Regenerate!

You must be coming across this phrase often, particularly if you are a business leader who tries to keep in touch with the current research and thinking in the fields of leadership and management. There is always some new thinking. You read an article, attend a leacture and pick up new thoughts. But before you have had any time to apply this to your business, you are either neck deep in your urgent business matters or there is a newer idea.

And then whatever happens to ‘old’ ideas and concepts? Does something gets useless just because it is ‘outdated’? Consider these, for example:

Core competence

Blue Ocean \ Red Ocean Strategy

Disruptive innovation

Six Sigma \ Lean Sigma for process improvements

360 degrees appraisal

Values based leadership

One can list many such concepts which were ‘in’ once upon a time.  But these concepts still present useful perspectives  if applied to specific situations. An intelligent leader can exploit these to check if any new insights and strategy points can be obtained by using these.

Learning Leadership programs and agenda generating workouts incorporate powerful principles behind various frameworks and ‘theories’ and give an opportunity to the leader to apply them to specific situations. Learning Leadership’s executive coaches assit the leaders in this.

Leaders sharpen their thinking and develop their agenda using the above and many more powerful principles throgh carefully designed executive coaching programs.

Leadership is not just about vision, values, and communication. Important though these are,  great leaders do much more -create brands, create great products, and achieve process breakthroughs. Here is an example. The Tata Swach. Design Directions, our associates, provided industrial design to Tata Chemicals for Swatch -water purifier based on nano technology and rice husk.

I work with Design Directions on several projects involving branding, user interface design, industrial design, and product design.  You get a lot with us… Leadership Learning, process breakthroughs, product, UI, and communication design!

Read on for more details….

The chances are that you never come back to it. That’s your fear, so you try to attend to every mail and every call in real time. You stay late and carry your blackberry and your laptop around. (Why do you need both?)

Deep down somewhere, you know that you are not the boss. Those mails, calls, and now sms or tweets are setting your agenda. But at other times you let your designation fool you.

This is not another piece on time management, it is about you taking a lead.

If think reading mail or responding to calls and messages is work, think again.

Let us be ruthless about what qualifies as work:  Work of value happens when you execute a repeatable process generating a result that is of value (expressed in money terms or through ready acceptance for subsequent value generation) for someone inside or outside the organization. OK, there is more. If you do a one time activity that clearly supports the above kind process then that too is work of value-though indirect.

Work of value happens only through processes and projects.

Now, if you examine what you call as work with help above filters, you may have horror on hand. Much of what passes as work is nothing but reminders, repetitions, repairs, and rework.

One CEO whom I was coaching, told me to reschedule our coaching session due to year end sales pressure. I said, ‘Fine. But what is your Head of Sales doing and why do sales need last minute pushing?” “Oh you know how it is..” The CEO was repeating the work that his head of sales was doing. The head of sales was doing a good turn to the organization. He was repeating what his sales executive was doing or supposed to be doing.

I was walking on a shop floor and I could not spot some supervisors. I peeped in the production manager’s cabin. He was away in stores, I was told. ‘Oh there were errors in the parts received..and the supervisors were busy in the quality department for getting clearances”, I learned from him later.

“We have decided to leverage our factory space and the idle machining capacity by taking up job work” another CEO who was heading a machinery business told me. They had a good product portfolio. “But how did you reach this conclusion? Is that your strategy?”, I asked. “That was not our strategy (till yesterday) but it has become necessary” , was his answer. So they were undoing and trying to repair their own strategy. Their machinery portfolio was crying for attention while they had a good customer base.

Think carefully before you brag or wallow about your work or overwork. You may horror on hand!

If something like the above happens with you or around you, you need to take lead and improvise on you leadership skills and build a good agenda. You can do with some coaching too. You can make a big difference.

If yes, then give it a little more thought. Your business metrics can make a big impact on your strategic and tactical decisions.

Metrics or measurements used for reviewing and planning various aspects of business have a lot of bearing on the results because what is measured and inspected is considered important by people. Metrics can be classified as historical or forward looking. Bias for historical data and analysis needs to be overcome. Customers, employees, and cash flows can provide vital clues to CEOs aiming to establish more forward looking signals and metrics. One can derive actionable points from even historical metrics if root-cause analysis for coming up with pro-active actions is done. Will all this take CEO’s attention away from vision, innovation, and inspiring people? No. The above methods provide a springboard for day to day innovation and path breaking ideas. They also support realizing the vision.

Read more

First the disclosures: I am not an Apple user \ fan. But I admire ‘design’ aspects of the products.
Apple’s success is design led (with spend in tech to back that). Much has been written about this. To many it appears that Apple does not mind limitation on its market share (due to price levels and \ or proprietary nature) since it gets better margins.
Coming to its strategy I see following factors
1. Limited market share (premium - exclusive positioning) is great for branding and can be a valid strategy if you have ability to unleash product after product that users love.
2. This ability is by no means a given thing even if Steve Jobs is around.
3. Windows or MS is not a great factor -they might sink under the weight of their success.
4. Google docs \ Android or Linux may change landscape once again.
5. If Apple’s product creation waves peter out, it is in a dangerous game of having to fund your ‘attitude’
6. Who knows tide may turn against the current absurd patent regime (read a fortnightly in BS) due to shift of center of Gravity from western civilizations.
7.In any case today there are many non-Apple touch screen based devices and Apple’s uniqueness will wear off unless it keeps come up with something new.
8. It may be the sign of times that Apple had to open of API for Iphone to encourage third party applications. But according to some mobile application developers, it is a pain to deal with Apple.

That’s the way things appear to be at this time. What do you say?

Royalty vanished. Marxism communism vanished. Industrial revolution gave way to information revolution.Now capitalism and globalization as we know are likely to vanish. Old things like snail mail (post), typewriters, film camera vanished. Even not so rich people change their cell phones every year. If you say this is the age of consumerism, the threats of global warming, the threats of social unrest due to poverty and hunger will challenge it (unfettered consumption). Change is in the air.

To be a good leader one must develop sensitivity to ‘change’ and one must be constantly challenging assumptions. One may think that only the top leader has to be doing this. Not enough. An organization needs leaders at all levels who can sense, champion, and even create change. An organization needs to be equipped with multitude of eyes and ears and change agents, if it has to survive and thrive.

Leaders must have sound grasp of reality.

I am referring to the crisis that has been named and renamed

-sub-prime credit (crisis)

-CDO (whatever that means) blowout

-it is only an asset market crisis

-liquidity crisis

-unwinding of yen carry trade (whatever that means)

-bailouts

-solvency crisis

-financial market seizure

-slow down

-regulatory (crisis)

-globalization (crisis)

-capitalism (death of)

-bailouts & nationalization (how wise Indians have been!)

-liquidity (just that..throw money at that)

-Wisdom of Indian regulatory authorities, Indian babus, and Indian politicians (Do you know that the governments preempt all credit needs just to waste a lot of money? How will pump priming be funded? Who will pump prime? China for sure. India? Russia? Brazil?)

The drama is still unfolding…if you are a CEO or a big stakeholder in a company you would have experienced occasional headaches. What should one do? If you are an investor?….well this piece not on passive investors.

1. Stop watching CNBC or such biz news channels. Read your business papers in the evening or ask someone to summarize news for you.

2. A DIY (Do it yourself): Get news from internet (say google news) stick to facts and forget opinions. Bigger the man, bigger the discount on the opinion.

3. If you are thinking of cost cutting (you should) just do more than cutting ad spends, expense accounts, motivational training programs, removing toilet papers (virtues of Indian-ness). Go beyond low hanging fruit, otherwise you might just keep hanging there.

4. If you have not done it before -get down to building leadership skills in yourself and your team. Get down to business process improvements. Both can be done on relatively low budget. Some people would walk out since they can not stomach such things. But you would not want ineffective leaders and bad processes to continue. Would you? (they are very costly)

5. Take a good strategic look at your business. Hopefully, CASH is real for you and your team. If not, do whatever it takes to make it visible, as real as actually counting money and paying up. You know the rest.

6. Get real -this is going to last for a long time. Long enough for you to re-invent yourself. Long enough to be doing something today and tomorrow about customer satisfaction and your market offerings.

7. There is no better time than today. You would save headache by doing above. You would be doing some really good work after a long long time. That would give you some secret satisfaction. Time to show that off will come.

Cheers. Be cheeky.

Hemant

I like Wikipedia. It represents collective knowledge and wisdom. Equally important: Its straightforward language and economy of expression. I chanced upon this on “strategy”

QUOTE

Strategy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often “winning.” Strategy is differentiated from tactics or immediate actions with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed.

UNQUOTE

Now how does one express this long term plan of action?

In my opinion, through some specific projects and processes which when executed (projects) and managed (processes) will help in achieving the goal(s) (strategic).

Many organizations attempt strategy implementation through “deployment” in departments or units. This does not work!

It is necessary to take the crucial second step (projects and processes).

Hemant