Towards Your Growth as a Management Innovator
Filed under: Leadership, Management Education, Management Innovation, Organizational Transformation
One of the exciting parts of living and working through “these interesting times,” comes from the opportunity to apply the tools of management in new ways and forms to today’s complex problems.
This “management innovation” as Dr. Gary Hamel describes it, is much about the search for approaches to organizing, planning, leading and controlling that better fit the challenges of the 21st century. The implication is that in many cases, we’re still trying to solve new and emerging problems with 20th century management tools. Another implication is that we haven’t yet cracked the code on sustaining high-levels of organizational performance for extended periods of time.
In Search of Management Innovation:
While some position this pursuit of management innovation as something on the scale of an Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail, for those of us who aren’t management researchers and who have teams and organizations to run, we need something a bit more tangible to grab hold of and play with in pursuit of survival and sustained success.
Consider these as idea prompters laced with encouragement!
Six Quick Ideas to Stimulate Your Management Innovation Thinking:
1. Innovation in management approaches occurs like almost all other forms of innovation…through enlightened trial and error backed by a lot of curiosity and a willingness to accept failure on the road to success. Translation…it’s all about environment and leadership attitude. If you aren’t working hard on creating an environment that not only tolerates trial and error, but encourages it, then you are missing the critical first piece.
2. It’s how you use the tools that counts! Our tools…structure, people, leadership approaches, technology, communications, goal-setting and measurement mechanisms are fairly easy to identify…and genuinely finite…however, there are nearly infinite number of ways to apply the tools.
3. The Right Answer…Well, It Depends. What works right in one situation or environment is likely not the right answer for other situations or environments. Recognize that when entering a new business, setting up new teams or taking on new types of projects and problems, you need to view the situation as unique, not cookie cutter.
4. Structure matters…and strategy must beget structure. If you forget or misapply either one of these, you’re likely to generate more problems than answers.
5. Creativity is a commodity however, the application of creativity to solving problems is priceless. And before you skewer me for the “commodity” crack, consider that ideas are all around us…it’s the courage to take an idea and work it until it either proves useful or useless that takes true courage. Translation: the value isn’t in the brainstorming session, although the process of generating, parsing, prioritizing and acting-on ideas is critical.
6. It’s always the people, stupid! Do everything to get the right ones in place and give them the tools they need to fail on the road to success.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
At the wrap-up of a Kellogg Executive program a few years ago, the Organizational Design Professor encouraged all of the V and C level people in the room to “Never quit trying to innovate with our people and our organizations.” Her meaning was clear then and it’s more critical now than ever. How hard are you working to promote, support and reward management innovation in your workplace?
Leadership Caffeine: Making Time to Glimpse the Future and Re-Think
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Organizational Transformation, Performance, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
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.
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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…
Management Week in Review for March 4, 2011
Filed under: Customer Service, Making Decisions, Management Education, Management Innovation, Social Commentary
Note from Art: every week, I share three thought-provoking management posts for the week. Fair warning: I take a broad view of management, so my selections will range from leadership to innovation to finance and personal development and beyond.
This week’s selections feature content on reinventing management, the strategic and practical implications of upgrade plans for consumer electronics products and some guidance on improving our decision-making by better utilizing outside advisors. Enjoy!
From Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 blog at the WSJ, “Inventing Management 2.0.” I’m making up for lost time by having missed this mid-February post. Dr. Hamel consistently beats the drums on the need for a revolution in the practice of management, and both his article and the comments here are guaranteed to get the blood of practitioners and students of management pumping a bit faster.
From the post: “Like millions of other would-be leaders around the world, you are being held hostage by Management 1.0—a dense matrix of bureaucratic practices that were invented to minimize variances from plan by maximizing adherence to policy. Despite a lot of high-minded rhetoric to the contrary (often found on laminated cards that begin with “Our Values”), the management model found in your organization most likely over-weights the views of senior executives, undervalues unconventional thinking, discourages full transparency, deters initiative, frustrates experimentation and encourages an entirely unwarranted reverence for precedence.”
From Joshua Gans at the HBR Blogs, “Best Buy’s Buy Back.” Who hasn’t felt the slight (or major) buyer’s remorse as your still new technology gadget is rendered obsolete by the market with a seemingly overnight feature upgrade. Of course, your device still works, and it still offers the same features that excited you when you purchased it in the first place. Enter an interesting discussion and a controversial approach on dealing with this, courtesy of the mega-retailer, Best Buy. And somehow, Apple figures into this mix as well. Good discussion with personal and corporate strategic implications.
From the post: “The strategic question is why Apple doesn’t solve this and work out a hard-headed way to buy hearts. Unlike Best Buy, who has to try their hand at high-priced insurance because they are operating in a highly competitive environment, Apple has some market power, particularly over serial upgraders. Why can’t I subscribe to a plan that allows me to have the latest iPhone? Or, perhaps a cleaner example (free of AT&T and Verizon contracts), to the latest iPad?”
At Fast Company Expert Blogs, Robert Sutton, Ph.D., offers: “Report: We are More Creative When We Help Others, Not Ourselves.“ Bob Sutton (Good Boss, Bad Boss) shares some of the findings from recent studies on decision-making and the power of outside advisors. An interesting reminder that by nature, we tend to over-estimate our own capabilities by a considerable margin, setting the stage for all sorts of follow-on problems.
From the post: “The implication of these diverse studies are quite instructive. If we want to make better decisions, make faster decisions, have a more realistic picture of our strengths and weaknesses, and now, apparently, be more creative, we need to ask others for their opinions and assistance. There is even a kind of weird implication that rather than working on our own problems, we should always be working on others.”
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That’s it for this week’s update. Enjoy your reading and don’t forget to catch up on the latest Leadership Caffeine posts here at Management Excellence.
Art Petty coaches and trains emerging leaders and consults with B2B firms on strategy and marketing. You can reach Art via e-mail to discuss your needs for coaching, speaking or consulting.
Nine Key Professional Capabilities Required By Our Times
Filed under: Career, Innovation, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Life and Business, Management Education, Management Innovation, Marketing Yourself, Middle Management, Organizational Transformation, Professional Growth, Project Management, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
There’s no doubt we live in interesting times…a true Dickensian Best of Times, Worst of Times environment, filled with remarkable opportunities and equally remarkable personal, competitive, societal and global challenges.
Over the past few years and few thousand contacts with professionals on the topic(s) of developing as a professional and developing as a leader, a number of key “capabilities needed for success in these times” have emerged as recurring themes in discussions and group settings. Importantly, these themes or as I describe them, Capabilities, Attributes & Behaviors (CABs) are essential for success at both the individual and organizational levels.
Nine Key Professional Capabilities Required By Our Times:
1. Cultivate Your Authenticity-while arguably never out of fashion, like small collars and narrow lapels, authenticity is back in a big way, and it’s increasingly important for leaders that hope to win the trust of the teams and generations.
This has been a hard decade or so for cultivating trust in leaders, and with the odor of the Great Recession still wafting through our society, fear is all too present in the workplace. It’s more critical than ever to be able to build trust on teams, trust across cultures…and trust as a leader, and the best starting point is to be yourself, let people see your strengths and weaknesses and work hard to get to connect with and get to know those you work with and for.
2. Learn to Adjust Your Altitude-whether you are a solopreneur, an individual contributor or a corporate executive, you need to develop comfort in navigating and connecting the lofty issues of market-forces to the RGM (real green money) issues of serving customers, innovating and differentiating.
I encourage leaders and professionals of all levels to develop the discipline to regularly scan the market environment and to change the nature of the conversations on their teams, by drawing upon this powerful and simple question set:
What does this mean for us? Our competitors? Our customers?
3. Develop Strategies for Coping with Extreme Ambiguity-the scale and scope of global challenges and opportunities coupled with the pace of change all combine to create a remarkable level of ambiguity in our professional endeavors.
Unfortunately, ambiguity combines with fear to paralyze teams and individuals and exacerbate problems. A counter-measure is to first recognize that EVERYONE you know is struggling with the same unknowns. Your competitors don’t know for sure where things are going and your customers need help navigating through all of the noise.
Try flipping the fear of the unknowns around and instead of preoccupying on the risks, focus your energies and your team’s sights on the opportunities that ambiguity affords to create and innovate. Change the nature of the daily conversations and encourage constant use of the key questions outlined above.
Of course, once you’ve discussed questions, it’s time to promote action. That’s where the next attribute proves critical.
4. Improve Your Adaptability-building on the ambiguity theme above, and acknowledging that we tend not to like change (understatement for emphasis), it’s critical for leaders of all levels to foster a culture that encourages experimentation and learning. Easy words, however, recognize that creating an adaptable environment takes time, focus and constant reinforcement.
Shoot one messenger or go off on one failed experimenter and people will revert to their prior fear-driven, hunker-down approach. As an individual contributor, learn to appreciate the benefits and learning experiences of change. Better yet, learn to be the one promoting change.
5. Leaders: Commit to Creating High Performance Teams-a great place to start is by overhauling your project management practices (or lack thereof), building sponsors with teeth and putting everything you and your leadership counterparts can into helping teams succeed. Again, easy words that only work when backed by consistent, aggressive actions. Given the number of projects and strategies that fail for people and execution issues, we all have a long way to go on this one.
6. Cultivate Cultural Intelligence (CI)-there’s a good probability that your business will become increasingly intertwined with global suppliers, customers, partners, competitors and team members. Developing CI is an organizational initiative, and one that must be pursued in the planning or early phases of your global outreach. If you are increasingly involved in leading teams with contributors from around the globe, you are absolutely on the spot for advancing your Cultural Intelligence. Your results depend upon it.
7. Develop Leadership Adaptability…yours and others. This is my catch-category to remind you that strengthening your skills as a follower is as important as strengthening your skills as a leader. As functional and national boundaries dissolve or at least shrink, your ability to move seamlessly from leader of one initiative to committed follower for another is critical to your success. And your efforts here set an outstanding example for those around you.
8. Don’t Be Afraid to Grow Your Power and Influence. Face it, others choose us to be successful, and there’s everything right with growing your professional network, seeking out important projects and opportunities and appropriately publicizing your successes. It’s a mistake to think that you’re above the fray of politics and power.
9. Develop an Innovation Mentality-gone are the days when innovation was just for engineers. It’s an innovation-driven world, and the most compelling innovations are occurring in how we work, communicate, market and make money.
If you’re leading others, one of your Key Performance Indicators is how innovative your team is. Their innovation is a reflection of your leadership. If you’re working as an individual contributor, every team and every project needs great ideas. Learn to take risks and learn to sell hard and then prove your ideas. Build a reputation as an innovative thinker and doer, and the world is yours!
The Bottom-Line for Now:
I’ve just offered a long list of really difficult things to do, without much specific direction. Awareness is the first step. Audit yourself against the nine CABs above and then take action to strengthen the already strong and improve the weak. Seek external feedback from those you trust to provide you the unvarnished truth about yourself. And remember, while others often choose us for success, you own your career and your development.
Want to Change the World? Don’t Forget to Build Your Business Model
Filed under: Innovation, Leading Change, Management Education, Management Innovation, Strategy
Over the past few weeks, I’ve connected with some brilliant individuals in multiple entrepreneurial organizations. In every instance, I heard some form of “We want to change the world” as these high-energy individuals described their ideas and their motivation.
I love “change the world ideas” put forth by people passionate about doing something new, doing something better and helping others along the way.
There’s no way I can avoid cheering for these teams. However, I can worry for them.
In particular, I can worry about the part of the discussion that is missing thus far in all of these conversations. The gap in our conversations occurred when the topic of “business model” was broached. And more specifically, the gap was reflected in the inability to clearly define whom they were serving and HOW they were going to make money.
What is a Business Model?
If you mention the phrase, “business model” in a crowded room, a good number of people will nod their heads knowingly, adopt thoughtful and curious looks on their faces and secretly wonder what the heck a business model really is.
For a bit of help in getting on the same page about business models, I am referencing the definitions put forth by both the late Peter Drucker and Harvard’s still thankfully, very alive Clayton Christensen (as described in the HBR article, “How to Design a Winning Business Model”):
Drucker offers that a business model is comprised of the answers to the following three questions:
- Who is your customer?
- What does the customer value?
- How do you deliver value at an appropriate cost?
Christensen indicates that a business model must consist of four elements:
- A customer value proposition
- A profit formula
- Key resources
- Key processes
I like them both. Take the time to address Drucker’s questions and Christensen’s four elements and you will be much better armed to go forth and conquer your targeted space in the world.
Unfortunately, a fair number of noble world-changers armed with know-how, communities, content/products and visibility are not yet able to answer Drucker’s questions or describe their business in terms of Christensen’s components with appropriate specificity.
These groups are not alone. We all struggle with this issue in our businesses…and frankly, I continue to wrestle with it several years after launching on my own. The issues surrounding your business model must be constantly re-evaluated.
The world is a difficult place and tends not to change for those that fail to figure out who in specific terms they are serving, and what REAL, TANGIBLE, PAY MONEY TO FIX types of problems they are solving for these customers. The outcome tends to be a great deal of activity with no vector and ultimately no ability to sustain.
The Pitfalls of Not Thinking Through Your Business Model:
- You have no true strategy..and therefore, almost every idea seems like a good one. You don’t know where to say, “No.”
- People around you are excited by an appealing vision and offer cheerleading that keeps you energized and focused on producing more of something…content…better mousetraps…huge visibility, but no revenue or profit.
- You easily get caught up in the trap of, “If I do more of something,” it will fix the revenue and profit problem. You keep doing more, creating more, building more, talking more..but still, nothing changes on the revenue or profit side.
- You turn to others for advice, and well, everyone has opinions. Some of these opinions include solving the nagging tactical problems that occupy your days. A new website. More technology. More widgets to help extend our visibility.
- You adopt visibility statistics as metrics, when there is absolutely no meaning behind the statistics. They’re fun to watch, but they don’t answer the important business model questions above.
- At the risk of being redundant and borrowing from my recent read/review of Wayne Elsey’s, “Almost Isn’t Good Enough,” “visibility isn’t engagement,” and, “no money, no mission.”
A Short-List of Ideas (and a case study) To Help You Think Through Your Business Model:
1. STOP! Take a time out. Quit creating “field of dreams” (build it and they will come) offerings without answering Drucker’s questions.
2. Clarify. Revisit your vision for what the world will look like when you’ve fulfilled your mission. Clarity is key here. If your vision isn’t crystal clear, no one, including yourself will understand how to build to road leading towards this vision.
3. Resolve. Solve the “my customer is potentially anyone who breathes” dilemma. Sorry, I know that everyone can use your product, but no one will unless you narrow your focus down to a tangible number of people that you know as well as you know yourself. In fact, you should strive to know them better.
4. Describe. Define the “experience” that you want this customer to have, and identify the processes you need to create to develop this unique and differentiable experience.
5. Push back from your desk! Spend most of your time getting to know your customers off of the computer screen and out in places where your customers live and work and hang out.
6. Map the terrain. Move from the customer to the customer’s sphere and map out the influencers, participants, channels, and competitors. Look for people that are interested in the same customers, as these may be people will to pay for, help or support your efforts to address those customers.
7. Show yourself the money. Resist the urge to do more, until you’ve built a plan to fund the business. Without this plan, you are effectively planning to fail.
8. Get creative. Funding can come from more than the end-customer.
A Mini-Case Study:
One of my favorite success stories is a firm that took the old media model of the magazine and successfully adapted it to today’s web-based world.
In the old magazine model, you secured subscribers to interest advertisers. The more subscribers and the more information you could provide/sell to your subscribers, the more you could charge your advertisers.
The owners of the magazine had a mission to bring information to very targeted professionals to help them solve mission-critical data dilemmas for organizations. With the demise of print media, they moved their model to the web, but also identified new ways to build global communities and leverage current social technologies. Today, this organization brings together communities of experts in specific business areas on the web, provides them with a platform to deliver content to targeted (free) subscribers. The subscribers opt in and agree to allow information about the content they consume to be aggregated and ultimately licensed to industry firms. This information is golden for advertisers that sponsor events, leverage the experts and market to the subscribers. The industry firms pay handsomely for access and for information, the industry experts build their businesses and the subscribers grow smarter and engage with firms that understand their needs.
As an important note, the former magazine publisher and now web-based community/content provider didn’t invest a single penny until he had defined this business model.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
No money, no mission. We need you to change the world. Just don’t forget to figure out how you’re going to pay for it, and how you’re going to pay yourself in the process. You’ll be much more effective and much happier once you can afford your idea as well as the talent needed to make it happen.
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