Needed: Creative disruption

Much has happened in the past two years to shake the historical assumptions held by the women and men who are in charge. In addition to global recession, the century's first decade heightened awareness of the issues surrounding global climate change and the interplay between natural events and our supply chains for materials, food, and even talent. In short, CEOs have experienced the realities of global integration. The world is massively interconnected—economically, socially, and politically—and operating as a system of systems. So what does this look like at the level of customer relationships? For too many enterprises, the answer is that their customers are increasingly connected, but not to them.

Against that backdrop of interconnection, interdependency, and complexity, business leaders around the world are declaring that success requires fresh thinking and continuous innovation at all levels of the organization. As they step back and reassess, CEOs have seized upon creativity as the necessary element for enterprises that must reinvent their customer relationships and achieve greater operational dexterity. In face-to-face interviews with our consultants, they said creative leaders do the following:

• Disrupt the status quo. Every company has legacy products that are both cash—and sacred—cows. Often the need to perpetuate the success of these products restricts innovation within the enterprise, creating a window for competitors to advance competing innovations. As CEOs tell us that fully one-fifth of revenues will have to come from new sources, they are recognizing the requirement to break with existing assumptions, methods, and best practices.

• Disrupt existing business models. CEOs who select creativity as a leading competency are far more likely to pursue innovation through business model change. In keeping with their view of accelerating complexity, they are breaking with traditional strategy-planning cycles in favor of continuous, rapid-fire shifts and adjustments to their business models.

• Disrupt organizational paralysis. Creative leaders fight the institutional urge to wait for completeness, clarity, and stability before making decisions. To do this takes a combination of deeply held values, vision, and conviction—combined with the application of such tools as analytics to the historic explosion of information. These drive decisionmaking that is faster, more precise, and even more predictable.

Taken together, these recommendations describe a shift toward corporate cultures that are far more transparent and entrepreneurial. They are cultures imbued with the belief that complexity poses an opportunity, rather than a threat. They hold that risk is to be managed, not avoided, and that leaders will be rewarded for their ability to build creative enterprises with fluid business models, not absolute ones.

Something significant is afoot in the corporate world. In response to powerful external pressures and the opportunities that accompany them, CEOs are signaling a new direction. They are telling us that a world of increasing complexity will give rise to a new generation of leaders that make creativity the path forward for successful enterprises.

from Frank Kern, senior vice-president of IBM Global Business Services.

Detta händer NU!

Trends in Global Leadership

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." - Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005)

What are the pressing global, industry and societal issues that business leaders must address in the wake of the "Great Recession"?

How to kill innovation!

The future can't be analytically derived. Of course it's almost always valuable to think comprehensively about a new idea. But maintain a healthy balance between analysis and action. If you get stuck in "What about..." loops, you'll never get the results you seek.

Want to kill innovation - keep asking questions!

Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review

Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review

Nyttig påminnelse att det är lika viktigt att bestämma sig för vad man inte skall göra!

How will you manage?

Peter Drucker's revolutionary teachings decades old but still fresh - latimes.com

Peter Drucker's revolutionary teachings decades old but still fresh - latimes.com

We have 40 years to re-industrialize the planet!

Don Tapscott call himself a media futurist. He´s quiet frank in his predictions of the future. In this short movie the headline is "Re-Industrialize the Planet".

A quick summary:

• The web is creating a global infrastructure for collaboration (which leads to disruption and confusion)
• As a result, all of our institutions have come to the end of their life-cycle
• The current recession is a crucial punctuation point in human history - the point where we said that we need to reset, the point where the industrial economy has finally run out of gas
• This paradigm shift is creating a crisis of leadership
• The Digital Natives are inheriting this situation - and they think very differently
• Kids are now the authority
  

Fast Company´s grundare till Stockholm 30 sept

Jag är och min nätverkskollega Jan lapidoth planerar med Bookhouse Publishing ett antal aktiviteter med Alan Webber 30/9 - 1/10. Hoppa in på den här sidan för mer info och intresseanmälan.

Här berättar Janne mer:

Det här kommer bli grymt bra och kul!

Hälsar Mikael

The future of management

Here's a summary of Gary Hamel's "The Future of Management".

Use it as an inspiration to bring innovation to your company. (and get back to us on how it worked!)

Thanks to my friend Marc who made the summary.

The Future Of Management

View more presentations from Marc Sniukas.

Right people on the bus

Exellent blogpost about the importance of having the "right people on the bus". The post is written by Tammy Ericksen, an award-winning author, after she met with Jim Collins - the author of "Good to Great"

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/erickson/2009/05/who_are_the_right_people_to_in.html

Everyone needs a coach!

A must see!

You are what you share:

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: 

Enterprise 2.0

Cisco´s CEO John Chambers gör här en fantastisk beskrivning av hur Cisco har utvecklat sin ledningsmodell genom att utnyttja den moderna tekniken. De har verkligen genomfört en enormutveckling för att utnyttja de möjligheter som teknikutveckling och globalisering har skapat. Den är väl värd att lyssna på!