Five Resolves for 2011

Continuing with tradition of writing (typing/texting) New Year Resolutions, here are my five Resolves:

1. Let customer speak once more: The conceit to assume that one knows “what customer wants?” is a dangerous habit that grows proportionately with years of experience as consultant. Hence the resolve to ask one more question (after the hurried run through of the check-list) before preaching to customer “what he needs to do” and be patient and shut-up till he reflects and respond. Better Insights, Better Results.
2. Dump the soulless Language : Enough of strategy, competency, commitment, knowledge management, collaboration; words which although bring sophistication to the dialogue, make conversations slave of standard patterns and arguments devoid of personnel attachment. Hearts and Soul react better to words like choice, will, clever, create, partnering or winning. Resolve to substitute as many listless words with curiously new/even absurd sounding words that provoke emotions.
3. Learn from new sources: Reading from similar sources is often more reassuring bias then illuminating new perspectives. Our ability to traverse knowledge across boundaries, often call for right level of abstraction, which with practice is within human realm of learning. Hence, resolve to consciously try to pick Dominique Lapierre over John Kotter, with hope that his recount of historic events has much to teach us on managing large scale transformations and radical societal shifts, that are going to be characteristics of global business entities.
4. Leverage Collective Intelligence: Captive knowledge and learning has a good companion in the form of wisdom of crowds and experts (real and imagined). Social media enable us to gather dispersed knowledge from our networks –no matter how weak are the links- as long as we have directional understanding of what we are seeking to achieve. Promise for potential digital eminence is sufficient for Gurus and specialists to willingly share and contribute. Resolve to go beyond captive intelligence to leverage dispersed but accessible knowledge in quest for better answers; but not to let collective intelligence be substitute to personal wisdom.
5. Leap beyond quick wins : Resist the temptation of bunching all quick wins (low hanging fruits etc) at the beginning of the execution plan to any transformation program, with hope that this will create momentum and stakeholder buy-in for expected tougher steps ahead. It seldom achieve these objectives, except making the program sponsors look good to have achieved something tangible in the short run- while doing nothing to mitigate stakeholders’ resistance for tougher measures ahead.!!! Resolve to see, that transformation initiatives insist on crucial steps early on (supported by better stakeholder management, plain speak and sufficient resource commitment) and to ensure that results come before project sponsors move on (say in first year). Further easy wins are dispersed along the complete program timeline then bunched in the beginning.

Not sure, if all of the above will yield better results, as these resolves are more based on self hypothesis then outcome of rigorous management research, underlining the need to continually experiment and break habits.

Happy to hear one thing that you plan to do differently in 2011.

“Hunters for credit” meet “Bosses that love fan clubs” – A convenient nexus that hurts!

Let me recount an interesting story my friend shared last Sunday. He leads a team of analysts and managers, who team on short term client engagements and multiple initiatives across the whole group. My friend shared an observation which seems to be worrying him. Some of his managers seem to be having tough time engaging analysts to work with them on volunteer initiatives, while some others always have more volunteers engaged in the task, then actual requirement (adding more to confusion than effectiveness). In his assessment, those managers that failed to engage were not particularly that bad in human relations, teaming or emotional intelligence, nor the other category of managers spectacularly better in those aspects. But the outcome was clearly underperformance on volunteer initiatives that were essential for group’s sustained prominence.


So what explains this phenomenon? Title provides the hint. Yes?

Here are few questions I asked my friend?

1 Do you ensure that in all team initiatives, whole team is invited as a norm, and that the decision to choose who attends and who doesn’t is not left to Managers? (Assured Airtime with the leaders)

2 Do you ensure that in collective work, the individual level contributions are clearly called for and accounted for? (Social loafing)

3 Do you seek Manager’s reasons for team composition and size that seems to be disproportionate (and skill-wise inappropriate) to task at hand, as per your estimate? (Building fan clubs)

4 Do you ensure that you praise progress, BUT reward only outcomes and impact?

5 Do you ensure that all your managers know the difference between GOOD (fit for purpose), EXCELLENT (better, faster) or EXCEPTIONAL (radical and beyond)? , and use same barometer (consistent language) to evaluate performance? (Demonstrate by example)

He has agreed to consciously try to apply above measures and demonstrate appropriate behaviours to see if situation improves. My hunch is it should work.

What do you say?

Competition at Workplace may not deliver results associated with Free-market competition

Often market place innovations and ever improving customer service standards are attributed to free market environment and players’ need for one-upmanship.
Competition is assumed to be motivating force that pushes all players to do their best. Organizations often seek to rely on internal competition (practicing relative performance ranking) to provoke employees’ efforts and spur creativity. The process surely leads to categorization of employees into winners and losers, but does not necessarily enhances overall organization effectiveness or financial performance. Some of the gaps in the outcome can actually be explained in the difference between Work Place Competition and Market Place Competition. 
 

 

The contention is not to let go leveraging the benefits of competition, but to be conscious of its limitations. Create enough avenues for all well meaning employees to win and make it evident that collaboration and partnerships in the overall interest of organization also pays.

Reflect!!!

When did you review Management Processes last?

Mostly, I hear Organization Leaders involved in evaluation of business strategies, competitive positioning, financial plans, operational processes, technological assets and organization structure, but seldom undertaking conscious review of Management Processes. My contention is that well aligned and oiled Management Processes have far greater impact in achieving effectiveness of business strategies and efficiency gains of operational initiatives, then traditionally given attention to.

Three key Management Processes; Information Management process, Decision Making process, and Communication process are essential part of organization machinery and once established tend to have life of their own. Unless their robustness and alignment with overall business strategy and execution plan are ascertained, they have the potential to undermine other efforts of enhancing organization performance.


Technological Innovation and Gen-Y employees orientation demands and make possible complete reconfiguring of these Management Processes from the traditional way these were handled. Let us consider some questions that may help review each of these processes:

Information Management process:

Are we tapping all kind of internal and external sources of information that can help make sense of the complex world? How many of innovative ideas are coming from outside the company (say customers)?

Are we able to derive actionable insights/ foresights out of all the information that we have access to? How much of unstructured data on the web is mined to understand what our customers/ stakeholders liked about Company (products and pronouncements) last week?

Are we ensuring that all those who have to act, use the same set of information and the most recent one? How many customer interlocks across the organization are informed by unified understanding of customer preferences, and interaction history?

Decision Making process:

Are the decisions that are centralized, emerging out of conscious assessment of gains in the form of consistent and effective roll-out or out of power concentration or tradition? When was the debate (experiment) to decentralize some decisions undertaken last?

Are managers consciously selecting the right decision making process (collective or individual) based on context or one style in predominant as part of organization culture? How well understood are the accountability norms related to joint decision making?

Are leaders balancing the intuitive and insight (data backed) based decision making? How often intuitive decisions are betted for experimentation, then waiting for additional data backed evidence?

Communication process:

Are leaders across the organization only telling orders or explaining rationales as well, to facilitate execution? To what extent, leaders are open to questioning existing practices and ready to listen and debate from say new hires or interns?

To what extent, communication networks, formal and informal, are supportive of positive collaboration and partnering across silos? What percent of email traffic for middle managers are with colleagues other than immediate bosses or subordinates?

Are we using new channels of communication that are symbolic of interconnected social age? How strategically are we using twitters, blogs, web 2.0 technologies to connect, convey and correspond effectively and coherently across the stakeholder community?

Review of the Management processes facilitated by above questions will surely throw-up some areas that need to change. Change in Management processes require intervention design, comprising leadership sensitization & coaching, and creating new technological infrastructure besides sustained monitoring, till new processes become institutionalized. Not an easy task, but worth it.

Lets Reflect!!!

You can also visit the adjacent poll to express your opinion and see what others are thinking.

Being Creative by Design

Everyone agrees that we need to be more innovative in our recommendations to clients to create greater impact.  However, despite rightful intent and efforts, there seems to be great variation in the quality of outcomes.  Some practitioners by experience or intellect are able to provide wider perspectives than majority.  So what does the majority do besides blaming education, experience or IQ?

I believe that conscious and rigorous employing of seemingly contradicting perspectives on any context can help us widen the universal set of possibilities leading to potentially better advice.  This is what we reckon as “being creative by design”.

Listed below are some of the perspectives (about objectives, strategy and execution) put forward by gurus that although contrarian to established thinking seems to be true as well in specific contexts.

1.    Stakeholders get motivated differently

• What motivates a professional manager may not motivate the owner of the firm.  Economists have always insisted on goal alignment between owners and professional managers under principal-agent theory. There is considerable debate on whether shareholder wealth maximization or stakeholder value generation should be the key objective functions of an enterprise.
• Further, managers and employees may get motivated differently.  Even in the same group, individuals may stand at different levels on the Missionary- Mercenary Orientation Continuum. 
• Off-course, there is need for an overarching objective that collectively reflects the aspirations of all stakeholders. But, for the message to engage, it should be able to connect to individual level legitimate aspirations as well.

Implications : Do not assume! Ascertain that every stakeholder’s priorities and expendables are well understood and the look towards achievement of Pareto Optimality.

2.     Selective Strategic Views are standalone traps

• Strategy formulation is essentially a creative exercise, an art that is being continuously scientisized through different frameworks, each approach providing a specific view towards strategy formulation.
• Unconscious of single view limitations, consultants often pick specific approach (framework) as favorites and apply it in all situations limiting the options.
• Ansoff matrix provides a sufficient framework for us to explore both the competitive and innovation orientation, provided we do justice to all the quadrants.  Return Driven Strategy framework is another broad encompassing framework.  

 

Implications :  It pays to consciously apply different views of Strategy Formulation to a situation to come up with diverse solution set.

Click here to view the complete article

You may like to further add to this list. 

Right Diagnosis precedes Right Advice (Rapid Organization Diagnosis Aid)

Top Managers in several organizations often run to outdo each other in adapting latest management concepts and introducing new initiatives with a hope that these initiatives will help address performance gaps. These initiatives may fall in the areas of strategy redesign, restructuring, process reengineering or automation. Sometimes these initiatives deliver, and most often, not. And the fault may not exactly be with the initiative design or execution, but with the areas of intervention itself. Disillusioned by outcomes of internal initiatives, clients often look towards Consultants for advice.

With due respect to fellow consultants, they also often move towards providing advice based on inadequate diagnosis, that is more selective and biased towards building case for initiatives that consultants excel in. And organizations are no better off after initial euphoria of implementing Consultants’ recommendations wear off.  All this reiterates the need for having right diagnosis.

There are several management frameworks and models such as BLM, 7s, business excellence models, which provide guidelines on undertaking comprehensive review, encompassing all organizational dimensions and their linkages.  These frameworks require extensive data collection and are often time and resource intensive efforts, which may not be feasible in all cases. 

How about having a rapid diagnostic aide that helps identify problem areas fast- the typical physician way- using a set of questions, developed on most frequently observed organizational infirmities.

Rapid Organization Diagnosis Aid is based on the premise that successful firms are able to manage four key areas well.  These four key areas are:

1.     Establishment of Organization Fundamentals
2.     Alignment of Organization Elements
3.     Appropriateness of Apparatus
4.     Accountability for Performance

Accordingly, the problem identification process focuses on reviewing the state of these four areas within the organization. Based on experience here are a set of 19 questions that will help undertake RAPID and RIGHT diagnosis.  

The reality check would be best achieved by evaluating how effectively the organization is responding to the key questions under each of the four key areas. 

Click here to read the full article and view the complete set of questions

Three Clever Questions: Don't Ignore Anymore

Often in our quest for continued business excellence and chasing new businesses, we tend to ignore asking uncomfortable questions that may spring surprises, we can better do without. With growing complexity, enhanced innovation focus and accellerated pace of change, these questions have gained lot more significance and need serious and systematic management attention, like never before.

1 Is the problem we are solving still a high priority problem for the client? Business depends upon its ability to help clients solve problems in an efficient and cost effective manner. What if the problem itself is no more a problem? Consultants banking on providing information access services to clients in earlier days have lost appeal as information access is no more a problem that clients face today. Video conferences solve the problem of managing face-2-face interaction without the need to travel. Hence business travel service agents banking on better travel services may be focused on solving problem, which may loose its own priority over time. What if the mileage efficiency of petrol engines double itself or oil prices become one-third of its present value? Alternate fuels based vehicles banking primarily on solving travel cost related problems may loose significance.

2 What is the potential appeal of the Opposite Extreme? For every loyal customer set there is a disengaged set, which is located at the other extreme of the continuum on specific service/product characteristics. If you have positioned your products with high acquisition cost and low consumable costs, there will indeed be a consumer set that prefer low acquisition cost and acceptable high running costs. If you have bunched all services and provided single price, some customers may be looking for separate prices for each service consumed. If your soft-drink is black, there are some consumers that prefer their soft-drink to be colorless. Often competition emerges from other extreme and goes unnoticed, till it starts gnawing your market share. Idea is not to advocate serving all set of customers, but to be conscious of the potential customer set that prefers the opposite of “what you offer”. You may choose to ignore them, but then that will be a strategic choice.

3 Are we depending too much on Rationality as a basis of appeal to potential customers? So much has been written about the limitation of humans to make rational decisions and how subconscious choices, operating environment and social context have disproportionately high influence on our decision making. In fact, Dan Ariely (predictably irrational), Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics), Michael J. Mauboussin (Think Twice) and other authors have not only provided examples of decisions taken by people like us that can not be labeled as rational, but also provide ideas on how to capitalize on this peculiarities associated with “how we buy?”. Marketeers know this through experience, but make sure the R&D folks, design engineers and operational excellence experts also keep this in mind and accommodate “irrationality” in their solution perspective.

Reflect! Share your views and perspectives, as always.

Leaders : Reboot your approach

Hi,

Thanks for reflecting your views on the previous post. Here are some of my reflections. 

I think, the difference lies in the approach towards some of the key leadership functions.

Lets take some examples:

1. Approach to “being accepted”: Leaders can no longer rely on Hierarchy to get acceptability. It is leader’s personal expertise and recognized excellence in an area of business value, which followers believe deserve respect and worthy of providing platform to lead. 
2. Approach to “being heard”: Directive style memos don’t work anymore beyond minimal compliance. Two way dialogue, that is authentic, persuasive, consistent across channels while being open to questioning with leader as facilitator and final integrator of views seems to work. 
3. Approach to “getting things done”: It is no more about detailed instructions about “how” it is to be done, but greater focus on telling “what needs to be done’ and “why it is important?” 
4. Approach to “getting best out of those led”: Traditional means of Motivating them to do what they are not convinced about, wont work. Connect work to their passion and then work relentlessly to avoid organization bureaucracy, and politics act as de-motivating distractions. 
5. Approach to “handling failures”: Instead of being criticized for being careless and unprofessional, leaders are expected to emphasize upon lessons learnt and may celebrate the well intentioned experimentations.

What other approaches need to change?

Lets Reflect!

What enable leaders to sustain relevance in the new world?

Leaders sustain their relevance till the time they continue to sustain dependency of the followers on them. This is achieved by leaders providing something followers’ value and are seen as the most preferred source. Seen this way, leaders’ sustained relevance depends upon their ability to continually understand their followers and provide Value they seek.

Apart from seeking reward, recognition or objective resource allocation (which falls more in Managers’ domain now), followers used to look towards leaders for problem solving. For this, leaders required sufficient technical finesse to design appropriate solution and guts to execute the same. Demonstrable outcomes reinforced their credibility and thus help sustain their leadership. No less demanding task, but a lot simpler as long as problem had knowable dimensions and followers relatively aligned expectations.

Given the complex operating context and growing influence of multiple stakeholders in decision making, these days followers look towards Leaders for Sense Making of the prevailing "chaos with dynamically shifting patterns". Leaders challenge is to define the context, and communicate the relative importance of various trends at play and define action program, in a language that is simple but sufficiently sophisticated (to convey complex set of interdependencies) and boundary-spanning to connect with diverse followers set.

While in earlier world, followers leaders' confidence in proposed action and surety behind the proposal, now they look towards leaders ability to accept tentativeness and risks but still convince that the proposed action is the most suitable and appropriate option. While earlier having contingency plan was a good management practice, now leaders need to convey ability to adapt and allow for mid-course modifications as essential part of their confidence winning proposals.

What additional other traits do you see leaders of the new world need to learn?

Do you see anything yesterdays’ leaders need to UNLEARN to sustain their leadership in the New world?

 Lets reflect!!!

How do you measure your Relevance?

Relevance is defined in terms of pertinent to matter at hand, appropriateness to the users needs and capable of making a difference in decision making. Staying relevant is indeed best assurance for guaranteeing survival. Need for sustaining relevance and threats to relevance are obvious, especially when pointed out. But still we see irrelevance eating out organizations, brands, technologies, products and experts all around. And in most of the cases, although the movement to irrelevance has been gradual, its realization has been sudden and often too late.


Measuring relevance of regular basis and picking signals early may help. So how do you measure relevance rightly, even if not necessarily quantitatively accurately? Financial Performance, present customer satisfaction index or order pipeline may not be right meausres. 

Here are some initial thoughts around measuring relevance as a Consultant:

Type of Engagements: Advance booking of your time beyond present engagement is not sufficient to construe sustained relevance but business. Are you getting engagements with enhanced complexity, seeking greater innovation and creativity and by more demanding customers? Or order book is full by customers seeking similar advice and efficient reliable solution in their quest to catch-up fast.

Type of Competition: Consultant is known by the “Competition” he is is compared with. Often the early indication of loss or shift in uniqueness of position comes from change in the type and number of competitors one has.

Type of Praise: Who is praising you and for what? Most sought after praise comes from competition (in disguised form), and at the same time praise that is easiest to come by but with least business benefit (however most endearing) is from your own team.

What are other measures of Relevance that you believe help?

Welcome to Sustaining Relevance

Today, in this world of globalization and interconnectivity, the business environment has become extremely dynamic and the long held business paradigms have been questioned.

Signs suggest that the economic scenario is turning around but in reality, the uncertainity and complexity is increasing for the organizations.This has resulted in many new challenges for the organizations with the need for "Agility" and "Redefination" becoming more relevant than ever before.

The challenge of "Sustaining Relevance" is ubiquitous and is spread across all key dimensions of business including brand, competition organizations, technology, institutions, laws, employer and employee. in this dynamic world has become a top priority for businesses.

This challenge is even more pronounced in the Consulting sphere.Inspite of being exteremly pogressive in nature, consulting advices are  more ephemeral than other aspects of business like brands and get obsolete much faster.

Welcome to Sustaining Relevance. Through this blog, I am looking forward to interact with you for sharing thoughts and ideas about the relevance of advice, counter trends and the dimensions that can question the relevance of organizations in the future.

Some of the other thoughts that I plan to cover in my upcoming posts include :

1. Lessons learnt from my past experiences
2. My personal views on the emerging trends in today's environment
3. Discuss about some explored fronts in management consulting. Talk about my favorite books and thought leadership papers
4. Change Management - Its evolution, importance, benefits and future

Please provide suggestions (as comments) on any other topics that I can cover in my blog.

Thanks for Visiting.