We are pretty well immune to those who make promises, as we have heard it all before, and having been burnt, and burnt, we tend not to believe the hype this time.
Doesn’t matter if it is a colleague assuring us they will meet a deadline, a supplier “guaranteeing” performance of his offering, or a pollie telling us the train line will be built by the end of 2020, we have heard it all before.
The antidote is to stop saying and start doing, and let the performance speak for itself.
Leadership is often seen as a “soft” skill, hard to measure, and really only obvious with the benefit of hindsight.
Perhaps not, the potential success of leaders can be at least partly assessed by looking at what makes people unsuccessful as leaders.
As a test, when considering someone as a potential leader you could do a lot worse than score the person on the traits listed, and if sitting on a selection committee, get the members to evaluate a candidate separately on a set of scales that reflect the particular requirements of the appointment role, then compare notes. At least then you will see the areas of agreement and those for further investigation and debate.
Equally, within a context of an agreed strategy and expected results, the same scale could be used as a tool to evaluate executive performance.
Perhaps our “leaders” in Canberra should consider some objctive evaluation in about 3 hours, rather than relying on self interest, and allegiences based on all but the long term good of the country. Always the optimist!
I spoke to a few people in Canberra yesterday, curious as to the impact of the Labor leadership cat-fight on the rest of the place.
Whilst I expected it to be the topic of the day, the consensus was that work in the bureaucracy, the implementers of policy, had come to a complete standstill over the last few weeks, and yesterday, started rolling backwards as individuals took the lead from their bosses, and started jockeying for post cat-fight, and probably post this current “government”, position.
If we ever needed a graphic example of the impact of indecision and conflict at the top, we need look no further.
The worse it has got at the top, the more the impact ripples through the ranks, stopping any sort of sensible conversation, let alone strategy (policy in their terms) implementation. Worse still, the ripples amplify the impact, so the recovery time will be substantial.
The impact of the profound lack of leadership that this power tussle has displayed will be felt for months, probably years. Problem is, we as taxpaying individuals and enterprises are paying through the nose for the privilege of watching this stupid game, as the main game gets totally ignored, and continues down the proverbial slot.
Successful stories are always greater than the sum of their parts.
Great stories engage, enlighten, inform, and inspire, so to dissect the sum to explain the parts may seem easier than selling the whole thing, but it usually does not work. Telling the big picture, the big idea, the big picture, is a key to selling.
Try describing how a frog jumps to someone who has not seen one jump by dissecting it. You can describe the long legs, musculature, power to weight ratio, but that does not help much, better to show them the frog jumping.
Into the new year, most companies that have June 30 as year end will start the tortuous path of setting the new budget. I have seen the budget process take 6 months, and be as useless as a water pistol in a gunfight when it comes to delivering meaningful outcomes.
Two simple questions are often not asked:
In other words, have a clear business purpose, and know what you have to do to progressively deliver on the undertakings.
Remember the Arnott’s case, in 1997 they recalled millions of packets, and showed them being crushed on TV, in the days before u-tube. Tylenol in the US went trough the same thing in 1882, 6 packets were laced with cyanide, leading to several deaths, and J&J without hesitation recalled the hundreds of millions of packets in the market, and talked about what had happened, what measures they and the police were taking, and assisted the families of those who had died.
In the new techie world, the same thing applies, 37 Signals has a suite of software products on the cloud, they appear to work well, but when they go down, (every senior managers major concern with the cloud) as it is out of immediate control, it really hurts. 37 signals lost Campfire, but they turned the disaster into gold by communicating.
In most cases where a recall is deemed necessary, it is just a cost, often a huge one, sometimes a terminal one. However, by taking the public into their confidence, a recall, or outage as in the case of Campfire, can be used as powerful evidence that the company puts the welfare of their customers above all else.
Pretty powerful stuff in an environment of bland, commodity brands that have little to differentiate themselves.
And most importantly,
Pretty simple really, or how enormously complicated, challenging, and ultimately rewarding, depending on how deeply you think about the list
Following up the post yesterday commenting on the changes the net has wrought in relation to Michael Porters ideas about substitutes. It seemed useful to add links to two useful articles by Joan Magretta, who has written a book on Porters work.
The first is the strategy mistakes Porters sees most commonly, and the second a great list of strategy do’s & don’ts.
There are many lists on the web, bloggers particularly know that response rates go up substantially with a list in the headline, but if you are going to take notice of anyone, it may as well be one of the giants of strategic thinking.
