Harvard Business Review 5 years 2004 – 2009

Strategic Leadership Skills by Paul Shoemaker, Steve Krupp and Samantha Howland. The six skills discussed are: the ability to anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align and learn.

Notes by [e-mail] 21^st January 2013.

Harvard Business Review 2012

Harvard Business Review December 2012

The theme for this issue is surviving disruption. Interestingly I am just reading a book called Resilience about the same issues. Perhaps the key message I take out of the articles is that you need to start to compete with yourself as a corporation. Don’t hunker down and close your eyes and hope that challenges will go away. Meet challenges head on. Nurture what you have and make it as competitive as possible but also have some of your best people separately and independently look at what might replace your success formula by alternative solutions and ideas and allow internal competition. Too many people focus too narrowly on efficiency and avoiding duplication at the expense of experimenting and seriously challenging the status quo. The concept earlier launched in HBR of pre-mortem often comes back to me. Pre-mortem differs from post mortem in that threats are actively sought out and analysed whilst the patients is still alive, whilst post-mortem can only deal with the obituary.

A few notes from the December issue.

The best leaders have short resumes. Unfiltered leaders are sometimes rejected by the people doing the filtering.

Suggestions that social media is a cure all should be taken for what it is: the patter of a snake-oil salesman. Social media will change nothing. Being social is just a (albeit critical) part of the process of acquiring knowledge.

Before you launch your next cross-selling campaign, pause and ask yourself – do we really want these customers? Cross-selling is profitable in the aggregate but one in five cross-buying customers is unprofitable – and together this group accounts for 70% of a company’s ‘customer loss.’ /Excess virtue is a vice – any idea carried to far starts to backfire/

The cell phone Industry is as large as the IT industry in India. As a tool of economic empowerment, cell phones’ impact transcends the particular circumstances of India. In any country the engagement of the masses is critical for overall progress, and cell phones can put value producing power in everyone’s hands. /I believe the same is now benefitting Africa/

Saving Economics from the Economist by Ronald Coase. Economics as currently presented in textbooks and taught in the class room does not have much to do with business management, and still less with entrepreneurship. The degree to which economics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate. Economics needs to be reoriented to the study of man as he is and the economic system as it actually exists.

How to Manage Disruption by Maxwell Wessel and Clayton M Christensen. The right path for your business requires you to identify (1) the disrupter advantage, (2) your own advantage and (3) how easily you might co-opt your advantage in the future. Before leaders engage in reckless price competition or squander resources and effort in the futile defence of lost causes, they owe it to their shareholders, employees, and customers to take stock of the entire situation and respond comprehensively – to meet disrupters with disruption of their own, but also to guide their legacy businesses towards a healthy a future as possible.

Two Routes to Resilience by Clark Gilbert, Matthew Eyring, and Richard N Foster. Sooner or later companies need to transform themselves in response to market shifts, new technologies, or low-cost start-ups. This involves two separate efforts – adapt the core business and create a new disruptive business yourself. For dual transformation to work, each organization must operate as if the future of the company depended on it alone. In 1958 the average tenure of a company on the S&P 500 was 61 years; by 1980 it had dropped to 25 years and today it is only 18 years. These numbers suggest that as companies grow, they need to manage metamorphosis – a reliable process that will enable them to shift gears without falling apart.

Who Can Fix the Middle Skills Gap? By Thomas Kochan, David Finegold, and Paul Osterman. Currently 69 million people work in the US middle skills market representing 48 % of the working population. It is estimated that 25 million or 47 % of all new jobs will fall into this category. There is an acute shortage of trained people to fill the vacancies. The remedy is collaborative programs that involve multiple employers in a region or industry sector, educational institutions, and other players such as unions and governments. By acquiring the skills to work in this sector workers have increased their annual salaries by an average of $ 10,000.

4 Ways to Reinvent Service Delivery by Kamalini Ramadas, Elizabeth Teisberg and Amy L Tucker. Radically inventing the delivery of a service requires deep insight into clients’ needs and a reconsideration of ‘how we do things around here.’ These innovations can create tremendous value for their customers and for them. One idea presented is doctors seeing a group of up to ten patients, suffering from similar ailments, at the same time increasing cost efficiencies and also perceived patient value.

Reclaim Your Creative Confidence by Tom Kelly and David Kelly. Most of us are creative until the environment takes it out of us. Key therefore is to help people rediscover their creative confidence – the natural ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. We need to move beyond the four inhibiting fears: fear of the messy unknown, fear of being judged, fear of the first step, and fear of losing control. Just get on with it!

The Primacy of Personality. In politics, business, effective leadership requires more than the right skills and strategies. By Jeff Kehoe. Skills and positions, which can be developed and changed, are important for key positions. But personality – biography, character and charisma counts in spades – and that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is therefore paramount to ask – who has the right personality for the job.

Notes by [e-mail] 6 Jan 2013

Harvard Business Review November 2012

The theme for this issue is Change Faster. I again found a very useful issue of HBR with great simple advice on key issues for success in any business. In most cases these are intuitive as opposed to counter intuitive, but the prestige and research of HBR helps me in arguing issues that I have considered important for a long time. There is still so much old school and hierarchical thinking out there which causes demotivation and lack of commitment partly because intelligent high achievers are put in leadership positions for which they may have little training or acumen.

This year is the 90^th anniversary of HBR. The editor in chief says in the leader: “As an institution, HBR believes that effective management can be a force for good. Otherwise we might as well just pack things up.”

Please find below a few lines from the November issue.

Strategy’s Scientific Method. Consumers are tired of pushy sales people – they are ready to fight back or to leave the battle if a competitor will listen and show them what they want.

Marketing is alive, whether in or out of social channels. What’s dead? The old hard sell! What’s new? Buyer power! What’s the source of the buyer power? Saturated markets combined with open access to information on the web. Customer engagement is a fundamental marketing tenet that’s been around longer than you or I have been in business.

Brands get recognition in the marketplace through customers’ physical interactions – with displays, environments, unique buying experiences, and so on. These interactions are what makes the difference between a brand’s succeeding or becoming stagnant and washed-up. Offering a product is one thing, but allowing someone to experience it is a whole different story.

The 40-Year-Old-Intern. ‘Returnships’ let companies audition professionals who are resuming their careers. By Carol Fishman Cohen. Through eight week long ‘returnships’ companies can offer women who want to return to careers a chance to show their ability to contribute. Despite high unemployment, companies often struggle to find the right applicants. Returnships can attract highly educated, experienced workers.

The Art of Developing Truly Global Leaders by Beth Brooke. Growing the necessary talent is both an art and a science. In the leadership shortage we have often focussed too much on the science and too little on the arts. Probably most leaders believe they are inclusive. Diversity after all is a fact of life for any global enterprise, and almost everyone accepts the idea that talented people come from all backgrounds, genders, ages and experiences. But in practice, it takes time to listen to people express ideas in unfamiliar accents or styles. It takes humility to accept that someone else might have a better idea. It takes patience to mediate a clash of cultural assumptions. Learning the science is useful but only by mastering the art will global companies become giants.

Accelerate! By John P Kotter. The traditional hierarchical system needs to be complemented with a second operating system, built on a fluid, network like structure, to continually formulate and implement strategy.

Summary and prediction – Because a dual operating system evolves, it doesn’t jolt the organization the way sudden dramatic change does. It doesn’t require the organization to build something gigantic and then flick a switch to get it going. Think of it as a vast, purposeful expansion in scale, scope, and power of the smaller, informal networks that accomplish tasks faster and cheaper than hierarchies can.

The system offers a solution to problems we have known about for some time. People have been writing for at least 20 years about the increasing speed of business and the need for organizations to be quicker and more agile. But who has been able to pull that off? The situation will not be improved by tweaking the usual methodology or adding turbo charges to a single hierarchical system. That is like trying to rebuild an elephant so that it can both be an elephant and a panther. It’s never going to happen.

People have been writing for 50 years about unleashing human potential and directing the energy to big business challenges. But who, outside the world of start-ups, has succeeded? So few do because they’re working within a system that basically asks most people to shut up, take orders, and do their jobs in a repetitive way.

People have been talking for a quarter of a century about the need for more leaders, because an organization’s top two or three executives can no longer do it all. But very few jobs in traditional hierarchical organizations provide the information and the experience needed to become a leader. And the solutions available – courses and leadership, for example – are wholly inadequate, because most development of complex perspectives and skills happens on the job, not in the classroom.

People have been grumbling for years about the strategy consulting industry, whose reports fail to solve the problem of finding and implementing strategies to better fit a changing environment. A consultant’s report – all thought and little heart, forecasting where you can flourish in two or five or ten years, produced by smart outsiders, and acted on in a linear way by a limited number of appointed people – has little or no chance of success in a faster moving, more uncertain world.

The inevitable failures of single operating systems hurt us now. They are going to kill us in the future. The 21^st century will force us all to evolve toward a fundamentally new form of organization. I believe that I have basically described that form here. We still have much to learn. Nevertheless, the companies that get there first, because they act now, will see immediate and long term success – for shareholders, customers, employees, and themselves. Those that lag will suffer greatly, if they survive at all.

The Management Century by Walter Kiechel. Three eras punctuate the period from 1880s until today. In the first, the years until WWII aspirations to scientific exactitude gave wings to the ambitions of a new, self-proclaimed management elite. The second, from the late 1940s until about 1980 was manegerialism’s era of good feelings, its apogee of self-confidence and widespread public support. The third and ongoing era has been marked by a kind of retreat – into specialization, servitude to market forces, and declining moral ambitions. But it has also been an era of global triumph, measured be agreement of certain ideas, steadily improving productivity, the worldwide march of the MBA degree, and general elevation of expectations about how workers should be treated.

There has been an ongoing quest for the right balance between the things of production and the humanity of production, between the numbers people and the people people.

Peter Drucker laid out a vision of the corporation as a social institution – a social network – in which the capacity and potential of everyone involved were to be respected. Out with the concept of “boss,” “foreman” and look at the concept of “employee.” Some 26,000 MBAs had been awarded in the US by 1970 and by 1985 that number had risen to 67,000.

In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman underscored the importance of culture in organizations, an attack on strategy as merely quantitative exercise, and a celebration of the human element in making a company successful.

Recovering or reimagining authentic, satisfying sources of executive authority will be high on the to-do list for management’s next century. Because management is finally about how to make humans and their organizations more effective – and because humans stubbornly cling to their propensity to be human – there will never be a ‘best’ way but there will almost always be a better way.

Inventing HBR by Julia Kirby. A first mention of women in the work force in 1935 noted that companies employing them in large numbers might be models of responsible wage policies. By 1953 they merited a full feature in Opportunities for Women at the Administrative Level. Fast forward to 1980s and the voices discussing the issue had become persistent and powerful.

Thoughtful leaders around the world are striving to be the best professionals they can be. And HBR is there with them, still evolving, still growing.

What You Can Learn From Family Business. Focus on resilience, not short-term performance by Nicolas Kachaner, George Stalk, and Alain Bloch. During good economic times, family companies have slightly lower earnings, but during down turns, they outperform their peers. What accounts for these counter cyclical results? A focus on resilience – which influences seven strategic choices! There is no reason that other companies can’t copy them – and in fact, many businesses would benefit from managing themselves more like family businesses. The 7 key parameters listed are: Be frugal in good times and bad. Keep the bar high for capital expenditure. Carry little debt. Acquire fewer and smaller companies. Stay diversified. Be more international. Be better at retaining talent than your competitors.

How Hard Should You Push Diversity? By Martin N Davidson

A corporate commitment to diversify as strategic imperative and a cultural reality can’t be the goal of one person. It must be part of the corporate DNA. Even with this mandate, it is always hard to attract, develop and retain world-class talent that mirrors the market place.

Rather than fulfilling a quota the metric should be more subtle and valuable: how many minority candidates have been positioned for success? This means leading initiatives that recruit, identify, coach and mentor minority talent. The key is to provide diverse associates with opportunities to improve their skills rather than promoting them because they are members of a minority group. Also useful to have all staff attend courses in cultural fluency to help highlight individual’s diversity blind spots and erase the underlying nuances of discrimination.

In order to be receptive to diverse points of view, a company must have a climate of respect for the individual that makes it safe for people to speak up. Employees know the difference between a company that is simply telling them a good story and one that is authentically supportive.

KPMG CEO says we’ve evolved from a mentoring culture to a sponsorship culture. Mentoring can be passive whereas sponsorship is active by finding and creating career-defining growth opportunities and assigning the individuals to the most important clients. That way when it is time to consider someone for partner, everyone knows that the promotion is based on the person’s experience and performance.

Notes by [e-mail] 10.11.12

Harvard Business Review October 2012

Feature articles in this issue cover ‘Getting control of big data. How vast streams of information are changing the art of management.’ Key message there is that it is better to base decisions on what you know rather than what you think. Another is that almost everything you need to know is out there, if you just know how to access it. A large portion of the issue covers general management concerns. Please find below a few high lights.

A New Guide to Selling- Potential clients do not buy things logically; they buy things emotionally and justify their purchases logically. As sales professionals, we must work to find out how these emotional decisions are made. It is important to avoid ‘the death by data-sheet’ approach.

Why Top Young Managers Are in a Non-stop Job Hunt – the drive to jump ship is tied to the desire to have more responsibility, to make more decisions. I want to do more than sit in a cubicle and fill in spread sheets all day. And no amount of coaching or mentoring is going to change that.

Businesses are just beginning to understand the power of ‘social norms’ by Steve Martin. By appealing to people’s sense of civic duty saying: “We collect taxes to make sure money is available to fund the public services that benefit you and other UK citizens” and “Nine people out of ten pay their taxes on time” lifted the clearance rate by 30%. People’s behaviour is largely shaped by the behaviour of those around them – by social norms. Every manager’s tool kit should include an understanding of the power of ethical uses of social norms.

The Life Cycle of CEO Compensation by Geoffrey martin, Luis Gomez-Mejia and Robert Weisman. Issuing stock as compensation tends to make CEO’s cautious and wealth preserving, issuing options tends to make the holder more risk oriented. Executives with valuable accumulated holdings may be reluctant to execute daring plans.

Great leaders don’t Need Experience by Gautam Makunda. Is experience a predictor of mediocre performance? The ability to think differently and not feel beholden to a certain way of doing things can lead to terrible results. Unfiltered leaders are high risk, high reward. People who are effective in stable situations – experienced leaders – are often unable to adapt to extreme sudden change or are unable to disrupt the status quo, which an outsider feels freer to do.

You can be a great manager but you won’t have impact if there are 100 other great managers who could do the same thing you would. If you want to grow to dominance you need an unfiltered leader, someone who will think differently and take risks. You can choose leaders who are likely to lead you to great wins or big losses, or you can choose leaders who definitely will be good at their job but almost certainly won’t be great.

The Unintended Circumstances of Good Ideas by Charles Handy. Two social inventions – the joint stock company and limited liability – spurred unprecedented economic innovation and growth, but they also put us on a dangerous course. By effectively separating the theoretical ownership of a company from its management, the first turned shareholders into something more like punters at a racecourse. Using shares as betting slips on the nags of their choice, they behave neither like trainers nor owners. As a result of the second, limited liability, managers gained their own license to gamble, at no personal cost. Perhaps the next good idea would be to require directors to obey the law and put the long term interests of the company as a whole before those of themselves and their shareholders. They might discover that all of the above were better served. And many years later we might find companies less opaque, anonymous, and ominous to people passing by.

Building Resilience by Wasting Time by Jane McGonigal. Engaging in some activities we assume are non-productive – as tiny exercises – may actually be a smart way to spend time, especially at work. These practices can make people more resourceful problem solvers, more collaborative, and less likely to give up when things get tough. They can make people more resilient. Make it a personal goal to waste at least four minutes every hour. / I have myself for 40 years practiced taking five minutes off every hour to re-bout and stay alert/ Research shows that will power gets stronger the more we exercise it.

Tackling a pointless but mildly challenging task, such as snapping your fingers exactly 50 times is a scientifically backed way of improving focus and determination – and thus mental resilience. In fact the more arbitrary the task, the better; without external motivators, you have to will yourself to finish. Social resilience is about the relationships that help us find resources when we need them. Develop habits that connect you to others. Greater resilience will make you more capable and will benefit your organization. / This is like crop rotation in agriculture – the system gets exhausted from too much of the same – a clever mix of chores can make you much more productive, my comment /

The True Measures of Success by Michael J Mauboussin. Most people use the wrong performance metrics. Through proper statistical analysis a retail chain found out that turnover of store managers, rather than turnover of all employee population, had a great impact on profitability. Executives often resist abandoning existing metrics in favour of more suitable ones. The two most popular measures of performance – EPS and sales growth – have limited value in predicting shareholder returns because neither is both persistent and predictive. The performance of a company almost always depends on both skill and luck, and luck is difficult to emulate.

Companies that bothered to measure a nonfinancial factor – and to verify that it had some real effect – earned returns on equity that were about 1.5 times greater than those of companies that didn’t take those steps. Exploiting the right statistics before rivals do will be the key to seizing advantage.

Big Data – The management Revolution. Exploiting vast new flows of information can radically improve your company’s performance. But first you’ll have to change your decision making culture. By Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson/

A couple of articles on how extracting the right date will help you manage better. Big data’s power does not erase the need for vision or human insight.

Data scientist is one of the most important jobs of the 21^st century.

Whatever Happened to Accountability? By Thomas E Ricks

It is the duty of the executive to remove ruthlessly anyone – and especially any manager – who consistently fails to perform with high distinction. To let such a man stay on corrupts the others. It is grossly unfair to the whole organization. An interesting article on leadership, worth reading in its entirety!