programs that are changing lives in the way that they do things.  Spend 10 minutes reading about one or more of these programs- or better yet, pick one and get involved- and you might start the year with a more hopeful attitude.

Do you have a favorite program that is doing well by doing good?  An organization that lights you heart and leads the way in how they do what they do?  Post it in the comments and let’s brighten everyone’s new year a little.

Happy New Year!
Barry

City Year- Do you think that the current generation of teens and young adults comprised solely of X-Box addicted slackers?  Have a look at this program in which 17-24 year old young adults volunteer a year of their life for public service.  By mentoring in schools and being a stable role model for kids who might otherwise drop out, these program volunteers are providing resource where it is needed most- right on the ground adn right in the lives of the kids who need it most.  And from all reports, it has as much impact on the young adults who spend a year of their lives in service as it does for those they serve.

FIRST – Go listen to this NPR piece from Talk of the Nation.  Neal Conan interviews Dean Kamen, prodigious inventor and founder of First.  Their vision is “To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes.”  FIRST uses terms like “gracious professionalism” to create a community fiercely dedicated to fulfilling that mission.  Along the way they enroll thousands of engineers in mentoring teams of kids in a robotics competition and foster a sense of fierce camaraderie as competing teams mentor each other.

KIVA – This one is not new news, but I am always amazed at the numbers of people who do not know about KIVA- a microlending  website.  Your extra few bucks can change the life of someone around the world: not through charity, but by making a loan.  To date, about 281,000 loans totaling over $113 million have been made to people in need of modest capital to change their lives.  And you can lend as little as $25 to help fill out a loan.  Payback rate?  Over 98%!  For amounts that are minuscule to anyone likely to be reading this, lives are changed daily.  Kiva is Entelechy Partners’ primary service organization to support  for 2010.  Here is a link to our newly formed Kiva team.

PonderThis is published to arrive in your RSS/ mailbox on Fridays as a concept to ponder over the weekend and goes to thousands of subscribers on 4 continents

  • Share/Save/Bookmark

→ No CommentsTags: