Archive | Leadership RSS feed for this section

Vision is Mapping a Future and Steve Jobs is a Visioning Icon

By on May 4, 2012 in Business, Culture, Employee Engagement, Executive Excellence, Leadership, Trust

♦ Leaders Leading Leaders

Seeing into the future is rather like running in heavy fog eyes wide open.  I was recently invited to participate in a strategic planning session for a not-for-profit organization where the CEO wants to see 30 years out into the future.

I proposed a people analysis as part of this process because there is an assumption that some of those folks who are currently in the organization will still be there to carry out this vision.  Some will not, the math doesn’t work.   Age is not your friend in this exercise.  Or in Steve Jobs’ case, illness was not his friend nor was his illness our friend.  I don’t know about you but I miss him!

In the fuzzy environment of the global financial crisis, technology advancements, and unpredictability of the environmental issues, there is something exciting about skipping all of those considerations and saying “this is where we WANT to be.”

Our favorite recent runaway successful leader Steve Jobs said, “ A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them.  Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.” That is vision in the face of a crumbling economy, yes? At Accountability Pays we use all Apple products.

Vision is an inside job that belongs to the leader. Moreover, it differentiates a successful leader from an also-ran leader.   But it isn’t enough to just envision the future, without giving it legs.  Warren Bennis said, “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”

Jobs could have believed in putting quality products into the market and flopped but general consensus says he tenaciously adhered to a winning combination of innovation AND a veracity about quality AND an incredible sensibility for design to differentiate those products from ANY competitor.  He had the capacity and the drive to translate his vision into more market share than any company anywhere in any industry.

Here is a teaser quote to send you on your way to visioning.  Who said this?  “Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’s or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?”

Your comments are welcome and invited.  Feel free to give your examples, your stories.

Comments { 0 }

Generative, Inspired, Focused Performance for Breakaway Success — Let’s Distinguish Generative

By on March 30, 2012 in Breakaway Success, Employee Engagement, Executive Excellence, Leadership, Perspectives, strategy

Generative performance stands with inspired and focused performance to create breakaway success.  Today I am only going to focus on the generative aspects of performance.

Generative is an adjective, which means it describes something — in our case, performance.  The definition of generative is: having the power or function of generating, originating, producing or reproducing.  Thank you Miriam Webster.

Let’s stick with generative as “having the power or function of originating or producing.”  That means something moves or changes when generative power or function is applied.  There is a powerful energy associated with generating.

My friend and mentor Bill Schwarz in Atlanta wrote a book called The Generative Organization.  The book is somewhat autobiographical, somewhat mystical.  Its story line focuses on moving an organization from reactive behavior to inspired performance.  In it he points out that if you only see what others see that cause a reactive state to exist — things like recurring events, problems, quick fixes, long-term consequences — then you are still part of the problem.  Until you, as a leader, go through the other four generative steps, including recognizing leverage points and aligning the organization around them, to see yourself as the designer of the organization, you are still at the effect instead of being the cause of a future.

This is a deep conversation greater than the length of this blog, so I encourage you to read Bill’s book.  You will find it at www.inspiredperformance.org. I have personally witnessed an entire company go through his weekend program and come out a different kind of company — generative, inspired, and ready to get focused on what matters.  Talk about courage.

Being truly generative makes a difference that no one will ever forget, not just for the company, for the larger community.  When your organization is organized to do that, you are truly generative.

Is your organization organized to be truly generative? If not, what do YOU think stands in the way?

Comments { 0 }

Employee Engagement: Right People in the Right Seats Please

By on March 2, 2012 in Employee Engagement, Executive Excellence, Leadership, Perspectives, Trust, Values

In case you haven’t read the original quote from Jim Collins, Good to Great, here it is:

“When we began the research project, we expected to find that the first step in taking a company from good to great would be to set a new direction, a new vision and strategy for the company, and then to get people committed and aligned behind that new direction.

We found something quite the opposite.

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there.  No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it. They said, in essence, “Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus.  But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”

If it were my organization, I think a safer bet would be to know something about where the bus is going so I could get people who are aligned with that vision of the future.  Probably that future isn’t sealed in absolutes with the business plan written, but the future is in the mind’s eye of the founder or the current leader and can be elucidated.

Dr. Peter Drucker said, “The ability to make good decisions regarding people represents one of the last reliable sources of competitive advantage since very few organizations are very good at it.”

I can tell whether human resources (the people) in an organization are valued by two indicators:  1) the senior human resources executive is a member of the strategic executive team or not, and 2) to whom the human resources department reports.  In a company of any size where human resources is a department, if the senior executive of that department does not report to the CEO, how likely is it that the key leverage of an organization — its people — is under-valued?

Pretty high.  So that is the first seat that I would get right, and the rest of the people equation will begin to foster success that should drop to the bottom line.

What is the scenario at your organization?  Comments?  Observations?

Comments { 0 }