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Monthly Archives: December 2015

Won’t Get Foaled Again

22 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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analogue, customer, customer service, Foals, LP, POMO, The Who, vinyl, What Went Down

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foals_645_normal

This week I received a gift in the post from the guy who designs our Annual Report. It came in a slim cardboard box which in itself created a certain frisson as it clearly wasn’t the stock standard Christmas gift of chocolates or alcohol. I ripped it open eager to see the contents. It turned out to be the latest release by Foals What Went Down. And get this …on vinyl! Wow I thought – somebody gets it. Why you might ask? For  a number of reasons:

  1. Stephen, who sent me the gift, knows I like Foals
  2. He had spent time getting to know me and my tastes
  3. He had thought about me not a ‘one size fits all’ gift. This was personalised.
  4. It was vinyl!!!

Without wanting to labour the last point the fact that it was a vinyl record speaks volumes about Stephen and makes me want to keep doing business with him.Vinyl is analogue and is warm. Had he given me a CD it would have felt much less warm and fuzzy. There is something about the size of vinyl and the warmth that you get when listening that draws you in. Much like good business relations. Had he given me an iTunes card – albeit more in $ terms – it would not have had the same impact. Here is someone who clearly knows how to delight his customer.

Of course Christmas offers an opportunity to see how we are regarded by our friends, colleagues and customers. That is not to say that gifting is any measure of the strength of relationships but the knowledge that someone has spent some time thinking about you does have a positive glow affect. Our suppliers fall into two categories at work. Those who provide a gift and those who don’t. It might appear facile to split them along these lines, but I think considering them in these two categories is worthy of some reflection. A gift goes to being present in someone’s thinking for at least some period of time. It suggests ‘I value this relationship’ and projects forward to a wish to continue in the same vein. It suggests perhaps some ‘older values’ from a time when people connected in a much more personal way – ‘face to face’, ‘handshake to handshake’.

In the last flurry before Christmas we had cause to order a new key cupboard to improve security. A robust and therefore expensive cupboard was ordered and shipped. That one item was returned for the third time whereupon we cancelled the order and are now looking elsewhere. Here was an example from the opposite end of the customer service spectrum. No gift, no little peace offering for mucking us around. Far from that it was a matter of not even being able to deliver to our specification…not once but three times. Customer service is about meeting our expectations first and foremost. After that we stand ready and willing to have these expectations exceeded.

How can one company get it so right and the other so wrong? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that one company realised that making us feel warm and fuzzy is important. I shall remember this when the Foals LP goes on the turntable over the Christmas holidays. As for that other lot who let us down…well we won’t get foaled again!

 

Channelling Oprah By Accident

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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accidental manager, authenticity, C K Prahalad, Caroline Myss, CMI, creativity;, David Gelles, failure, flow;, Gary Hamel, innovation, innovation economy, lucky country, Malcolm Turnbull, Michael Porter, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, OECD, Oprah, Oprah Winfrey, Pfeffer, risk, risk taking, self-esteem, Soul, spirt, Sutton, Wyatt Roy

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I went to the Oprah Tour of Australia in Brisbane recently . There I’ve said it! Fair play to Oprah she did, mid-show, acknowledge the 9 or so of us blokes in attendance, whereupon we were asked to stand and received the ‘love in the room’. It was just a momentary and miniscule glimpse of what it must be like to get adulation like Oprah does. She then went on to regale the audience with her ‘recipe’ for happiness, peppered with anecdotes from her life to illustrate junctures at which important things happened. All events that have helped her form her view on happiness and success. She touched on authenticity, having clarity of purpose, intention, dedication of service and surrender amongst other things. This gave me pause for thought. While her recipe for life seemed fairly common sense I reflected it wasn’t a bad recipe for achieving success in the business world either.

Just a couple of weeks ago now Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull released the much awaited policy on innovation. In his own words this is the best time to be alive in Australia. That point may be moot but you could prosecute a strong case to say it is perhaps the most interesting (and not in a Chinese proverb sort of way). In short the main issue confronting us is the re-calibration of the Australian economy from one of pulling resources from the ground (Coal, Iron Ore and Gas) to one of innovation. We were once the ‘lucky country’ and now we are striving to be the ‘creative’ one.

Out of the earth we once extracted wealth and now we must extract from our minds and spirits (the well of creative ideas) the new wealth. Once we extracted resources and sent them overseas without much in the way of a value-add, only to buy those goods back as steel and other value-added products. Now we must do the value-add bit here. When the commodity is ideas and we don’t value add in our own backyard it’s called a brain drain. We must have ideas and then shape and polish them if we are to maintain our enviable OECD position in terms of absolute wealth and also in terms of stature and national self-esteem. This is a nice segue to Oprah  who talked a lot about self-worth. Little it appears can be achieved if this is not at its optimal level. The real challenge now will be how we manage creativity and ideas within the workplace. Just the word ‘workplace’ sounds like a misnomer  because creativity, long associated with play, may seem a slightly awkward bedfellow to work (grind) which is what we get up each day for.

The Executive corridor (or C Suite – a term I really don’t like) is populated with managers whose qualifications fall into one of three distinct groups:

  • technical experts with a management qualification tacked on;
  • professional managers whose expertise lies solely in the art and science of the practice of management; and
  • technical experts with no management qualifications to speak of.

In the past knowing more than the other ‘bloke’, and yes it has generally been a male, has been the prerequisite for promotion or advancement in the workplace. This has had two impacts:

  • the most knowledgeable person in the chain has been taken out of the position immediately lowering the knowledge quotient at the pointy-end;
  • a position requiring an altogether different skill set has then been occupied by someone ill-equipped to handle it. Arise the accidental manager.

There is nothing wrong, per se, in promoting a technically proficient worker. This can act as an encouragement to others to strive to do better (or as Oprah might phrase it, to be the best you that you can be). However before doing so there are four precursor activities that need to be set in motion first:

  • working with the soon to be promoted team member getting them to realise there is a whole body of knowledge that they don’t know but will need to;
  • helping them realise that falling back on their default technical knowledge to define their sense of self-esteem in the new role is not appropriate;
  • providing some baseline management training before the promotion; and
  • instilling in them the notion that they are now on a path of lifelong learning.

In short it is necessary to do succession planning, or as Oprah might say, find your thread, follow and nurture it.

Regrettably the world is littered with accidental managers. It has become so acute that the Chartered Management Institute in the UK, the peak body for management professionals, has identified this as a key risk to the UK’s success in the digital age. The impact of accidental managers in the workplace is varied. It ranges from small business failures to meltdowns of global enterprises; the shockwaves of which ripple across the globe. Seldom do such impacts happen without individuals and families being affected. Compare an accidental manager to a not yet fully qualified pilot. At least s/he has auto pilot to rely upon. The promotion of managers without the requisite insight, training and commitment to lifelong learning is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Those who have put in the hard yards of learning and study over the years are often left to pick up the pieces and in ‘repairing’ those mishandled by accidental managers oftentimes find themselves reaching into their wider families to help salve their wounds.

With the need for Australia to generate ideas and turn these ideas into commercial successes, there is a greater need now than ever to have managers in place who are anything but there accidentally. There are four generations in the workplace – boomers (me), Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z. As managers we will need to add this additional complexity to the existing skills necessary to run a successful business. Add to this the requirement to be able to create a culture where ideas can be encouraged, shaped and presented to market and we can begin to see that not only is the accidental manager well out of their depth but the assured manager may well be coming up short up themselves.

The ability to generate ideas is not enough in its own right anymore. The testing, hot housing, incubating and prototyping will require courage as it involves risk and risk taking. If we are to survive in the digital age and this new era of innovation, our approach to risk must change. Our default position of being risk averse can no longer protect nor sustain  us. This begs the question as to whether the existing breed of assured managers are up to the task (me included). Oprah may well prompt us to ask the question as to whether were are getting our team members to embrace their failures and allowing them to learn from them. We cannot innovate unless we fail some of the time. We cannot grow as individuals without some elements of failure in our lives. Failing in front of our subordinates is a huge display of vulnerability but without leadership by example how can we expect our team members to learn from us?

Failure starts to take us into areas where very few assured managers are comfortable to travel. Many of us may not even recognise that such terrain exists. Failure and success, creativity and innovation start to go to the spirit or soul of a person. To become successful managers we are going to have to embrace the soul and recognise the way it affects those about us. We will need to know about energy and flow. Required reading should now include Csikszentmihalyi, Myss, Chopra and Sheehy while still including Hamel, Prahalad, Porter, Pfeffer et al.

Oprah has a head-start here because she was able to build a successful media empire based on self-belief, focus, intention and surrender. She knows intrinsically that the spirit requires nurturing and in doing so, flow – the well from which we draw ideas – can bring happiness. As assured managers we are going to have to continue to learn and do so in new areas; some of which may not sit that comfortably with our scientist selves.

Highly developed intuition will be required (future blog topic on the way). I suspect business school learning will not be of great help here. Sure we can learn about digital marketing and the importance of cash flow at B School, but to learn about soul and spirit as Oprah would reflect will require us to attend ourselves. Perhaps the way of the future for managers is retreats built along the lines of ashrams? The drive that made us devote our own time to improving our management skills must be re-kindled to encourage us to learn new skills and acquire new knowledge that awakens new dimensions; those that will lead to innovation, business success and above all true happiness in the workplace and beyond.

 

The Tesla: A Feat of Daredevil Do

15 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by Burning Manager in Uncategorized

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Tags

Australian Financial Review;, Daredevil, Eldon Musk, Environment, IP, Jeremy Clarkson, Jessica Jones, Master of None, Millenials, Model X, Netflix;, Prius, Tesla, Wilson Fisk, YouTube

section-hero-touch

I sat down to watch TV last night with my soon to be 19 year old son. The communication gap between baby boomer and millennial can sometimes be a wide one. To be honest there is very little in the way of taste in television we share in common. Invariably when I stumble across a series that we might both agree on he has watched it. Netflix has helped and he is able to steer me towards some shows of merit e.g. Marvel’s Jessica Jones or the comedy  Master of None. Too late sadly to watch together.

Last night was different though. We didn’t watch Netflix, we didn’t watch Foxtel and we didn’t watch terrestrial television. Instead we watched a thirty minute YouTube Clip together that we beamed via his MacBook onto our projector screen. In doing so we found a nexus between our love for technology and concern for the environment. Now a half hour YouTube about the environment doesn’t sound like a stimulating night’s viewing especially one might suspect for a 19 year old. Add to this the fact that it  was a product launch!

But it was riveting. It was Eldon Musk’s (of Tesla fame) launch of the new Model X transportation disruptor.  Far from a polished performer Musk takes you through the innovations that make the Tesla Model X such an inspiring design achievement. It challenges and often turns on its head the traditional approach to motor vehicles. No longer is the electric car the domain of the quirky and the environmental front-runners ( a la the Prius). Rather here is a vehicle that even Jeremy Clarkson may now want in his garage.

I was drawn to Musk in a piece I read in the Australian Financial Review about Tesla giving away their IP for their technology. Tesla spokeswoman Alexis Georgeson said recently.

“We released the Tesla Model S in June of 2012 and expected other manufacturers to create cars with similar performance and range, but nothing comparable came along,”

By releasing the patents, she said, Tesla hoped to spur consumer acceptance and even create a network of supporting businesses, like car charging stations and mechanics. Of course growing the pie, which IP sharing is likely to do, is good for Tesla. As Wilson Fisk says on Daredevil – currently playing on Netflix – we all rise with the tide. Regardless of some of the by-product benefits, the environment will end up thanking Musk and his associates. Finally our love affair with gas guzzling cars might be at an end. Car envy now is starting to focus on the unthinkable – a vehicle powered by a battery and not the internal combustion engine. Think about it…tomorrow’s young people tinkering about on cars may well be chemists rather than mechanics. Whatever happens, the future is looking a lot brighter than when the Prius was the only viable alternative.

It was a half hour of viewing to be savoured. Communicating meaningfully  across the generations is never easy. Finding common ground is one good way to start and maintain that engagement. I await Musk’s further Tesla product launchs for more than the obvious reasons.

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