Leaders In London

So, to state the obvious, we’re still here, then. But, it did generate a wave of human energy, didn’t it, all the media coverage about what might happen when the particle accelerator at CERN was turned on this morning. Did you notice how much more ‘alive’ and animated people were/are when talking about it? There was a thrill attached to the minutely possible (or, as most scientists were saying, vanishingly impossible) chance that the mundane would suddenly .

(That’s a writer’s conceit - using the . as a sudden ’stop’ for impact. First used in the book 1066 And All That, which ends with the words “…and history came to a complete . “)

Apparently the first high speed clashes between particles won’t happen till October 25th or something, so we’ll go through it all again then. But, what interests me from our leadership perspective here is…What can you, as a leader, do to generate that frisson of energy about your organization; that sense of ‘buzz’, sense of aliveness? Leaders generate and channel energy in people; that’s your main job description.

There’s a line of thinking that says we sleepwalk through most of what we do; that the ‘highs’ people seek are a seeking after a sense of aliveness and alertness that the Hadron collider inadvertently generated today. Most organizations are like this, according to some organizational behaviourists. The routine, the process, the familiarity of the working day, dull our senses and our sense of the possibility.

What’s the alternative? The ‘conscious company’ is the phrase that has emerged in recent years to describe organizations with a sense of buzz, purpose, nimbleness, aliveness about them. So, let the Hadron collider human energy emission that took place this morning (European time) be a ‘wake up call’ for your leadership: what can you do as a leader to help generate the alertness, agility and buzz of energy that will turn your organization into a conscious company?

You could Google ‘conscious company’ for starters. And book your place at Leaders in London 2008, to soak up the learning there on how to make your organization more alive, focussed, purposeful and energetic. ‘Cos. here’s a clue: the world may not have ended today; but in an overcrowded world marketplace, with far too many suppliers, and tough trading conditions for the next year or more, organizations that haven’t woken up and injected some energy and ‘aliveness’ about them - become ‘conscious companies’ - won’t be around anyway.

Tim Clark sent me his book, Epic Change: How to Lead Change in the Global Age. I like it a lot. He points out what a lot of leaders and commentators fail to notice: that the leaders’ (plural on purpose) ability to draw out people’s discretionary efforts is more important in success than strategy or other issues that are usually assumed to be primary success factors.

I also like his other central point - that the role of leader(s) is largely one of energy management within an organization; generating, releasing and channeling people’s energy.

This brief extract is particularly relevant to leadership today:

Great results over time isn’t a mark of a great leader, it’s often a sign of a ‘Teflon’ leader

“I was more than a bit startled to hear a quartet of prominent leadership scholars recently declare that ’superior results over a sustained period of time is the ultimate mark of an authentic leader.’ My own research comes to a very different conclusion. What I find instead is a pattern in which capable leaders at every level are struggling with unremarkable results and are often checkered with failure. The leader who is able to move through a career with sustained results and uninterrupted success is the rare exception indeed.

“Often these are the leaders who are either not playing hard enough or gaming the system to select low-risk opportunities that are likely to return professional success. So-called Teflon leaders are more often those who have ridden market waves but successfully avoided down cycles.”

I guess now’s the time we find out.

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Martin Sorrell, CEO of the advertising and marketing group giant WPP, has been in the news recently , pouring resources into China. His reasoning is that if you are leading for growth, then you have to look to be where the growth will be. And it won’t be America. Sorrell spoke at Leaders in London for us last year and a clip is below, in which he talks about this strategy.

Of our 2008 speakers, Andy Cosslett, CEO of IHG, the hotels giant whose brands include Holiday Inn, is also expanding the company’s presence in China - spectacularly so. IHG already employs 32,000 people in China. It needed to recruit 20,000 more before the end of this year to keep up with its expansion plans.

Like all of us, IHG faces a war for talent in moving into new regions. So, they grow their own. They are building 22 IHG Academy sites in China to train local people and then recruit them. Twelve of the sites have been built already and thousands of local Chinese are trained to IHG standards in how to run a hotel and then employed each year. IHG’s future leaders within China will emerge from these new cohorts they are developing themselves.

So, to lead for growth in tough trading conditions, it seems you need to look East, not West. Are you facing the right way? And are you putting the resources in to get the results you will need? More from Martin Sorrell in the clip, below.