- By Kathy Harris

[Wall Street journal]

Operational excellence, an innovative spirit and persistent agility are three defining business strategies that will drive organizations during the coming decade.

- Surveys show that 80% to 90% of executives say innovation is important to their organizations, yet fewer than half take overt action to formalize an innovation program. Further, if a program is established, fewer that 10% are still active two years later.

- We at Gartner believe that innovation and agility are emerging management disciplines and are imperatives for business success between 2008 and 2012.

- Agility is an organization’s ability to sense environmental change and to respond efficiently and effectively to that change. Agile organizations are agile throughout, that is, their people, processes and technology are creative, flexible and adaptable to change.

- Agility doesn’t just “happen” in an organization; it is a management discipline that requires a clear process model, intentional design, careful development, and continual refinement.

- Agility shares manu traits with innovation. Like agile companies, innovative organizations are innovative throughout.Many organizations think of innovation as only the narrow domain

of disruptive changes that significantly alters markets, products and the rules of competition. In additiona to pursuing the “next big thing,” organizations should consider another dimension of innovation – that of operational excellence as the enabler of change.

- Operationally excellent systems and processes are by definition, agile and flexible. Therefore, the capacity for innovation is built in.

- Ultimately, it will be vital for organizations to rethink operational excellence as building in not only reliability, but also innovativeness and agility. The organizations aggressively pursuing these strategies will be well positioned in the coming decade.

Mr. Goldsmith is one of the world’s leading CEP coaches.

- He abhors three words: “no”, “but”, “however”. He says “It is a bad habit. The word ‘but’ means disregard everything that came before this.”. It is distracting.

- Somewhere along the way leaders have inclucated bad habits, like winning too much. It is important that we want to win. People at that level are winners – they are used to winning. But now they ought to let other people win too. Because you get to win anyway when you are at the top. You still need to win big things, not win stupid things.

- Control what you need to control. Let go of what you don’t need to control.

- The other bad habit that CEO’s have acquired is that of adding too much value. Let’s say I as a young, enthusiastic guy go up to my boss with an idea. And instead of saying that it’s a great idea, the boss says, ‘Let me add this to it.” Now the problem is that while the quality of the idea may go up by 5%, my commitment may go down by 50%.

- Realize that you are human not god.

- One of the toughest leadership lessons was that all the suggestions become orders. “If they are smart, they are orders. If they are stupid, they are still orders.”. Answer: Before you speak, breathe and ask yourself, is it worth it?

- the old idea of command and control-to tell people what to do and how to do it-doesn’t work anymore. You have to ask, listen and learn. Think about what it important, and realise that people you manage know more than you do.

- At a meeting when he was with Boeing, one man came up to Mullali and said: “I don’t know.” He applauded. It is so rare that someone in that culture would do that because historically they pretended to know everything. Mullali tried to create an environment where people reach out, learn from everyone around them, and build relationships across the organization.

- People need to realize hat the behaviour that got them to point A isn’t the same as the behaviour that will taken them to point B.

- Half the leaders don’t need to know what to do. Rather they need to know what not to do.

- How does one figure out something needs to change? : You can get confidential feedback. The tricklies in not asking what I did wrong, but saying in the future this is where I want to go, so give me ideas. It works much better. It is less threatening.

- Buddha said never do what I teach because I teach it; always do what I teach because it works in the context of your life.

Source rediff.com

What makes an effective leader

November 22, 2007 09:39 IST

The cult of the heroic leader remains strong.

– Loren Gary, editor

Effective leaders are not born with the gift of knowing how to lead. Rather, they gain experience, they absorb knowledge, they see and listen to the world around them – both inside the organization and beyond. Effective leaders are also capable of assuming the leadership qualities needed for specific situations. There

are many kinds of effective leaders — among them are the charismatic leader, the transformational leader, and the pragmatic leader — but these distinctive qualities can blend together in one person in different ways at different times.

Charismatic leaders seem to shine

A charismatic leader may seem to be born with a gift to inspire. Particularly during a crisis, people turn to this powerful voice for a grand vision and hope for solutions. Such a leader can clarify the situation for his people and instill the confidence they need. People feel safe handing off a problem to this type of leader.

What makes charismatic leaders such champions? They differ from the norm in greater self-confidence, energy, enthusiasm, and unconventional behavior. Charismatic leaders tend to:

A charismatic leader is most successful during a crisis. For example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a charismatic leader who led the United States out of the Great Depression and readied the nation for World War II. On the other hand, Adolf Hitler was also a charismatic leader who gave his defeated nation a new vision of power and might. Thus, charismatic leaders can have great power and influence, but how they use it determines whether their inspiration works for good or not.

However, most organizations are not in a continual state of peril. A lofty vision for achieving a grand mission may not be attainable, and the value of inspiration may dissolve into a need for everyday, step-by-step progress. Thus, charismatic leaders are not always the best type of leader.

“[The charismatic leader is] supposed to have the ‘gift of tongues’ with which he [can] inspire employees to work harder and gain the confidence of investors, analysts, and the ever skeptical press.”

— Rakesh Khurana, professor

Transformational leaders focus on the people and the task

Unlike charismatic leaders, transformational leaders remold an organization not through the force of their own personality but by appealing to their people, gaining their trust and respect. Transformational leaders achieve results by paying close attention to their group or team as they

What makes transformational leaders effective is their ability to make their vision a clear, identifiable goal that can guide their team’s actions to meet the goal. They trust their people, provide the resources they need, and encourage them to move forward.

Pragmatic leaders — from the ideal to the real

The most apparent characteristic of pragmatic leaders is their focus on the organization rather than on people. Pragmatic leaders face the realities of business environment; they listen to and understand the truth, whether good or bad, hopeful or daunting. They are effective because they

Pragmatic leaders may not be as flamboyant or exciting as other types of leaders, but they get the job done. Pragmatic leaders are most effective when an organization is going through rough times or when the business environment is too turbulent to see far ahead, when a short-term, familiar vision is necessary.

After all, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were successful in attaining the goal of their Northwest journey. When they reached the Pacific Ocean in April 1805, Lewis wrote that he was “much pleased at having arrived at this long wished for spot.”

Effective leaders are future-focused

In general, leaders who are effective now and in the future have learned how to be:

Future-focused: They create a vision, articulate it to their group, and stick with it. They understand how their unit or organization fits into the larger picture, and they organize short-term tasks according to long-term priorities.

Comfortable with ambiguity: They are willing to take calculated risks, can handle a certain level of disruption and conflict, and are willing to change their minds when new information comes to light.

Persistent: They can maintain a positive, focused determination in pursuing a goal or vision, despite the obstacles.

Excellent communicators: They know how to write clearly, listen closely, run meetings, make presentations, negotiate, and speak in public.

Politically astute: They have acquired a solid sense of their organization’s power structure, listen carefully to the concerns of its most powerful groups, and know where to turn for the support and resources they need.

Level-headed: They know how to stay calm in the midst of turmoil and confusion.

Self-aware: They know themselves enough to realize how their own patterns of behavior affect others.

Caring: They have a demonstrated ability to empathize with other people’s needs, concerns, and professional goals.

Humorous: When the situation warrants it, they know how to inject a little mirth to relive tension within a group.

Tip: Be the change you want to bring about — model the behaviors you’re trying to encourage.

Excerpted from:

Leading People 

Source baselinemag.com

October 17, 2007

4 Reasons Why Tech Consultants Get Sacked

By Laton McCartney

The biggest sins: Promising what can’t be delivered and not closing the loop in client communications. To do either is to invite calamity.

Not long ago I interviewed a representative from a tech consultancy that was involved in a systems upgrade. The project was progressing as planned, the firm’s rep claimed. Everything was on schedule and within budget, or close to. Sure, there had been a few rough patches, but the client was now pleased with the work being done.

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Two weeks later the client summarily fired the consulting company. Clearly there was a major disconnect between the client’s expectations and what was being delivered. The consultancy lost a valuable piece of business.

Typically there are several reasons why tech consultants get the axe. Among them:

No. 1: Promising more than you can deliver. Usually, consultants sell these kinds of overly ambitious projects at the boardroom level, meaning they convince senior managers

they can provide a silver bullet that will transform a company into a lean, mean, highly competitive machine.

Remember some of the early ERP initiatives in the late 1990s? Viola! All enterprise data and processes would be magically integrated overnight. Of course, some of these initiatives dragged on for several lifetimes and cost a fortune?one company supposedly lost more than $100 million on a failed ERP effort – and for the most part didn’t pan out. In fact, according to some surveys, only 6% of companies consider their ERP systems to be effective. The upshot: a number of ERP vendors were not only canned but were targeted with lawsuits as well.

No. 2: Failure to win hearts and minds. A consultant can implement a system that delivers as promised, but if the users don’t get on board, there’s going to be trouble in River City. According to popular wisdom, what’s needed in these instances is change management. Fine, but too often consultancies underestimate the recalcitrance of the user community and initiate change management after the fact. We’ve given you this wonderful tool, and now you better use it, or else. Better to promote the benefits of the wonderful tool at the outset of the project and let the client do most of the selling.

No. 3: Lack of project management. The ongoing dispute between the FBI and Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) is a classic instance of the problems that can arise without adequate project management, ideally by both the client and the contractor. The FBI, you may recall, hired SAIC in 2001 to build a Virtual Case File (VCF) project. Four years and $104 million later it finally became evident to the client that the VCF effort was a disaster. SAIC was ousted and Congress pressed the FBI to get its VCF funding back. Meanwhile, SAIC claimed the VCF could be saved and made specific references as to how to do so. Too late. Why had it taken the FBI four years to figure out it was pouring tax payer money into a black hole? Why had it taken SAIC so long to shift into emergency mode to try to salvage VCF? An effective project management team would have put in place milestones that had to be met along the way. If not, alarms would have sounded. Of course, this isn’t entirely the contractor’s failing but the client’s as well.

Someone was asleep at the wheel.

No. 4: Taking things for granted. The aforementioned IT consultancy believed that all was hunky dory with the client, filing weekly status reports as per the client’s request. Since the client never responded, the consultant assumed all was well. No news is good news, right? Not so. Had the consulting firm solicited feedback from the get-go, it would have learned early on that there were problems and would have at least have the chance to rectify them before the axe fell.

Other columns on IT consulting by Laton McCartney:

1. Business is made up of ambiguous victories and nebulous defeats. Claim them all as victories.

2. Keep track of what you do; someone is sure to ask.

3. Be comfortable around senior managers, or learn to fake it.

4. Never bring your boss a problem without some solution.

5. You are getting paid to think, not to whine.

6. Long hours don’t mean anything; results count, not effort.

7. Write down ideas; they get lost, like good pens.

8. Always arrive at work 30 minutes before your boss.

9. Help other people network for jobs. You never know when your turn will come.

10. Don’t take days off sick?unless you are.

11. Assume no one can/will keep a secret.

12. Know when you do your best?morning, night, under pressure, relaxed; schedule and prioritize your work accordingly.

13. Treat everyone who works in the organization with respect and dignity, whether it be the cleaner or the managing director. Don’t ever be patronizing.

14. Never appear stressed in front of a client, a customer or your boss. Take a deep breath and ask yourself: In the course of human events,

how important is this?

15. If you get the entrepreneurial urge, visit someone who has his own business. It may cure you.

16. Acknowledging someone else’s contribution will repay you doubly.

17. Career planning is an oxymoron. The most exciting opportunities tend to be unplanned.

18. Always choose to do what you’ll remember ten years from now.

19. The size of your office is not as important as the size of your pay cheque.

20. Understand what finished work looks like and deliver your work only when it is finished.

21. The person who spends all of his or her time is not hard-working; he or she is boring.

22. Know how to write business letters?including thank-you notes as well as proposals.

23. Never confuse a memo with reality. Most memos from the top are political fantasy.

24. Eliminate guilt. Don’t fiddle expenses, taxes or benefits, and don’t cheat colleagues.

25. Reorganizations mean that someone will lose his or her job. Get on the committee that will make the recommendations.

26. Job security does not exist. Always have an answer to the question, “What would I do if I lost my job tomorrow?”

27. Go to the company Christmas party.Don’t get drunk at the company Christmas party.

28. Avoid working at weekends. Work longer during the week if you have to.

29. The most successful people in business are interesting.

30. Sometimes you’ll be on a winning streak and everything will click; take maximum advantage. When the opposite is true, hold steady and wait it out.

31. Never in your life say, “It’s not my job.”

32. Be loyal to your career, your interests and yourself.

33. Understand the skills and abilities that set you apart. Use them whenever you

have an opportunity.

34. People remember the end of the project. As they say in boxing, “Always finish stronger than you start”

1. Incentives are the conrnerstone of modern life and understanding them – or often, ferreting then out is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating.

2. The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done. * Surprise – drinking 8 glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health.

3. Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes. The answer to a given riddle is not always in front of you.* NOrma McCorney had a far greater impact on crime [Roe Vs. Wade].

4. ‘Experts’ – from criminologists to real-estate agents use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda.

5. Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.

WSJ: What is business intelligence?

Mr. Davenport: It’s the systematic use of information about your business to understand, report on and predict different aspects of performance. Historically, it has had a number of names. It was called decision support when I started my career…It’s been called business intelligence for about a decade now.

WSJ: Why is it so hot now?

Mr. Davenport: I think it’s some combination of the software and hardware for doing it keep getting better and there is a huge amount of data that most organizations have now. You could argue that for 20 to 30 years organizations were just capturing and refining their data about their business and now they have finally decided maybe they can actually do something with this data to manage their business more effectively.

WSJ: What are the benefits?

Mr. Davenport: I define business intelligence into really two categories. One is just reporting, knowing what is going on in your business.

The benefits of that are that one you stay out of jail. If you are a public company you have to report accurately on what is going on in your business. Two, you get relatively early warning on how you are performing so you can fix the problem, and you can educate mangers about your business.

Analytics, which is the other key category of

business intelligence, is more understanding-oriented in terms of knowing what factors are really driving your business performance, or prediction-oriented, looking forward instead of backward.

WSJ: Can you give some examples of how specific kinds of businesses would use these tools?

Mr. Davenport: In hospitality, pricing and customer loyalty would be the two major areas. Pricing of rooms or pricing of airplane seats. Pricing of airplane seats was a very early use of this stuff.

In health care, you are trying to figure out who is likely, for example, to get a certain disease. Who is likely to get diabetes, a big issue going on in health care right now. So you can do an analysis based on how active physically the person is, how much they weigh, their blood sugar levels are today and you can actually come up with a fairly good assessment of how likely a particular individual is to come down with diabetes.

In financial services, it’s ‘should I give this person a mortgage?’ ‘Should I authorize this transaction on a credit card?’ That has become a very analytical decision. ‘Should I pay this insurance claim or is it fraudulent?’

For retail, it’s ‘what price should I charge, in the beginning?’ ‘How many of each clothing type should I have in each store and when should I mark it down and by how much?’

WSJ: What technology does a company need to go down this path?

Mr. Davenport: The most important thing is good data. Now organizations still have lots and lots of it.

The key task is integrating it and making sure it doesn’t have a lot of errors, making sure it’s common, that customer means the same thing across the entire organization so you are not comparing apples to oranges.

WSJ: Is it all about technology?

Mr. Davenport: No, not at all. That was one of the things that I think was an interesting outcome of my research. I’d say the number one factor is really a leadership dimension.

It’s how committed are a company’s senior executives to fact-based and analytical decision-making and the whole idea of experimentation as a way to learn rather than doing it out of gut feel or intuition.

The easiest way is when you have a new CEO who is very quantitatively oriented and who has had experience with this. People like Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com Inc., he was the founder, but he is very mathematically inclined. Gary Loveman, is one of the best examples as the CEO of Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. who has a Ph.D. in quantitative economics from MIT. Reed Hastings at Netflix Inc. was a high-school math teacher.

Sometimes it’s a struggle. I remember some people at Harrah’s saying they did a hotel-room price-optimization system where the business-intelligence system was recommending prices that would be charged for hotel rooms when customers would call and make reservations. Initially, the hotel property managers would override the system, because they didn’t understand it and they thought their expertise and their experience was a better guide to what prices should be.

After some analysis they found out the system was doing a better job, so they had to get a little heavy handing and say if you keep overriding these things you don’t have a future at this company.

WSJ: What do you make of the SAP deal to buy Business Objects?

I think it’s a good idea. I believe that the emphasis in the world has shifted now from compiling data from transaction systems to using the data effectively. SAP had some capabilities for doing that, but certainly I think most people would agree that they were not industry-leading capabilities. Now with Business Objects I think they have a much better story about how you can use your data effectively to run your business.

I think it’s a statement that just having transaction systems is not enough and I think Oracle’s purchase of Hyperion is evidence of the same thing.

WSJ: Will business-intelligence and analytics software disappear as a separate category?

Mr. Davenport: Well that is an interesting question. I do believe that the goal of certainly SAP and Oracle to a slightly lesser degree is to start embedding business intelligence, both reporting and analytics, into the business process itself.

The world is a long way away from doing that, but I believe that is the long-term direction.

Sam sold Equity Office Properties, the real estate investment trust he had built over decades, to Blackstone for $39 billion. At the time, business publications were unconvinced. “Is he cashing out too early?” One headline asked.

Instead as wenow know, the sale was at the top of the market, and only months before the credit meltdown that has shaken up a financial system. So was he seeing portents of a tightening last winter that others weren’t yet ready to acknowledge?

“Obviously, the deal that was done on Feb. 7 could not be done on Sept. 7,” Mr. Zell says, while insisting that he’s told everyone he didn’t try to deliberately pick a market top so much as weigh the offer against what his own instincts told him was the right price. “Somebody made an offer that was wide by a significant margin of my own caluation. So I’m looking in the mirror, and any day you don’t sell, you buy, and I wasn’t willing to buy at the price they were willing to pay, so I sold it.”

A law of nature that leads to fruitless spending? No, a law of corporate governance. With founders entrenched in a controlling position, such companies don’t see their luck for what it is and channel their winnings to shareholders. Instead they squander their abnormal returns hoping to make lightning strike again, and end up with a collection of low- or no-return businesses to show for their trouble.

Case # 1: When NASA began the launch of astronauts into space, they found out that the pens would not work at zero gravity (ink will not flow down to the writing surface).

Solution # 1: To solve this problem, it took them one decade and $12 million. They developed a pen that worked at zero gravity, upside down, underwater, in practically any surface including crystal and in a temperature range from below freezing to over 300 degrees C.

Solution # 2: And what did the Russians do…?? They used a pencil.

Case # 2: One of the most memorable case studies on Japanese management was the case of the empty soapbox, which happened in one of Japan ?s biggest cosmetics companies. The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soapbox that was empty.

Immediately the authorities isolated the problem to the assembly Line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department.  For some reason, one soapbox went through the assembly line empty.  Management asked its engineers to solve the problem.

Solution # 1: Post-haste, the engineers worked

hard to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soapboxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty. No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast but they spent a whoopee amount to do so.

Solution # 2: But when a rank-and-file employee in a small company was posed with the same problem, he did not get into complications of X-rays, etc., but instead came out with another solution.  He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line.  He switched the fan on, and as each soapbox passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.

Moral

o        Always look for simple solutions.

o        Devise the simplest possible solution that solves the problems.

o        Always focus on solutions & not on problems.