Thoughts on Your Personal and Professional Success in the New Year

December 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Hang out with really smart people and teams and some great lessons can’t help but rub off on you. 

I was truly gifted in 2011 to gain access to and work with and support some remarkable professionals across a number of different market segments…from high tech to professional services to manufacturing, and I learned something with every engagement and encounter.

Here are Six Lessons Learned that Can Help Us All in the New Year:

1. It’s Critical to Think Deeply About Your Business: Strategy still counts. The strongest teams/firms I observed are the ones who took the time to step-back and evaluate their situation and rethink their futures. And then back all of that lofty thinking with action, learning and adaptation.

Call it what you want…I call it strategy work…and done right…asking and answering tough questions and then backing the ideas with key hypotheses and experiments is the corporate equivalent of a continuous fitness program.

2. Operational Myopia Guarantees Mediocrity (or worse): Conversely, the firms and teams mired in the muck struggled to get beyond the endless operational discussions and move towards the tough questions that help assess the current state and begin to identify options for the future. Yeah, everyone needs to make sales in the here and now. We all know that. Adding in the work of thinking about and adapting your business in pursuit of better serving customers, finding new customers, extending into larger growth areas or more attractive categories takes that extra level of discipline that separates the big winners from everyone else.

3. Leadership Counts. More than ever…and not just at the top. High performance firms have an unrelenting focus on developing people who can think critically, lead others to challenge convention and stimulate people to provide their best results. And given the past decade or so of leadership failures, people are quick to sniff out and mentally discard the disingenuous leaders. If you are leading others, you need to bring your “A” game, and the game isn’t about you…it’s about everyone else and what you can do for them!

4. Behold The Rise of the Integrator Leader: individual contributors who embrace the role of integrator…bringing together disparate groups and resources to solve problems are the future formal leaders in organizations. We are all well served to view our own roles through the filter of the new integrator leader. Build your network(s) internally and externally and learn to connect networks in pursuit of solving problems.

5. Diversity is a Strategic Asset to Build Competitive Advantage:  While we predictably and annoyingly gravitate to those who act, think (and yes, look) like us, the true opportunity for greatness is in bringing together people of disparate backgrounds, ethnicities and ages and setting them loose to change something significant. The best leaders get this. The rest are still mired in the misguided thinking from another century.

6. If You’re Not Learning, You are Failing. Learning is more important than ever. The top performing professionals are learning everyday in the workplace (through experimentation), are pushing themselves personally to continue to grow in their respective fields, are filling classrooms and demanding more from an old and mostly broken educational system, and leveraging technology and unparalleled access to information to expand their thinking. There are no time-outs allowed when it comes to gaining and applying new knowledge.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The short form:

Strategy isn’t a four letter word. We all need to find ways to break out of the day-to-day crunch to assess and learn and plan.  Leadership skills are more critical than ever…and the best and most powerful leaders might not have people reporting to them. Diversity isn’t just an H.R. initiative, and if you aren’t learning every single day, you’re moving backwards at an accelerating pace.

May 2012 be a year of learning, growth and professional success.

 

 

Filed Under: Career, Leadership, Leading Change, Performance, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , , ,

Escaping the Gravitational Pull of the Past

October 5, 2011 By 8 Comments

If you work in a firm struggling to redefine itself and maintain its relevance in this changing world, you’re not alone. You’re also involved in a battle for your firm’s life. 

There’s a great article at HBR Blogs by Judith Hurwitz on the topical and timely example of this change battle being waged in front of our eyes at HP.  In her post, “Can HP Change Its DNA?” Hurwitz explores the challenges that hardware firms have in adopting software thinking and business models. The post is filled with relevant questions and ideas for anyone dealing with this Herculean challenge.

A Road Strewn with Wrecks:

Certainly, the corporate history books are filled with great names of firms who failed to adapt and change with the times. For every Apple/Jobs, IBM/Gerstner and GE/Welch story, there are dozens of firms with formerly great household names that are no longer great or even good. Many are gone or on their way out.

I suspect there were more than a few smart people in those firms, yet through some combination of factors…poor leadership, the gravitational pull of an old, strong culture, pride and arrogance, dominant logic, management systems and technologies optimized for another era, etc. these firms failed to change and so, they failed.  

Experience Breeds Respect for the Magnitude & Complexity of Organizational Transformation:

I’ve lived through this transformation three times as an employee…and learned something every time.

The first one failed. I recall sitting in the conference room as a young product manager, when the management team explained why we would never pursue the low-margin, low-end of the market when we were so dominant at the top end. It felt horribly wrong then and it’s painful to recall now. Perhaps a young Clay Christensen was listening in, because we had our butts disrupted right out of the marketplace.  

The second one worked on a concentrated level. This global firm had no idea how to promote systems and software..it was hardware-centric and component oriented and wanted to get into the software and systems business. We built a nice business that for a good decade dominated market segments around the globe. We also spent a hell of a lot of time justifying our existence and trying to make the square peg of a software business model fit into a company that only understood the box and component model. Ultimately long after the founding/sponsoring team members moved on to new lives elsewhere, the gravitational pull of the low-margin, box oriented mentality sans support and significant R&D investments, returned to its roots. The unit is a shadow of its former self.

The third one…a pure software firm, succeeded in large part because the only change it had to make (I use “only” very loosely here), was the market focus. The business model was clear…the challenge was facilitating a culture shift into new, emerging and adjacent markets where the capabilities were highly valued. To the credit of the professionals in this firm, it ultimately worked very well. Nonetheless, transition was a bite…with many fits and starts and a lot of resistance. It worked, but it wasn’t a day at the beach. The lessons learned along the way are enough to fill a book. (Hmmm.)

No Easy Answers and a Resource:

Instead of being prescriptive and proffering a list of easy-to-write, nearly impossible to replicate/implement suggestions, I’ll offer that helping a firm break free of the past is difficult at best and almost impossible in some circumstances. (OK, you can save the “thank you, Captain Obvious” messages.)

There must be a fierce corporate will to live…catalyzed by strong, united leadership and a workplace population dedicated to doing the messy, heavy lifting required for success in this difficult endeavor. Oh, and did I mention the courage and fortitude required to look around and say, “this all has to change,” and then to do it.

I’ve not yet found the magical answers for this (they don’t exist), however, for those involved in this effort of reinvention and revitalization, consider checking out Geoffrey Moore’s latest book, Escape Velocity-Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past. (Geoffrey is the Silicon-Valley consultant whose thinking and writings in Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado and others has profoundly shaped strategy and execution in the tech sector for two decades.)

I caught up with Geoffrey last week to interview him for The Leadership Caffeine Podcast (episode to be aired soon!), and I left the conversation convinced that his latest effort offers some important and much needed tools to guide us on this difficult journey. The framework of frameworks that he offers and the approaches for rethinking the business from the outside in, will be incredibly useful along the way. More on this when I run the interview.

If you’ve lived through and succeeded in one of these endeavors, I suspect we would all like to hear your ideas on what worked and what didn’t. There are more than a few out there with a lot riding on getting this right.

–

About Art Petty:

Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book (an edited, annotated collection of the most popular leadership essays), Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, was released at the end of September in 2011.

Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.

 

Filed Under: Leading Change, Strategy Tagged With: , ,

Learning to Collaborate at the Top

August 5, 2011 By 2 Comments

image of two people shaking hands with a shadow image showing one person holding a gunThe July/August issue of HBR focuses on the issues around building collaboration into the workplace. It’s required reading for all of us.

If you’ve spent any amount of time inside the walls of an organization, you understand the promise and perils of collaboration. Great things can happen when we reach across silos and boundaries and seek to work together in pursuit of shared interests. However, as team guru Prof. J. Richard Hackman offers when talking about the potential of teams, “just don’t count on it.”

I’m going to set aside my usual focus on project teams and raise my sights just a bit to the rarefied air of the senior levels of organizations.  In both my executive and consulting experience, I’ve observed or have been a part of situations where otherwise really smart people crash and burn on the shores of potential internal (strategic) collaboration.  In many of these cases, there’s good money and important marketplace moves that were left on the table as a result of a failure to collaborate.

Two Common Senior Level Collaboration Pitfalls:

1. Navigating the rocky waters of moving investment emphasis to emerging and new opportunities.

How many of you have seen this movie before? The legacy business got you here and even made you great, but the new businesses are essential for survival and future success.  However, no one can agree to reduce investment in one area and ramp up in another. After all, this would require executives to sublimate their egos and potentially risk displaying to their direct reports that one area is more or less important than the other. Horrors!

This issue derails just about every management group I’ve encountered.  A few get through it, but most flounder until they endure a shock to the system or a metaphorical clubbing across the head.

2. Leveraging disparate products and varied pockets of internal expertise to deliver a systems offering to clients.

There’s typically a great deal of talk about the potential customer benefits or competitive differentiation that might result through internal product and service integration (i.e. across business units), but without true senior level advocacy, the ideas and talk fail to gain traction.  And while more than a few of the internally generated “integration” ideas are just that…internally generated ideas with no real basis…some of them are potentially valuable.  Unfortunately, most never reach the point where they are properly vetted.

image of waves crashing on rocksAnd Then the CEO is Left to Steer Through the Rocky Shoals of Potential Collaboration:

Both of the situations described above often achieve lip-service interest or token compliance.  People see the potential opportunities or the underlying logic. However, more often than not, both fall victim to overt or passive-aggressive behaviors driven by egos, turf-wars, loss-of-control fears, politics and any other human issues that drive our behaviors.  Frequently, the CEO is stuck alone, attempting to steer the ship of state through these rocky waters without crashing.

A good number of these Captains on the Sea of Collaboration are focusing on trying not to fail…instead of trying to succeed.

While this isn’t a defense of the CEOs who struggle to navigate these internal and strategic collaboration opportunities, it is at least empathy. They are most definitely trying to keep the plates spinning for all stakeholders, from the board and market (investors) to direct reports and entire groups of people. It is understandably difficult. Of course…that’s why they earn the big bucks.

Helpful Thoughts from “Are You a Collaborative Leader?”

Herminia Ibarra and Morton T. Hansen writing in the July/August issue of HBR, offer the following on the complexity of driving collaboration:

“Part of the problem is that many leadership teams, composed of the CEO and his or her direct reports, actually don’t operate as teams. Each member runs his or her own region, function, or product or service category, without much responsibility—or incentive—for aligning the organization’s various projects and operations into a coherent whole.”

and:

“Persuading people to contribute countless hours of effort in partnership with people they don’t necessarily like to solve important problems requires consummate leadership skills. Managing egos so that each person’s commitment, energy, and creativity is unleashed in a way without disadvantaging others demands an impresario personality.”

In addition to their research supporting what we already know…that the challenge to foster collaboration is a difficult leadership task, the authors offer that the skills required to succeed in this endeavor can be learned and strengthened:

“It requires strong skills in four areas: playing the role of connector, attracting diverse talent, modeling collaboration at the top, and showing a strong hand to keep teams from getting mired in debate. The good news is, our research also suggests that these skills can be learned—and can help executives generate exceptional long-term performance.”

The Bottom-Line for Now:

While it’s possible to head down a slippery slope of collaboration paralysis, most organizations and most leaders I’ve encountered are in no danger of that slide.  Perhaps some new measures of accountability for strategic collaboration are required. After all, what gets measured gets learned and gets done.

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change Tagged With: , ,

Leadership Caffeine: Making Time to Glimpse the Future and Re-Think

April 11, 2011 By 10 Comments

Note from Art: effective leaders keep an eye on the future. Instead of my usual soft skills focus, I’m challenging all of us to think about the tools of the trade and our processes for working together.

–

As technology finally begins to catch up to our long-standing vision for how it can positively change our work lives and our businesses, it may just be time for us to rethink our stone-age approaches on how we work.

Of Tablets, Apps, Ecosystems and How and Where We Work:

If you’ve made the commitment to adopt a tablet as your new personal productivity tool (beyond the movies and music), you know what I mean.  These turbo-charged, slightly over-sized content-consuming  and emerging content creation PDAs are enablers and drivers of personal productivity innovation.

The first thing you notice as a business user is that your long-established preconceived notions of how to do things is wrong. Or at least it’s different. From how you store and access information (in the cloud) to how you surf and clip to how you produce, edit, display, integrate, share and collaborate, things are different. After spending several weeks, I’m getting sense that “different” in this case holds the potential for better.

The massive and growing ecosystems of developers and new applications and instantaneous and no-holds barred feedback from consumers is a revolution in and of itself. While Apple in many regards popularized and enabled the modern platform strategy (and still is driving much of it), this is much bigger than Apple.  It’s likely, there are some very profound strategy ideas inherent in this arena for your firm, aside from serving as a consumer of tablets and apps.

Making a personal commitment to investing in one of these new tools is a commitment to opening a door into a world mostly invisible to so many of us happily plunking away on our desktops and laptops, working on MS Office and filling our jump-drives and dashing off to our meetings across town.

If you are interested in the uses of the tools beyond the entertainment value, this is, a commitment to learning and rethinking how and where you work and to learning about powerful and simple new tools to help enhance you in your trade.

Seriously, Who Will Need All of The Stuff in This Store?

As an aside, my wife and I visited an over-sized office supply store recently, and as I looked around at the massive commitment to “stuff” we use in our businesses, my only thought was, “hope these firms have a new plan.” There’s an app (or will) be for just about everything I could see.  Not certain what any of us will need from those stores in a few years.

Hone Your Massive Multi-Player Role Playing Game Skills to Glimpse the Future of Work:

The traditional world of bodies moving around from place-to-place and country-to-country at huge costs in terms of money, time and environmental impact, seems to be just a bit out-dated. We’ve just not figured it out yet.

My emerging thoughts on how people will work and engage are the result of two initiatives:

1. I’m working with a former colleague who is passionate about developing a virtual office space where the growing legions of solopreneurs and small firms can meet, work and collaborate (at an affordable price), with a suite of tools that actually work together.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink the idea of where coaching and counseling sessions take place, or, how to facilitate group brainstorming sessions, or how to meet and work with extended virtual teams. If your framework for this is Skype, Webex, TelePresence or other name brand (and good and popular tools), you’re a few generations behind the true potential here.

2. Another source of inspiration comes from the research being done on the use of tools such as Second Life, World of Warcraft and other virtual worlds, as tools and places to support collaboration and project management with colleagues around the globe.

(For a recent read on this, see the article: “Unlocking the Business Potential of Virtual Worlds,” in the MIT Sloan Management Review. Also search on Harvard Business Review…there was some research published within the last few years on the use of these tools to support the development of leadership skills.) Firms like ProtoSphere and TeleSpace are already applying the virtual world concepts to the world of work.  It may just be time to take a stroll through a virtual world, and let the mind wander a bit about how being a Level 5 Warlord with special powers might just have some applicability to winning in the market in a few years.

The Bottom Line for Now:

If you’ve not pushed yourself to explore the new tools, and if you are responsible in some form or fashion for pushing the envelope on how your firm competes in the market, engages clients and arms its people to win, it might just be time to spend a few minutes focusing on the future.

Now, how do I natively edit a powerpoint file on my ipad? Oh, that’s right…there are apps for that, or, I need to rethink how I create, display and use content to do a better job than ever engaging my clients.

And it’s time to quit writing. I need to drive 42 miles round-trip for a small group project meeting.  If only…

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Performance Tagged With: , , , , ,

#FollowFriday The Blog Version: Two Pros Worth Following

April 8, 2011 By 2 Comments

Every Friday on Twitter there’s an informal and fun custom to identify those individuals whom you appreciate, and then encourage others to follow their tweets and blogs.

This #FollowFriday  or #FF  is both fun and heart-warming.  It’s great to showcase the skills of others and it’s a nice way to find others to follow.  It is of course, humbling and gratifying when people you hold in high regard encourage others to follow you as well.

(Sidenote: Imagine what the workplace might be like if every Friday, people walked around offering their thanks and encouragement for your efforts. Hmmmm.)

My only challenge with the #FF process is the inability in 140 characters to share why some people are so remarkable and worth paying attention to on a regular basis. Consider this my long form of the #FF convention.

Mom Was Right! (Mom is always right):

I most enjoy connecting with individuals who motivate, inspire, encourage, challenge and generally push us to think and act in ways that make us better as professionals and as human beings. Mom’s old advice of picking the right crowd to hang around with, was spot on.

I thought it might be nice to share a few thoughts beyond 140 characters from time-to-time about some remarkable individuals worth following. I look forward to continuing this process and helping us all live Mom’s advice!

Erin Schreyer

I met Erin Schreyer for the first time on the phone just this week, although I’ve long been a regular reader of her blog and an admirer of her efforts to promote character-based leadership.

Talking with Erin was a lot like receiving a massive infusion of energy, enthusiasm and “can do” positive encouragement.

From her commitment to serving her clients to her passion for and success in spearheading the evolution of the LinkedIn Group (Authentic Leadership Cincinnati) into an active, formal non-profit organization and community, she is truly remarkable.  Her skills and gifts as a professional are enhanced all the more by her genuineness and humility.

Erin’s great and thoughtful blog posts offer encouragement and guidance, and her work to spread the practice of character-based, authentic leadership, truly helps make the world a better place.

You’ll find Erin on Twitter at: @ErinSchreyer

Mary Jo Asmus

Regular readers of my blog know my regard for Mary Jo Asmus. She’s a remarkable coach and writer who shares insights and guidance that make us better people and stronger professionals.

Mary Jo and I have collaborated on a number of blog posts, and from time-to-time, we’re able to get planets and schedules to align and catch-up on the phone.  I’ve yet to come away from a conversation with Mary Jo where I didn’t benefit from her wisdom, and find myself practically exhausted from smiling and laughing from the beginning to the end of our conversation.

From her “Thoughtful Thursday” posts offering inspirational quotes and compelling questions to her always strong content on dealing with the challenges of leading and of developing ourselves, spending time on Mary Jo’s blog is a great habit to adopt!

After you get to know her through her writing, you’ll quickly understand why she’s such a successful person and in-demand coach!

You’ll find Mary Jo on Twitter at: @mjasmus

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Surround yourself with great people, read great and challenging content, and work hard to improve your own habits and practices, and you’ll find yourself in a good place.  Both Erin and Mary Jo are great places to start!

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , ,
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