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14. German Trend Day: Social Wealth / Charles Leadbeater: We-Think: Mass Creativity, not Mass Production from Trendbuero on Vimeo.

Pushing talent by designing specific roles

Recent research shows that companies best able to attract and retain the talent they need share three key characteristics:

 

• Deep focus of Board, CEO and executive team on the talent of the organisation. This does not just mean that a succession plan is prepared annually by HR and approved by the Board. Neither does it simply mean that the investment in leadership development programmes is top quartile. It means that, if asked, the CEO could describe the career history and development plan of each of his most high-potential employees. It means that the executive team, as a team and as individual leaders, devote up to 30% of their time to talent development and leadership. It means that a core process of the entire organisation is evolving the link between talent strategy and corporate strategy.

 

• The fundamental development philosophy of these companies is based on talent pushing rather than talent pulling. In these organisations the focus has shifted from role-specific succession planning to employee-specific development planning. The appraisal and development process has shifted from: audit capability, identify gaps, apply development intervention; to: understand unique capability, focus development on deepening capability, design role to leverage capability.

 

• For these companies, talent management has become a core strategic capability at all management levels. It is measured, rewarded, celebrated and valued. Role model leaders are those who tirelessly develop others, who identify talented people and volunteer them across the organisation and who can list countless people they have developed and mentored. 

We need Management Innovation Now!

McKinsey: What Matters: Three forces that will transform management

McKinsey: What Matters: Three forces that will transform management

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The Survival Academy

The Survival Academy is a temporary academy for learning how to affect and cope with the future of climate change

The Survival Academy is conceptualized as a place where, during the COP15 Climate Summit, participants and the general public can come to learn human capacities of affecting and coping with the future of climate change.

Learn more at : http://www.survivalacademy.org/ 

The power of collaboration!

Listen to Charles Leadbetter talking about the power of collaboration. He´s talking about the conflict between the rising surge of mass collaboration and the attemps to retain top-down control will be one of the defining battles of our time. An exploration of what this means for our culture, the way we work, government, science and business.

Charles Leadbetter, thinker, famed policy advisor to former UK prime Minister Tony Blair, and author of "We think" - a groundbreaking analysis of a changing world.

It´s really something going on in the world that will have profoundly consequences on the way we manage our traditional companies.

Charles Leadbeater at PICNIC08 - We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

Zappo - creating a wow experience!

According to Hsieh, the ultimate aim of the Zappos brand is to be the very best when it comes to customer service and consumer experience. "Our hope is in 10 years people won't even realize we started out selling shoes online," he explains, "we sell clothing and handbags, accessories - even electronics and house wares." He also points out that it doesn't necessarily need to be online. "20 - 30 years from now, I wouldn't rule out Zappos Airlines," he said.

Great customer service is not something offered by the majority of companies and Hsieh suspects a lot of people are frustrated by this. "In the long run, customer service is just good business," he says. "The problem, however, is that the payoff is usually two or three years down the line."

Given the company made over a billion dollars in gross merchandise sales in 2008 after starting with almost nothing in 1999, and that repeat customers and word of mouth were the main drivers of that growth, we can see how many businesses are trying to model themselves on the force that is Zappos.

So what is different about Zappos?

• The company provides free shipping both ways
• Zappos has a 365 day return policy
• Only products available in the warehouse are placed on the site
• The warehouse is open 24 hours a day
• The company is contactable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• The 1800 contact number is prominently placed on every page of the site
• The company trusts in its reps; sales staff don't have scripts
• If products are unavailable, sales staff direct customers to competitors

While the company has formalized the definition of its culture into ten core values and people are hired and fired based on those values, Hsieh believes the company culture is different because it is not driven by him, but the employees who themselves determine how they want the culture to evolve.

"We've actually passed on a lot of really talented people that we know would make an impact to our top or bottom line," says Hsieh, "but if you know they're not a culture fit we won't hire them. Similarly, he explains the company will fire people even if they're doing their job perfectly if they're bad for the culture.

The Culture Book, a book Zappos puts out every year, consists of thoughts from all Zappos employees about what the Zappos culture means to them. But for typos, it's unedited. Hsieh offers the book freely to anyone who wants a copy. You can find out more about the culture-book here; http://tinyurl.com/c75btk

Listen to this interview with Zappo´s CEO Tony Hsieh to learn more about this forward thinking company and the man social media experts are calling the master of customer experience: