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

Why strategy execution is life or death at the moment

In a forgiving economic climate (remember that?) you can get away with the fact that, on average, 50% of strategy fails to get delivered. But, in an unforgiving economic climate (ah, sounds more familiar) if everyone and everything is not focused on delivering your core strategy, then you are in trouble. That’s assuming your strategy is a sound one, of course. But, that’s a different subject.

So, here’s the one thing you need to know to maximise strategic execution (i.e. making sure what gets done throughout the organisation is directly geared towards your core purpose, with no wasted effort and resources at a time when you can’t afford any).

The one thing…

Booz & Company consultants collected survey data for almost five years from more than 125,000 employees of 1,000 organizations in over 50 countries.

From this data they distilled - and ranked in order of importance - the top traits exhibited by the organizations that are most effective at executing strategy.

The single most common attribute of such companies is…that their employees are clear about which decisions and actions they are responsible for.

Source: The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution, Harvard Business Review, June 1, 2008

Book by end of Friday (tomorrow): Last chance to save up to £400 on learning how to put strategy into action from the phenomenal lineup of leaders at Leaders in London. Click on the link and book before Friday October 31st.

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.

WATCH FOUR LEADING INDICATORS

This is an excerpt from September’s Taking The Lead, the monthly email newsletter from Leaders in London. If you like it, you can subscribe using the link on the right. If you already subscribe it should land in your in-box any minute.
Carly Fiorina also reminds us that you will navigate best through the current turbulent economic conditions if your attention is kept outward, on forward indicators, rather than being sucked into the classic mistake of looking inward and focusing almost exclusively on resource reduction (cuts) without paying enough attention to what’s coming. Fiorina says you need to watch four leading indicators:“The leading indicators of any business are

1. Customer satisfaction
2. Rate of innovation
3. Diversity of your management team
4. Ethics”

Now, that’s really interesting because, apart from the first one, most companies would have rolled those bottom three, or at least the bottom two, up into the category of ‘nice to have in good times, but time to ignore them and bare our teeth now’.

Why Diversity? “If everyone thinks in the same way…something important is going to be missed, some problem ignored, some risk under-estimated. The only antidote to the dangers of ‘group think’ is a diverse team sitting around the table,” says Fiorina.

And Ethics? The FT reported recently that regulators are on the lookout for a rise in questionable behaviour as companies take whatever measures they can to protect themselves from the downturn. If you sail close to the edge, argues Fiorina, inevitably someone in your organization will cross the line. And, in a transparent age, you’ll be sunk.

* * *

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THE SPEAKER LINE-UP SO FAR

Philip Kotler, the inventor of modern marketing
Rudy Giuliani, two-time Mayor of New York
Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Prize-winner, Founder, GrameenBank
GE’s Jack Welch, ‘World’s most acclaimed CEO’ (live by satellite)
Carly Fiorina Former HP CEO, “2007 CEO Hero” (Tom Peters)
Richard Reed, Founder, innocent Drinks
Garry Kasparov, Chess genius
Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence pioneer
Professor Gary Hamel, ‘The World’s reigning strategy guru’ (The Economist)
Harvard Professor Bill George, former Medtronic CEO, author of ‘True North’
Mark Penn, author of Microtrends; the small forces behind big change
Captain Mike Abrashoff, who turned around a poorly-perfoming US warship to make it the best-performing ship in the Pacific fleet
Professor Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck Business School, GE’s Innovation Expert in Residence
Ron Dennis, CBE, Chairman & CEO, McLaren Group, leader of the UK’s most successful Formula One team
Andy Cosslett, CEO, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), one of the largest hotel groups in the world
Charlie Mayfield, Chairman, John Lewis Partnership, ‘Britain’s most loved retailer’
Luke Johnson, FT columnist & one of the UK’s most successful serial entrepreneurs
Steve Tappin, Author, The Secrets of CEOs and a Managing Partner Heidrick & Struggles
Chairman Rene Carayol, Author, Business Guru, Visiting Professor, Cass Business School

So, holiday/vacation time? Are you taking any? Did you/Will you take the Blackberry and check in by phone or get the office to call you if they really need you? Ah, me, how essential leaders think they are. Actually, as I learnt from the co-founder of Pret a Manger, Sinclair Beecham, great leaders make themselves inessential.

Sinclair said that he used to welcome the phone ringing with store managers and others bringing him problems to solve. It made him feel essential. As Pret grew, his phone didn’t stop ringing and he realized his idea of leadership doesn’t work. It’s not scalable. He changed his attitude. Instead of seeing himself as chief firefighter and problem-solver, he stepped back and gave people space, permission, indeed insisted, that they find their own solutions.

His phone didn’t ring so much. He felt less essential. At first, this was a bother. But, leadership isn’t about ego and how important you are. It’s about the high performance organization, and that comes from, paradoxically, making yourself inessential as a firefighter and problem-solver. A recent report says true leaders free up 50% or more of their time - they don’t schedule in half their week in their diary. They use that time to lead rather than firefighting. How do you do that? By creating more leaders, of course.

It may make you feel indispensable to be on call when on holiday. But, it actually shows you have a long way to go to be a great leader. If your deputies and the system aren’t coping and leading themselves in your absence, you aren’t doing your leadership job properly.

Nick McCormick, who runs the Be Good leadership blog, has a nice post on this in The Leadership Hub

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

Forget strategy? OK, I’m exaggerating. But, in difficult trading conditions, it’s pretty clear that your mission, not your strategy, is what will deliver the discretionary extra from your people that marks out winning companies from losers.

In a paper for IESE Business School, Professor Pablo Cardona makes this very sound point, that would have strategists such as Michael Porter, who presented to Leaders in London last year, up in arms:

“Ever since the military term ‘strategy’ entered the business lexicon, considerable attention has been paid to different methods of deployment and implementation. From planning in the 1970s, to the analytical models of the 80s and the re-engineering of the 90s, or more recently, the ‘balanced scorecard’ model, the objective has been to create ‘organizations focused on strategy.’

However, experience shows that when focus is placed entirely on that aspect, the mission (the company’s purpose) is relegated to a secondary plane, at the mercy of intuition and the good example set by the company’s leader. Actually, there are scarcely few management tools for moulding ‘organizations focused on the mission.’ ”

Professor Cardona’s paper is in the IESE newsletter, which you can read online here:

Manage By Mission and other papers from the IESE Newsletter

For monthly insights like this on leadership, you might like our Taking The Lead email newsletter, which you can sign up for using the link on the right. Here’s the content list from the July issue to help you decide (each item is designed to be a 60 second read: you’re busy; who has time for more?)

TAKING THE LEAD CONTENTS: JULY’S LEADERSHIP LESSONS

1. Philip Kotler’s Ten Deadly Marketing Sins
2. Forget strategy: Manage by Mission
3. What can’t be measured doesn’t get done
4. You need a new Golden Rule of leadership
5. The power of after-action reviews
6. And, finally…Luke Johnson’s recommended read