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Archive for June, 2009

In-House Training for Success in New Technologies: A ‘Must-Have’

Monday, June 29th, 2009

By Rick Grbavac

A recent survey of the construction industry conducted by a large US accounting, tax, and consulting firm had some interesting results:

  • 60% of the respondents did not have succession plans
  • 30 % participate in joint ventures.
  • 57% don’t have in-house training programs
  • Change orders continue to be the largest factors in litigations
  • 57% have a business plan, 40% have a marketing plan

Nothing here really earth-shattering in these numbers  but what caught my eye was in the area of training, as the article states: “With the need for increased training in safety standards and new technologies, training both in best practices and technology emerges as a ‘must have’ for many construction companies. There appears to be need for more improvement in this area.” 

I’m fairly certain that these numbers are indicative of most businesses today: no succession plans, many must form alliances with other companies to do business, most need more training, specifically around their best practices to keep up with the changes in their environments and business and marketing plans always need tweaking.  And in the construction arena, if they did better planning up front (and used the latest modeling software) they might reduce change order litigation.

Cerebyte takes care of the in-house training and best practices implementations in one step.  Let your local construction company know!

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Posted in best practices, management consulting, training | No Comments »

Finding Positive Deviants in Unusual Places (Just Look!)

Friday, June 26th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

Sometimes I find  positive deviants in places I might not have thought to look.

If there’s an industry that’s  perceived to lack innovation and creativity,  it would be  estate planning .  Estate planning clients are very risk-averse. They want to preserve their wealth, and maximize the value that is passed down to the next generation.  Are there positive deviants  even in this conservative, risk-averse industry? You bet! Lee Brower is a great example.

 I just finished reading  Brower’s  new book “The Brower Quadrant.” I have had the privilege of knowing Lee for several years now. He is incredibly engaging in person and his book is a great insight into his underlying beliefs. His “prescription” for living is something that anyone can benefit from, whether you’re in your teens or your 70’s.

Lee has worked in the estate planning industry for many years, mainly focusing on high net worth clients. What makes him a positive deviant? Like positive deviants that we see in other industries, he has taken the conventional wisdoms and thrown them out the window. Instead of conceiving of estate planning as simply shielding financial assets, he sees it as optimizing all of a family’s assets, including their collective wisdom and experiences. In the estate planning industry, this is a pretty radical notion.

Has he been successful? Absolutely! Again like other positive deviants, he has not only challenged the conventional wisdoms, he has created a vision around his approach that engages others.

Do you think that your industry or specialty is too “cookie cutter” or too procedure-driven to have positive deviants? Do you think that performance has already been optimized in your company? Think again! If someone can begin a revolution in the estate planning industry, why not in your industry? You just have to keep your eyes open and really look for them.

Positive deviants are out there.

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Posted in best practices, leadership, management consulting, positive deviance, positive deviants | No Comments »

Thrive Using Unconventional Wisdom: Ignorance and Arrogance May Cost You Millions

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

By William Seidman

SAP  is the holy grail of IT systems: it integrates almost all functions needed to run a big business. Sales links to orders, links to manufacturing, links to inventory, links to shipments, etc. SAP is huge and  difficult to use. However, it is better than the separate alternatives.   

SAP’s size and complexity often overwhelms organizations. I used to go around asking people if any company had ever been successful with SAP and the answer was almost always “no.” At least one Fortune 500 company nearly went under because of SAP problems. 

The trick is that SAP can be successful, but only if you go against everything  you were ever taught about how you do these deployments. We work with Intel and,  after years of grappling with SAP,  Intel eventually recognized and adopted the unconventional approach we suggest as the only way to go.  But it took them literally years of unsuccessful effort to accept a perspective that was so different - and successful.

I am involved in two other projects with SAP.  The conventional wisdom just does not work, but the unconventional wisdom is so counter-intuitive that it is not accepted until an incredible amount of damage is done.  It is very frustrating at times.

To be successful with SAP, take SAP defaults (literally) and make the business conform to what SAP can do. Companies reject this idea until they have spent millions and substantially failed. The teams I am working with right now are convinced that they know what they are doing because they are following the conventional wisdoms.  No one on the teams has done work like this before.

It’s really, really difficult to believe that the conventional framework won’t work,  because for so long it’s been  the mainstream, accepted way.

To do something in an unconventional way- but in a way which actually works - is just so contrary to their framework that they can’t understand why anyone would do it the unconventional way.  Unfortunately, unless they embrace an unconventional way of utilizing SAP they will all fail, and there is nothing that will convince them to approach the work differently.

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Posted in best practices, business, management consulting, organizational change | No Comments »

Positive Deviance: A Key to Great Government?

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

By Michael McCauley 

In her recent column, “How Questions Can Drive Leadership Success“   in the weekly of the National League of Cities , Dr. Barbara Mackoff  posits that asking the right questions can drive municipal leadership success. I couldn’t agree more!

Dr. Mackoff seeks to encourage the use of the wisdom of positive deviants.  Instead of asking,  ”What’s wrong here?”  she suggests that we ask,  ”What do we want more of here?”

How refreshing!

I just finished reading Lee Brower’s   new book, The Brower Quadrant . In it Lee supports  Mackoff’s approach, saying,  “To be true leaders we need to ask different questions. Asking different questions leads us to different answers. Different answers lead us to different, and often better, results.”

Next, Mackoff suggests that we look around and see who is already solving this problem. Again, this is a positive deviance approach. In any organization, there are people who consistently and systematically outperform everyone else. These are the people we should be focusing on. They are the ones that can help us with work through our challenges and adopt the successful behaviors they have made them so successful.

 There are several additional suggestions that Mackoff provides in her column to help determine if the solution defined by the positive deviants is the right one for your particular city and to ensure that we get the most leverage possible.

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Posted in best practices, leadership, management consulting, positive deviance, positive deviants, positive leadership | No Comments »

Wear Your Rose-Colored Glasses: A Good Mood is a Biological Reality and is also Good for Productivity, Creativity, and Vision

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

By William Seidman

We have observed that there is a noticeable change in the speed and quality of learning when people are feeling good about themselves. Kim Cameron  in his book Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance  supports this.

Now there is more specific research that shows that a good mood makes learning more effective .   A University of  Toronto  study by Drs. Taylor W. Schmitz, . Eve de Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson, “Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding,”  strongly suggests that “seeing the world through rose-colored glasses is more biological reality than metaphor.” 

The study team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at how the visual cortex processes information when the subject is in a good,  bad, or neutral mood. Good moods enhance the size of the window through which we see the world. A bad mood shrinks creativity and productivity. This information is critical in terms of creating an organizational culture worth having. 

For the good of your organization, learn to think positively!

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Posted in affirmations, business, management consulting, neuroleadership, neuroscience, organizational change, personal change, positive leadership | No Comments »

Shared Beliefs, Values, and Ways of Doing Things: Your Organization’s Culture

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

By William Seidman

Organizations of all stripes are rightfully concerned about their cultures: the shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and and standards that define and guide them. Organizational culture has everything to do with goals and strategies and ultimate success or failure. Culture sets the underlying norms for functioning. Sometimes, culture needs to change.

Organizations as diverse as the Maryland  prison system or the  British National Health Service  are thinking about their culture.  Last week Martha  Johnson, President Obama’s nominee for administrator of the General Services Administration (the GSA), named “an organizational culture of values and trust” as one of her highest priorities for the agency.

Regardless of the differences - in purpose and practices -  every organization needs to talk about its culture, tweak what isn’t working,  and continuously find ways to support and reinforce it.

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Posted in best practices, business, optimization, organizational assessments, organizational change | 1 Comment »

Remembering Ourselves/Revising the Past: Are Rose-Colored Glasses Hard-Wired?

Monday, June 8th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

As we work with companies to maximize their performance we often encounter a rather odd phenomenon: once the people in an organization have changed their behavior and internalized the new way of doing things, they deny ever having done things the old way. Even when we show them data that clearly illustrates the way they used to do things, they still deny that they ever engaged in the old, now outdated, behaviors. They claim that they have always done things the “right” way - i.e., the way they do them now.  How can that be?

I’ve been reading an interesting book, Why We Make Mistakes   by Joseph Hallinan . Hallinan finds that this tendency to see and remember our actions in self-serving ways is so ingrained, and so subtle, that we often have no idea we’re doing it. He cites a study of recent high school graduates now attending a local college. They were asked to recall their high school grades; researchers compared their remembered grades against the actual transcripts.

They found that no less than 29% of the recalled grades were wrong and far more grades were shifted up than down. This combined with other studies shows a significant predisposition for people to reconstruct their memories in positive, self-flattering ways.

These findings are confirmed by Princeton Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman . He has found that that most people, after they change their mind or behavior, reconstruct their own past opinions in such a way as to truly believe that they always thought or acted in a certain way. 

So, it seems that the responses we encounter are perfectly natural - people really don’t remember ever doing things the “old” way. It seems that we all wear “rose colored glasses” -they’re probably hard-wired, and we don’t even know it.

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Posted in neuroscience, organizational change, personal change | No Comments »

Your Brain on Failure

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

Is failure actually good for you? Recent studies by Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck  indicate that it is.  For forty years she has studied how people handle failure, and her research has led her to identify two distinct mindsets that dramatically influence how we react to failure. She’s recently published a new book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which explains her findings.

 A “fixed mindset” is grounded in the belief that talent is genetic - you’re a born artist, baseball pitcher, or math wiz. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are entitled to success without much effort and regard failure as a personal affront. Conversely, a “growth mindset” assumes that no talent is entirely innate and that effort and learning make everything possible. Since the ego isn’t on the line as much, the growth mindset sees failure as opportunity rather than insult.

In her studies,  Dr. Dweck  tracked and compared brain waves of subjects with both growth and fixed mindsets. She  found that when those with a growth mindset fail at something, they actually enter a more focused mental state as they try to figure out their mistake and how to learn from it. On the other hand, those with a fixed mindset never enter this focused state of learning and show little, if any, advancement from failure. In essence, fixed mindset people don’t learn from their mistakes.

 Antoine Bechara, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at University of Southern California, has gone further and actually isolated the spots in the brain that are responsible for our fear of failure and our fear of success. These are the points in the brain where we debate risk and reward. By studying brainwaves emanating from these two locations, Dr. Bechara has found that in a normally functioning brain, failure is welcomed as an opportunity for learning, and for strengthening us.

What we learn from these studies is that failure is normal, healthy and necessary to learning. Great coaches and teachers know this, and they give us the opportunities we need to fail in a controlled environment so that we can learn and grow.

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Posted in neuroscience, personal change | No Comments »

Tell Your Audience Who You Are!

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

By William Seidman

Recently, I had the opportunity to work with Gerry Sindell  of  Thought Leaders International.  Gerry is an expert at helping people transform their loose, disorganized ideas into concrete products, particularly when it comes to writing. In his blog  (May 14, 2009) he writes, “I have helped a lot of smart people become successful authors and leaders, and one of my first rules for clients is: you must tell your audience as quickly as possible who you are.”

He wrote The Genius Machine  about his methods; it got a great review in Time . Gerry is particularly skilled at seeing the things that others do not, and turning his visions into positive work.

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Posted in leadership, management consulting, optimization, personal change | No Comments »

 
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