Leaders, Tattoo this Causal Relationship on Your Forearms

February 22, 2012 By 6 Comments

I’ve been mildly surprised that the book, Beyond Performance-How Great Organizations Build Competitive Advantage by Scott Keller and Colin Price, hasn’t commanded more attention in mainstream business circles. Perhaps we’ve grown numb to the almost endless number of books purporting to show us the way to sustained success. However, don’t let the existence of 25,000 or so books published on managing change during the past two decades, blind you to some of the important and data-backed conclusions of Beyond Performance.

The book is the outcome of a massive McKinsey research initiative that suggests that the ability of an organization to gain and sustain success is a function of a focus on traditional performance tools and measures AND something they describe as Organizational Health. 

Organizational Health is defined as, “the ability of your organization to align, execute and renew itself faster than your competitors.”  

The authors backed by research that encompasses 600,000 survey respondents from more than 500 organizations; surveys and interviews with 6,800 CEO’s and an exhaustive literature review, put forth a powerful claim “On the strength of our research and analysis, we assert that the link between (organizational) health is more than a correlation, and is in fact causal.”

We’ve moved beyond correlation to a place where most of the 25,000 aforementioned books never go. The authors are stepping out on the statistical limb (a fairly sturdy, data-supported limb) in suggesting a causal relationship between performance and Organizational Health.

They take their conclusion one step further: “We argue that the numbers show that at least 50 percent of your organization’s success in the long term is driven by its health.”

What’s Organizational Health?

The short form: Organizational Health is described by three key components:  internal alignment on direction, quality of execution and capacity for renewal.

These three break down into 9 elements:

  1. Direction
  2. Leadership
  3. Culture and Climate
  4. Accountability
  5. Coordination and Control
  6. Capabilities
  7. Motivation
  8. External Orientation
  9. Innovation and Learning

The 9 further subdivide into 37 distinct management practices that can be measured, monitored and evaluated.  The 37 practices comprise the Organizational Health Index (OHI) survey, “a tool for measuring the health in rigorous and comprehensive manner.”

My Quick Takes:

Invest the time and read the book.  The book, the data, the OHI and the inherent management practices merit our time and attention!

There are practical implications for you and your firm now. Often, big  research studies seem to come back and confirm the obvious. There’s a little of that here, but the data backing of the conclusions allows us to move from conjecture about these practices to confidence that we need to focus our energies around promoting organizational health.  Anyone reading this or any other leadership and management blog will intuitively get that the 9-elements (and 37 practices) are essential. The book offers few epiphanies from an intellectual perspective. From a practical perspective, it clubs us over the head and reminds us that we tend to ignore much of the softer stuff (beyond performance activities and measures). Translation, too many business and leaders suck at cultivating organizational health.

It’s broader than employee engagement.  The OHI is comprehensive enough to bypass my gag reflex on employee engagement surveys serving as proxies for organizational health. If I see one more question asking me whether I have friends at work or whether I have the tools to do my job, the gag reflex will fail!

See also the last decade. Ignoring organizational health has in large part contributed to the creation of the lost decade we’ve just lived through. This past decade guarantees heartburn many years into the future.

Reminds you of your priorities. The authors and their concept of Organizational Health speak to the pieces we all intuitively know are essential for survival in this world…alignment on direction, focus on getting great people supporting execution, and promoting a culture that learns and adapts. The encouragement to work on the practices that beget health is an important reminder for all of us.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

No magical answers, but strong support for what the best leaders and managers have long known…the soft stuff of culture, climate and environment and all the inherent management practices are critical. Organizational health begets performance. Is it time for a check-up?

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Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Strategy Tagged With: , , ,

Steve Jobs-Walking With Giants

October 6, 2011 By 3 Comments

Twentieth Century Industrialist and the founder of Panasonic, Konosuke Matsushita, established a garden outside of the firm’s modest headquarters in Osaka, Japan. In this garden, he commissioned and placed statues of his heroes. Fittingly, a giant statue of Thomas Edison is at the center of this collection of remarkable Western and Asian inventors and thinkers. A few of the recognizable names beyond Edison, include: Anton Phillips, Ampere, Marconi and Ohm.  In my mind, Steve Jobs is now strolling in his traditional garb in this garden, talking and debating with Matsushita, Edison and the other great thinkers and doers that have defined our age of technology.

Safe travels, Steve and thanks for your contributions to our world.

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Management Innovation Tagged With: , ,

Towards Your Growth as a Management Innovator

August 29, 2011 By 2 Comments

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?

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Management Innovation 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.

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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…

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

Management Week in Review for March 4, 2011

March 4, 2011 By 3 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Management Innovation Tagged With: , , , , ,
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