Sterling Performance

Ever sent someone an important email and they fire back a response in minutes? What crosses your mind — that they can’t be that busy if they can get back to you, or that their promptness is impressive?

Your perception of time and the value you place on time is crucial to your success. It’s likely to have been influenced by how time was managed as you were growing up, whether yours was a regimented household or one that just went with the flow.

You may be someone who regularly runs a bit late as a result. While you may not be bothered by 10 minutes here or there, it can be stressful for others. It’s also simple courtesy: to keep someone waiting on purpose is rude and unprofessional. Ultimately, it will damage how you are perceived by colleagues and managers.

Having a sense of urgency isn’t just about punctuality and time management. It’s a feeling of getting things done or making a decision promptly and efficiently. Reflecting and thinking things through is valuable as long as a decision is made on time.

Protracted procrastination is akin to laziness and comes across as feeble, wishy washy and inept. If someone is waiting on a decision from you, get on with it.

Conversely, don’t underestimate the importance of ‘quality reflection’. Some decisions shouldn’t be rushed so don’t be afraid to say if you need to mull things over. You can make a judgement as to how much reflection time you’ll need, and then go back with a decision within the agreed timeframe.

Successful people have an innate sense of urgency. The skill of time management and completing a large number of actions is the norm. Whether it’s inbuilt or a learned behaviour, managing timing, getting lots done and making quick decisions are all qualities that are increasingly important in today’s business world.

If you haven’t got a sense of urgency chances are your lackadaisical approach has been holding you back in your career. But this is something you can turn around. There are numerous resources to help you with time management. But you need to act. Now.

Check out Team Taskmaster’s top 5 time management mistakes to get you started.

(Photo by Elaron, CC2.0)

The approach of September always seems to bring with it a quickening pace. But while people seem a little more focused, will they get more done? Business guru and author John Kotter believes there’s still a lot of ‘busyness’ masquerading as true urgency — not a state of affairs that can go on much longer.

“In a fast-moving and changing world, a sleepy or steadfast contentment with the status quo can create disaster — literally disaster”, he writes in his latest book, “A Sense of Urgency”.

The pace of change is accelerating all the time, he argues, and it’s the people who grasp the nettle that will thrive. People in business must develop a sense of urgency — a relentless and daily drive forward that is awake to new developments which may alter the direction the business is moving in, or add momentum to strategic changes already underway.

It’s not a natural state, as Kotter acknowledges, so that sense of urgency has to be recreated every day. It’s also easy to ‘fake’ — people may look focused, seem busy but not yield much by way of results. It’s not usually a deliberate ploy to fob off work, but a genuine struggle to identify and stick to only priority tasks every day.

It can get worse as extreme busy-ness clouds priorities and a general sense of anxiety takes over — this makes us slower to respond, and less productive, according to a New York University psychologist’s study quoted in the Observer.

It may even result in “chronic procrastination”, a state of severe indecision that afflicts up to 20 per cent of people, according to a study by Professor Joseph Ferrari of Chicago’s De Paul University. Putting things off may be a more natural response for most people, argues fellow academic and recovering procrastinator Professor Piers Steel of Calgary University in Alberta. Steel even created an equation to explain our tendency to delay work for no good reason.

“Very, very smart people can be astonishingly complacent in the face of needed change,” writes Kotter. Whether a result of inherent characteristics, too many distractions or an inability to prioritise, busy-ness needs to be replaced by urgency — and fast.

Leadership Now picks up on four tactics for increasing a sense of urgency in the workplace:

1. Bring the outside in. Success can kill urgency — it can lead to a “we know best” culture. If you don’t see opportunities and hazards, complacency results. Get an outsider’s perspective.
   Ideas to get this going include listening to customer-facing employees, filming customer views, redecorating the office, sending people out to gather intelligence and “importing” consultants, new hires or key partners who may have interesting insight into the business.
2. Behave with urgency every day – if you’re the boss, all the time. Enemies of urgency are clutter and fatigue. Delegate relentlessly, move with speed, speak with passion and walk the talk.
3. Find the opportunity in a crisis. A crisis can be a “burning platform” to create true urgency, but handle with care — you need to gain co-operation from throughout the organisation.
4. Deal with NoNos, the “highly skilled urgency killers”. Three ways of dealing with NoNos are to distract them, push them out of the organisation or allow social pressure to take its toll on their behaviour.

Do you have a question for John Kotter? BNET UK interviews him in a couple of weeks. Let us know what you’d like to ask.

(Photo: mscaprikell, CC2.0)

Great leaders have great visions. But for every leader who takes you to the Promised Land, there are another dozen who march you straight back into the desert.

A great vision is not always good: it can be evil, foolish or evil and foolish - step forward Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler.

In more positive vein, Kennedy and Martin Luther King showed how strong visions can mobilize an entire nation.

Martin Luther King gave voice to an entire rights movement with his “I have a dream….” speech. It is electrifying, even 35 years after the event.

The problem for practicing managers is how to live up to the standards of Martin Luther King (although there are plenty who seem to aspire to the standards of Pol Pot and Stalin).

If you stand up in front of your department and announce “I have a dream…” you will go far — probably out of the door, never to return again. If you have dreams in the office, keep them to yourself.

So how can you inspire staff with a vision if you are in charge of paper clip purchasing at MegaCorp?

In practice, what people want from a vision is very simple. They want a story. The basic story (vision) has three elements:

1. This is where we are
2. This is where we are going
3. This is how we will get there

Most leaders can tell a simple story like that. The purpose of the story is to give clarity, certainty, direction and possibly meaning to what staff do.

Look at it the other way: if people are unclear, uncertain and lack direction they will probably lack motivation.

A simple vision (story) provides the framework, it will help people determine priorities and what are right and wrong courses of action without having to ask you for direction all the time.

The more people ask you for direction, the less you have succeeded in setting a clear vision for your team.

There is one more element that converts a standard vision into a great vision. Added to ‘where we are, where we are going and how we will get there’ is a fourth story line: this is your (very important) role in helping us get there

This makes an abstract vision relevant to each individual. Clearing muck may not be inspirational, but if a medieval muck clearer were helping to build a cathedral that would promise him eternal salvation, it would have some meaning. Perhaps paper clip procurement can have meaning in the right context.

What’s your vision?
(Photo of MLK from pingnews CC 2.0)

A century ago, Henry Ford’s idea of choice when it came to its Model T was “any colour, as long as it’s black”.

Today, the customer calls the shots — increasingly so, says best-selling author and strategy professor C K Prahalad.

In his latest book, “The New Age of Innovation”, he argues that customers will increasingly seek to co-create purchases with suppliers, leading to a new business model where companies will rarely have both feet planted in one specific industry.

In the last of a three-part interview, I ask Prahalad which businesses represent the apex of his co-creation model and companies stand to benefit by taking the plunge.

Who’s already co-creating and sourcing globally?
IGoogle. It’s yours. You create the page, but Google provides the platform. Apple — it’s your portfolio of music — it’s totally R=G. It doesn’t produce the content.

But the model applies to all businesses — it’s only a matter of time. If I can make a £30 mobile phone, the £500 version will have to be marketed in a different way — as a fashion accessory. Telecoms then moves into a different industry.

What are the biggest benefits to business?
The more you as a customer reveal through transactions, the more business can help you.

It can reduce churn dramatically. For a little investment, I’m increasing the switching cost for consumers because they cannot get the same quality and value if they go somewhere else.

I have no motivation to go to another supplier, because I’d have to start all over again. If the price is compelling, I might switch, but there is no natural motivation.

Will consumers always co-create?
No. Business must start with the assumption that consumers don’t want to apply the same amount of effort to construct all their experiences. Today, I will take whatever coffee I’m given — but on another occasion, I might be more particular.

People shift their priorities, where they want to customize, where they want to invest their energy and expertise.

So, if you build systems for total participation and co-creation, buying off-the-shelf is a sub-set and is also possible. If you only build a system for what’s available and what you make, then people cannot co-create.

You talk about it being urgent. Why?
If one company in one industry does this, others don’t have a choice — it would be like a business saying today, “I don’t like TQM.” Too bad. It’s the norm.

It will and should become standard. The ultimate is where an individual creates her own experience with the business - which then becomes the platform.

Before the iPod, consumers didn’t know they wanted one — can customers anticipate their own needs?
The Napster model pre-dated the iPod — the market was already created. The only thing that wasn’t there before Apple was the ecosystem to deliver it. We called it piracy, but how can 40 million kids be crooks?

The amazing thing for me is that Sony didn’t do it. It was stuck in the old model. It had all the technology to create a device. It had a lot of the content. But it kept focusing on the piracy issue.

How do you remove your blinkers to spot those trends?
A while ago I wrote paper about “dominant logic”.We are all socialised to think in a certain way. There is existing wisdom as to how a business is run.

When working with companies, I make their existing dominant logic — their latent beliefs about business — explicit. Then they can see what is applicable in the future and what’s not. Some, you may have to forget, some protect.

Over time successful business recipes become dull — your success leads to business structures that may become dysfunctional.

What we need to ask ourselves is — is there a different way?

Also on BNET — C K Prahalad lays out new business model and explains how to apply it to established organisations.

It may be silly season, but the numbers on this survey  are pretty alarming nonetheless: according to hospitality recruitment website Caterer.com, 66 per cent of 4,300 people it surveyed detest their current job and 43 per cent actively dread going to work every day.

The hospitality sector’s employees came out as unexpected cheerleaders for their sector — just over 49 per cent feel enthusiastic about going to work and are dedicated to their jobs. Only 19 per cent feel no job satisfaction whatsoever.

Compare that with despondent retail workers or (worryingly) those based in an office (a description that takes in a wide variety of jobs), who are overwhelmingly underwhelmed by the prospect of going to work each day.

So who were the UK’s least enthused employees? Here’s a list of the least loved jobs.

Not surprisingly, jobs with more of a structured career path and prospects for advancement elicited more enthusiasm than those without. But ’skilled jobs’ should surely rate higher, if employers are giving people access to apprenticeships and other learning opportunities. And shouldn’t public-sector roles in social work, education and the forces inspire dedication, given their more vocational nature?

The misery factor in a job is not necessarily confined to a particular sector, believes The Table Group founder Pat Lencioni, who also wrote the best-selling “Three Signs of a Miserable Job”.

He defines the three signs for Work in Progress as:

• Anonymity — which is the feeling that employees get when they realize that their manager has little interest in them a human being and that they know little about their lives, their aspirations and their interests.
• Irrelevance  — which takes root when employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others. Every employee needs to know that the work they do impacts someone’s life – a customer, a co-worker, even a supervisor – in one way or another.
• Immeasurement — which I realize isn’t actually a word. It’s the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contribution or success. Employees ho have no means of measuring how well they are doing on a given day or in a given week, must rely on the subjective opinions of others, usually their managers, to gauge their progress or contribution.

Maybe this is where the problem lies. A smaller survey by performance management software business SuccessFactors of 139 UK or Eire-based HR executives has found that, while many have a succession plan of some description in place, the majority don’t have a formal process that can be used to identify and develop a continuous stream of talent within the business. Employees, then, have little sense that they might progress beyond a certain point and almost no promise of getting to the top job.
Forty per cent lacked any way of identifying future talent — at the top, or presumably at any level of the business. And managers in two-thirds of the organisations weren’t held accountable for developing people.

It’s not that businesses don’t recognise the importance of talent management. But the processes aren’t in place to create a recognisable career progression. The introduction to a McKinsey chart lists familiar obstacles — short-term cost-cutting on talent spend, a shortage of the right type of person, poor line management, no cross-departmental collaboration.

But the chart itself is more eloquent, showing line managers and HR professionals frequently at odds on who’s responsible for finding and keeping the best people. No-one appears clear as to who is accountable for talent management in the business. Surely that’s a job worth getting enthusiastic about.

Are you creative? There’s a mistaken belief that very few people are creative and that the rest of us poor plods couldn’t come up with an original idea if it were served to us on a platter. Quotes like: “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower” (Steve Jobs) are pure rubbish. Everyone has ideas.

Some years ago, inspired, perhaps, by Toyota’s performance-improvement suggestion scheme, a group of eight colleagues agreed that we would each think of one idea a day to do something at work better, faster, cheaper, more easily, more enjoyably or more efficiently.

We agreed not to share any of the ideas, but just wrote them down and put them in a sealed envelope on our boss’s desk every morning, having explained the process to him with the first batch.

It only took until the next weekly meeting for it all to come to a grinding halt. The boss, a genuinely nice, open-minded person, pointed to the 40 sheets of paper in front of him and asked: “What am I supposed to do with these? At this rate we’ll have 2,000 a year to process. We won’t have time to do any other work.”

This is not uncommon. People who have lots of ideas sooner or later get the message that the behaviour is career limiting. “We are an innovative, creative company” tends to rank in credibility terms with “people are our most valued asset” and “the cheque is in the mail”.

In most organisations the concept of creativity is used a bit like a club to beat people with. Being labelled “creative” is be code for unfocused, disruptive, undisciplined, rebellious, unreliable, and not worth paying much mind.

People who have lots of ideas — and who hasn’t? — and who put them forward may even be seen as interfering with getting actual work done. If you have a good idea, chances are you think that if you do make a suggestion it will either be dismissed or you won’t be given the credit.

People stop trying. Or they don’t start. Talking to a Japanese businessman, where lifetime employment is still common, revealed why people in western jobs don’t try too hard to generate new ideas and suggestions. He asked how much effort we gave to our work. Did we give 100 per cent — everything we had, all the time, non-stop — or did we give something less?

The uncomfortable truth is that only the most trusting and naïve give everything. We hold something back and we work on developing transferable skills that we can hopefully use when the company turns its back on us. And we keep our good ideas to ourselves because they might be needed somewhere else.

But, our Japanese acquaintance said, if you know that when you have nothing more to give you will continue to be treated honourably, and continue to be rewarded for what you have done in the past, you will give your very best.

Image by Richard Winchell, CC 2.0

Laying out how Apple outstrips Facebook, Havas Media Lab’s Umair Haque argues we should start thinking of platforms as markets, like Apple.

“Apple took something terminally closed — the mobile value chain — and pried it radically open,” he writes.

In doing so, Apple and Google and a handful of others have opened up a new way of doing business, a new supply chain that involves myriad players of all sizes.

Traditional companies can — and must — get on board, argues best-selling author strategy guru C K Prahalad, doing so by means of “co-creation” and “global resourcing”.

“How do you create a consistent, personalized experience, one touchpoint at a time? How to get highly distributed action and at the same time extreme consistency: that’s the challenge,” says Prahalad.
While Haque calls for revolution, Prahalad’s more interested in evolution, and his latest book, “The New Age of Innovation”, takes traditional businesses through the process from start to finish. Here, he explains how to prepare for change.

• Get the foundations right ICT is very important. But before embarking on a big IT spend to create a new business model, make sure you understand the underlying forces that will take you to N=1, R=G.
  You have to have faith: otherwise, every time there’s a minor problem in the implementation, you’ll change direction. Just because you are going north, doesn’t mean it’s going to go in a straight line.
  It’s a question of taking a lot of small steps: don’t try to eat the elephant in one big bite.
• Run small experiments Start with clear specifications and a clear idea of gaps by auditing your own internal structure.
  Then create small internal experiments to move one step at a time rather than turning everything upside down.
• Separate processes from analytics and ICT First consider business processes. How do you get clearly articulated, well documented business processes that are resilient and capable of change?
  Then, ask how you can get good analytics that understand the implications of N=1, R=G. It’s not historical understanding of what happened with sales forecasts last week or last month — to help customers requires real-time analytics, and the real-time engines for connectivity, for clearing messages between the company and the consumer. That’s the starting point.
• Re-train your managers The social architecture — the mindset of managers — must change. You cannot procrastinate. People must be empowered to act. Real time action requires a managerial mind-set. It also requires distributed leadership — a shared agenda commonly understood, but access to information at very distributed levels.
  Nobody in senior management can act on these issues in real time. It has to be totally distributed — a call centre operator, a customer service representative, all must be able to take action.
  This empowers people at all levels of the organisation. Break the hierarchies and move to an orientation where people with the best information and closest to the problem can act in real time.
• Ensure brand consistency Everyone should act in a way that’s consistent with the broad philosophy of the company, so you enhance your brand, you enhance the experience of consumers.
  We have a lot of training to do, allowing people to let go, enabling people to act at all levels, but sharing the common information — there should be visibility across the organisation, not just at one level.
  Consistency of management direction and small, calculated steps are the keys to ensuring it’s not disruptive at all.

A couple of tips:

Candour’s much to be admired. But our social upbringing teaches us the need of a little opacity, argues Stefan Stern in the FT.

He’s considering the merits of a  new book, “Beyond Bullsh*t” by Samuel Culbert, a professor of management at the University of California in Los Angeles, which advocates a return to plain honesty in the workplace.

“Bullsh*t (sic) has become the etiquette of choice in corporate communications,” claims Culbert. “Even people who disdain deception find themselves involved in it. They feel compelled to bullsh*t at work.”

We crave straight talk,  but we get deception and obfuscation and sometimes “self-serving verbiage” .

This can be frustrating at best, and dangerous when it results in widespread deception on the scale of Parmalat or Enron.

But are we programmed to BS? Studies suggest we learn to fib as toddlers. We have countless words for lies, say Ronald A Howard and Clinton D Korver in “Ethics for the Real World” — doctor, dupe, dress up, embellish, varnish — as well as countless ways to deceive (gesture, euphemism, even silence.)

It’s not just the wrong ‘uns that are given to BS, either: compromise, say Howard and Korver, comes as a result of “pressure from competitors, regulators, managers and others.”

“Opacity begins at home,” Stern quotes from an essay in “Transparency”, another call for candour by influential leadership thinkers Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman and Patricia Ward Biederman.

Within our families, we learn to distinguish between what can be aired openly and what cannot — what playwright Henrik Ibsen called ‘vital lies’, family secrets and unspoken issues that, say the authors, “rarely get better on their own”. (Is this where the phrase ‘home truths’ comes from?)

We naturally bring this tendency to keep quiet about certain things to work. Social conditioning may even train us to be downright reticent about sharing our views on someone’s behaviour.

Yet “there’s no greater contribution to operational effectiveness and success than conversations in which people with conflicting viewpoints discuss their differences forthrightly,” argues Culbert.

Managers have a responsibility to advise, guide and sometimes upbraid their team members so that people know how they are doing all the time, not just on the occasion of their appraisal (or when they are being fired).

So Culbert counsels candour, but only when someone is prepared to receive it. That means getting to know people a bit before diving in with hard-hitting truths, and being open to hearing their views. Getting to know people may mean small talk, possibly a bit of finessing — or BS, argues Stern.

Culbert also suggests that you frame your views as exactly that — your opinion. But doesn’t this fudge things a bit and take you back to square one?

(more…)

Author C K Prahalad sees a future where the customer really is king, and businesses will be able to offer individuals just about anything. It’s all explained in his latest book, “The New Age of Innovation”, as much a practical manual as a manifesto for change.

It expands on ideas first laid out in previous books by Prahalad, a strategy professor at University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Prahalad came to the business world’s attention when he co-wrote “Competing for the Future” with Gary Hamel.

In 2004 he wrote “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, which re-framed the world’s poor as “resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious customers” for multinationals.

His latest outing expands on the idea of co-creation (or N=1) and global resourcing (R=G), first raised in “The Future of Competition” with Venkat Ramaswamy.

I ask him what it means and how it applies to established businesses.

What do you mean by co-creation or N=1?
The individual is at the centre of the buying experience, whether it’s iTunes, tyres or insurance — Norwich Union applies N=1. It uses driving patterns, not just age-led assumptions, to build up an idea of behaviours, then sets premiums accordingly.
It creates a virtuous circle: the customer gives you feedback about they want from the products. No need to do market research — you get real-time product information.

What’s driving it?
Four underlying forces have changed business over the past five years:

1. Ubiquitous connectivity — three billion people connected in some fashion must make a difference to the relationship between the consumer and the company.
2. Dramatic reduction in the cost of technology — I can put everything I know on a small stick, for less than $20. It’s very humbling! So technology is not the private privilege of the rich. Everyone can access it.
3. The convergence of technology on industry boundaries, which is taking place everywhere, not just in technology. Look at face cream: it’s a pharma product and a fashion/beauty product.
4. Most important, the tremendous success of social networks.

The long-term implications of all four combined will affect every business, not just Google or Netflix.

Can traditional businesses migrate to this new process?
Established businesses may be doing it without knowing it. Take General Motors’s telematics network, On Star: it monitors what’s going on in the car and, with your permission, can make an appointment with the dealer and ensure parts are available. But I can also use it to look up restaurants, check stock prices.

It converts the car into a node in the global network and it is very personalised, down to the human voice it uses. GM still thinks of itself as being in the car business, not in the connectivity business.

How does this fit with your idea of global resourcing, or R=G?
On Star doesn’t produce any content — the emergency service contacts, stock prices restaurants — so GM has to form a number of partnerships to deliver these services.

With your permission, On Star can become the distribution channel for information about you. As a service provider to On Star, I don’t have to have a long-term relationship with GM. I just need access to the infrastructure that collects information. The underlying structure is the same: it’s using information technology to create a new business model of N=1 and R=G.

It is a perfect example of transforming a traditional, transaction-oriented business into one where there is continuous interaction.

If there is no basic transparency between suppliers and you, R=G won’t work, because it’s not a joint venture relationship, it’s not an alliance. It’s a relationship where everybody accepts the broad intellectual framework, everybody believes they can make a little bit of money.

Next: how to make it work

(Photo of C K Prahalad courtesy of McGraw Hill)

Much is made of the art of leadership. But for every leader there are many more followers, and there’s not much in the way of advice on how to follow well.

Just as followers complain about their leaders, so leaders despair of their followers — they always seem to want more time, more attention, more money, more help, more resources, more reassurance, more praise. At times, leadership can feel like managing a kindergarten class on drugs.

In finding out about what makes a good leader, I also took time to ask what leaders look for in their followers. The answers were surprisingly simple. In order of priority bosses look for:

1. Hard work
2. Proactivity
3. Intelligence
4. Reliability
5. Ambition

They are several ways of looking at this list:

• Bosses want you to work hard, deliver the goods and stop whining,
• These are low hurdles to jump, but bosses pick them because many people fail to jump these hurdles: beating your peers should be easy if this is all bosses want.
• It is OK to be ambitious.

If this is what bosses want, what do they dislike? The biggest issue that came up was trust. One boss summed up everyone’s view when she told me: “I forgive most things. I forgive cock ups, I forgive failures as long as people do not repeat the same failure. But when the trust goes, it’ over. I can not work with a team I do not trust.”

Digging further, the trust agenda became clear. In part, trust is about honesty — being open about problems early so that they don’t spiral out of control.

It is about reliability and delivering on commitments. And it is also about supporting the boss when things get tough — keeping quiet during a critical meeting is just as disloyal as plotting and moaning about the boss behind his or her back .

The formula for survival and success is simple from the corner office: show hard work, proactivity, intelligence, reliability and ambition and you will be ahead of many of your peers in the race to survive. Bosses find it very hard to fire people they trust.

Of course, applying the survival formula and managing your boss effectively requires both skill and practice. That is the subject of future blogs.