Five steps to re-invent management and leadership

We once home swapped with some people who live in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco. The small town goes by the proud title of "Pumpkin-Growing Capital of The World", which means they must be doing good business in the run up to Hallowe'en right now. So, we ate a lot of pumpkin and wandered around their seven bedroom mansion, while they (the people we homeswapped with) were squashed into our two-bedroom flat in Chiswick, West London. We got the use of their talking Chrysler Le Baron ("Your seatbelt is still undone"). They got the use of our Nissan Micra. I think we won.

So, when Gary Hamel, whom the Wall Street journal rates as "The Number One Most Influential Business Thinker In The World" convened a big think tank in Half Moon Bay a week or two ago, I snapped to attention, as it seemed such a sleepy location for such a powerful think tank. It wasn't just pumpkin soup on the menu (delicious, I recall) - It was the future of management (and leadership!).

I'd love to have been there, as Hamel brought together CK Prahalad, his former tutor and collaborator, Peter Senge (author of the Fifth Discipline, and pioneer of 'the learning organization' and systems thinking), Henry Mintzberg (the strategy guru who spoke to us at a previous Leaders in London), Ed Lawler, Chris Argyris, Jeffrey Pfeffer and other enormous management brains.

The event was called "Inventing The Future of Management". For those of us who couldn't be there to eavesdrop on their findings, Gary Hamel himself is coming to Leaders in London 2008 and I'm sure we can prevail on him to share some of the outcomes with us there.

The two days of debate concluded that we need to re-invent management using the following five principles:

1. Reconstruct the philosophical foundations of management

2. Orient individual and collective effort around a higher and broader purpose

3. Increase trust, reduce fear (My note: Boy, is that important right now in the turbulence facing all of us)

4. Substantially reduce the gravitational pull of the past

5. Reinvent the work of executive leadership

Powerful stuff. The gurus reported after the event, according to the FT, that "natural hierarchies require natural leaders, individuals who are able to mobilise their fellow human beings despite having no 'positional authority'.

"A 21st century management model demands a 21st century leadership model - where leaders are no longer seen as grand visionaries, all-wise decision makers and heroic deal-makers, but are viewed instead as 'social architects', 'constitution writers' and 'entrepreneurs of meaning'."

I love that 'Entrepreneurs of meaning'. Leaders make meaning. More to come from Gary Hamel when he presents his findings to us at Leaders in London 2008

Our Leaders in London 2007 speaker, Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the marketing, advertising and media group, is profiled in the new book by our 2008 Leaders in London speaker Steve Tappin, author of The Secrets of CEOs, which was reviewed in the FT last week.

Martin Sorrell told Tappin and his co-author Andrew Cave:

"No-one has any magic formula" for leadership.

"Everyone obfuscates and makes it too sophisticated. Having a clear purpose, vison and strategy, having the right team and having them aligned to what's important," is the closest you can get to a formula for a successful leader, particularly a successful CEO, says Sorrell.

Richard Donkin of the FT says that although Sorrell says there is no magic formula, his (Sorrell's) own formula for corporate leadership is still important. Sorrell likens himself "to a referee, a sort of consolidator or co-operator" who can bring all the parts of the company to work together," says Donkin.

Tappin argues that the "idea of the solitary figure who tries to think through everything is no longer appropriate for complex international business." Absolutely.

I also like this, from Steve Tappin's book, where he quotes Archie Norman who, along with Allan Leighton and a close knit leadership team, turned around ASDA's fortunes to move up from the bottom of the big four supermarkets in the UK to replace Sainsbury's in coming (at the time - Sainsbury's have since fought back, with the help of CEO Justin King, who was part of Norman's ASDA leadership team) as second in the UK supermarket league table:

"I like businesses where people feel able

to shout at each other, in a professional way, of course."

- Archie Norman

If your relationships with other leaders and the rest of the organization are strong enough to have 'fierce conversations' (see the book of the same name), based on passion for the business (not on ego and trying to get your own way) then you have a robust, healthy corporate climate that's well-placed to make the right decisions in the current tough trading environment.

See a few posts ago for more on Steve Tappin and his core idea of the need to 'build a fellowship' of leaders. And you can learn from Steve direct at Leaders in London 2008.

Labels: FT, Leaders in London, Leadership book, Leadership conference, Martin Sorrell, rules for success, rules of leadership, WPP

Over at Slacker Manager, Phil Gerbyshak has been blogging about how to improve decision-making. As we are in a less forgiving economic environment, it's all the more important that your decisions as a leader are mostly right. So, here are a few quick 'sources of power' on making better decisions:

1. Don't assume the best decisions come from you. 'The leader as decision-maker' who answers everyone's questions and makes the final decision at the end of every meeting, is old hat and based on the outdated notion of the infallibility of leaders.

2. Gary Klein's book Sources of Power, despite its title, isn't about power, but is actually about decision-making. It's a powerful analysis of decision-making by people in life or death situations - firefighters, soldiers, doctors - and the techniques (often sub-conscious) they use. Klein experimented with getting a bunch of marines to work in a trading pit, applying the military's decision-making system for battlefield situations. The trader who were also part of the experiment trounced them. No surprise there. However, when he took the same traders and the same marines and put them in a war game exercise...the traders trounced the marines again. Their use of 80% information plus instinct in a fast-moving situation beat the military's need (at the time: they've learnt since) for 100% information before making a decision.

3. Take your time when you can. Yes, I chose the 'trader' example in 2., on purpose. The turmoil in the financial markets shows that what looks like great, fast decision-making - if you've been in the bearpit of a trading floor, you'll know how fast and furious it is - can, when scaled up and cumulatively, be disastrous for overall strategy. It can even de-stabilize the structure. So, our third and last thought on this subject comes from Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York, who is coming to share his leadership insights with us at Leaders in London in a couple of months (naked plug: book by tomorrow - Friday 26th - to save up to £500).

Giuliani advises us not to make decisions until you have to. The ability to reflect and ponder outcomes before acting is a sign of strength, not weakness, he stresses:

“One of the trickiest elements of decision-making is working out not what, but when. Regardless of how much time exists before a decision must be made, I never make up my mind until I have to. Faced with any important decision, I always envision how each alternative will play out before I make it. During this process, I’m not afraid to change my mind a few times. Many are tempted to decide an issue simply to end the discomfort of indecision. However, the longer you have to make a decision, the more mature and well-reasoned that decision should be.”

Labels: Decision-making, Decisions, Rudy Giuliani, Slacker Manager

What are the first and last questions you ask in any job interview?


What do you like to do?
What do you hate to do?

From an interview with John Catsimatidis on Forbes.com .

Recruiting the right people is a vital part of a leader's job. And yet recruitment is treated, says the Brazilian entrepreneur Ricardo Semler, in a superficial fashion in most organizations. The applicants fill in a form, come and answer questions once or maybe twice. Then you appoint them. Or not.

That's like getting married after meeting someone twice from an online dating site, says Semler. He's right, of course. No wonder if you ask executives what their biggest regrets are, somewhere in the list will be a number of people they appointed who turned out to be not what the exec. hoped they'd be.

The knock-on effect to your plans of mis-appointing is huge and longterm. We all know people we've had to work around because they wouldn't or couldn't leave. The waste in terms of cost is enormous. The waste in terms of opportunity cost - if you had the right person in post - is even bigger.

The two questions, above, sparked off a big debate over in The Leadership Hub, where one person thought they were a joke, but a number of people say that these are vital questions, and have added a few questions of their own. The link, above, takes you to their comments.

What do you think of these questions?
What questions do you ask that help reveal the 'real' person beneath the outer shell that is an interviewee?

Labels: job interview questions, leadership and questions, recruiting, Ricardo Semler

Interesting how celebrity and leadership connect today, isn't it. I mean, for example, Bob Geldof going from pop...not 'star', since his had waned till he took up the mantle of leader of a world movement against poverty...'pop figure', I guess, to a kind of world leader.

His Irish glimmer twin (that's a Rolling Stones reference for you old enough to get it) Bono has become his co-leader. Equally articulate and passionate (what is it about the Irish and a beautiful turn of phrase: I'm a quarter Irish and I resent the fact that I don't have a quarter of Geldof or Bono's eloquence), he is blogging from the Millennium Development Goals summit at the moment in New York. In his latest blog he describes a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and throws in this description:

"Both the first lady and the president change the molecular structure of any room they are in - he speeds them up, she calms them down. A great team. "

'Change the molecular structure of the room they are in'...what a great phrase for describing what leaders do.

Bono also says of the diminutive Sarkozy: "Sarko is a real physical presence in a room. He might even be taller than me… animated, funny one minute; annoyed the next. I admire his energy and vision."

And he describes how Sarkozy reaches across and grabs his arm at one point, and how Carla Bruni, his wife, uses storytelling to capture the imagination.

So, if you want to read Bono's posts there is a scattering of leadership learning jewels in there, such as:

1. How great leaders connect on a personal, intimate basis;

2. The power of leadership partnerships of contrasting styles (Sarko and Bruni sound like Hewlett and Packard - leadership partnerships haven't been studied enough, and we focus as a result too much on leadership as being about individuals, whereas leadership is really something that happens between people, not something one person does to lots of others);

3. The importance of a leader as a generator or releaser of energy - in a meeting, in their daily work - and so on.

There's also a powerful reminder of the point Al Gore and Kofi Annan made at Leaders in London last year - how the rest of the world needs a strong Africa that is not mired in poverty if the rest of the world is to be strong and prosperous, and that this is one of the biggest issues for world leadership today.

Bono's blog, which dissects Sarkozy's leadership style based on his meeting with him, is here

Labels: Annan, Bono, Bruni, celebrity and leadership, Geldof, Gore, great leaders Zarkozy, Hewlett, Packard, world leadership