Gurus Joshing

The ECSM conference last week in London was a great hit. And so it should be with speakers like Michael Eisner of Disney and gurus Peter Senge and CK Prahalad. Nice to see someone going full out for quality of content rather than pandering to the sponsors.

One of the highlights for me was that CK, the “world’s premier strategy guru” talked about co-creation of business value and new virtual organisations being the powerful place to be. Having being delayed by British Rail I only know this because Phil Dourado intro’d my talk, on Amazon’s Skyline and WOCAS processes, by explaining how we in Budd and LimeBridge already did what CK was predicting. We created a global organisation of immense value to clients in the UK and overseas without traditional thinking or structures.

I really looked forward to seeing Peter Senge talk. His book ‘The Fifth Discipline” is the absolutely seminal work on systems thinking – thinking about the whole rather than 20th century management’s habit of breaking things into accountable pieces. Then wondering why the whole doesn’t work to customers satisfaction ie why dumb things happen. He created a language for explaining gut feel, for intuition, for delayed reaction and for personal performance.

“To measure is to fragment” was one of his mantras.

His plea was that “It's all about the customer” is far too simple a statement. Its about everything if you are to be about the customer. He touched briefly on the importance of passion and purpose – the topic I spoke about later. In fact we should soon have some video clips from this talk on our passion, from the PPF event in Dublin a few weeks ago.

His major message was to foster 3 core learning capabilities to succeed in a world where complexity is acceptable :
Aspiration: personal mastery and shared vision
Reflective conversation: mental models and team learning
Understanding complexity: systems thinking

He did get a bit carried away on the world being at a tipping point, there being 40x more CO2 than at any time in the last half million years. It could be all about to end but heh don’t say he’s right til its over….. Luckily, as the saying goes ‘you can relax, the world’s not going to end today, its already tomorrow in Australia’

Management by not getting in the way

I met Henry Stewart, CEO of Happy, an IT training firm that has won numerous awards for being what it says on the tin. What a nice bloke. With 50 employees, they have a waiting list of 2000 people to join and are top ten in the FT top companies to work for apparently.

His secret goes back to MBGITW – management by getting in the way. He did a great exercise to make you think about it. Try it:

What do you think is most important to do when you are managing?

Think about when specifically you did your best work

What did your manager do when you did your best work? (Most common answer – nothing, they got out of the way!)

So what should you do when you’re a manager and want to get the most out of your people?

Scary thought eh?

MBGITW - managing by getting in the way

The earlier post on managing by getting in the way seemed to hit a rich stream. Not least in terms of re-thinking some of the things I do!

One of the rich veins to tap when looking for waste and MBIGTW is the purchasing department and paying one's bills.

I won't say which companies are concerned, but needless to say they are 3 major companies I could example, household names, coincidentally European companies. The systemic problem they have is that the business leaders are not so much supported by good purchasing practice, as ruled by them. They cannot run the business at the pace or in the way they would like. The cultural impact of purchasing is major.

Worse still, in these companies, there appears to be an accidental, but systematic inability to pay their bills. This results in major time wasting for executives, managment and their staff. The effect on culture and morale is palpable. The effect on retaining the best talent can't be measured, but it's there.

Ok, the CFO might make an argument for the financial benefits of not paying the bills owed. But the human impact in the business ( let alone the suppliers) is bigger.

Is this the biggest example of managing by getting in the way that you can suggest, or do you know of a bigger one?

Is anyone at Ikea watching?

Taking money off people ought to be easy. Especially after they've made the effort to fight round the M25, fight their way into Lakeside, find a parking space closer than London, go through the trauma that is the Ikea shopping experience, put their back out lifting weights in the warehouse and then reach the check out with hundreds of pounds worth of damage about to be done to their credit card!!

So why the 100s of full, abandoned shopping trolleys littering the way to the check outs at Thurrock this weekend?

Maybe something to do with manning about 6 from 30 check outs and causing a queue half way round the block. Or just the thought of tryingto load the car?

If you think its not hard to get brilliant basics to work like Tesco do, just look at Ikea. Anyone at Ikea watching ..... I dont think so.

Now if I can just solve the multipart technical Nokia, Microsoft or Sony problem so I can transfer the photos off my phone, I'll show you what the evidence

What would the customer think? CC them and see!

Someone sent me a great email today. He'd heard me tell the Amazon story of the customer's chair last week at the PPF conference. Jeff Bezos used to insist on an empty chair in every meeting - for the customer to be sat in every meeting. If the customer would be bored, disagree with what you decide or not understand what you're talking about - change it there and then!!

The great email? - He'd cc'd "Customer" on his mail. A great way to check if your email diatribes would bore the customer and if he or she would agree with your decisions!!

Managing by getting in the way

Managing by getting in the way

You’ve heard of MBWA or “managing by walking about” ? It comes in a number of guises:
- The early morning tour just to say hello, catch a few swift glimpses of what’s going on, take the temperature and be seen to be around
- Staple yourself to the order – a famous HBR article about walking the route of a piece of work to see what really happens with it. It avoids “fact-free” meetings, all too common the higher you go in an organisation. You can apply it to any
- Back to the floor – not every manager is skillful enough to be trained to fully do the job of a frontline, but they can do a lot of learning and inspiring by taking part in frontline activities

Let me introduce you to another acronym – MBGITW or “managing by getting in the way” It also comes in a number of guises:
- the need for copious management information that tells you what happened in the past
- the need to know what’s going on in every corner all the time
- the need to be seen to have all the answers, to be in control, to make the decisions

We all do it. Try asking yourself these questions:
- How often are decisions about change made by the people who do the work involved?
- How long do the decisions take that you make, from first being raised through investigation to conclusion?
- How much time do people spend explaining the things they need to you?
- How often do you say “I don’t know”?