Category Archives: Strategy

The Talent Innovation Imperative

Any company that competes on the global stage must, in light of today’s changing workforce, rethink the way it manages people.

Too many companies are wasting their resources — their people and their financial leverage — by perpetuating outdated approaches to talent management. They structure jobs rigidly, forcing many people to work a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, workweek. They focus their training on functional skills, not on aligning employees’ capabilities with the strategic objectives of the business. For leadership development and career advancement, they rely on long-standing training courses that don’t reflect the contributions that people can make in today’s flat, flexible, and entrepreneurial organizations. And their compensation systems do not adequately link to performance or hold managers accountable for developing the talent of their staff and their direct reports. In short, the talent management in these companies is not arming them with the decisive, experienced, globally minded visionaries that they need at every level.
  DeAnne Aguirre, Laird Post, and Sylvia Ann Hewlett in The Talent Innovation Imperative

This opening paragraph from the Autumn issue of Strategy + Business is, in a word, AWESOME! Creativity and Innovation doesn’t work on a 9 to 5 schedule, there are millions of people in India and China with the functional skills in demand in today’s knowledge economy, and you never get anywhere if all you do is stand in line. So why are you queueing your employees instead of helping them reach their full potential? And more importantly, why are you putting talent management innovation off? The midst of a global economic crisis only heightens the need for talent at the top of their game. Furthermore, the commitment of employees is most needed in a crunch, and it’s not likely to be there if they feel you don’t respect them (and think they’re lucky to have a job). And if you think you’re not losing their loyalty, think again. As quoted in the article, as per surveys conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, between June 2007 and December 2008, the number of employees expressing loyalty to employers plunged from 95% to 39% while the number trusting their employees fell from 79% to 22%. Surveys in 2009 were even more dismal. Voluntary attrition has spiked by as much as 31% — among the people you need most to get you through these troubled times.

So what can you do? Embrace new employment structures, differentiate capabilities, accelerate performance, develop leadership, and foster a talent culture.

Embrace New Employment Structures

Allow for highly responsible part time work, telecommuting, contracting, and lots of flex time. Retain your aging workforce with their experience — who don’t want to work full time any more but don’t want to completely retire either, and use them to mentor your junior hires. Let people work from remote areas and maintain their community links. Let people work contract until both parties are comfortable and ready for a direct relationship. And let them work on their schedules as well as yours.

Differentiate Capabilities

Understand the key capabilities, not functional skills, required for competitive advantage, determine the skill gaps in your current workforce, and develop talent strategies to close them. Then develop new and diverse attraction and retention values that include competitive compensation and benefits packages, innovative job designs, flexible schedules, career development opportunities, strong leadership, a distinctive culture, and a welcoming work environment. Furthermore, you should pursue a workforce that is global, diverse, and gender balanced, with discontinuous career progressions, in which high-potential employees may take time off or work for different types of organizations along the way.

Performance Acceleration

Organizational success hinges on the collective daily decisions and actions of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual employees. To ensure that the decisions are in tune with success, reinforce meritocratic pay and promotion decisions, follow through, and measure outcomes.

Leadership Development

Leaders today must be able to master enormous complexity, but too few leaders have the right combination of skils and experience. Companies that want to improve their leadership development must evolve the leadership competencies model, promote and develop people who match the competencies (and who cultivate a team that performs well), and build the leadership bench, because one leader is no longer enough (and a bench will be needed to seat them all).

Talent Culture

A talent culture is made up of the value, beliefs, behaviours, and environment required to attract, engage, and retain committed and competent employees. A great culture is not accidental, it is the result of engagement, proper organization, and a commitment to the “talent brand” and a visible “talent culture”. Engagement is key, as more than 100 studies have demonstrated the correlation between employee engagement and business performance. Right now, at most 1 in 4 employees is “engaged”. If you want to lead the pack in today’s economy, getting employees engaged is the surest way to do so.

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Playscripts? PLAYSCRIPTS? Are we going back to Kindergarten?!?

I was a little annoyed with the chosen focus of a recent article by Mr. Michael G. Jacobides and very annoyed with the terminology chosen in “Strategy Tools for a Shifting Landscape” (subscription required), a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. While I agree that some companies need to reinvent the way they develop strategy, I’m not sure that strategy should be “defined” by narrative plots, subplots, and characters and definitely convinced that the last thing we want defining corporate strategy is a “playscript”.

Business is, well, business. Not playtime. And while it shouldn’t be duller than necessary, it shouldn’t be all fun and games either. Businesses exist to benefit shareholders. And unless you’re a production house generating content for web, TV, and Movie studios, writing scripts is not going to benefit your shareholders in any way. And while I agree that plots, subplots, and characters might be the best way to describe your strategy to all of the members of your organization, who might otherwise speak different languages (mechanical, programmatic, sales, etc.), a strategy should still be backed up by some research, which is typically expressed in the “maps, graphs, and numbers” the author is telling us to avoid.

And while I also agree that the typical frameworks used by industry analysts (five forces and maps) and blue ocean thinking (value maps and value curves) are better at managing the strategy process than enabling the creative and critical thinking required for success, the last thing we want to do is replace one insufficient framework with another, less sufficient framework. While a story might make a great vision, you can’t execute a story. You can only execute a plan, and that requires more than plots and subplots — it requires processes, steps, and success metrics, captured in traditional maps, graphs, and number formats. So while anything that encourages creativity is great, if all we do is focus on the production of play scripts (instead of including them as another tool in our creativity toolbox to get people brainstorming), our strategies will never progress beyond the imaginative vision of a kindergartener.

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Three Answers Every Supply Chain Executive Should Give Themselves This Year

A recent post over on the Harvard Business Review Blogs pointed out “Three Questions Executives Should Ask for the New Year” based upon eight characteristics of top performers and four characteristics of under-achievers identified by Melissa Raffoni of Raffoni Ceo Consulting and author of “Managing Time” in the HBR Pocket Mentor Series.

According to Raffoni, who identified the following eight characteristics of top performers:

  • they set clear measurable goals
  • they seek feedback
  • they communicate thoughtfully
  • they act thoughtfully
  • they are decisive
  • they have integrity
  • they have ego-less confidence
  • they study to make themselves smarter

and the following four characteristics of underachievers:

  • they don’t set goals with leverage in mind
  • they don’t get enough out of the people around them
  • they don’t listen well
  • they lack the energy and boldness to try new things

executives should ask themselves the following three questions before setting their goals for 2010:

  • If there was only one thing I could do to improve my business, what would it be and how would I make it happen?
  • If there was only one thing I could focus on to improve my personal performance, what would that be and how would I make it happen?
  • What messages am I not listening to or refusing to confront in my business and personal performance and how am I going to overcome that this year?

I agree. But even more importantly, I think supply chain executives (CPOs, CSCOs, etc.) should start with these three answers:

  • I’m going to improve my organization’s technology platform.
    Supply management is too complex, and the opportunity costs associated with continuing to use antiquated spreadsheet technology (which never fit in the first place), are too great not to have the right tools. I’m going to get the right platform for the job, make my people more productive, and watch the savings go Straight to the Bottom Line as efficiency soars and my people are able to strategically source more categories than they were able to in the past.
  • I’m going to get training.
    I’m going to learn what I’m missing, fill the holes in my vision, understand what my team needs to be the best they can be, and then get them the right training.
  • I’m going to say “uncertainty be damned”.
    “I’m not one of the lemmings“. “If my brethren want to jump off the cliff into the ocean, that’s their choice”. “I’m going to forge ahead and be successful, economy be damned”. “I’ll make the tough choices”. “And I’ll win”.

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Want to Get Your Message Out There? Avoid the Social Butterflies!

The MIT Technology Review just published a great post on “the physics arXiv blog” that covered some recent research from Maksim Kitsak et. al. that found that the best connected individuals are NOT the most influential spreaders in social networks.

In a social network, most of the nodes (people) are not linked to each other, but most can still be reached by a small number of steps, according to the small worlds network theory. (In fact, recent research indicates that the average separation is now less than 5, and not 6.) In these networks, some nodes are much better connected than others. Traditional thinking is that these so-called hubs play a correspondingly greater role in the way information and viruses spread through a society. But traditional thinking has just been proved wrong!

Kitsak et. al have found that in contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people. This might seem counterintuitive, but, on reflection, it does make perfect sense. For example, many of the “best connected” people typically exist on the edge of the network, and, as a result, have minimal impact on the spreading process through the core of the network. In contrast, “a less connected person who is strategically placed in the core of the network will have a significant effect that leads to dissemination through a large fraction of the population“. Or, in other words, it’s not how many hits a site gets, it’s who hits the site. There are influencers and followers. If most of the readers hitting a site are followers, the message will not get spread beyond those readers. But if most of the readers are hitting a site are influencers, the message will spread far and wide with only a fraction of the hits!

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HBR’s Breakthrough Ideas for 2010 are Good for Your Supply Chain, Part III

The Harvard Business Review recently ran a great article on “Breakthrough Ideas for 2010”. While many of the ideas aren’t new (as a few can easily be traced backed decades), for many, their application would be. But more importantly, their application could fix a lot of problems in the world today.

What really struck me was how they all had good supply chain equivalents that could help you revolutionize your supply chain. So, in this post, I’m going to tackle the last three ideas and explain how their supply chain equivalents are ideas you should strongly be considering if you haven’t implemented them already.

  1. Hack Your Way to Innovation.
    Thinking outside the box doesn’t help if what you really need is a sphere. If the current system isn’t working, you need to fix it. If you’re not sure how, then hack at it piece by piece, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn’t, until you get the results you need. After all, this kind of work-around isn’t new–your company has been hacked from the inside for ages. What is new is that the cheat codes are becoming public, and there’s nothing you can do about that. There’s only one successful strategy for a hacked world: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Change the debate within your company to leverage what your hacker employees know.
  2. Apply a Bubble Model to Every Industry You Do Business In.
    As every major market has demonstrated during the last decade, there’s sustainable growth, and then there’s a bubble … and when you start treating a bubble like sustainable growth, you are headed toward a supply chain disaster. Now, while it might not be possible to predict every bubble, and definitely won’t be possible to predict with accuracy precisely when a detected bubble will burst, research coming out of the National Bureau of Economic Research and behavioural finance studies suggest that you can identify bubbles as they form with significant accuracy. Then you can take steps to increase measurement and monitoring and decrease production cycle time to allow you to quickly alter projections and plans as you approach a likely burst point. At the very least, this will prevent you from getting stuck with millions of dollars of inventory. It will also keep morale high as you’ll make more informed staffing decisions and avoid adding headcount you’ll have to lay off later.
  3. Take Business Organization Lessons From Hong Kong.
    Just like too many countries are stuck with rules that slow down inflows of technology, prevent successful urbanization, and stifle personal ambition, too many companies are stuck with processes that slow down inflows of technology, prevent successful adoption of innovative applications, and stifle professional growth.
    As the article points out, you start by launching an anonymous corporate division to act as a Center of Excellence (it could be one-in-the-same with the R&D lab in the beginning). You start with a charter that lists the rules that will prevail in the company to come and allocate space (land), employees, and resources. Assign only staff that want to be part of the COE, accept the charter, and bring with them a vision of the great company to come. They will invest not only their time, but their energy, experience, and education in the location of best-in-class technologies, processes, strategies, and paradigms that will ultimately make your organization a better place.

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