The McKinsey Quarterly recently published their survey results on “Why multinationals struggle to manage talent“. Their result highlights the challenges that multinational firms are facing when it comes to managing global talent, and more importantly, how it can reflect on their financial results.

International assignments enable firms to achieve greater cultural diversity, innovation through better understanding of their target customers, enabling knowledge transfer between divisions as well as further development of company talent. Yet, many employees don’t view overseas experience as valuable career path, mostly due to the way companies handle international assignments. Based on their survey, McKinsey indicates that those who have done well in managing their global talent have the following best practices:

• Top management encourages people to get experience in multiple business units/locations across organizations
• Overseas experience is regarded as a prerequisite to promotion to senior level within organizations
• Managers are willing to or are offered incentives to lose their talented employees to other divisions, functions or geographies within the company

Along these lines, also check out Kai-Fu Lee’s (President of Google Greater China) Carnegie Mellon presentation “Google China — Can a Multinational Internet Company Succeed in China?” on YouTube. He discusses Google’s success in China and highlights key factors to their continued performance. During the presentation, you will also gain great insights into challenges awaiting companies entering China.

The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in. —Harold Goddard

Storytelling is an art. It is powerful, expressive, and perhaps the quickest path to building deep connections. When you are in the presence of a good storyteller, words take you beyond their meanings where you are presented to the world of possibilities. Its like living Sheherazade and hearing her stories from One Thousand and One Nights. I had the pleasure of working for a General Manager that had an amazing storytelling ability. Stories of our customers, competitors, market changes, hopes and dreams were his way of expressing his experiences, his vision and exploring how we could jointly create a new shared reality. For a startup within a large company, these stories are crucial for building a common future and a culture that would sustain itself when the going gets tough.

I can go on and on about the importance of storytelling for the innovation process and the leadership. However, Steve Denning summarizes the power of storytelling quite eloquently in his blog: The Secret Language of Leadership. You can read his summary here.

If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life. —Siberian Elder

We are our stories. We tell ourselves stories about what we can and can’t do, how our world operates, and we use these stories to internalize what we experience daily through our clouded filters. If you like to know more about how our stories shapes our lives, take a look at Jim Loehr’s book The Power of Story: Rewrite Your Destiny in Business and in Life, and be ready to explore your own story.

I hope you can see the power of stories, their influence and impact in the innovation process as they shape and form our views of the world. I also hope that you recognize the importance of grounding ourselves when it comes to our stories, so that we are seeing them for what they really are. Before you read the rest of the post, take a moment and think about some of your own stories. Then, see if any of the ideas below can help ground them, so that they are more real.

Stories are a form of assumptions. However, before you take apart the whole plot piece by piece, step back and understand the overall theme, the key characters and the point of view needed for success. Evaluate each, and determine which ones need to be treated as assumptions and which ones are just flashbacks in your story that adds flavor and spice. Record each of these assumptions and start your validation and tracking process. Just as an example, an in depth understanding of your ecosystem is mandatory for a story that evolves around making your technology platform pervasive across the board. Some of those players within your ecosystem will be gatekeepers needing to be infiltrated, while others are accessory providers adding sugar and spice and something nice to your product. Make sure you are focusing on the right problems.

Get to know your storyteller. In the real world, our storytellers are a part of the human machinery that operates the thing called the corporate bureaucracy. The story might be great, and might even be true. But, if it doesn’t fit within the decision making structure of this bigger machine, it will never be a legend. So, get to know your storytellers, the structure and the decision making process they operate in. It will give you the opportunity to evolve your story, if it wasn’t quite right to begin with. Things such as, your firm’s hurdle rate, markets you operate in, revenue projections, type of customers you serve, resource and funding requirements will all play into your story somehow.

Everyone loves a good ending. So, understand your key metrics that you need to measure and track. Lets say that your story is referring to a target market size. Recognize that, it is actually talking about the addressable target market of your product, and put actions in place to grow that size overtime. Or, maybe your success truly depends on your customer connection. Then start building your customer relationship model and your brand where the customer is the keystone of your story from day one.

Every story has a point of view and a perspective that changes depending on the person involved. It is great to have different perspectives, angles and takeaways which will improve your creativity and innovativeness. However, you need common vocabulary, understanding and acknowledgement in order to execute “Ready all…Row” command properly. Take your customer knowledge as an example. Good analysis and understanding of your customer data is priceless. Yet, extracting this data unbiasedly, interpreting it appropriately and creating the right actions are your challenge. For more on this, check out How to Hear the Voice of Your Customers: Hone First-Person Intelligence From All Forms of Feedback by David Bean at MarketingProfs (registration might be required to access). So, use your stories well, and create the language and the vocabulary that your culture will understand and embrace.

Your stories have a structure (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), and so should your innovation process. Milestones, stage-gate process, iterations, … are great way to ground yourself in the story while it evolves. Whatever process you use, make sure you have frequent checkpoints along the path to keep you honest and accountable.

Finally, share your stories with others and allow them to make it their own. Otherwise, when story is over everyone just goes home. Yes, a meaningful story can be inspiring. But for it to ignite the change you are hoping, individuals will need to believe in the story and make it their own for it to be real. In other words, when you pass the baton, someone is there to take and continue from where you left off, because they believe.

And remember: “The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.” (Jim Harrison)

Technorati Tags: stories, storytelling, grounding yourself

I was recently pinged regarding to the challenges of managing geographically dispersed teams. The wisdom below is based on my experience. How about you, are your observations different?

Overall, I found the leadership and management challenges of managing geographically distributed teams similar to day-to-day leadership challenges. However, distance, cultural diversity and communication differences make it even more challenging to ensure your teams are aligned with your values, processes and are working together towards the same goal with the same level of urgency. In my experience, I learned that I can’t assume that I am understood (even if I hear “yes, I understand” from the other side). I need to make sure to take the time to educate my teams on our processes, explain the context of my decision making process, discuss my values and how we do business in general. Establishing trust and good communication is essential in managing global teams.

Managing people, regardless of location, is a great reminder that I am in the people business, and not necessarily the technology business. With that, once the processes are understood and a few glitches are dealt with, the coordination process becomes smooth. However, when you are dealing with people, you will always have misunderstandings, miscommunications, etc. These tend to cause the coordination problems, and take the most effort to iron out, since you need to solve the root of the problem and not just deal with the symptom (such as coordination issues, misunderstood expectations, etc.)

Culture and language differences are yet another challenge to deal with. It is important to be aware of cultural diversity, as it can cause unnecessary tension and problems. Language and method of communication tends to be the bigger challenge. As an example, e-mail distribution lists are a great way to convey information and can be used heavily for decision making. However, the quantity and verbosity of email can be quite difficult for non-english speakers. So, your main issue is how to structure your communication such that your audience can understand and act on it as you intended.

When dealing with distance, I think there is always an aspect of out of sight, out of mind, which applies to both sides. Distance and time zones contribute to the challenges of communication and trust. In my experience a few hours of difference (such as the case of neighboring US States) wasn’t an issue. However, when you are dealing with differences of culture, holidays, work days (M-F vs. Su-Th) as well as large time zone differences (8+ hrs), you need to be aware of potentially burning out your teams. Active management of these issues (such as rotating meeting hours, face-to-face meeting locations, establishing quiet days, etc.) certainly helps.

I am a believer in over-communicating. I use face to face meetings (crucial, especially with very diverse teams and at the beginning and the middle of projects for best coordination), phone calls for 1:1s (personal updates), conference calls (web, video, phone, …) with my management staff, conference calls with all my teams, emails and instant messaging. Agendas as well as clearly stating the context of the issue and outcomes expected (including any boundaries, etc.) are key to good communication on both sides.

Technorati Tags: global teams, distributed team management

Previously I wrote about Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan’s comments on innovation and how it will impact management practices and organizational design.

Now you can visit HBS Working Knowledge to read and comment about how you see the future of management changing: Where Will Management Innovation Take Us?

It is no doubt that innovation and the drive to continuously innovate is changing the way work is done and where it is done, how groups are led and organized, and how creativity is encouraged and tapped. Technology is also playing a key role in facilitating this situation, whether it is through social networks, forums, virtual meetings, development environments or knowledge management tools.

However, perhaps the biggest challenge to the future of management will be big corporations and all their bureaucratic bloated supporting departments. As important as the management process itself is to innovation, the alignment of the supporting organizational structures, such as the HR department, is just as vital in order to succeed.

Brought to you by the “Rambling Blogs” department of Kitetail.com.

Technorati Tags: future of management, HBS

“Good and bad ways to go wrong” is David Weinberger’s article in KMWorld, and it is a definite good read.

David advises us not to be wrong in two or more ways, as that can be disastrous: “you can be arrogant or you can be ignorant, but you better not be both.”

In his article, he talks about the good and bad ways of generalizing, the need for making and learning from mistakes (though he indicates not every mistake is a learning experience), and the importance of good mistakes.

I hope you enjoy the article.

Technorati Tags: KMWorld, David Weinberger, good and bad ways to go wrong

Stop, don’t dismiss or shrug away that little nagging, semi-irritating feeling you get after an interaction with someone in your organization. Ask yourself, “is this a common occurrence?” If the answer is yes, it is time to look at your organization and its culture.

What, how and why your organization does the things it does and how it behaves is a reflection of your organization’s culture. It is all about how you as a collective see the world, interact with the world and what rules you instinctively follow.

Take a step back and think about your organization’s culture. You might use one or more of the following characteristics to define it. Note some are more positive than others.

• innovative and high risk tolerance
• good attention to details
• focuses on results
• values people and team work
• aggressive with take no prisoners attitude
• creative and out-of-the-box thinking
• tolerance for ambiguity
• entrepreneurship focused
• customer centric
• collaborative, open and values trust
• empowered, self-managed, adaptive and agile
• quality work is a given and not an after thought
• need to know basis only; i.e. limited knowledge sharing
• does enough, but reluctant to go further
• ownership and accountability
• not invented here
• penny wise, pound foolish or otherwise known as frugal
• do first, think later or otherwise known as just do it
• …

Yes, the list can go on and on and on… And here is why should you care.

• Your organizational culture is linked to your firms success: Various studies and surveys indicating the link between organizational culture and firm’s success. Denison Consulting’ 2006 study links high performance in key areas of the organizational culture (adaptability, consistency, mission and involvement) to long-term financial performance and short-term sales growth.

  What do you think? Can you establish cause-and-effect links between your culture and other performance indicators such as your current customer satisfaction or employee motivation scores?

• Your culture can attract and retain talent: Individuals differ in what motivates them, what degree of social and community connections they need at work, amount of pay and benefits, as well as level of innovation, entrepreneurship, empowerment and risk taking in the company. Great companies not only create excitement and camaraderie for their purpose, but also build a culture that attracts the type of individuals that they need.

  Think about it… Are you attracting the type of talent you need to be successful in your business? What is preventing you from creating a company culture where you attract best of the best?

• Your strategy and culture are joined at the hip: Lets face it, your culture has a big influence on how your company does things. This influence certainly extends to your strategy. Just think about different generic strategies: cost leadership, differentiation, fast follower, … Each of these require a different set of cultural characteristics to be successful. Along the same lines, for any change in your strategy, you will need to identify the cultural behaviors that need to be changed and managed.
• Your culture can deliver 1+1=3: When you have a high performing organization, you can truly achieve 1+1=3! By focusing on ownership, accountability, action and results you improve your product and services using the same or fewer resources. By relying on their values and leaders, successful companies can decentralize authority to succeed in times where there is a high degree of ambiguity.

  As leaders, our every action sends a message to our people: dusty action item lists, reoccurring discussions with no specific decisions or owners, late start to meetings, runaway meetings, … Just a reminder, the buck stops with us.

• Your culture defines your ethical behavior: The world is transparent and becoming more transparent everyday. Honesty, integrity and ethical behavior is no longer a nice to have, but a must to demonstrate. Sure, you can put in place as many controls, checkpoints and policies as you want to ensure ethical behavior. But, to be successful, this ethics DNA must be embedded into your culture.

  The real test comes when doing the right thing is extremely hard: schedule slippage, customers’ personal data is compromised, lower than expected revenue results, … When that happens, and they will, how do you work as an organization: conduct open, yet difficult communications, take ownership for the responsibility, ensure joint accountability, …?

Finally, here are some of the signs that hints your culture needs work:

• second guessing/revising of decisions;
• execution issues and problems achieving results;
• inability to deal with or tolerate ambiguity;
• excessive workforce turnover;
• living in the past rather than facing to the present;
• loss of confidence in the leadership, direction and purpose;
• excessive politics and bureaucracy;
• firefighting mentality that rewards heroics;
• inability to innovate and risk adverse behavior;
• difficulty attracting and retaining talent;
• lack of respect;

Technorati Tags: organizational culture, why organizational culture important

The McKinsey Quarterly recently had a good discussion on the topic of innovation management (might require free membership to access the content). As Gary Hamel summarizes, the discussion is about the changes that are occurring with management practices and organizational designs.

How do you build organizations that are as nimble as change itself? How do you mobilize and monetize the imagination of every employee, every day? How do you create organizations that are highly engaging places to work in? And these challenges simply can’t be met without reinventing our 100-year-old management model.

Managing creatives, knowledge workers, freelancers, …, is not an easy process. It requires a careful balancing of freedom to explore and directing energies in a productive way that ultimately profits the firm and society. From Lowell Bryan:

These thinking-intensive people are increasingly self-directed. In fact, they’re directed as much by their peers as they are by supervisors. The management challenge is akin to urban planning. The art of it is that you must enable people to make thousands and thousands of individual decisions about how to live and work, but you have to create the infrastructure to make it easy for them to do so.

Insight from Gary Hamel:

The outlines of the 21st-century management model are already clear. Decision-making will be more peer based; the tools of creativity will be widely distributed in organizations. Ideas will compete on an equal footing. Strategies will be built from the bottom up. Power will be a function of competence rather than of position. In terms of the future of management, we’re at the beginning of what will be a fairly long journey. You can see some of the pieces starting to come together, but we’re not there yet.

And finally, Gary Hamel’s questions to the CEOs that are serious about innovation, which should be asked and compared at all levels of the organization:

• “How have you been trained as a business innovator? What investment has the company made in teaching you how to innovate?”
• “If you have a new idea, how much bureaucracy do you have to go through to get a small increment of experimental capital? How long is it going to take you to get 20 percent of your time and $5,000 to test your idea? Is that a matter of months or is it very easy for that to happen?”
• “Are you actually being measured on your innovation performance or your team’s innovation? Does it influence your compensation?”
• “As you look at the management processes in your company, do they tend to help you work as an innovator or get in the way?”

Enjoy the article.

Technorati Tags: innovative management, Gary Hamel, Lowell Bryan, McKinsey

It must be WSJ week… Here is an interesting article from WSJ about the differences in brain activity between a visionary leader and a non-visionary leader. Pierre Balthazard, Arizona State University management professor, indicates that the visionary leaders use their brains differently than others.

The brain-wave analysis highlights differences in the patterns for visionary leaders: more efficient left brain (logic and reasoning) and better connected right brains (social skills). Professor Balthazard hopes to use this information to promote brain-training for leadership-development.

This certainly takes the argument of effective leaders are made not born a step further. What do you think, will we see assessments of EEG brain activity levels as a requirement for promotions? Maybe they should be given to current CEOs, board members, … It could go hand in hand with the study that links success of firms to the personal lives of their CEOs.

It is too early to say… But, it would be interesting to see the metrics and of course the conclusions of this study. In the meantime, I could certainly enjoy the process of getting my brain’s EEG mapped

Technorati Tags: WSJ.com, mind of a leader, leadership

There is actually a silver bullet for increasing your organization’s effectiveness: hire well. More specifically hire good leaders that will step up and raise your organization’s performance bar and set a new standard. Peter Drucker summarized this straight-forward recipe in his book The Effective Executive (Drucker Series).

…[Effective executive] knows, moreover, that the standard of any human group is set by the performance of the leaders. And he, therefore, never allows leadership performance to be based on anything but true strength.
…In human affairs, the distance between leaders and the average is a constant. If leadership performance is high, the average will go up. The effective executive knows that it is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass. He therefore makes sure that he puts into the leadership position, into the standard-setting, the performance-making position, the man who has the strength to do the outstanding, the pace-setting job.

Exceptional leaders can deliver the impossible while building the organization, creating excitement about the future, enhancing communication and team morale while strengthening customer and partner loyalty. No wonder “bet on the jockey, not on the horse” is a mantra that drives VC investment decisions.

There are many studies on what constitutes an effective and exceptional leader. These individuals share some common characteristics:

• They challenge the established processes, search for new opportunities and experiment with new ideas. However, they do this in a participatory fashion where they are inclusive of others. They listen well, consistently request feedback, encourage and share and in return they are persuasive, persistent and as they tend to be politically savvy, they use discretion.
• They are focused on key priorities, keep it simple, celebrate small wins and are clear about their values. This enables them to build a compelling vision for the future, create a nurturing environment and provide motivation to rally a team behind this shared vision where everyone understands how they fit into the big picture.
• They understand the importance of accountability and ownership, for themselves and for the teams they manage. They enable others to act by involving them in decisions, and continuously look for ways to coach and mentor their team for individual growth. They build on other’s strengths and use it to motivate them.
• They focus on results and prefer to ask for forgiveness over permission. They share the rewards and recognition while taking responsibility for setbacks.
• They have a presence that brings credibility to what they do and say. They build confidence as they are thorough, professional and insightful.

If you are in a people management position and struggling with raising your team’s performance bar to the next level, consider the following:

• Do a self-analysis of your own management style, observe yourself in action and request feedback from others. Are you emphasizing accountability and ownership, or micro-managing everything short of chewing the food for them? Are you building on the strengths of your team, or just bluntly pointing out their weaknesses expecting them to overcome it overnight?
• Analyze your organizational circumstances. You can certainly build a dynamic and high-performance team, but your organization might have put the choke collar on you. Powerlessness over external resources, lack of cooperation, issues of trust and openness are certainly frustrating experiences. Some could be solved by organizational restructuring, for others you will need to sharpen your political savvyness.
• Evaluate the cultural aspects of your organization. Is it participative and inclusive, or more command and control? There is a time and place for different styles, such as in case of emergencies where command and control can be most effective. However, in general this style destroys motivation, creativity and lends itself to just tell me what to do attitudes.
• Study information and knowledge sharing patterns of your organization. Ideas and innovations are built on other ideas, and transparency/openness creates an environment conducive to sharing, understanding and motivating.
• Be honest, are there egos at play? Effective leaders learn to supress their egos in favor of the team.
• Take a survey; is the problem with lack of focus and having unrealistic optimism? Too much task switching reduces productivity, expectations that are obviously impossible to meet kill any potential for motivation.

At the end of the day, you need to model the way. Demonstrate your new performance standards by setting the pace, by having challenging, exciting yet achievable goals, by motivating and coaching others to contribute their best to the team. And, don’t forget to celebrate small victories along the way.

Technorati Tags: leadership, raise performance of teams, characteristics of exceptional leaders, high performance teams, effective leadership

To which I ask “if everybody before you has jumped off the bridge, would you follow?” Yup, we’ve always done it this way is one of my pet peeves. I believe there is a time and place for everything, and things/circumstances do change.

Organizational memory is a valuable asset for the firm. It is defined as shared data, information or knowledge of past experiences that are relevant to an organization’s present activities. As such, it lives in the collective memory of the employees and evolves with them. Improvement in the overall effectiveness and success of the organization is dependent on the quality of its memory and how well it learns from the past. Yet, organizations routinely “forget” what they have done in the past and why they have done it, which reminds me of the classic Thanksgiving turkey story:

A teenager was watching her mom carefully stuff and prepare the turkey for the oven. As part of the preparation, prior to putting the turkey into the oven, mom cut about 3″ from the tail of the bird. When the teenager asked why that was, mom simply said “I don’t know… Mom always did it this way. Why don’t you ask your grandmother?”. Later on that night at the dinner table, the teen queried grandma, to which she responded “Well you see… My oven was too small, so in order to fit my 20lb turkey, I always had to cut off about 3″ from the tail.”

Yup, things and circumstances usually do change… Alzheimer-like poor organizational memory usually results from a lack of leadership focus on learning from past success and failures, and where the organizational processes do not require employees to document and share organizational actions, outcomes, and to apply those learnings to new problems. The information overload that we experience daily certainly makes the problem more challenging to deal with. As the firm heavily relies on individuals to be the keeper of organizational experience, turnover, attrition and downsizing eventually erodes precious knowledge, learnings and insights. With that, effective organizational memory is compromised of three parts:

1. Explicit knowledge, information, facts, policies or rules that are embodied within the culture;
2. Tacit knowledge, insights, knowledge of the rationale, discussions, assumptions behind those explicit knowledge and information that is shared and understood by the organization;
3. Application of this knowledge, recognition of the knowledge, its context and successful internalization, associations and utilization of the knowledge by the organization;

Basically, you need to be able to move from “we’ve always done it that way”, to be able to share why, how and other relevant context, to successfully recognize how those experiences might be relevant to a new problem or that the circumstances have changed and it’s time for an update.

Companies heavily rely on groupware tools (wikis, Microsoft Sharepoint, …) to capture and manage their organizational memory. Given that the organizational memory lives as part of the collective memory of the employees, you can see the challenges associated with managing a living organism. However, the real competitive advantage comes from the application of this knowledge within the appropriate context of the new problem that needs to be solved. So, unless the organization successfully fires on all three cylinders and builds a learning organization, it will not be effective at utilizing their collective knowledge for new ideas, inventions or innovations.

If you think your organization is suffering from (hopefully) a temporary case of amnesia, here are some suggestions to improve the overall effectiveness of your organization’s memory.

• Formalize processes for creating and using organizational memory. This includes holding project postmortems where you capture the learnings, but also a specific action plan that would be applicable to the overall organization as well as next project. And, make it part of your project initiation phase to review prior postmortem reports.
• Build a learning organization by insisting on learning from past success and failures. As with life, learning is multi-dimensional, it is individual and collective. So, be inclusive and encouraging in your learning process.
• Make it easy for the organization to capture the knowledge by investing in tools to easily capture, catalog and organize knowledge and information being exchanged. However, focus on building a learning culture by putting in processes that requires connection with the rationale and assumptions of past decisions and learn from it in a way that would be applied to today’s problems.
• Continuously expand on the organization’s memory and experience. New knowledge can be gained through customer surveys, tradeshows, hiring people with relevant experience, … You can utilize your vision, your core competencies and strategic objectives as a method for determining where you want to enhance your learnings.
• Remember, people are fallible and our memories are flawed. As you remember and apply past learnings, make sure it is within the context of the new problems. Otherwise, you are dealing with apples vs. oranges.
• As with anything you want to improve, focus on measuring your initiatives. This can be simply implemented as assessment surveys, utilization of knowledge management and collaboration tools and measures of your best practices in the organization.

So, next time you catch yourself arguing “we’ve always done it this way”, stop and think. Recognize that it just might be the right time to question the so called wisdom.

Technorati Tags: organizational memory, organizational learning, best practices