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Changing Attitudes and Opening Closed Minds: Leaders Who Need Leadership

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

By William Seidman

We’re working on several leadership programs right now, leading an organization through a transformation.

We have built decent best practices that are different from the usual. We’ve been emphasizing “authenticity.”

When we talk about deploying the best practices, though, we get stuck.

After a lot of conversation and thought, we realized that the leaders who most need enhanced leadership capabilities are executives most convinced they are already great leaders. This mindset  is a good part of why they are powerfully resistant to considering their own need to grow and change.

Ironically, the best leaders are those who seek  out —  and are open to –  growth opportunities. They’re easy to work with but don’t need the development.

How do you you engage “leaders” who are so resistant to learning from others?

Posted in best practices, business, company culture, leadership, management consulting, organizational assessments, organizational change, personal change | No Comments »

If Your Company Came with an Instruction Manual You Don’t Need “Strategy to Action in 10 Days”

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

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By William Seidman

Ever wish your company had come with an instruction manual? Michael McCauley and I have written a book, Advantage Media has published it, and we’re excited. You can buy  “Strategy to Action in 10 Days: Creating High Performance Organizations”  directly from us, in bookstores, or on Amazon. There’s a Kindle edition, too.

Join our Facebook page and come with us as we travel to promote our book.

Ron Nakamoto, CEO of Strategic Financial, has praise:  ”I recommend Strategy to Action in 10 Days to any person interested in creating a high performance organization. It clearly illustrates how to break from the status quo and create a truly sustainable change. It is as much a practical guide as it is a game changer.”                              

We’re as excited about our book as we are about the many people who are using it to create real, lasting, and positive change in their organizations.

Posted in best practices, business, captology, knowledge workers, leadership, management consulting, optimization, organizational assessments, organizational change, organizational culture, persuasive technology, positive deviance, positive deviants, positive leadership, training, wisdom discovery, wisdom transfer | No Comments »

How Many Consultants Does It Take To Change a Company?

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

By William Seidman

One — but only if the organization really wants to change. 

At a recent holiday party I chatted with someone who had been an executive in a family-owned ship repair company — successful for fifty years — which had finally failed.

The business had begun to decline quickly because of changing world market conditions. The owners knew their business was in trouble and brought in high-priced consultants to make recommendations.

Each recommendation was rejected as “not understanding our business.” I asked this person if the owners had really wanted to change. His frank response was,  ”Not really.”  They believed that there was a need to change and their numbers reinforced it. But in their hearts,  they really wanted to stay just the same. The desire to do nothing was stronger than the need to change.

I recently had a discussion with an executive of a high tech company about the difference between going toward something and going away from something.

His observation was that going toward something is much more powerful than leaving something.

The ship repair company’s executives were being told to go away from their comfort zone but not, in their minds, toward something promising or exciting. They didn’t have a vision, or even a picture, of what they were moving toward.

They might have been able to successfully change  had they had framed their thinking as going toward something desirable. Moving away from the old ways wasn’t enough. A positive, motivating vision was missing, and the company — like so many others that couldn’t change – is now gone.

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

Headquarters versus The Field: Replace “versus” with “Working With” for Great Results

Monday, December 21st, 2009

By William Seidman

I’m working with a company that has both a very strong corporate headquarters culture and a very strong sales and field operations culture.  But these two vitally important parts – headquarters and sales — are often disconnected from one another and, even worse, at odds with what should be shared goals.

Headquarters designs programs that are forward-looking and innovative but, according to the people on the ground, are difficult to deploy.  The result is that the people in sales - in the field - are so focused on daily survival that they tend to produce great short-term financial results, but have neither the time nor the energy to learn new things.

Conflicts between headquarters and sales and operations result in good ideas from headquarters being derided as “fads of the week.” Often the innovative concept is discarded or, if the new idea is tried, immediate revenues may decline.

But when headquarters and the field align around a new idea, the synergy can be powerful.

How to get them to align?  Headquarters needs to be more aware of what’s really going on in the field and adjust programs to fit these conditions.  Headquarters must reduce its constant pressure for immediate numbers. The field has to be given support for learning something new. This takes time and often results in lagging numbers.

Both changes in behavior are difficult for executives to manage because they require everyone to take some risks.

Cooperating for a change can be nerve-wracking for companies since it simultaneously puts immediate revenue and the future at risk. But our experience has shown us that this cooperation ultimately produces great results.

Posted in best practices, business, company culture, getting change to "stick", management consulting, optimization, organizational change | No Comments »

Can Persuasive Technology Be Fun? You Bet!

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

By Michael McCauley 

“Persuasive technology” is technology specifically designed to change people’s attitudes and/or behaviors. But can persuasive technology be fun, too? This is the question that Volkswagen asked. The results are some of the most creative and interesting uses of persuasive technology I’ve ever seen. Their idea was to see if they could change people’s attitudes and behaviors simply by using technology which made the preferred behavior fun.

On their website thefuntheory.com are several examples. At one subway station they made the stairway into a giant piano, with each step being a single piano key. When people walked up or down the stairs they played a tune. The result was an incredible 66% increase in the use of the stairs over the adjoining escalator!  

In another example, a simple bottle recycling bin was transformed into an arcade game. If you dropped a bottle into the hole that was lit then your “score” (displayed on a large scoreboard) increased. Did this approach change people’s behavior? You bet - during one day, this bottle recycling arcade was used 100 times while a similar recycling bin (without the arcade) just one block away was used only twice!

Urbanspoon has taken a similar approach with their restaurant selection app for the iPhone. This persuasive technology is part Magic 8 Ball and part slot machine. To use it, you simply shake your iPhone and it finds a restaurant close to your present location. It’s a really fun and original way to locate a restaurant.

I believe that these examples are pointing the way to an emerging trend in persuasive technology development. Rather than trying to convince someone to do something, these apps simply make the preferred behavior more fun. It’s nice to think that the solution to many of the world’s challenges might be resolved by simply adding a bit of fun into the mix.

Posted in best practices, business, persuasive technology | No Comments »

Brains and Brawn: Integrate the Strengths of Headquarters and Your People in the Field for Maximum Power and Effectiveness

Monday, November 16th, 2009

By William Seidman

Often in large companies, the difference in the perspective and cultures of headquarters and the people in the field can be so large as to be startling. I’ve wondered, Are these people in the same company?

But I realize that each has a particular set of strengths along with some blindspots, and it’s only when they are integrated that the company gets the best results from everyone.

Headquarters tends to think more widely and theoretically. They tend to see a bigger picture and a long-term view. This type of thinking is good for an organization.

However, headquarters loses touch with operational reality very quickly. HQ tends not to understand the customer, their needs, or what it takes to sell and service them. It’s hard to make their ideas into operational reality. Too often, and sometimes unfairly, their work is seen as “more crap from headquarters.”

The field, on the other hand, tends to be great at getting something done. Field sales and service can be very effective at running the business, connecting with the customer and generating sales.

But the field’s narrow and short-term perspective — the world in which they live — doesn’t account for longer term issues. Planning and the long view are absent.

The optimum is to have the intellectual strength of HQ and the operational strength of field sales and service. The best way to attain this, we’ve found, is to have a third party facilitate the discussion. The goal is integration of these two powerful halves, resulting in a high-quality and effective new program.

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

Doing Business in the Big Leagues: Be Smart, Bold, Careful, and Thoughtful

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

By William Seidman

A recent article by Maureen Farrell in Forbes.com, “Doing Business With The Big Boys,” discusses several ways in which smaller companies, eager to do business in the big leagues, got burned - or at least chastised.  The gist of the warning is:

If you’re signing a contract, you need a lawyer. Then check out that big company thoroughly, proceed with caution, be prepared, get it in writing, make sure you have read and understand ALL the fine print - and then read it again.  I’m profiled and quoted (though Cerebyte is in beautiful Lake Oswego, Oregon - and not the nonexistent location Lake Oswego, Canada!) because it’s happened to us, too. We dealt with a senior manager who, in fact, didn’t have the decision-making authority we’d thought he had. Ouch. But it won’t ever happen to us again, and needn’t happen to you.

 

 

Posted in best practices, business, financial decision-making, leadership | No Comments »

Talent, Ideas, and Patience: So Many Great Ideas Take Time to Pay Off

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

 By Rick Grbavac

Jim Clifton, CEO and Chairman of Gallup,  comments in The Gallup Management Journal :

“In the world we’re competing in now, solving problems isn’t about spending money. It’s about understanding and managing ideas and talent — and states of mind. That’s where the new leadership breakthroughs will be. Leaders who can quantify states of mind and make decisions about their constituencies based on that information are the ones who will lead the world.”  

This makes perfect sense to me.  But when he goes on to say that companies have maxed all of the benefits of performance improvement ideas, I think he has been sitting in his office a little too much. I think leaders have a tendency to want to talk about the next shiny ball and have trouble staying with good ideas that just take time to fully pay off. 

The idea of tapping into the ideas, beliefs and actions of the 1 in 10,000 is exactly the right idea.  He just left off the part about getting the other 9,999 to embrace those ideas and truly elevate performance.

Posted in best practices, business, company culture, leadership, management consulting, optimization, organizational culture | No Comments »

Both Sides Win in This Tournament

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

Logo Tournament  uses the power of the internet to provide companies with logo designs. It used to be that a company would work with a single artist or design shop to create their logo.  It costs a lot and is usually a slow process, as anyone who’s gone through it will tell you.

This site turns the tables. You post your request for a new logo as a “contest.” Your contest includes information on your company, a description of what you do and/or want, the time limit you have and the fee you’ll pay. Then anyone can submit a design. You pay only the designer who submits the design you select. With this approach, you have hundreds or even thousands of designers creating ideas for you - and you get to pick the best one!

Is this the future of the service industry? I think it could be, especially where the client’s needs are easily defined or the solution requires great creativity.

Why not have as many creative people as possible working to solve your problem?  

This approach offers advantages for the service providers too. Now anyone can have access to any organization, essentially bidding for their business with your talent. It creates a highly competitive environment, but one in which the best could certainly prosper. What do you think?

Posted in best practices, business | No Comments »

Keeping it Simple: When “Good Enough” is Best

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

By Michael McCauley

An interesting article by Robert Capps,  “The Good Enough Revolution“  explores the ways in which what consumers want from products and services is changing:  buyers now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, and quick and easy over slow and polished. In fact, their very definition of “quality” is changing!

Capps sites examples such as the decrease in CD sales and the explosion of MP3 downloads, the increase in Skype usage (Skype now accounts for 8% of all international calling minutes) and the huge increase in the use of Hulu over standard TV. All of these growing alternatives have much lower quality and significant limitations over the old standards, yet they continue to grow. Why? Because they are all quick to access, easy to use and free or virtually free. They are good enough.

Is this phenomenon localized to consumer electronics alone? The answer is “no.” “Good enough” is also gaining traction in the legal and health care professions, and in the military. We have also seen consumers in the consulting and training world also begin to adopt this approach. Our wisdom discovery sessions have gained popularity partly because they enable organizations to develop best practices in less than one week, where a traditional consulting approach might take a month or more. Often, keeping it simple equals “good enough,” which is fine.

Maybe you’ve run into this approach in other areas. If so, we would love to hear from you. In your experience, when is good enough ok?

Posted in business | No Comments »

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