Category Archives: All

What happens then? You just come back.

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Two months ago I put my blog on hiatus while I finished up a very cool project with a great client,  then went on a family vacation, and then had some downtime at home.  As I sat down last week to start writing again, I got a call from a former coaching client and we had a great conversation. He is interested in starting a blog, and I mentioned that I was getting back to writing this week. He asked me if it was hard to get started again and I said “well, you know, you just come back. There are no rules, there’s no etiquette, there’s not a process map to follow.  You just start writing again, it really is that simple.”

For those of you who have been reading for a while, thank you, welcome back, and I hope you enjoy this month’s focus on driving business results through innovative approaches to thinking about products, customers, markets, and sales. If you are new, please feel free to say hello, send in any questions or suggestions, and / or peruse the past.  I’m looking forward to getting back to writing, and to hearing about your experiences, questions, and thoughts.

In the meantime, enjoy this picture from my recent holiday in Cayman Brac, a lovely island with friendly people and fantastic diving!

Sunrise off of Cayman Brac

Sunrise off of Cayman Brac

What’s GenX’s Winnebego?

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When we think about the future of work, we think about how things are changing.  New generations entering, older generations exiting, new types of work becoming the norm, with older patterns and habits dying off – some going easily and others fighting to stay relevant.

When I think about what’s changing, I think in terms of environmental, economic, organizational, and individual changes that drive industries, markets, and the workforce. In the 60s, the American desire to get on the road and explore, coupled with inexpensive materials and fuel, gave birth to entire new industries, including the Recreational Vehicle, KOA parks, and chain restaurants. Baby Boomers gave us the Winnebego and its related support industries, and now, as I look into the future, I wonder what will happen as mid-life GenXers start to  exert generational influence and character while also navigating between the needs of longer living (and working) Baby Boomers and Millennials whose expectations of work and reward are so different from traditional definitions.

Perhaps we already have our Winnebego, and it is the iPad and all of its related industries that didn’t exist a scant 10 years ago. App Stores, wireless speakers, camera phones, video chat, text platforms, social media – these are all feeding a generational desire to connect in ways that were pure fantasy not so long ago.  I’m typing this post on a tablet, in my kitchen, without a cord in sight, while listening to a streaming radio program and texting with my nephew and finishing up some work for tomorrow.  Perhaps that is our Winnebego – the portability and integration of home life, recreation, work, and play. Or maybe we haven’t figured it out yet, we’ll have to see.

GenT – How Transparency is rocking our world at work, at home, at life

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There’s been a lot of discussion about NetGen, or the Millinials, but to me, the defining characteristic of today’s generation is transparency. Kids are growing up in an environment where everything they do and say is shared with broad audiences, and where digital archives are an accepted part of life. People in their 20s and 30s have spent the majority of their work lives in a digital world, where easy replication of once sensitive information is commonplace. Perspectives on what is private and what is OK to share are changing rapidly.

Transparency has some wonderful results – once taboo sujects like abuse, rape, hazing, government overreach, and workplace dangers are brought out of the shadows and into the national conversation, helping survivors to heal and assisting in the prevention of such behaviors going forward. In the workplace, sharing ideas, solutions, and having broader, more open conversations help drive creative solutions. Collaboration requires transparency and authenticity to be successful, and learning to work in a transparent world is a critical skill.

But transparency also introduces new problems for society to understand and address. Intrusions on privacy, protecting corporate practices and intellectual property, and respecting individual boundaries are all areas that start to shift when transparency is more accepted. What is private, the perceived need to protect, the value of sharing, and where exactly individual boundaries lie are all changing, and management approaches, policies, and social contracts need to keep up.

If your workplace isn’t thinking about the impact of changing social mores around transparency, now is the time to start.  Try these three questions to get the conversation going, and see what happens then.  Keep in mind that assumptions are usually driven by people with more tenure, and may be hard to surface if you don’t really dig deep.

  1. What are current assumptions about what is confidential and what isn’t?
  2. Are those assumptions really reflecting current behaviors and common understanding?
  3. If not, do you need to update the assumptions or address the behaviors?

 

 

Nimble elephants aren’t just for the circus

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Once a company moves out of start up mode and into major operations, it is easy to become cemented into ways of doing things, ways of thinking, and ways of reacting that slow down even the coolest, fastest, most innovative companies. Many entrepreneurs take intentional steps to try to prevent it, but the inertia is tough to fight.

Growing but staying nimble is a constant balancing act for companies because being nimble means taking risks, and growth means you have more to lose. It requires having a culture that can absorb and respond quickly from a common core foundation, which is easy to say….. tough to do.

Adam Bryant’s new book Quick and Nimble is reflected in a New York Times article today, and highlights some of the key ways leaders and managers try to maintain that balance through strong cultural commitments.  He shares some of the lessons learned in his research of companies grappling with this kind of challenge – check it out for a good read.

One is the loneliest number when it comes to knowledge

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When I’m working with companies on understanding and improving their approach to content management and knowledge sharing (formerly known as “knowledge management”), it always strikes me how some people want to get down to “just one” solution.  Just one repository, just one social platform, just one process, having Just One seems like a neat and tidy solution.

Here’s a problem that comes with the Just One direction (and not just that it comes with a boy band attached…..) – the governance and oversight required to sustain it is often extensive. So all you really do is move the complexity to the governance work, generally it fails to meet local needs, and eventually people will do their own thing anyway in order to survive.

It is, in my opinion, better to design a solid information architecture and infrastructure within which both general and specialized repositories and networks can co-exist. Solid guidelines give people the ability to create what works for them and the local culture of their teams / functions / work processes. At the same time, guidelines give everyone the boundaries within which they can be most successful.  If you have that in place, it actually doesn’t matter how many repositories or social spaces you have, because they are all following similar guidelines and a common architecture, but they are building what they need for their local needs and wants.

I equate it to driving down the highway – we all know the basic rules of the road – speed limits, how to use on and off ramps, staying in lanes, etc. As the saying goes, in the law, there is freedom. Generally people follow the same flow, but in very different ways – people use a car, a truck, or a motorcycle depending on their needs and resources, and the way they drive depends on the training they’ve received and their personalities, but for the most part it works pretty well considering all of the variables in play.

Failure makes visible our naked condition

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Just read a great article from the New York Times on failure by Costica Bradatan – In Praise of Failure.  Check it out for his three reasons failure is important to human existence:

  1. Failure allows us to see our existence in its naked condition
  2. Our capacity to fail is essential to what we are
  3. We are designed to fail

Bradatan points out that “To experience failure is to start seeing the cracks in the fabric of being, and that’s precisely the moment when, properly digested, failure turns out to be a blessing in disguise. For it is this lurking, constant threat that should make us aware of the extraordinariness of our being: the miracle that we exist at all when there is no reason that we should. Knowing that gives us some dignity.”

Somehow we have become a population that shies away from failure – we talk about ‘failing forward’, or how we don’t have to ‘fail’, we can instead ‘learn’. We get aggressive about failure ‘tackling it head on’, ‘turning it around’, ‘refusing to fail’, or being ‘too big to fail’. We are afraid of what we are, as Bradatan reminds us, biologically designed to fail in the end.

Philosophically it is fascinating to consider – what happens when we seriously interrogate our popular aversion to failure? What to we give up, what do we gain?

Local Culture Eats Change Management for Dessert

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After some great discussion with colleagues and friends about my last blog post on local versus corporate culture, I realized that if local culture eats corporate culture for lunch, it has change management for dessert. That’s because change management tends to focus on individual change, neglecting the power of the collective outside of a corporate construct. I think both individual and collective approaches are necessary, but here’s the challenge. You can measure and report out on how many people have been through training, received communications, and even those who are exhibiting behavioral changes. It is much trickier to figure out how to manage and report on organizational change that gets at local culture.

At the same time, change management delivered via external consultants has to rely on “deliverables” and “roadmaps” – that’s how the contracts are constructed. As a result, going into local cultures and figuring out change management approaches that will deal with highly local resistance points is impractical.

I think change management has a lot of value, and I’ve seen some tremendous work delivered by my colleagues in the field. But I think we have to be practical about the power of local culture, and work through how to leverage and incorporate it into change programs rather than going for a ‘one size fits all’, or worse, a ‘one size fits corporate’ approach. That’s the kind of challenge I love to wrap my head around, and to think about what happens when you are able to get everything firing on all cylinders locally and globally. It is exciting to think about, right?

Local culture eats corporate culture for lunch

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I’ve had the rich opportunity to work with many global clients on challenges related to culture, especially with the introduction of social media tools in the workplace. The ability and desire to connect across offices creates fascinating questions about what a single global entity can understand and relate to as ‘its’ culture while dealing with the incredibly local reality of culture.  This become particularly evident when a single person located in a corporate headquarters is responsible for driving ‘engagement’ and ‘communities’ worldwide.  It also is especially visible when considered in the scope of global technology or process roll-outs, M&A activity, and implementation of shared services for global businesses.

Companies are starting to see the value of a ‘branded’ culture – a culture that everyone understands, embodies, and protects. The challenge, especially for older or larger companies, is shifting to a common understanding of an organizational culture, when powerful micro-cultures have existed and thrived for decades self-reinforcing over time.  These are particularly ‘wicked’ challenges, and require broad thinking coupled with the ability to understand narrow needs – ambidextrous thinking at its best.

In my work, I’ve learned three things about how to approach these challenges:

1) Never underestimate the power of the local culture. Headquarters tends to apply a command and control approach to “culture change” that honestly never works. They might think it does, but spend a few days out in the field and you will find a very different view.

2) Use the tools that are available to create conversations specifically about culture. People need to talk about it to create a new mental model – they can’t just get it off of a piece of paper, no matter how artfully rendered. Conversation is critical.

3) Accept that local cultures will always exist, and that they can serve a positive purpose. Focus on the big things that need to be consistent – mission/vision/values if you use those tools, or common purpose, or whatever it is that is the anchor for your culture. There is value in local color and connection, so long as it exists hospitably within the larger cultural paradigm.