The Leading Bold Change Workshops are nearly sold out but don’t despair – we are doing it again in October 2010. Many Australian organisations have chosen to implement this remarkable program into their entire organisation through the very cost effective Train the Trainer program while others are utilising our fun filled trainers to present the workshop in-house.
Today we launched the new promotional video which will soon be shown world-wide to promote the product. Learn more about our famous Antartic colony and how they can assist you to identify changes required in your organisation or how to implement a proven strategy to make change successful.
To be involved in this fantastic leading change process for your organisation call us now on +61 8 8272 9854 and let us show you a proven methodology to make change stick whilst creating leaders at all levels.
Richard Branson talks to TED's Chris Anderson about the ups and the downs of his career, from his multibillionaire success to his multiple near-death experiences -- and reveals some of his (very surprising) motivations.
Agency theorist Michael Jensen has a very clever view about qualitative performance assessment. He notes that subordinates generally object to receiving qualitative performance feedback from their superior, especially if it is at all negative. They typically are dismissive of the qualitative feedback and ask for the feedback to be on a quantitative basis only.
Jensen's counter-intuitive advice to the superior is not to apologize for the qualitative nature of the feedback but rather to tell the subordinate that if he could actually be evaluated using purely quantitative measures, his job should be outsourced. That is because if everything important about his work could be defined quantitatively, it would be easy and more efficient to design a contract with clearly defined service level agreements with an outsourced provider.
What this means is that a smart subordinate should actually want the relationship with the firm to be based at least in some part on things that are qualitative — that require judgment and interpretation because these are what makes it necessary and optimal for him to be an actual part of the firm. A quantitatively based relationship is a shallow one while one that has an important qualitative dimension is a deeper one.
The same logic applies to a firm's relationships with customers. If our understanding of customers is based entirely on quantitative analysis, we will have a shallow rather than deep relationship with them.
This runs against the prevailing view of customer understanding. Quantitative customer analysis with a large statistically significant sample and multiple choice questions that enable quantitative analysis of the answers is deemed 'rigorous'. Qualitative customer research that uses small samples and conversational and/or observational approaches is considered by many to be lax and/or shoddy — and certainly unscientific.
The former represents an interesting definition of rigor. It is rigorous from a numerical statistical perspective. But note what we have to give up in order to acquire this 'rigor'. It means that our words have to be used, not the respondents' words.
For example: "How important on a scale from 1 to 5 is reputation for thorough after-sale service to your purchase decision?" As research tool designers, we know what we mean by 'reputation', 'thorough', 'service' and 'purchase decision'. And we know what we mean by 1 through 5. And we will have an idea of what the model respondent means by these terms if we did rigorous pre-testing of the instrument with a customer sample.
As a management researcher, I’ve had the opportunity to peer inside a lot of organizations. In doing so, I’ve learned that most big companies are pretty much the same, at least when it comes to the way they’re managed. The rituals of goal-setting, planning, budgeting and performance appraisal differ only slightly from firm to firm. There’s even less variety in the architecture of power. Hierarchical authority structures, top-down leadership appointments and order-following employees have come to nearly every organization I’ve studied—nearly. One amazing exception is W.L. Gore & Associates. Known mostly for its Gore-Tex range of high-performance fabrics, the company makes more than 1,000 products and employs 9,000 in 50 locations around the world. Wherever it operates, Gore is frequently ranked as one of the best possible places to work.
I first visited Gore when I was doing research for “The Future of Management.” My friends at Fast Company had labeled it as the world’s most innovative company, so I thought I should learn more. That first visit was weird, even disconcerting. I found virtually nothing at Gore that matched up with the management practices I had observed in hundreds of other companies—no titles, no bosses and no formal hierarchy. I felt like a surgeon who had opened up a patient who looked human, but turned out to be filled with wires and circuits. Yet as I got to know Gore, I realized I had this analogy was backwards. Gore was deeply human and by contrast, all those other companies I had studied were cyborgs. Gore’s management model seemed wacky only because I had grown accustomed to the inhuman practices that predominated in most other companies.
Fact is, Gore’s progressive management model has been ahead of its time for more than half a century, ever since the company was founded in 1958 by Wilbert (Bill) L. Gore, a chemical engineer who left DuPont with the goal of building a company where innovation was the main show rather than a sideshow. One measure of Gore’s innovation-fueled resilience: in 50 years it has never made a loss.
Despite having no EVPs, SVPs or even plain ol’ VPs, Gore does have a CEO. Terri Kelly got the job in 2005 in a peer-driven process. She joined Gore in 1983, after graduating summa cum laude from the University of Delaware with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. During her career at Gore she has exercised her considerable leadership gifts in a broad array of critical roles.
Recently, I met up with Terri in Northern California, and asked her to take me—and you—on a deep dive into Gore’s wonderfully strange (and strangely wonderful) management practices. This week: Part I of that interview.
Gary: What would be the most distinctive elements of Gore’s management model to an outsider?
Terri: First, we don’t want to operate in a hierarchy, where decisions have to make their way up to the top and then back down. We’re a lattice or a network, not a hierarchy, and associates can go directly to anyone in the organization to get what they need to be successful.
Second, we try to resist titles. We have a lot of people in responsible positions in the organization, but the whole notion of a title puts you in a box, and worse, it puts you in a position where you can assume you have authority to command others in the organization. So we resist this.
I came across this entry on Daniel Pink’s website. It is defiantly worth reading. Go to www.danpink.com to read all Pink’s entries.
Call someone a “liar,” and it’s clearly an insult. Call someone a “genius,” and it’s almost always praise. But how about calling someone a “perfectionist”? Is that a diss or a kiss?
The answer, it turns out, depends on what kind of perfectionist the person is. And that depends, in turn, on the person’s motivation.
According to research reported in this Miller-McCune article, perfectionism comes in two varieties: adaptive and maladaptive. And one of the key determinants of the type of perfectionism someone displays is whether the quest for perfection is “motivated from an inner urge or an outside push.”
If you’re driving hard because of your own desire for excellence, that can actually lead to greater satisfaction and psychological health. But if you’re pursuing perfection because of pressure from others — parents, bosses, peers — that’s likely to take you down the path of dissatisfaction and reduced well-being.
“Adaptive perfectionism is an internal standard for achievement,” researcher Robert Hill tells Miller-McCune. “Maladaptive perfectionism is an external concern – wondering what other people are going to think. It’s kind of a thinking habit: ‘I made a mistake there.’ ‘Someone will notice I didn’t do that right.’”
So go ahead and be a perfectionist. Just do it for yourself — and forget what others think.
Click here to find out more about Daniel Pink and his blog
Marcus Buckingham is a leadership expert, internationally renowned speaker and New York Times bestselling author of several books, including First, Break All the Rules; Now Discover Your Strengths and Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently. He’s the founder of TMBC, a management consulting company, and has been hailed as a visionary by corporations such as Toyota, Coca-Cola and Microsoft. He has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Larry King Live and been featured in major newspapers.
SUCCESS: What are the best ways for people to discover their strengths?
Marcus Buckingham: It’s ironic that your strengths can be so easy to overlook, because they’re clamoring for your attention in the most basic way: Using them makes you feel strong. All you have to do is teach yourself to pay attention. Try to be conscious of yourself and how you feel as you’re completing your day-to-day tasks. Most of the time, we’re so focused on getting our work done that we don’t really have time to notice how we feel about it. At the end of the day, we go home and tell our loved ones that it was a good day or a bad day, but we haven’t made the effort to notice why the day feels good or bad as it happens. When you make the conscious effort to notice yourself at work (or at play, for that matter), you will fi nd that you experience what I call “strong-moments” throughout your day—times when you feel invigorated, inquisitive, successful. Those moments are the best clues as to what your strengths are.
There’s also a simple acronym to help you recognize the signs of strength: SIGN. * S— Success: Do you feel a sense of accomplishment about finishing this task?
* I— Instinct: Do you instinctively look forward to this task?
* G— Growth: Are your synapses fi ring? Are you mentally focused?
* N— Needs: Does this task fulfill one of your needs? If you notice yourself feeling any of those feelings while doing a task, chances are that activity is one of your strengths.
I don't know how many times I've had the Fortune 500 presented to me as Exhibit A by those who argue that it's time to give up on a 20th–century American idea. Forget about building great companies that endure, they tell me. One technology pundit cornered me at a conference and deemed the whole premise absurd in today's world: “We live in an era when nothing can be built to last. Everything is in flux; nothing can sustain.” He invoked Joseph Schumpeter, the great economist who wrote about the “perennial gale of creative destruction” wherein technological change and visionary entrepreneurs give birth to new things that obliterate old things, only to see those new things become obliterated by the next generation.
His argument feels particularly sharp today. Bear Stearns disappeared over a weekend, after more than eight decades of growth to No. 156 on the Fortune 500. Citigroup traces its roots to City Bank of New York, founded the same year Napoleon marched to Moscow, which grew into a visionary global bank under mavericks like Walter Wriston and John Reed. Today Citigroup's CEO reports “unprecedented losses resulting from the sudden and severe deterioration in the U.S. subprime market”—a shock so severe that it overshadowed all of the company's other accomplishments. In 1907 Henry Ford proclaimed, “I will democratize the automobile,” and then made good on his promise. Today Ford Motor Co. fights to create a future for itself in the face of brutal global competition and the green revolution. Fifty–four of the Fortune 500 lost a combined $115 billion in 2007, an amount equal to the entire revenue of more than 20 Fortune 500 companies.
I've been through versions of the creative–destruction argument dozens of times, with smart, well–informed people. And one of their favorite arguments invokes the Fortune 500: If you examine the list over time, you find tremendous churn—the vast majority of those on the list 50 years ago being nowhere to be found on the current list. And, yes, the data do lend credence to the argument:
Of the 500 companies that appeared on the first list, in 1955, only 71 hold a place on the list today. (The 1955 list included industrial companies only, whereas today's list also includes service companies.)
Nearly 2,000 companies have appeared on the list since its inception, and most are long gone from it. Just because you make the list once guarantees nothing about your ability to endure.
Some of the most powerful companies on today's list—businesses like Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Dell, and Google—grew from zero to great upon entirely new technologies, bumping venerable old companies off the list. Robert Noyce invented the integrated circuit in 1958, three years after the first Fortune 500. Dozens of companies on this year's list did not even exist in 1955.
Some of the most celebrated companies in history no longer even appear on the 500, having fallen from great to good to gone from the list—companies like Scott Paper, Zenith, Rubbermaid, Chrysler, Teledyne, Warner Lambert, and Bethlehem Steel—most often because they capitulated their independence, but sometimes because they outright died
At TEDxUSC, David Logan talks about the five kinds of tribes that humans naturally form -- in schools, workplaces, even the driver's license bureau. By understanding our shared tribal tendencies, we can help lead each other to become better individual.
David Logan is a USC faculty member, best-selling author, and management consultant.
The Leading Bold Change Workshops are nearly sold out but don’t despair – we are doing it again in October 2010. Many Australian organisations have chosen to implement this...
Richard Branson talks to TED's Chris Anderson about the ups and the downs of his career, from his multibillionaire success to his multiple near-death experiences -- and reveals some...
by Roger Martin, Harvard Business Review Agency theorist Michael Jensen has a very clever view about qualitative performance assessment. He notes that subordinates generally object to receiving qualitative performance...
Sandra Bienkowski November 30, 2009
I don't know how many times I've had the Fortune 500 presented to me as Exhibit A by those who argue that it's time to give up on a 20th–century American idea. Forget about building great companies that endure, they tell me. One technology pundit cornered me at a conference and deemed the whole premise absurd in today's world: “We live in an era when nothing can be built to last. Everything is in flux; nothing can sustain.” He invoked Joseph Schumpeter, the great economist who wrote about the “perennial gale of creative destruction” wherein technological change and visionary entrepreneurs give birth to new things that obliterate old things, only to see those new things become obliterated by the next generation.