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Comrades – Day Two

Friday, June 10th, 2011

Day two

It’s been a relatively quiet day today so far.  We got up around 9am and made our way to breakfast at the hotel. Filled with runners, as you can imagine, and as far as I can tell, mostly from outside South Africa.  Breakfast was a typical European-style buffet with lots of meats and cheeses in addition to traditional breakfast fare.  A hard boiled egg and a 1/2 PB&j  were perfect for me – Sharon, however, was into major calorie load, and had two fried eggs on toast, orange juice, fruit and a huge croissant with lots of butter….  T’would be nice to eat with such abandon, but I’m not ready to commit to the side of the equation (training side), that makes that kind of a meal work :) .

One of the things I have recently learned about marathon running is the concept of shedding. It seems that it is quite common to start at the beginning of a race with several layers of clothing, and as time passes and you (and the temperature) warm up, you shed layers, leaving them on the street.  At some marathons, charity groups put out bins for you to donate – at others including here, kids will swoop in and pick up whatever is left behind.  Sharon’s plan was to end up finishing the race in her sports bra, but has subsequently learned that she will need to wear her race number on her shirt, which doesn’t work with a sports bra.  The long and the short of it is that it may be that while I will undoubtedly never run Comrades (or any marathon for that matter), my workout top might just make the journey :) !  A double win for me as it is also a great excuse to avoid the meager excuse for a fitness center they have here…

After breakfast we headed back over to the expo for a bit and then headed over to a local shopping area just around the corner.  Wow, what a difference a half of a block can make.  Within one turn of a corner, we went from a diverse group of (primarily) runners, to a very local crowd, all busy with either their weekend shopping, or (mostly) just hanging out.  We were the only blond women, or frankly, whites around.  There was a huge crowd circled around a group of young Zulu girls who were dancing to the beat of an African drum.  I was having a hard time seeing much as the crowd was so big, but as soon as someone noticed that I was trying to get a picture, people around me voluntarily cleared a path so I could get a shot or two. One of the things that I have noticed is how very friendly people are – particularly the locals.  There are 11 different major tribes in this area, each with their own language or dialect.  Most people speak at least three languages – their local dialect, at least one other, and English.   In talking to our server at lunch, she said that she is Zulu, but speaks Xhosa (?) and English – our cab driver the same.  Current plan is to have dinner here at the hotel so as to have no concerns about food, and turn in early.  Supposedly there will be over 300,000 watching the race along the route, and it will be televised live throughout Africa, so tomorrow should be a very interesting day!

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Succession Planning Below the C-Suite

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled Sudden Leader Loss Leaves Firms in Limbo, says that according to research done by the American Management Association, more than one-fifth of senior managers say that their companies are “not at all prepared” in the event of a sudden loss of a key member of the company’s senior management team.

While this is obviously important and thanks to Apple, currently receiving a lot of  attention, the issue goes much deeper.  Most of the writing and research I read about the need for succession planning, is focused on senior management.  To ensure effective strategy execution, more attention needs to be paid to talent requirements below the executive suite.

For example, at a biotech firm I worked with several years ago, when the program manager of a critical drug development project left unexpectedly, it resulted in the costly delay of the launch of the product.  Management at the top remained constant – they simply didn’t have anyone prepared to take over the reigns.

A manufacturing executive I spoke with the recently, is concerned about the loss of an entire layer of seasoned mid-level managers, who in the past, had provided much of the informal  mentoring and on-the-job training of young managers moving up in his organization.    He’s worried that while they have plenty of talent, they don’t have the necessary breadth of knowledge to handle unforeseen events when they occur.

When organizations lose core elements of their internal institutional knowledge, it can be perhaps not as externally obvious, but equally devastating as losing a member of senior management.

To help make these key talent requirements more visible, companies must explicitly identify the critical talent resources they will need to execute as a part of their strategic planning process, and develop contingency plans in the event of unplanned departures.

Has this happened in your organization?  How did you address (or not)?

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Posted in Leadership, Strategy Execution, Team Effectiveness | 11 Comments »

What Makes a Good Boss?

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Almost 25 years ago, an article in ‘Business’ magazine described the ten qualities employees most wanted their bosses to possess.  A lot has changed in the world since then, but these (with some updating by me) still look good.

1. Establishing organization clarity

a.  Establishing clear goals and standards

b.  Communicating group (not just individual) goals

c.  Involving people in setting goals (not just dictating them)

d.  Delegate responsibility clearly

2.  Encouraging open, two-way communication

a.  Open and candid when dealing with people

b.  Honest, direct and to the point

c.  Establishing a climate of openness and trust

3.  Willingness to coach and support people

a.  Supportive and helpful

b. Working constructively (and decisively) to correct performance problems

c.  Going to bat for subordinates

4.  Providing ‘objective’ recognition

a. Recognize good performance more often than criticizing performance problems

b. Tying rewards to excellence of job performance (vs seniority or personal relationships)

5.  Establishing ongoing controls

a.  Following up in a timely manner

b.  Giving ‘real-time’ feedback on how subordinates are doing

6.  Selecting (and keeping) the right people

a.  Both bringing the ‘right’ people on and exiting those who don’t fit

7.  Understanding the financial implications of decisions

8.  Encouraging innovation and new ideas

a.  Surprisingly, this was seen as important regardless of how conservative or traditional the company

9. Making decisions and ensuring the organization executes successfully

10.  Demonstrating high levels of integrity

a.  Doing the ‘right’ thing, both internally an externally

Anything you would add or omit?  Which one is the most important to you?

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Posted in Leadership, Strategy Execution, Team Effectiveness | 2 Comments »

Keeping the Right People on the Bus

Monday, June 21st, 2010

I’m the guest author in the June edition of the STRe Solutions Newsletter. You can find the entire newsletter here, or read my article below.

What’s your secret for keeping your best employees engaged and motivated?

In the classic business book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins states that to be effective, organizations need to first get “the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figure out where to drive.” In essence, who you have on your team, is more important for the organization’s success than where you are headed and how you get there.

While I agree that getting the right people on the bus is as critical today as it was back in 2001 when “Good to Great” was first published, today’s leaders are faced with more complicated challenges.

Most companies have done a good job hiring highly talented, super-smart people. Especially in today’s economy, finding the “who” is not the problem. Where they struggle is keeping them engaged and focused on the “where” and the “how”. To say it another way, you can have strong individual players, but unless there is an overarching purpose that requires them to become a team, little will be accomplished.

For this to happen, organizations need to be two things.

First, they need to be smart. Smart organizations have the basics: Sales, Finance, HR, R&D, Product Development, IT, Services, Support, etc… — all the bits and pieces that keep a company running. The truth is most companies are plenty smart. In today’s world though, that’s not enough.

Organizations have to be more than smart — they have to be healthy as well.

Healthy organizations have low politics (not no politics — but politics that don’t get in the way). They have high morale, engaged employees, and no surprise, they have high productivity. Another thing I see in a healthy organization is a lack of confusion about where the company is going and how what every employee is doing fits.

I saw this time and time again in my 13 years with Federal Express where employees would regularly do amazing things to ensure that our customers were getting the service they expected — delivering critical payroll checks in a blizzard and completing customer pick-ups during the Loma Prieta earthquake are just two of many examples.

The trap that many companies fall into is that you can’t do one without the other and you can’t think about them separately. For organizations to be effective, you must embed the smart stuff with the healthy stuff, keeping the right people engaged and productive.

Employee engagement happens when four things occur:

* The Leadership Team is aligned and cohesive
* There is absolute clarity about the organization’s direction (strategy)
* Every person in the organization understands how what they do fits with the strategy
* Organization policies and practices support the above (this does not happen nearly enough)

One of my favorite quotes is from General Norman Schwarzkopf, who I heard speak not long after Desert Storm. He said: “Great leaders never tell people how to do their jobs. They set the goals and establish the framework. Lousy leaders think they know it all, and all the while, their organizations sit there, aquiver with potential.”

What are some of your best practices for keeping the right people on the bus? I’d love to hear them in the comments below.

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Posted in Leadership, Strategy Execution, Team Effectiveness | 1 Comment »

Best Business Advice

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Once a month, I have the opportunity to spend a half day with about 10 CEO’s from a variety of different businesses, talking about issues they are facing and sharing perspectives. It’s a great group who really care about each other and offer thoughtful, insightful advice. Last month, on a whim, I asked them to share the best business advice they had ever received. Here’s what they had to say:

“Leaders Lead”
“Don’t do Retail”
“Don’t take it personally”
“Hire slow, fire fast”
“Hire people with good judgment”
“Don’t try to do everything”
“Make sure you know your cash position on Friday”
“You’ve got to do what’s right”
“Keep the ‘main thing’ the main thing”

What’s yours?

Cheers,

Amelia

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Is Your Strategy MOSTLY Right?

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

In the 1987 classic movie, “The Princess Bride,” there is a scene where the hero, Westley, is thought have been killed by his nemesis, Prince Humperdink. His friends bring him to the home of Miracle Max, who proclaims that in fact, Westley is not completely dead, but merely MOSTLY dead.

Perhaps an odd transition to organization strategy, but it was the analogy that leapt to mind when reading a recent blog post from Harvard Business Publishing entitled, Lessons Learned from 30 Years of Leadership .

While I am getting uncomfortably close to that milestone myself, I will let Tony Tjan, CEO of Cue Ball and Dick Harrington, former CEO of Thomson Reuters speak for me as they talk about the three most important lessons Harrington has learned over his long career:

First: Having a ‘directionally correct’ strategy (Lesson Learned: Don’t get caught in the minutia)

Second: Execution focus – alignment and communication (Lesson Learned: Organizational clarity around a small number of ‘must do’ objectives is crucial)

Third: Build in systems to ensure true customer intimacy (Lesson Learned: Never assume that you know everything about your customer’s needs)

Simple yet eloquent points that never go out of style; worth communicating over and over again.

Many years ago, as a young Managing Director with Federal Express, I attended a meeting for Sales and Operations Directors and above. I can’t remember the purpose of the meeting, but do recall an impassioned speech given by our COO Jim Barksdale (who subsequently became CEO at Netscape). I vividly remember him saying at one point, “You people are always looking for the 100% solution and nothing gets done around here. Give me 80% every time”.

In other words, get it MOSTLY right, focus, execute, and iterate as necessary.

What leadership lessons are important to you? Is getting it “mostly right”, good enough for you?

Thanks, Amelia

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Posted in Leadership, Strategy Execution | 1 Comment »

Business Week Debate: The recession is no time to worry about employee engagement. Pro or con?

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

Business Week recently posted a debate starting with the premise that a recession is no time focus on employee engagement.

The ‘Pro’ position stated that organizations should concentrate on the business, not the workers.

The ‘Con’ position stated that employees need a morale boost now more than ever.

Here’s the comment I added:

Healthy companies understand that employee engagement is a critical component to their success.

When employees are not engaged, more than likely the leadership team is not engaged either.

Engagement happens when four things occur:

1. The Leadership Team is aligned and cohesive
2. There is absolute clarity about organization direction (strategy)
3. Every person in the organization understands how what they do ‘fits’ with the strategy
4. Organization policies and practices support the above (this does not happen nearly enough)

One of my favorite quotes is from General Norman Schwartzkopf, who I heard speak not long after Desert Storm.

He said: “Great leaders never tell people how to do their jobs. They set the goals and establish the framework. Lousy leaders think they know it all, and all the while, their organizations sit there, aquiver with potential.”

What do you think? Cheers, Amelia

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“How Would You Know?”

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

That’s the question posed to Jim Collins (best-selling author of ‘Good to Great’, ‘Built to Last’, etc.) that became the inspiration for his latest book, How the Mighty Fall.

In the cover story of the May 25th edition of Business Week, Collins identifies the FIVE STAGES of corporate decline, and how organizations at (almost) any stage can identify where they are and correct. In the article, Collins goes into these in greater depth, but here they are briefly:

• STAGE 1: HUBRIS BORN OF SUCCESS, or success borne from entitlement. In this stage, companies attribute their success to their knowledge and ‘smarts’, failing to understand the real reasons why they have done so well, including the acknowledgement of luck and chance.

• STAGE 2: UNDISCIPLINED PURSUIT OF MORE. Here companies begin to compromise on their values or lose sight of who they really are, in the pursuit of the latest ‘big’ thing. In this stage, expansion is undisciplined and few (if any) restrictions are put on adding more and more infrastructure and resources.

• STAGE 3: DENIAL OF RISK AND PERIL, which begins when warning signs begin to appear, but are discounted. Positive data is amplified and ambiguous data is either neutralized or looked at in its most positive light. The light at the end of the tunnel is daylight ahead for sure. Another sign of this stage is when leaders choose to blame external factors for failures versus accepting responsibility.

• STAGE 4: GRASPING FOR SALVATION, or grasping for the ‘silver bullet’ solution. By then the signals of decline are visible to all and the company jolts around reactively In some cases, they bring in a high profile CEO to turn things around; in others, a bold new product or ‘life-saving’ acquisition (think AOL/Times Warner). Here Collins believes the solution is not more but less – he says, “If you want to reverse decline, be rigorous about what not to do”.

• STAGE 5: CAPITULATION TO IRRELEVANCE OR DEATH, when the continuous setbacks and false starts become too much, and the organization loses its spirit, becomes irrelevant or, in the most extreme cases, is gone forever.

According to Collins, while it is possible to survive and even thrive from the depths of Stage 4 (“Our research indicates that organizational decline is largely self-inflicted, and recovery largely within our own control”), once an organization gets to Stage 5, there is no turning back.

When you think about the challenges/opportunities your organization is currently facing, how would you know…?

Cheers,

Amelia

P.S. At the end of the article, Collins uses Ann Mulcahy as an example of a leader who pulled her company out of the depths of Stage 4, when most had given Xerox up as lost. See my previous blog for some additional perspectives on how she did it.

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Clarity, Alignment and Focus are Keys to Success in any Market

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

When Anne Mulcahy took over as head of Xerox in 2001, few believed that anyone could save the company, particularly an unknown ‘insider’ with limited financial acumen, who had joined the company right out of college. The company was facing bankruptcy, in the midst of a SEC investigation, and was staggered with a debt load of $19 billion. Despite all these obstacles, succeed she did, bringing Xerox back to profitability by 2005 and out of debt by 2006. In a speech Mulcahy gave at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, she had this to say about her success: “The best high-performing companies aren’t typically led by big name CEO’s, but by leaders who build great teams. When people ask me how this company made so much progress so quickly, I think they want to hear that there was something particularly brilliant about the strategy or the planning. The reality is: it was the alignment of the people around a common set of goals.”

Baxter International’s CEO, Robert Parkinson, who was named by Forbes as one of 2008’s ‘Best CEO’s You Don’t Know’, credited his company’s success to its clear focus and discipline. In the article, he was quoted as saying, “Too often organizations get distracted by competition, economic uncertainty or growth for growth’s sake. A successful leader is able to keep the organization focused on its priorities and relentless execution of its strategy.”

When I was Chief Administrative Officer at Hyperion during the height of the dot com implosion, we were able to course-correct only after the executive team aligned ourselves and the company around ‘1 – 3 – 5’; ONE clear vision of the future (Desired Future State), THREE ‘over-arching’ Business Priorities, and FIVE Strategic Assaults.

What are your experiences and/or learnings about successfully managing through crisis? I’d love to hear them. Cheers, Amelia

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Posted in Leadership, Strategy Execution | 3 Comments »

Our Deepest Fear… a reminder

Monday, April 27th, 2009

I came across this poem again the other day, and was struck by how true this is – now more than ever… It was a good reminder to me – how about you?

Our Deepest Fear

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear
is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness,
that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually who are we not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people
won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine as children do.
We were born to make manifest
the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And when we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

- Marianne Williamson

Hope you have a wonderful week! Cheers, Amelia

Posted in Leadership | 2 Comments »

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