The Leader With 7 Faces

Net-work, not more teamwork (2)

2008-05-08T14:10:00.002+01:00

Following form the previous post, what can one do? For starters, don’t oppose people spending some time networking inside the firm. If you have a formal IT system for that, you are well advanced. Many organisations are just beginning to come to terms with the idea that people are connecting and will continue to connect routinely outside the boundaries of the division, team or department. But is this not something that even traditional management wanted to do? Promote the idea that people should go ‘outside’ for questions and answers. ‘Outside’ may just mean inside the company, but in another division or affiliate. People should pick up the phone and be able to ask a colleague miles away, perhaps somebody they have never even met, how they solved problem A. Going beyond the natural boundaries should be the norm, not the exception. These are not behaviours reserved for one-off situations or annual internal company conventions, where so-called Best Practices are shared. This is not enough. We need real time sharing of those best practices or best ideas. We simply need the ability for somebody in sales in the South of the country to be able to shout, “Houston, we have a problem” and then get help/an answer almost on the spot, because he is reaching an entire network of potential experts for solving the problem. Not just his peers, not just his immediate team, not just his boss. And frankly, if you think this can be done via email, forget it. You need to accept that it is much messier than organisation chart management and a command-and-control style of leadership, but you can no longer afford people on the payroll who are only good at the internal dynamics of the team. Chances are you have lots of those already. You need net-working as a routine process and this is different from the standard networking: something that usually has the emphasis on the net, not the work.Teams are predictable structures. They are very good for operational delivery, but not so good for strategy or innovation. A certain degree of ‘groupthink’ is always present. Putting the net-work before the teamwork ensures the continuous flow of new ideas. If the old saying “If you have two people who think the same, fire one of them!” were to be applied to teams, the world population of teams would shrink by 50%.

Net-work, not more teamwork (1)

2008-05-08T12:59:00.003+01:00

This is the title of one of the chapters of my new book DISRUPTIVE IDEAS which builds upon Viral Change. Disruptive ideas will be available by the end of this month, May 2008.

Organisations have become proficient in team management and teams have become the natural structure for collaboration, the default position. But in these days of inter-dependence between roles and jobs, many collaboration solutions can be found in informal networks, not in designed, cohesive teams.
Let me inject another contrarian idea: you don’t need any more teams. I know, I know, teamocracies rule the waves. We all talk about teams and how to make them stronger, more effective, etc. Teams are at the centre of organisational development and somehow we have equated them to ‘collaboration’ or people working together.
Teams are here to stay and I’m not going to waste any more space justifying their existence. But what we really need to do is not to refine the team machinery, but to exploit the net-work one. The organisation is composed of a number of collaborative spaces. Some of them are relatively rigid and designed - teams, task forces - while others are composed of looser connections between individuals, with different degrees and nuances of the word ‘looser’. Some communities (of practice or interest) are semi-loose, with a more or less defined membership. There are other networks of connections of a much looser nature, represented by people who sometimes know very little about each other and/or only communicate from time to time. There is a wide spectrum of connections available, but traditional management has only focused on one end; the one where structures are designed and borders given: the teams.
In recent years, people of different disciplines interested in organisational life have begun to suspect that the structure of teams may not be as universally desirable as we first thought, particularly when the organisation needs to tap into intellectual capital wherever it is. We need more and more people who are able to navigate, to ride the looser informal connections where many answers to innovation lie. Teams are too predictable in their capability to answer questions such as, “is there a different way?” Even if the answer is yes, chances are ‘that way’ is to be found within the confines of the team.
We need to favour looser network structures, even if we won’t have the same command and control capacity as we do with teams and taskforces. This is the price to pay. It is from those sometimes un-structured conversations that true innovation originates; it is there that many answers to questions can be found. What can you do? Next post!

Redesigning Sales Forces

2008-04-10T18:04:00.001+01:00

Redesigning pharmaceutical sales operations is probably one of the most strategically important things on the table of senior commercial executives in an operating company today. And this redesigning doesn’t only involve the field forces, but also their connections with other HQ functions such as Marketing, Medical or Sales Force Effectiveness groups.

Leandro Herrero has published a new white paper describing the methodology his company, The Chalfont Project, has used for years in their client work. This methodology combines strategy with group decision analysis, creating a shared common understanding amongst stakeholders, a common sense of purpose and shared commitment to action. This proven method will enable companies to find their most preferred option that will work.

Although the white paper is focussed on the pharmaceutical industry, the methodology equally applies to all industries when looking to redesign their sales forces.

You can read the full white paper here.

Legacy traps

2008-04-01T20:14:00.002+01:00

The best legacy is always a beyond-me leadership. A great period led by a leader followed by the absence of new leaders tells you a lot about the leader’s view of himself. Succession is as important as tenure. Great tenures followed by bad successions always make me very suspicious of the greatness of the tenure.

For many years, Max De Pree was the CEO of Herman Miller, a pioneering furniture company that, at times, went through difficult periods. During those, De Pree led firmly with a mixture of deeply rooted Christian values, extraordinary personal commitment and closeness to every employee, and a professed ‘servant ethos’. It paid off. Loyalty was very high, both in bad times and better times.

I am told that he was deeply involved in the finding of his successor. You would have thought that whoever went to sit on De Pree’s chair (and the company creators of the Aeron chair know a thing or two about sitting!) would have exhibited similar values and behaviours. The reality was that the first post-De Pree CEO was fired by the Herman Miller family and the second in command resigned. Although I don’t claim to know the whole story, there was something there about an incredible legacy-fiasco that makes you think about the mechanisms that some leaders use to establish their own succession. I always draw people’s attention to a De Pree syndrome!

There is also a form of prostituted legacy that is very toxic. It happens when the leader projects himself above the judgement of the current organisation (followers), dismissing that judgement as less relevant than the one that ‘history’ will provide. The ‘history-will-judge-me’ type of leader exhibits a great deal of arrogance by assuming that his greatness can only be understood by people in the distance. This assumption of man-or-woman-of-history, a history-maker, de facto closes the doors to a rational scrutiny today. Many political leaders see themselves in that way; some clearly articulate it, like British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. At least this has the benefit of honesty with the consequent transparency of the dimensions of the ego.

Leadership legacy

2008-03-13T16:37:00.002Z

A leader can certainly be judged by his legacy. I usually ask people in my seminars to describe how they would prefer to be remembered as leaders. I do that as part of something broader that I call ‘The Pub Test’ (living in England, I simply must refer to this pillar of social intercourse.) Ten years from now there is a reunion of this leadership team. Most of them left the organisation a while ago. What would be the language, the theme of conver-sation and the description of what was left behind? Here is a typical output example of this exercise:

The 2016 Reunion – Pub Test

The company itself

There were ‘opportunities’…

Learning experience

Innovation, chance to influence

Progressive environment

Our divisions, our own teams

Winning attitudes

High expectations, high rewards

Opportunities for people’s development

Influencing corporate

Risk taking

Source of knowledge to our customers

Cross-functionality as way of life

We as management

Action and decisions

Influencing beyond our own R&D function

Flexible, driving on change

Diversity paid off

Acknowledged stretch

Great opportunities for personal and professional development

Me/You

Trying

Achiever

Flexible

‘changed something’

Created a work environment

It doesn’t have to be a very sophisticated output, but when you start asking people about legacy and questions about ‘ten years from now’, what starts as a light exercise usually ends up giving a solid view of the current values and beliefs. It definitely says a lot about (the visions of leadership in) a particular group. Indeed, the ‘proof’ of the values is the legacy. The legacy becomes the inexcusable window to what leadership was about.

You can lead an organisation and leave behind an increase in market share of 4.5% and a P/E ratio the joy of stock analysts. You can lead an organisation and leave behind a great behavioural fabric that attracts talent. You can lead an organisation and leave behind significant collective eldership capabilities. You can also lead an organisation and leave behind the shadow of your ego as big as a cathedral. You can leave nothing. You can lead misery. You can lead joy. Or combinations thereof!

Bowling regardless?

2008-03-11T22:06:00.000Z

Putman’s work made me think that perhaps many corporations these days have a single objective: bowling. That is: keep moving, reaching targets and objectives, increasing the return on investment and pleasing shareholders, whatever it takes, whether their people do so bowling alone or in a league. Don’t get me wrong, for many this is what companies are for. But it is precisely this ‘bowling, regardless’ - whether alone, in groups, in teams or otherwise - that should worry leaders who are interested in the building of social capital.

If Putman is right and his findings could be extrapolated to the nine-to-five world, then, companies that truly profess a ‘bowling regardless’ philosophy should be in trouble in the long run. They risk losing the precious wealth of ‘associability’, the voluntary association of individuals in order to obtain a collective gain above the individual gain. A corporation of loners would be the equivalent of Putman’s ‘nation of loners’ and it would be equally dangerous because of its false appearance of ‘league-bowling’. As leader-builder you need to decide what kind of bowling you want!

The third component of the organisation’s I.Q. assets is architectural capital. This has to do with ‘ways of doing’ and ‘ways of being organised’. I explore some of these aspects in my book The Leader with Seven Faces in the face ’How you do it’.

The leader-builder-architect creates environments where collective I.Q. grows. He is a leader of tangible and intangible assets and the houses he built can be seen as his legacy. Which I will talk about in my next post.

Leandro Herrero keynote speaker at the eyeforpharma Sales Force Effectiveness Europe conference 2008

2008-03-07T04:35:00.001Z

Leandro Herrero - a leading organisational consultant and CEO of The Chalfont Project Ltd (www.thechalfontproject.com) – will be a keynote speaker at eyeforpharma’s 6^th Annual Pharma Conference - Sales Force Effectiveness Europe 2008 in Barcelona.

Dr Leandro Herrero, founder and CEO of The Chalfont Project Ltd (www.thechalfontproject.com) – an international firm of organisational consultants - will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming eyeforpharma Sales Force Effectiveness Europe Conference 2008.

Dr Herrero will address conference attendees on April 2^nd 2008 during his keynote speech, entitled: Pharma SFE 2.0 – How to go beyond ‘more-of-the-same’ processes, IT, and standard solutions and engage in true business transformation’.

In his speech, he will discuss the following:

Five key transformations still on the to-do list:how to jump from ‘me-too’ evolution to true organisational leadership
Overcoming the pharma change management motto: ‘Change is great, you go first’
‘The emperor has no clothes’ and your CRM has no customers: is customer-centrism in pharma a myth?
Seven deadly fallacies in pharma SFE: how business transformation is impaired by disconnected structures, processes and behaviours

He will also touch on further transformations of Sales Force Effectiveness models, with focus on new Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies that have the potential to redesign organisational cultures.

A book signing has been scheduled for Dr Leandro Herrero at lunchtime on 2^nd April, immediately following his address. Attendees will have the opportunity for an informal conversation with Dr. Herrero and signed copies of all his books will be available for purchase.

Dr Leandro Herrero practised as a psychiatrist for more than fifteen years before taking up senior management positions in several leading companies, both in the UK and the US. He is founder and CEO of The Chalfont Project Ltd, an international firm of organisational consultants. Taking advantage of his behavioural sciences background, coupled with his hands-on business experience, he works with organisations of many kinds on structural and behavioural change, leadership and human collaboration. He has published several books, among which The Leader with Seven Faces, Viral Change and New Leaders Wanted (www.meetingminds.com).

The Chalfont Project Ltd (www.thechalfontproject.com) is an international consulting firm of organisation architects with a long-standing presence in the bio-pharmaceutical industry.

The eyeforpharma 6^th Annual Pharma Conference - Sales Force Effectiveness Europe 2008 is an in-depth exploration of the latest strategies, tools and best practices to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales force. The eyeforpharma Sales Force Effectiveness Europe conference will take place at the CCIB, Rambla Prim 1-17, 08019 Barcelona, Spain from Wednesday 2^nd April 2008 through to Friday 4^th April 2008. Mention ‘SPK08’ as a discount code and receive a discount of €550.00 of the standard registration price when you register here.

Leandro Herrero to host workshop at the eyeforpharma Sales Force Effectiveness Europe conference 2008

2008-03-07T04:20:00.003Z

Leandro Herrero - a leading organisational consultant and CEO of The Chalfont Project Ltd (www.thechalfontproject.com) – will be hosting a workshop at eyeforpharma’s 6^th Annual Pharma Conference - Sales Force Effectiveness Europe 2008 in Barcelona.

Leandro Herrero, founder and CEO of The Chalfont Project Ltd (www.thechalfontproject.com) – an international firm of organisational consultants - will be hosting a workshop at the upcoming eyeforpharma Sales Force Effectiveness Europe Conference 2008. Dr Herrero will be addressing pharmaceutical industry experts and innovators from all over the world, focussing on how to improve Sales Force Effectiveness through Behavioural Change the Viral Change way.

Dr Herrero has personally led multiple organisational and cultural changes by applying the Viral Change^TM-way, which is described in his book Viral Change: the alternative to slow, painful and unsuccessful management of change in organisations (meetingminds, December 2006)

“Viral Change as a form of management of change is completely different from the conventional way,” Dr Herrero says. “It represents a truly new way of producing and sustaining changes. In Viral Change mode, a small set of behaviours, spread by a small number of internal activists, propagated like an internal infection of new ideas or routines creates long-lasting, faster and sustainable real change. Viral Change is closer to the dynamics of fashions, fads and infections than to standard management practices. Through Viral Change, the leader’s goal is to create an internal epidemic of success!”

A book signing has been scheduled for Dr Leandro Herrero at lunchtime on 2^nd April, immediately following his keynote address. Attendees will have the opportunity for an informal conversation with Dr. Herrero and signed copies of all his books will be available for purchase following both his keynote address and the workshop.

The Chalfont Project Ltd (www.thechalfontproject.com) is an international consulting firm of organisation architects with a long-standing presence in the bio-pharmaceutical industry.

Disruptive Ideas achieve bigger results

2008-03-07T04:19:00.001Z

Disruptive Ideas – the forthcoming new book by Leandro Herrero – shows organisations that all you need is a small set of disruptive ideas or powerful rules to create big impact.

In a time when organisations simultaneously run multiple corporate initiatives and large change programmes, Disruptive Ideas tells us that - contrary to the collective mindset that says that big problems need big solutions – all you need is a small set of powerful rules to create big cultural change.

In his previous book, Viral Change™, Leandro Herrero described how a small set of behaviours, spread by a small number of people could create sustainable change. In Disruptive Ideas, the follow-up book to Viral Change™, the author suggests a menu of 10 ‘structures’, 10 ‘processes’ and 10 ‘behaviours’ that have the power to transform any organisation of any size.

These 30 disruptive ideas can be implemented at any time and at almost no cost and what’s more...you don’t even need them all. But their compound effect – the 10+10+10 maths - will be more powerful than vast corporate programmes with dozens of objectives and efficiency targets.

This book will appeal to people at different levels of management or leadership, who want to reshape their culture by enhancing working practices and in general aim at greater organisational effectiveness. Its practical nature will appeal to all who want to implement key ideas – some of them contrarian or counterintuitive - that have the power to transform the organisation without having to embark upon a massive change management programme.

Leandro Herrero was a practicing psychiatrist for many years before holding senior leadership positions in top league business organisations. He is currently CEO of The Chalfont Project Ltd, an international group of organisational consultants, which he co-founded. His previous books include The Leader with Seven Faces, Viral Change and New Leaders Wanted – Now Hiring!, also published by meetingminds.

Disruptive Ideas, 10+10+10=1000: the maths of Viral Change that transform organisations
by Leandro Herrero
meetingminds, April 2008
£18.50/US $26.00, Paperback, 300 pages - ISBN: 978-1-905776-04-7
Available to pre-order at: www.waterstones.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, www.meetingminds.com and many other (online) bookshops and outlets.

Creating associability

2008-03-06T17:49:00.003Z

If these ‘organisations within the organisation’ do exist (in the way the literature points to them), do they matter anyway? I suggest they do. The condition of ‘associability’ is perhaps one of the main sources of the so called ‘social capital’ of the firm. It is worth distinguishing between ‘associability’ and ‘sociability’. Whilst ‘sociability’ has to do with the universal propensity to socialise, ‘associability’ is defined by the ‘willingness and ability of individuals to subordinate personal goals and associated actions to collective goals and actions’. In other words, a sociable environment where people meet, discuss, interact and interchange communication is a prerequisite for ‘associability’, but does not necessarily lead to it; to the enormous added value of the ‘association’.

The social capital of the firm is based upon internal and external relationships. It produces mutual benefits, for the individual and for the organisation itself. It is an asset different from other forms of capital such as bricks-and-mortar (physical capital) or knowledge and technical ability of the individuals (human capital). As an asset, it must be managed like other types of capital. Volatile, short-term or superficial relationships will invariably also generate volatile and ephemeral social capital, or a so-called ‘low social capital environment’. In these organisations, any form of leadership appeal for collective goals is a contradiction in terms. Individuals may get on with their jobs (as in their ‘job descriptions’), and even do them well, but they may not be interested in anything else, certainly not in any form of collective collaboration that, in most cases, entails ‘going the extra mile’, beyond formal responsibilities. And it is in those circumstances where the real added value is generated and a real difference is made.

Robert Putman - a political scientist who has researched American social habits - discovered that, progressively, people are less inclined to join in collective activities, engage in communitarian projects, give money to charity etc. In other words, less donations, less voluntary work, less voting is converting American society – he says - into ‘a nation of loners’, where - and here’s the metaphor - ‘bowling alone’ has replaced league bowling (See his book Bowling Alone).

Putman also refers to the concept of ‘social capital’ which he defines as ‘connections between individuals, social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arises from them‘. When social capital is diminishing, something precious in the fabric of the civil society is disappearing.

Is there a contradiction between Putman’s findings in a society that, to him, is composed of members ‘bowling alone’ and organisational life in that same society, where a constant sermon about ‘league bowling’ (we are a team, we work as a team etc.) seems to dominate?

Is it possible that there are two societies: the nine-to-five of ‘bowling together’ and the five-to-nine and weekends of ‘bowling alone’? Is Putman - by the very nature of his target research - ignoring that (professional) people spend most of their time ‘at work’, and therefore, bowling with others in the nine-to-five teamocracy? Are we in a schizophrenic society? At the cynical end of the questions, could Putman be right and his ‘bowling alone theory’ be extended to the nine-to-five world? In other words, is the bowling together in the teamocracy just a superficial appearance whilst in the individual’s heart he is still bowling alone?

Leading the organisation you can’t see

2008-03-04T17:45:00.002Z

Stuart Kauffman, of the Santa Fe Institute (a world centre for the study of complexity), explains some of the mechanisms in the generation of networks in a metaphor about ‘buttons and threads’ (In his book At home in the Universe). Scatter 20 buttons on a table, randomly choose two, connect them with threads and put them back. Repeat and repeat. At the beginning you are likely to choose buttons that are unconnected and that you have not picked up before, but, after a while, you will start picking up at random buttons that were already connected. Clusters of connected buttons will emerge.

A form of ‘stable system’ has been created from an apparently chaotic and random interaction. At the mid-point of this journey, when the ratio of threads to buttons is 0.5, the system experiences a ‘phase transition’ or a sudden change in the size of the largest connected cluster. Suddenly, you realise that you have a ‘visible mass’ in front of you. This is the ‘transition point’ when, for example, water freezes into ice.

Kauffman explains via simulation how, in a similar way, the ‘interactions’ of the total number of human genes gravitate to a smaller number of ‘systems’. This is a number that - regardless of whether you are dealing with buttons and threads, genes, or any set of ‘units’ - tends to be pretty constant, roughly the square root of the number of original units. In the case of genes-to-cells, all the potential ‘gene interactions’ (for lack of a better way to describe them) do not generate a chaotic number of ‘clusters’: there is a definite number of known different types of cells in the human body.

The progression of genes-to-cells follows Kaufmann’s ‘order for free’ mathematics, as in the buttons and threads case. It’s a journey from chaos to stability, from something that seems like random or chaotic interactions to some sort of stable system: the ice from the water, the cells from the genes. Chaos and random connections do not seem to produce more chaos (which can be a consolation in one’s life).

What does this have to do with organisations? Quite a lot... Individuals in organisations establish networks of interactions and communications. Some of them are ‘official’ and ‘designed’: teams, task forces, committees etc. It is the teamocracy part. But more interesting are the ones that may be formed like Kaufmanns’s buttons: emergent clusters of individuals, not designed by the boss, but ‘self-generated’ by the interactions between them.

The literature describing ‘non-designed’ groups or associations inside the firm has become more and more solid in recent years. Self-managed teams are often interpreted in terms of semi-spontaneous associations that don’t need a formal boss to achieve their objectives. The largely fallen-from-grace ‘knowledge management’ movement has created the term ‘communities of practices’ to describe networks of individuals linked by a common objective or interest (including the finding of solutions to an organisational problem). People following the systems approach and the concept of ‘the learning organisation’, tend to refer to ‘networks of commitment’ with more emphasis on the mobilisation of motivation and energy in the organisation. ‘Emergent teams’ is another generic term frequently used. More on the spontaneity side, ‘hot groups’ have been described as mobilisation of individuals with common interests and drivers of real organisational creativity. Finally, ‘TeamNets’ have been introduced in the UK as a ‘way of encouraging voluntary relationships in team formation, information exchange and problem solving’.

All the above are examples of the richness of internal relationships within the organisation, a form of capital waiting to be unleashed and constituting part of the social capital of the firm. The leader-architect role is one of facilitating, enhancing, promoting and fostering relationships. He has two choices: collaboration by design (teams, task forces) and emergent collaboration. The second is much scarier to lead!

What do all those ‘emergent groups’ have in common? Despite the different labels, probably a lot. For a start, they live outside the organisation chart with different degrees of both independence and spontaneous formation. It may be that, like in Kaufman’s buttons, they are somehow invisible at the beginning of their life and it is not until some level of interaction has been reached that they manifest themselves as a proper system. Leaders can no longer ignore ‘the invisible world’!

Leadership and Social Capital

2008-03-01T04:46:00.002Z

The second form of capital in the organisational I.Q. is social capital. This is the asset created by relationships, both internal and external, both in quantity and quality. The modern business organisation of today has a web of external connections. Alliances, partnerships, joint-ventures,etc. are common. The web may be so vast that it is bound to contain ‘nodes’ where competitors sit. Companies may find themselves competing and collaborating at the same time. It has been called co-opetition. Internally, organisations are rich in connections and relationships but most of the time they are ignorant, focusing only on a relatively small part of human collaboration models: the teams. I have called the current business organisation a teamocracy because this model of collaboration has become coterminous with ‘organisation’.

In today’s business organisation, the organisation chart is dead. The job description is dead. But, as of Mark Twain’s, the death of the structure may have been grossly exaggerated. For clues, see Biology.

Like biological organisms, business organisations are in continuous adaptation to stimuli (external and internal environments), and must change and evolve accordingly. Biological organisms do not understand one year budget cycles, quarterly reporting on activity, one-off post-retreat reorganisations, static organisation charts, two-page-forever job descriptions, or annual objectives set up in January and assessed in December. They grow, generate antibodies, move, reproduce, get smaller or bigger, and die at different paces and rhythms.

Their ‘ultimate structure’ is created by their functionality “The function creates the organ”, I learnt from my anatomy teacher. Also, they can not be fully explained without reference to another system to which they belong or are connected to. In fact, they are complex systems that are better understood through the glasses of complexity theory.

Organisations may be just the same. What happens inside them can’t be tracked by the static organisation chart and the job description manual. The different components (people, groups, teams, networks of influence, etc.) are linked by an information flow which is far from static. The organisation is an information network. Leaders today need to understand this. Organisation-chart-management - fiddling around with reporting, solid lines, dotted lines, any combination - is like grammar. It has to be right. But leaders should play their role in literature. Mistaking one for the other is not a good sign of leadership. Let’s take a further look at this property of the organisation to create its own connections, because if this is true, then leaders have to be aware and also lead this ‘more invisible part’.

The investors metaphor

2008-02-25T17:20:00.001Z

Hosting talent is developing the organisation’s human capital. One of the roles of the leaders-architects is to build good hosts and hubs of something that they do not own: the individual’s talent. Nobody has put it better than Thomas O. Davenport with his ‘investor metaphor’ of workers (in his book Human Capital). Employees were once treated as ‘cost’, then as ‘most valuable assets’ and now they should be seen – he says- as investors, that is, investors of their own human capital. It is a very interesting concept from the leadership perspective.

What do you do when you invest? You go and find a place where your capital is going to grow! At the end of the year, or whatever other period, you are going to compare what you put in and what you got out! It follows that people should go and work at places where their human capital is going to grow, and where, in the process, it’s being used by the organisation. In this model, leaders are more like investment fund managers, creating the conditions for the growth. As such, they should be measured by their ability to show the growth. And this is a tricky one because whilst we are good at managing tangible assets, we’re not necessarily that good at managing intangible ones. If your people are not sure about what ‘intangible’ means, use this:

A rich American lady visits the most famous hat maker in Paris. She sees a beautiful, exquisite, long ribbon and immediately falls in love. The hat maker takes the ribbon in his hands, does a few twists with it and creates a stunning hat. Brilliant! The lady grabs it immediately. “How much is it?” she asks. “Five thousand Euros”, the hat maker says. “Five thousand Euros!” the lady exclaims, “But, it’s just a ribbon!” “Madam”, the hat maker says, “the ribbon is free.”

Leadership and ‘home effects’

2008-02-14T19:02:00.003Z

In a previous post, I mentioned to you that leaders are architects and that there are 3 dimensions to their architecture. I’ve already focused on how they need to protect time and create space in my previous posts. Now, let’s look at how leaders build homes: the second dimension.

Leaders build ‘homes’. Leaders build organisational I.Q. which is a combination of three things:

Human Capital: the combination of individual talents, assets that the company does not possess but hosts. The organisation is like an investment bank using other people’s talent
Social capital: the quantity and quality of relationships between people internally and externally and between the organisation and other organisations.
Architectural capital: the assets developed and grown from (a) a particular ‘way of doing things’ and (b) a particular way of being organised.

The no-war on talent
In 1997, McKinsey-consultants coined the term ‘war on talent’ to describe the fight between corporations over the attraction of good human capital. Talent is a key asset, not a commodity, so there must be a war to win it for the company. There were articles and more articles and a book… It took a few years for somebody to shine a different light on the problem and it was Prof Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University who did it. I learnt of this through an intriguing article in the Financial Times in 2001 with the title The futile war on talent. After all the noise made about the war, to have the FT saying there wasn’t one, or that it was futile, deserved a bit of attention.

The thesis was very simple. All this business about a war on talent distracts people from focusing on the talent inside their organisations. By making so much noise about a talent that seems to be ‘out there’ and for which organisations are murdering each other, we lose sight of our own internal talent pool. The issue, the article put forward, was how to host talent (whether home-grown or attracted) not how to grab it from some sort of extra-terrestrial place.

Intrapreneurs at the gates

2008-02-07T22:57:00.000Z

I bring this topic here as an example of leader’s architecture designed to create space and place for people. And this is far from altruistic. It is an example most applicable to medium or large organisations but the principles would be more universally valid. I am talking here about self-contained, entrepreneurial ‘business units’ within a large organisation that can be designed to take advantage of the large company context, but without its bureaucratic liability, and with the attraction of the small ‘independent’ organisation. They live a symbiotic life with the company, and somewhere else I have called them ‘SymBUnits’, that is symbiotic business units. They are inside the firm. Individuals don’t have to open the gates and go… but they are different from the rest. And here are the differences:

Protected boundaries. The borders of the unit, the group of individuals or the ‘special team’, must be protected (by management) but those borders may be permeable. Actually, they may even look more like Monaco borders than Heathrow borders. When in Monte Carlo, you have to look hard to see any visible difference from France other than the police hats. But they have their own police, banking system, laws and government. Some of these groups of entrepreneurs-inside-the-gates may be similar, separated more by an osmotic membrane than a rigid organisation chart. But don’t be fooled, accountability and clarity of goals will be there. Yes, some degree of ambiguity may be necessary, and this is not everybody’s cup of tea. These units need to be particularly good at stakeholder management and at nurturing their interfaces with the rest of the organisation. They may need resources in and out, part-time people lent from other parts of the company, and a mixture of secondments and fixed headcount, all in one. Today’s structure may look different tomorrow. They may represent a bit of a moving target for HR departments! But the leadership needs to protect that permeability and those semi-invisible borders to facilitate a sense of identity.

Clear, well-defined output intent. These groups must have a clear idea of what they are going to deliver in return for their protected uniqueness. Of course, their delivery must add value. Expectations must be clearly defined and those expectations must be aligned with their special charter, which, incidentally, must be well documented and shared.

Operating model freedom. These units must be free to operate in a different way from the rest of the organisation. Within the agreed charter and their permeable boundaries, they must have protected freedom to establish their own processes and sit outside the homogeneity of the rest of the firm. They make their own rules. They should not be forced to follow the same systems and procedures as anybody else. If there is a massive, corporate, overall project management system with defined reporting and control, for example, they must be allowed to opt out if it’s not suitable. There is no point to give them the borders, charters and protection and pretend that they will behave like anybody else. If project teams report monthly to management, these units may want to do it weekly or quarterly. That can be agreed upfront, of course, but the whole point of having them is that they can enjoy a more agile, fast-track, tailored way of doing things. This is particularly worrying to command and control bosses.

Resource control. Within the agreed framework, these intrapreneurial groups must fully control their allocated resources, with direct visible accountability of their use. They must be free to outsource if needed. They should be allowed to spend the money in the way they need, not the way the rest of the organisation does. Scary again, but, yet, what’s the point of having them following the same rules? At this point of my presentation, I usually get things such as: “Oh my God, this is crazy, a recipe for chaos.” But it is not, if you trust them enough to allow their set-up.

Magnet for talent. These ‘units’ must by design be magnets for talent inside the firm (and outside). They must exhibit an ability to seduce and attract the best hearts and minds. These units must pride themselves to become ‘the place to be’, a prestige, elite space where growing intellectual capital is as easy as growing mushrooms (in places where mushrooms grow!) Inevitably, you are creating some sort of internal competition, but this is healthy. The role of other parts of the organisation is to become ‘the place to be’ themselves as well, not to complain about unfair treatment or differentiation. There is no law that says that you have to run parts of the organisation that must be defined as ‘the places not to be’. If there are lousy processes and boring work, these have been created by man. Man can change that.

High Brokerage. Although brokerage is part of normal leadership, these ‘units’ must be exquisite at that capability, They will have to constantly negotiate with other parts of the organisation to protect their boundaries, use ad hoc resources, and make trade-offs. Their leader is their Master Broker. The leader of these units must be unapologetically contagious in his or her energy, determination and passion. Passion is not necessarily jumping in the corridor singing and clapping – business passion is a deep belief in what one is doing (when in doubt, look at your entrepreneur friends who left, passing through those open gates).

Identity and destiny. And now it gets even more philosophical (and scarier for standard managers). These units must have a sense of ‘any-size-d’ destiny, as I mentioned in chapter 1. I don’t mind whether you use a big D or small d, but sense of destiny means that they share a good awareness of their potential unique impact on the organisation. They want to be remembered as ‘the ones who did such and such, who developed that product, who created that new idea, who commercialised that opportunity, etc’. People in these intrapreneurial cells have a high sense of belonging. The unit is their reference place. They are aware of their elite status and all the benefits and the liabilities associated with it.

Knowledge incubation. These units thrive on knowledge creation, sharing and transfer. They invest heavily on training and development of their people on anything that is necessary even if it’s not part of the training portfolio available in the company. If somebody needs to be trained on something specific that is desperately needed, here you go, here is the ticket and the credit card, go and get it. They take intellectual leadership seriously and pay a lot of attention to their own recycling of skills and capabilities. Incidentally, they control their training budget, the one that usually gets cut around September time when the company needs to make some ‘savings to compensate for the lower than expected sales in Singapore’ and/or the ‘unfavourable currency conversion’.

Urgency ethos.They have a culture sense of urgency. Sense of urgency is not synonymous of all-fast-at-any-cost. They have a motto: “Life is short”. They protect their ‘time to think’ but then, it’s all go. They politely answer the concerns about quality by professing quality as a given, as a ‘pass’, as a baseline, not as an aim in itself. Whilst other people produce quality ideas, quality products, quality services and quality goods for the sake of quality, they produce them for the sake of the output itself, their added value, which just happens to have high quality. Quality is a given, slowness is not negotiable. As I mentioned in the previous chapter - referring to ‘the tyranny of the or’- many people around them say that it’s one or the other, quality or speed, one compromises the other, they can’t have it both ways. To which they respond, “Watch me!”

Emergent architecture. Over time, the shape of the SymBUnits, intrapreneurial units, in-venture groups or whatever you may choose to call them, may change. The composition of members, nature of their network, size of the operation, etc. may evolve. However, the foundations remain.

You have noticed that I have been calling these groups differently all the time. This is by design because it is not a question of creating a new ‘theory of the organisation’ or ‘a new model’ but applying the principles no matter what form, shape or label. Structural evolution in these groups follows more of a self-organising path than a designed plan. Identity remains high all the time, but the borders of those Monacos may look like a moving target.

The old Arab choice between having enemies inside the tent but pissing out (annoying) or having them outside the tent but pissing in (more annoying), also applies here. Choosing between all those about-to-leave people (going outside the tent and eventually pissing in) and creating an inside-the-tent strategy (definitely far more hygienic) that keeps talent in the organisation… Well, it’s your choice. You will also introduce healthy internal competition. These ‘structures’ are ideal for internal ventures, fast-track development projects, expansions into new fields, special projects, one-stop problem solving ‘teams’, internal product incubators, hosts for different product-development life cycles inside the same organisation, or just intrapreneurial pockets retaining talent.

I am told that on the door of a GE facility in India there is a sign: ‘Trespassers will be recruited’. You as leader should have an equivalent sign for your organisation, perhaps something along the lines of ‘Leavers will be seduced and recruited again.’

100K investment lost

2008-02-01T05:12:00.000Z

It has always surprised me. Corporations are resigned to let their best entrepreneurs go on the grounds that it is normal for those people to want to exit corporate life. They are not good at dealing with many practices and procedures, hate too much reporting, need an agile ‘entrepreneurial environment’, want to be more free, to make decisions that matter and to feel that they can see the differences they make. So they have to go! Great! So we acknowledge that rigidity, over-reporting, lousy decisions and lack of freedom are an inevitable part of corporate life.

If a £2,000 laptop is missing from the office, we will launch an investigation. If an entrepreneur leaves to create his own show because he can’t stand the constraints of the company, we call it a ‘natural fact of life’. I heard this comment many years ago and it’s still valid today. How interesting! Instead of fixing the internal rigidity problems we prefer to let human capital go in search of a more motivating environment. We will even have a party to say goodbye and celebrate the loss. Accountants will be happier because they have just made a saving on the balance sheet. It’s the surreal world of management: let somebody go and you’ll save money.

It is probably impossible to pretend that the entire culture, systems and processes of a medium-sized or big company changes overnight to accommodate for entrepreneurial groups on the inside, but can we do anything about it? Yes, we can! Provided that the leadership is not too scared to ‘allow’ different operating structures to cohabit within the firm, that there is no obsession with uniformity of systems and that the focus is to make the most of those entrepreneurs at the gates (that is, in this case, entrepreneurs about to get out), there are definitely ways.

And I’ll look into that more in detail in my next post.

But I never heard the builders!

2008-01-30T05:04:00.000Z

Space is not necessarily about solitude, as I said before. Constantine P. Cavafy, a poet who died in 1933, wrote a little poem called Walls. This is how it goes:

Walls

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind, because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.

Many people in our organisations reach late age surrounded by walls (their own career pathways, the single track pursuit of success, the 365/24/7 busy-ness as leader), only to realise that there are walls when it is too late. Those people will shout, “But I never heard the builders! I was doing my emails on my Blackberry and there was nothing in Outlook about any walls of any kind. Did I miss a meeting about walls? What’s happened to me? Julia! (calling his last PA) Julia!” Julia can’t answer. She is not deaf but those walls are so thick!

►Those who hear the builders

People who leave an organisation do so for a variety of reasons. One of them is sometimes the feeling that ‘the walls’ are getting thicker and taller. They realise at some point that their personal or professional development requires that they push themselves outside those walls. In some cases, it means the next job, next context. In many cases, it means to start a business on their own. In the last decades, there has been an explosion of people ‘going solo’, ‘liberating themselves’ from corporate life, ‘becoming their own boss’, etc. This has been particularly noticeable in the US. There is a healthy, entrepreneurial, adventurous side of this that fits very well in the traditional ‘American dream’, in whatever version there is these days. But there is also a sad side for ‘the company’.

And I will discuss that a bit more in my next post.

Sitting quietly alone

2008-01-25T19:59:00.000Z

The French philosopher Pascal said that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”. It is a valid statement today. Modern life, organisational life, business life is not terribly conducive to letting ourselves be with ourselves ‘in a room alone’. But the need to find that ‘lost space’ is greater than ever.

All this stuff about psychological spaces and protection of time will also sound incredible stupid to the always-on executive, the one who never switches off. As Michèle’s husband says, this kind of leader and the company’s server are a continuum via a wireless umbilical cord recently called, amongst other names, Blackberry.

As leader, or leader-to-be, or leader in development…. you should look into all these issues seriously. Some people take a view that it is simply logistics, a question of good time management. Other people however tend to think that there is a more fundamental problem behind the pervasive and ubiquitous busy-ness of executive life.

There is little question that concepts of reality are different depending on what view you take. And - as I said in the introduction of my book Leader with Seven Faces and repeat in my Leadership seminars - the answers to these questions are personal. Unfortunately, the consequences of the answers are not.

As a leader who builds organisations (ideas projects, common purpose around a vision), how you choose to answer matters. And not only to you but to everybody else depending on you. Not a minor burden.

If you want to read more about leadership or want to continue reading from the above, you can read it all in my book The Leader with Seven Faces: finding your own ways to practice leadership in today’s organization.

You can also read some of the resources on leadership posted on the left or contact us for more information.