Leaders In London

According to Vijay Govindarajan, GE’s innovation guru and a profesor at Tuck Business School, everything you do falls into these three boxes:

1. Manage the present

2. Selectively forget the past

3. Create the future

Now, that’s a powerful mental formula to help you lead in fast-changing times. As a framework, it helps you continuously evolve your organization to keep up with fast-paced change.

We spend too much time on box 1., whereas strategy lives in boxes 2. and 3., he says.

Here’s a clip of VG, as he likes to be called, explaining the three boxes. You can learn in person from him, if you are quick (as time is running out) by reserving your place at Leaders in London (that link takes you to the event details).

Here’s the clip: Vijay Govindarajan explains the three things leaders have to do

The core brand proposition of the Crowne Plaza hotel chain is ‘the place to meet’. A while ago, I received a press release from IHG, Crowne Plaza’s owners, announcing the launch of newly-designed luxurious meeting rooms, with gadgets and tools to boost productivity in the meetings, and a meeting facilitator to ensure you have everything you need to make your business meeting go smoothly.

At the end of the press release was the kicker: these particular meeting rooms don’t exist in real life (though their specifications did mirror new real-life meeting rooms Crowne Plaza had just launched). The new rooms mentioned in the press release only exist in the virtual, online world, Second Life.

IHG had been watching where people were meeting, since that is Crowne Plaza’s core proposition. Large organizations had started organizing virtual meetings in Second Life.

So, instead of being blinkered by their existing offer – ‘We are a hotel chain operating in the real world, and that’s what we do’ – IHG extended Crowne Plaza’s proposition into a completely new world. Because that’s where its customers were starting to meet.

If you have a crystal clear understanding of your brand proposition and aren’t locked into ‘the way we’ve always done things’ – a prisoner of your corporate past – then you can take advantage of unexpected opportunities in tough trading environments that your competitors miss.

Andy Cosslett, Chief Executive of IHG, the biggest hotels group in the world by number of rooms, is coming to Leaders in London in a few weeks to share how to lead and grow through your corporate brands – and the people who deliver them.

And a nice dose of serendipity: Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life is also coming to talk to us, to help you capture emerging opportunities and increase market share at no or low cost – which is the smart way to lead in a downturn.

And if you want to market your way to survival in the downturn, who better to learn from than Philip Kotler, the founder of modern marketing, who is also presenting at Leaders in London.

Use this link to reserve your place if you haven’t already: Leaders in London

This is a provocative post just to get you thinking differently on a Tuesday morning…

There’s a new economics of capitalism. It’s been emerging for a while, but the clearing away of the weird world of financial derivatives that looked like the new capitalism - but has turned out not to be - has cleared the air.

Investment banks are almost no more (their financial model, it seems, doesn’t work…yet was seen as the engine of capitalism until a year or so ago).

So, let’s do what leaders are supposed to do, and look away from the slow motion car crash that is transfixing us all, and look to the edges to see what’s emerging.

And here it is. Here’s the one surprising thing that is moving to the heart of economic thinking. Here’s what Kofi Annan, who spoke at Leaders in London last year, calls “the single highest returning social investment in the world today”.

It’s what drives the success of GrameenBank and the other pioneers of the multi-billion dollar microlending form of new banking that is thriving while largescale investment banking is disappearing as a business model. Muhammad Yunus, founder of GrameenBank, who was granted the Nobel Prize for making it work, is coming to Leaders in London to help us define the new economics.

‘ It’ could be the mythical lever big enough to move the world (”Give me a lever big enough and…”) out of poverty. And, as economists have noted resoundingly recently, move Africa in particular out of poverty to become self-sustaining and capitalism has a Continent-sized new engine.

Tom Peters, another of our past Leaders in London speakers, has for long plugged away on a variant of this insight, pointing out that the second biggest economy in the world by size of purchasing power after the US isn’t China, it’s….women. (See what he did there? ‘Reframing’, our NLP-er friends call it: leaders see differently; that’s where insight comes from).
The actual lever, that is most likely to have the most positive effect on the world economy, according to Annan and economists who back him up on this, is educating women.

The Financial Times says today that women’s education has moved from ’sandal-wearing’ fringe issue to the heart of economic thinking.

GrameenBank only lends to women, because they pay back, whereas their husbands don’t. Female education is the variable most highly correlated with improvements in social factors. Women typically spend their income on food and healthcare for their children, leading to an upward spiral of health and wealth.

Move on to the wider issue of women as consumers and Tom Peters has an eye-opening set of slides he goes through that shows that in the US, women are the decision-makers on buying almost everything, including ride-on mowers, the ultimate in boys’ toys.

In what way is this mainstream or linked to your leadership agenda? Well, it takes an investment bank to notice it first, oddly. In March, Goldman Sachs said it would invest $100m in 10,000 women from developing countries to improve their access to entrepreneurial education. They can see a return on investment by thinking differently. Can you? (PS Interesting to see if they are still making that investment or if they have changed their minds as $100 m suddenly became real money that they might not have available…)

There’s more here:
FT on the impact of developing developing women on world economics

And here’s Tom Peters $5 booklet ‘Women Roar’, which starts off with this rant from Tom: “The evidence is clear!
(1) WOMEN ARE BETTER LEADERS THAN MEN (under the conditions of the New Economy).
(2) WOMEN ARE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST MARKET OPPORTUNITY (BY FAR) … and are wildly underserved. The stakes amount to TRILLIONS of dollars. Our story: WOMEN ROAR. WOMEN RULE. Believe it!”

OK, as Lehman crashes and other big banks look shaky, and the FT banner says ‘Wall Street Bank’s Black Monday’, I just have to pull up this post from July to remind us all how to be a good banking leader:

“If you don’t fully understand an instrument, don’t buy it.

If you would not buy a specific product for yourself, don’t try to sell it.

If you do not know your customers very well, don’t lend them any money.

If you do these three things, you will be a better banker, my son.”

- Emilio Botin, 73-year-old Chairman of Spanish bank Santander, which has emerged unscathed from the credit crisis and was named ‘World’s Best Bank’ at this year’s Euromoney Awards.

PS So Lehman Bros, which has a customer base concentrated in the richest country in the world, can’t handle its debts and goes belly up, while GrameenBank, whose customers are among the poorest in the world, is a multi-billion dollar profit-making success story. When Muhammad Yunus tried to get traditional bankers to lend to the poor they laughed at him and said they’d go bankrupt as the poor never pay back what they borrow. Turns out Grameen’s micro-customers (Yunus leant them the money himself to start with, to prove his idea worked), who live on less than $2 a day, are less likely to default on their bank repayments than European and American middle class borrowers. His new model of banking pulls them out of poverty AND makes a profit. Compare that with the mess Western banking’s old model has got itself into and it’s really time we challenged our assumptions, isn’t it?

The Nobel prize winner is coming to Leaders in London in a couple of months to help us do just that.

Harvard Management Review have a short video clip from Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck Business School, who is currently seconded as GE’s chief innovation guru, and who is coming to Leaders in London later this year to tell us how to lead innovation. The former boss of his current workplace, Jack Welch, will also be sharing leadership lessons with us, live by satellite.

You can find the short clip on the link at the end of this post, where you’ll also find a link to Daniel Goleman’s latest work on social intelligence and leadership. Goleman is leading a workshop for us on this very subject at Leaders in London. Reminder: save up to £500 if you book your place for Leaders in London by September 26th. Once you click the link below, scroll down to find the video clip.

Vijay Govindarajan, over at Harvard Business Online, on how to lead for innovation

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.

One of the biggest hits with the audience at our last Leaders in London was futurist Andrew Zolli. Andrew is many things, one of which is curator of the brilliant poptech!

Fast Company magazine ranked Andrew number 10 in its Fast 50 (the top 50 people going places, doing new things, breaking new ground).

One gem I remember from his talk last year is that a large part of the future is not unknown - we only need to look at the demographics to know what the people profile of the world, our market, our region, our country, etc. will be at any given time in the future. But, almost no large companies employ a demographer or have demographics in their skillset.

Andrew’s company, Z + Partners has just launched a new foresight service called First Word, that looks interesting in helping you navigate the future. You can find out more about it here: First Word from Z + Partners