Catalogue - page 4

Affiche du document The Reciprocity Advantage

The Reciprocity Advantage

Bob Johansen

1h41min15

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135 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 1h41min.
A powerful new kind of competitive advantage is now possible thanks to technological and social disruptions that are already occurring. These disruptions revolutionize how companies can partner to create new growth. The Reciprocity Advantage shares a model for creating that growth: define your right-of-way (the underutilized resources you already own that you can share with others), partner to do what you can’t do alone, experiment to learn, and scale the new business at low risk. Reciprocity and advantage are words that are not normally seen together, but reciprocity—giving now to get later—will become a normal part of winning in the future. The Reciprocity Advantage shows you how to leverage new forces like digital natives and cloud-served supercomputing now into massively scalable, profitable, incremental growth for your business. Provocative and pragmatic, leading ten-year forecaster Bob Johansen and experienced business developer Karl Ronn describe how to lean in to disruptions to create new growth for your business. They include actual cases showing early successes for a range of companies and nonprofits like IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and TED. They then provide key exercises to define your promising new ideas and nurture them into healthy new businesses. Their recommendations are based on practical experience in managing the problems of new business creation and many years of helping others see the future more clearly. Distilled from hands-on work, this book gets you started today on creating your own reciprocity advantage.
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Affiche du document Boards That Excel

Boards That Excel

B. Joseph White

2h08min15

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171 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 2h08min.
This is a different kind of corporate governance book. With its vivid stories and conversational tone, Boards That Excel is like sitting down with an astute and experienced friend—one who’s passionate about what corporate and nonprofit boards can contribute to their organizations’ success when they set high aspirations, are clear on purpose, and do the right things in the right way. B. Joseph White, an experienced corporate and nonprofit director and a distinguished academic, argues that boards can enable organizations to do great things, but only when directors go well beyond their duty to oversee and monitor management. White offers a road map for governance success based on his experience with two of America’s most successful companies, one public and one private. He knows governance research and distills it to a handful of truly useful insights for boards and directors. He provides clear guidance on the essential work boards must do, and, drawing on behavioral research, he describes how they can ensure the boardroom is a place of good information, thoughtful evaluation, and wise decision making. The book reports on interviews with more than a dozen high-performance board chairs, CEOs, and directors, including Siebel Systems founder Tom Siebel, legendary real estate investor Sam Zell, former Harlem Globetrotters owner Mannie Jackson, GM board chairman and former Cummins chairman and CEO Tim Solso, and volunteer (University of Illinois, University of Michigan) and corporate (Hershey, Bob Evans) director Mary Kay Haben. All speak with unusual candor on what it takes for boards and directors to excel.
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Affiche du document What We Learned in the Rainforest

What We Learned in the Rainforest

Bill Shireman

2h21min45

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189 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 2h22min.
What We Learned in the Rainforest presents a surprising new business principle: by applying strategies and practices gleaned from nature-by emulating what it once sought to conquer-business can adapt rapidly to changing market conditions and attain greater and more sustainable profits. With clear, direct language and dozens of real-world examples, Kiuchi and Shireman show how a company can become a complex living system that doesn't merely balance competing interests but truly integrates them. Examples from leading companies include: How Coca-Cola CEO Doug Daft uses diversity to drive sales How Intel founder Gordon Moore creates profit by design How Bill Coors builds businesses on the theory that "all waste is lost profit" How Shell profits as an industrial ecosystem What Weyerhaeuser and activists learned from each other How Dow earns 300% returns, and Dupont builds market share with eco-effectiveness, and more This book shows that the old model of business-the machine model that pitted business against nature-is growing obsolete. In the emerging economy, businesses excel when they emulate what they once sought to conquer. They maximize performance as they become like nature, like a complex living system. By moving beyond the industrial machine model, and applying the dynamic principles of the rainforest instead, business can learn how to create more profit than ever, and to do so more sustainably. Written by two would-be "arch enemies"-a hard-nosed CEO of a major corporation and a dedicated environmentalist-this book doesn't just balance competing interests, it integrates them into a truly revolutionary new paradigm. Kiuchi and Shireman present numerous real-world examples from leading companies-business strategies and management practices that maximize business performance by all measures: economic, social, and environmental. They illustrate the powerful business model provided by nature for driving innovation, increasing profit, spurring growth, and ensuring sustainability.
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Affiche du document How to Be a Positive Leader

How to Be a Positive Leader

1h27min00

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116 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 1h27min.
The field of positive leadership continues to expand. Building on the practical tools and philosophy in Kim Cameron's books (including Positive Leadership, over 30,000 copies sold), this edited volume brings the best research from fourteen scholars and translates it into plain English for organizations.Positive leaders are able to dramatically expand their people's—and their own—capacity for excellence. And they accomplish this without enormous expenditures or huge heroic gestures. Here leading scholars—including Adam Grant, author of the bestselling Give and Take; positive organizational scholarship movement cofounders Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn; and thirteen more—describe how this is being done at companies such as Wells Fargo, Ford, Kelly Services, Burt's Bees, Connecticut's Griffin Hospital, the Michigan-based Zingerman's Community of Businesses, and many others. They show that, like the butterfly in Brazil whose flapping wings create a typhoon in Texas, you can create profound positive change in your organization through simple actions and attitude shifts. Foreword—Shawn AchorInvitation—Jane Dutton and Gretchen Spreitzer Part I. Foster Positive Relationships Chapter 1: Build High Quality Relationships–Jane E. Dutton Chapter 2: Outsource Inspiration–Adam M. Grant Chapter 3: Negotiate Mindfully–Shirli Kopelman and Ramaswami Mahalingam Part II. Unlock Resources from Within Chapter 4: Enable Thriving at Work--Gretchen M. Spreitzer and Christine Porath Chapter 5: Cultivate Positive Identities–Laura Morgan Roberts Chapter 6: Engage in Job Crafting--Amy Wrzesniewski Part III. Tap into the Good Chapter 7: Activate Virtuousness–Kim Cameron Chapter 8: Lead an Ethical Organization–David M. Mayer Chapter 9: Imbue the Organization with Higher Purpose–Robert E. Quinn and Anjan V.Thakor Part IV. Create Resourceful Change Chapter 10: Cultivate Hope: Found, Not Lost--Oana Branzei Chapter 11: Create Micro-Moves for Organizational Change--Karen Golden-Biddle Chapter 12: Treat Employees as Resources not Resistors--Scott Sonenshein Chapter 13: Create Opportunity from Crisis--Lynn Perry Wooten, Erika Hayes James Epilogue and Looking Forward–Gretchen M. Spreitzer and Jane E. Dutton NotesAcknowledgments IndexAbout the Authors
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Affiche du document Make an Ethical Difference

Make an Ethical Difference

Mark Pastin

1h17min15

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103 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 1h17min.
People are often skeptical that there is anything they can do to raise society’s ethical level. Mark Pastin begs to differ. We can make a difference, and we don’t need ethics “experts” to tell us what to do. He argues that we all have an innate ethical sense—what he calls an “ethics eye.” He offers tools for sharpening the ethics eye so we can see and do the right thing ourselves, particularly in the workplace, where our decisions can affect not just ourselves but coworkers, clients, customers, and even an entire organization. Seeing what’s right is one thing—getting others to agree with you is another. With examples drawn from his decades of experience advising governments, corporations, and NGOs, Pastin shows how to identify competing interests, analyze the facts, understand the viewpoints, measure the benefits of different outcomes, and build consensus. You’ll gain confidence in your ethical sense, make better leadership decisions, and take actions that elevate the ethics of the groups and organizations you belong to—and society as a whole. “I know no one who has accomplished more than Pastin across the entire operations of ethical behavior. Enjoy his book, embrace his vision, adhere to his basic values and we will be a more ethical society.” —Joe Rocks, CEO, NHS Human Services “Mark Pastin has written the only book on ethics that is worth reading.” —Ian I. Mitroff, Professor Emeritus, Marshall School of Business, USC “Pastin continues to take ethics to the next level using examples to make the book not only interesting but also actionable and pragmatic.” —Tony Spezia, President and CEO, Covenant Health
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Affiche du document Fear Your Strengths

Fear Your Strengths

Robert B. Kaiser

44min15

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59 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 44min.
Once you’ve discovered your strengths, you need to discover something else: your strengths can work against you. Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, and they see it in others. But they don’t see it as clearly in themselves. Mainly, they think of leadership development as working on their weaknesses. No wonder. The tools used to assess managers are not equipped to pick up on overplayed strengths—when more is not better. Nationally recognized leadership experts Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser have conducted thousands of assessments of senior executives designed to determine when their strengths serve them well—versus betray them. In this groundbreaking book, they draw on their data and practical experience to identify four fundamental leadership qualities, each positive in and of itself but each of which, if overemphasized, can seriously compromise your effectiveness. Most leaders, they’ve found, are “lopsided”—they favor certain qualities to the exclusion of others without realizing it. The trick is to keep all four in balance. Fear Your Strengths provides tools to help you become aware of your leadership leanings and excesses and provides insights for combatting the mindset that encourages them. It offers a practical psychology of leadership, a better way for leaders to calibrate their performance so that you can make sure your strengths don’t overpower you but rather move you—and your organization—forward.Introduction THIS BOOK IS THE CULMINATION of the surprising epiphanies and serendipitous insights we have garnered over a lifetime of working with senior leaders, including the CEOs of major corporations, to help them increase their effectiveness. We did not set out to discover what the leadership field has overlooked, but over the years, as we helped these leaders look in the mirror, each little revelation was like a curtain lifting on a neglected part of the drama of leadership. Most of what we have observed is in plain view yet its significance has been missed or it hasn’t been put into practice. Fifteen years ago, a routine executive assessment provided us with just such a seminal moment. We were working with an executive whose 360-degree evaluation characterized him, as one coworker had put it, as “an elemental force in nature.” Yet his effectiveness as a leader was less than optimal. “Look,” we offered, “you are clearly a force to be reckoned with.” Then we took it a step further. “The problem is that at times you’re overly forceful.” There it was. In a way we had never quite realized or articulated before, we acknowledged that too much strength can be a weakness. It dawned on us that doing too much of something was as much of a problem as doing too little of it. Put differently, your strengths can work against you. Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, but they tend not to accept it in practice. It’s not even in most managers’ vocabulary. Mainly, they think of leadership development as working on their weaknesses. No wonder. The tools used to assess managers are not equipped to pick up on strengths overplayed. In performance appraisals, managers are typically rated as not meeting expectations, meeting expectations, or exceeding expectations. In coworker feedback questionnaires, popularly known as 360s, managers are typically rated as ineffective, effective, or very effective. Nowhere in most assessments is there language or diagnostics that can reveal when someone is overdoing it—when more is not better. The lack of attention paid to strengths overplayed has persisted despite the glut of books—most notably, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton’s Now, Discover Your Strengths—exhorting managers to focus on their strengths. Remarkably, in their enthusiasm to accentuate the positive, Buckingham and other strengths advocates fail to point out to their managerial audience the ever-present danger of taking their strengths too far. In our consulting work, we have increasingly focused on making leaders aware of that danger and enabling the important developmental work necessary to mitigate it. We have enjoyed enviable firsthand exposure to senior leaders, conducted thousands of assessments of individual executives, and collected reams of data. We have put our thinking into practice in the form of an assessment tool, the Leadership Versatility Index (LVI, US Patent No. 7,121,830), a coworker-feedback questionnaire (360) that we designed expressly to assess for strengths overplayed. It has in turn served to further refine our thinking. Our statistical findings as well as our practical experience form the basis of this book. We regularly illustrate our insights with case studies of executives with whom we have worked closely and extensively. To guard the executives’ anonymity, the protagonist of each “case” is actually a composite and real names are not used. But the anecdotes, experiences, and voices we describe are unfailingly real, as are the problems we identified and the solutions that were implemented. Among our most surprising findings has been that leaders often have a hard time acknowledging their strengths in the first place. Once, when preparing for a feedback session, we were startled to see that the executive was so highly rated that there seemed to be practically nothing wrong with his leadership. “We’ve got nothing to work with,” we thought. It was unnerving. It turned out, however, that there was plenty of “ammunition” in the positive feedback. This individual underestimated his assets and, as a result, sometimes overcompensated, making him less effective than he might have been. Gifted leaders, we have found, are often the last ones to acknowledge their gifts, even when they have ample evidence and feedback that attests to it. The practical fact is that the only way to manage your strengths is to accept them. If you literally don’t know your own strength, you have no way to calibrate or modulate it. In a relentless effort to be better, you have no way of knowing if you are going too far. One of the main missions of this book is to help you come to grips with your strengths and make full use of them without overdoing it. We have also found that, for most executives, waking up to the potential dangers inherent in their strengths can be a vertigo-inducing shock. As one senior leader admitted, “The idea is unsettling. It’s chilling. I really mean that.” When leaders are faced with the prospect that the very intensity that fueled their rise to the top can be smothering their coworkers and sabotaging their effectiveness, they are often panic-stricken at the thought of needing to ease up. “I’m afraid I’ll lose my edge,” is what we often hear, a reaction that is natural but misguided. In what may be the cruelest of ironies, overplayed strengths are often at the root of career failure. Analyses of derailed leaders time and again point to the excessive reliance on qualities that were key to past success but less relevant to the current role. We have learned that to stop overplaying a strength does not mean, as many leaders fear, to stop using it. It means using the strength more selectively. As another hyperintense executive finally realized, “I don’t have to give up my fast ball. I just don’t have to throw it all the time.” Coming to grips with the need to modulate your strengths is some of the hardest developmental work you will ever do. After all, it’s your strengths that have made you successful. Why would you ever tamper with a winning formula? As one client quipped, “Overplaying your strengths: that’s a comfy, cozy place to be.” We wrote this book to ease the transition, to offer you real developmental leverage on both a behavioral level and a personal level. The work on yourself isn’t therapy. It is a plainspoken and useful approach that helps you trace your leadership behavior back to the “crooked thinking” and “trigger points” that can throw it off kilter. We offer a practical psychology of leadership—a better way for leaders to get a reading on their performance, one that is truer to the realities of managerial work. Leadership development amounts to moving an individual from point A to point B. Each of the insights and practices described in this book offers the leader added leverage for making that move. Chapter 1 Strengths Beget Weaknesses— In Two Very Different Ways RICH SPIRE’S TALENT SHIMMERS. He embodies everything that the word “leader” has come to mean in the business world. The same raw, competitive instinct he had as a baseball player in Little League and right through college—always swinging for the fences—animates his leadership today. As president of a sector of a large, fast-growing technology company, he never shies away from making big, bold moves. He knows his business and is uncannily adept at identifying industry trends and opportunities. He has a positive attitude that won’t quit. “Self-actualization,” he often says, “comes from the impossible dream achieved.” Spire is a commanding presence with a true gift for articulating his vision in a way that persuades and excites people—not just in broad terms but, as one colleague says, “with enough color and granularity that people can grasp their portion of the vision.” “He has more potential than anyone I know,” says another. “He has huge talent, intelligence, and strategic insight. And it’s all wrapped up in a charismatic package.” What could possibly be wrong with this picture? As is often the case with natural leaders, the use of power comes easily to Spire, but perhaps too easily. He so stunningly wields his intellectual firepower and charisma that he makes it a daunting task for others to contend with him. His forceful leadership—a good thing when used in correct proportion—effectively renders him unable to elicit, nurture, and benefit from other input in the organization. “I think he stakes out his positions too early,” says one colleague. “People then seek to be in agreement with him rather than bringing their best thinking.” What’s more, Spire’s penchant for bold, strategic action often exceeds his organization’s ability to keep up. It isn’t just that he is too aggressive strategically; he correspondingly neglects—and even undervalues—the operational component of his strategy. His CFO puts it this way: “[Spire’s] vision outstripped our internal capacity. His strategic reach was too great to be executed with the bench strength we had. It’s useful to have vision, but he needs to implement it in a more measured way.” Facing into the headwind of Spire’s forceful personality and his voracious appetite to have a big impact, some people on his team simply give up trying to influence him. “It takes too much emotional energy to keep confronting this guy,” says one, “and he isn’t going to listen anyway.” In defeating his loyal opposition, Spire puts himself and his organization at risk. By taking his talents to such an extreme, Spire undermines those very talents. They in fact become a weakness. There is a tragic irony in this. What could be a great asset turns into, at least in part, a liability. It’s an unfortunate loss for the leader and for his organization. Just like a point guard whose uncanny court vision causes him to make lightning-quick passes that catch his teammates flat-footed, or like a running back who is so fast he crashes into his own lineman, a leader of prodigious but immoderate talents will leave half of his team in the dust. A gift can often work against the gifted. All managers, regardless of level, are likely to overuse their strengths. A leader’s desire to be forceful and straightforward with direct reports becomes a tendency to be abusive and peremptory. A devotion to consensus-seeking breeds chronic indecision. An emphasis on being respectful of others degenerates into ineffectual niceness. The desire to turn a profit and serve shareholders becomes a preoccupation with short-term thinking. To the leader whose best tool is a hammer, everything is a nail. A leader who goes to his best tool in every situation, who consistently overplays his hand, may perform adequately, or even well, but he is ultimately far less effective than he might be. As one manager said about himself, “Overusing a strength is underperformance.” The irony that maximizing a strength corrupts it is beautifully captured in Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio. An old writer on his death bed muses: “In the beginning when the world was young there were truths and they were beautiful, and then people came along. The moment a person took a truth to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live by it, he became grotesque, and the truth became a falsehood.” Overusing one’s strength not only corrupts the strength, but it begets weakness in yet another way. What deforms leaders, makes them grotesque, is that not only do they embrace their strength as the only truth but they consequently ignore an equal and opposing strength. The result of this collateral damage is lopsided leadership: too much of one thing made worse by too little of its complement. When Rich Spire overplayed his considerable powers of persuasion, they drowned out his ability to hear the voices of his staff. Likewise, Spire had the setting on his strategic ambition cranked up so high that it swamped its opposite, operational realism. His CFO, familiar with Rich’s instinct to grab strategic ground, would often counsel him: “Let’s make sure we execute in a measured way so growth won’t just be a flash of light and burn out.” Spire confessed, “I jump in with both hands and both feet because I only have one speed: high.” For leaders like Spire, the challenge is to turn down the volume on his natural strength and turn it up on its opposite, which he usually ignores. It’s all about getting the setting right on both dials. This is a practical notion that goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who postulated that what is good, virtuous, and effective in thought and action is the midpoint between deficiency and excess. Aristotle’s precept has often been mistaken to advocate moderation in all things. On the contrary, speaking of courage, or of compassion, he emphasized that what is needed is the right amount for the circumstances. “Anybody can become angry or give money, but to be angry with or to give money to the right person, and in the right amount, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way—this is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” There is no fixed setting on the dial for the proper use of a strength, a virtue. The volume needs to go up or down according to what the situation requires. There is no better—or more extreme—case of corrupted strengths than that of Jeffrey Skilling, who as company president personified the infamous scandal at Enron. Although Rich Spire’s voracious appetite for taking strategic ground crossed the line that separates productive from counterproductive, Skilling’s unchecked growth mania eventually crossed the line from counterproductive to ruinous, unethical, and illegal. Skilling had a huge hand in Enron’s collapse, which led to what was then, in 2001, history’s largest corporate bankruptcy. At the time of this writing, he is in prison, several years into a 25-year sentence for conspiracy, fraud, and insider trading. Jeffrey Skilling was brought to Enron to head its trading operation, a sideline business in what was primarily an old-line natural-gas company. Brilliant and creative, he saw and seized the opportunity to convert Enron’s contracts to buy and sell natural gas into financial instruments that could be traded, something that had never been done in the industry. That was Skilling’s strength: he was clever and visionary. But he overplayed that strength and took his business-building zeal beyond ethical limits. He used mark-to-market accounting to book the total estimated value of, say, a ten-year contract on the very day the contract was signed. He engineered financial deals, schemes really, that removed debt from Enron’s balance sheet and thereby projected a false picture of the company’s financial condition. In the end, Enron had borrowed $38 billion of which only $13 billion appeared on the balance sheet. Skilling’s leadership was lopsided in so many ways. A big-idea guy, he ignored the blocking and tackling of implementation. When picking people, he overvalued intellect and undervalued social skills. When rewarding people, he overrelied on money as a motivator but was personally abusive and grossly neglected the organization’s increasingly destructive and corrupt culture. Skilling was also a classic victim of the Peter Principle. He was made president of Enron despite coming from a consultant background devoid of operational experience on the industrial side. He lacked the practical experience to know there are some things you can’t do. To compound the problem, Skilling either ignored or steamrolled Enron’s Risk Assessment and Control (RAC) group, whose job it was to veto deals that broke the rules or ran exceedingly high business risks. In the end, no one individual, discrete event, or single policy brought Enron down. The collapse was aided and abetted by CEO Kenneth Lay, CFO Andrew Fastow, and a host of other lieutenants, as well as the outside accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, which ultimately signed off on Enron’s false financial statements. The book that chronicled Enron’s downfall, The Smartest Guys in the Room, described it this way: “The scandal grew out of a steady accumulation of habits, values, and actions that began years before and finally spiraled out of control.” But Skilling was the leader. Ultimately, it was his excessiveness and his lopsidedness that bred and sanctioned Enron’s out-of-control culture. The destructiveness of overweening strength can be seen in endless leadership examples, from the historically notorious, such as Hitler or Mao Zedong, to the ignominious, such as Jeffrey Skilling, to the immoderate, such as Rich Spire—each larger than life in his own context. However, there are also multitudes of leaders at all levels of every imaginable type of organization laboring in relative obscurity whose leadership is marred by the same fundamental dynamic. Daily organizational life is replete with examples, and the warning signs can be quite commonplace. A most ordinary example is overtalking. Some leaders who excel at expressing themselves articulately and at great length have a lot to offer but don’t know when to stop. Eventually, the energy goes out of the room. Other leaders who talk too much are storehouses of knowledge or great storytellers. They have the ability to hold the floor and they enjoy doing so immensely, but they ultimately lose their audience. That is because overtalkers of all stripes have one fatal flaw in common: they act as if there is nothing to be gained from hearing from others. The dial is cranked up too high on their strength—the ability to be articulate—and it’s stuck at that setting, effectively precluding any ability to listen. In one study we found that leaders are five times more likely to overdo a strength than their other attributes. Whatever they were best at, they got carried away with. Likewise, they tended to neglect the opposing and complementary behaviors. For instance, managers who, using the Gallup Strengths Finder instrument, categorized themselves as “Achiever,” “Activator,” and “Command” tended to be rated by coworkers as too forceful and not empowering or participative enough. Conversely, as you would expect, those classifying themselves as “Developer,” “Harmony, and “Includer” were rated the opposite by coworkers. Don’t just discover your strengths, as Gallup recommends; also understand how you use them, including what happens when you overuse them. The signs and symptoms of overplayed strength are everywhere and affect every leader. It’s not just that performance suffers; promising careers derail. Yet overuse of strengths is often overlooked because neither leaders nor their handlers are attuned to how strength can beget weakness. To be sure, not every weakness is a by-product of overused strength. Sometimes, it is a shortcoming that can be rectified by getting more experience or training or giving greater effort. But in every leader, in every person, there is at least one strong tendency that carries with it the risk of being too strong as well as a secondary risk of rendering the opposing tendency too weak. When this insidious lopsidedness takes hold in a leader—often very early in life—it can become chronic, deeply habitual, and in the worst cases virulent. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson: you must stand in terror of your strengths.
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Affiche du document Stewardship

Stewardship

Peter Block

2h13min30

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178 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 2h13min.
One of the most provocative and revolutionary books written on leadership, business, and organizational design, Stewardship remains just as relevant, even twenty years later, to transforming our organizations for the common good of the wider community.One of the most provocative and revolutionary books written on leadership, business, and organizational design, Stewardship remains just as relevant, even twenty years later, to transforming our organizations for the common good of the wider community. We still face the challenge of fostering ownership and accountability throughout our organizations. Despite all the evidence calling for profound change, most organizations still rely on patriarchy and control as their core form of governance. The result is that they stifle initiative and spirit and alienate people from the work they do. This in the face of an increasing need to find ways to be responsive to customers and the wider community.  Peter Block insists that what is required is a dramatic shift in how we distribute power, privilege, and the control of money. “Stewardship,” he writes, “means giving people at the bottom and the boundaries of the organization choice over how to serve a customer, a citizen, a community. It is the willingness to be accountable for the well-being of the larger organization by operating in service, rather than in control, of those around us.” Block has revised and updated the book throughout, including a new introduction addressing what has changed—and what hasn't—in the twenty years since the book was published and a new chapter on applying stewardship to the common good of the wider community. He covers both the theory of stewardship (in particular how it ameliorates the shortcomings of traditional leadership) and the practice (how it transforms every function and department for the better). And he offers tactical advice as well on gearing up to implement these reforms. Introductionto the Second EditionWhat Has Changed?REVISING A BOOK after twenty years is an occasion to reflect on what has changed in that time. There is, of course, the wish that the world had gotten better. You want to believe that there is less suffering, more kindness, and, for all peoples, a world of more possibility. This wish to see progress is even stronger considering the practice of stewardship, a clearly idealistic and spirit-based undertaking.Stewardship as used here is meant to be a choice to (1) act in service of the long run, and (2) act in service to those with little power. In historical terms, this has meant to care for the well-being of an unborn king or the next generation. For today's world, it translates into creating accountable and committed workplaces without resorting to increased control or compliance as governing strategies. This is not an easy assignment, considering the still-dominant paradigm of leadership, which is about good parenting and its stronger cousin, patriarchy. Patriarchal leadership, the common practice in most organizations, acts in service of the short term and works in the interest of those with high power, not low power.Stewardship, then, is an intention to distribute power widely, especially to those at the lowest levels of the organization. It calls us to organize workplaces based on relatedness and collaboration as an alternative to the bell-curve ideology of competitiveness that is used to rationalize patriarchy.Stewardship also is a call for a purpose larger than today's drive for material gain, and it pays attention to supporting the common good for our communities, the earth, and people outside the usual cast of stakeholders. This takes us a step away from the individualism and self-interest that is so prevalent.Against this backdrop, here are reflections on developments over the last twenty years that make stewardship an even more urgent form of governance.It's a Digital WorldThe biggest change in organizational life is that we have been beamed into all the joys and sorrows of the virtual and digital world. It is a romanticized world, riding on the wings of speed and frictionless transactions with no human beings involved. It is mesmerizing to grasp the world in a handheld device, much smarter than we will ever be. Technology is credited with bringing the world closer together, spreading democracy, changing the nature of business, supplying round-the-clock connectivity. Geography has been made obsolete. Here are some noteworthy aspects of this life in a work context:• Workers are members of teams made up of people they have never been in a room with. This has given rise to the question “How do we build a team that never or rarely meets face-to-face?”• We have willingly given up the forty-hour workweek. We are online and in touch and reachable most of our waking hours. If you ask people to park their cell phones at the door, 40 percent say that this is not possible.• We work at home. Our bedroom has become our office. We can work in our pajamas most of the time. This allows us to move our residence anywhere, supposedly take better care of our family, and have more control over our time. We can also go to school at home, so our dining room becomes our classroom.What is new is the wedding of futurism to what might be called “virtualism”: a vision of the future within which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.—Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft• With a device in our pocket and plugs in our ears, we can have background music or be in phone contact all the time. You go to public places and you see that most people have something in their ear and are somewhere else. There is no longer a need to be here now. You can go anywhere but here, anytime you wish.• We all participate in this electronic world, one where speed is a value in and of itself. If something is quicker, it is attractive. If we are quicker, we are attractive. Slow food is considered a revolution. Fast food, a value proposition.• Controlling costs is now the dominant value for most organizations, replacing the priority once given to the customer and the employee. We can now outsource most every job and function (except top management) in order to reduce labor and benefit costs. We cut down on travel costs and training on the rationale that current audio and video technology approximates the sights and sounds of being in the room together in real time.The virtual world is sold on these features. A promise of more freedom to the individual. Work at home, learn at will, and control your time. Get information you need on demand. Be a global citizen. All true. Big change in twenty years.What Is Good for Business Is Good for the WorldA second major shift is that the private sector has fully come into its own power to name the debate and create the context for what matters. It is the dominant sector. In other times, the church and the military set the tone for the society. Once it was the government and concern for the social good. Not so now.The lens for assessing our common interests and institutional well-being is the business lens. It is the focusing device. This defines the conversation: Government is primarily assessed on its waste. The social-service sector is encouraged to merge, eliminate overlap, increase leverage and productivity. The private sector sings, “Why can't a school be like a business?” Our answer to the “public education problem” is to institute variable pay for performance and stronger measurements as tools for reform. Pure business plays. Intuition and experience have been replaced by evidence. Evidence-based medicine, evidence-based learning, evidence-based decision making. All business terms. This language and reverence for business seeps into all conversation about a better future. We are also looking for businesspeople to run every institution: the hospital, the school, the prison, the government, social services, the church, even the Girl Scouts. We consider business success the ultimate credential.This is not an argument against business, for businesses are the stabilizing institutions in most communities. They contribute to communities in many more ways than creating jobs. They are the institutions most open to change and adaptation to the new world. They also bring to the community talented and committed people. Businesses provide some of our best foreign policy too; the globalization of business puts a crack in the class structure, has fought racism, and helped create a middle class where none existed. The point is not to paint business as a villain. The point is to recognize its power to frame the culture, to frame the context for how we choose to be together.In recognizing the power of the business perspective, we see how it affects not only the way we work but also who we are becoming. It defines our new heroes. The contemporary hero is now the entrepreneur. A single soul with faith in an idea that reinvents a marketplace, disrupts a whole industry, takes everything to scale, creates new needs, and provides an escort service into the future. This inventive instinct can also take over domains once reserved for God. We clone sheep today, humans tomorrow. We are in the process of creating synthetic versions of aliveness; we send avatars to meetings, watch a screen more hours than we can count, create video games to simulate experience. In all this we are witnessing the second creation of the world, as if to say, “Thank you, God, for your hard work and the good beginning; thank you for providing a good role model—we can take it from here.” This economic usurpation of God produces a certain amount of guilt, so now we put the word social in front of entrepreneur. The social entrepreneur speaks to our wish to integrate our surrender to consumption and materialism with the universal desire to do good in the world.Side EffectsThese two concurrent forces—the growing virtual and digital world and the preeminence of the business perspective—have their grip on us. They live on a set of assumptions so deeply embedded in our consciousness that we rarely question them and so cannot ever solve the fundamental issues that keep us and our organizations in patriarchy's power. These assumptions have a cost. What we see in the last two decades is increasing isolation, anxiety, fear, and concentration of wealth and power. This reality is what calls us to stay interested in the idea of stewardship. The point of this book.In this journey to the stewardship possibility, we can note some ways in which these cultural forces are shaping our lives:• Electronic connection, while touted as valuable for building relationships, has the effect of isolating us more deeply. Take Phil, a friend who works at home for a large technology company. This allows him to move around the country, following his wife's career. The price he pays is that his time on the computer is minutely monitored by the company. The normal workweek is fifty hours, but he is expected to deliver fifty-eight billable hours a week.• Phil works in a world where there is little travel budget for him to be in the room with other employees or to see how what he has designed is being used. There is no budget for his development. The digital revolution that promises more freedom also impinges on our privacy and provides infinitely more control than we thought possible. It creates more instrumental relationships. Thus the isolation.• Stewardship requires a level of trust and relatedness and is about putting choice close to the edge. The electronic world shares information widely, but that does not necessarily mean it builds relationships. It may sustain them once built, but something is lost by not being in the room with other human beings. If we want to decentralize choice and power, the virtual world has ushered in vast surveillance capacity. Jobs that once held some privacy, like driving for a living, are now monitored closely. Your workstation can now be monitored from afar. The virtual world also has eliminated incidental contact, like passing in a hall, eating in a lunchroom, chatting before and after meetings, or going in and out of work. These peripheral moments, captured in sideways glances, are what build social capital; unplanned, face-to-face encounters encourage the informality where trust and connection are built.• E-mail and social media are another substitute for seeing each other. We have come to believe that we are communicating with each other when we send an e-mail. Maybe, maybe not. Facebook creates the illusion of having five hundred friends. We can exchange photographs, be up to date with the smallest details of our lives, but even so, we are still watching a screen. The handheld device becomes an extension of our arm and has made eye contact a rarity among strangers. We have confused an amazing information gadget with a tool of relatedness.• The divide between personal life and work life has become blurred. We all have a major concern about work/life balance, how to balance work life and personal life, which means we are way off balance, and not in the direction of too much personal life. If as stewards we care for the common good and well-being of a community, yielding so much sovereignty to the workplace makes that care harder to act on.• The current business narrative is fundamentally one of scarcity. No amount of earnings, no amount of productivity improvement, is enough. Even in good economic times the narrative is one of fierce competition, more cost reduction, grow or die. One effect is increased fear at work. People seem more afraid of their bosses now than twenty years ago. The fear is joined by a schizophrenic sense of enormous business growth and success at the same time as individual earnings and well-being are declining or staying flat. Stewardship is a narrative of abundance: it says that what we have is enough, that there are limits to growth, and it expands our field of vision to care for something larger than profitability.• The rush of globalization destabilizes our sense of place and security. While globalization has the advantages of increasing our cultural competence, increasing our understanding of other cultures, and providing a positive kind of foreign policy, it moves our center of gravity into unknown territory. Being global citizens can cost us our sense of place, our stability, and the experience of knowing where we belong. Stewardship relies on trust, familiarity, and continuity to do its work.• We are consumed by our anxiety about success. Parents are more worried about the employment future of their children. We have tiger moms and helicopter parents who want their children to win in the competitive world we have constructed. Home has become a child-management-services bureau where every day is scheduled for positive outcomes. In some cases, when you hire an employee, you are also hiring the person's parental management team; one day you might have to answer to his mom or dad on why you rated their son only above average. Stewardship supports the assumptions of a cooperative world; it replaces competition with collaboration, self-interest with service. It asks us to care more about meaning and impact than about the traditional concern for upward mobility.• Finally, we continue to be disappointed in our leaders, which means our expectations of them are beyond fulfillment. We seek transformational leaders and relational leaders. We want our mentors, and everyone who can afford it wants a coach. We still love leadership; we just want it to be more benevolent. This focus on leaders tends to centralize accountability instead of distributing it. It says that leaders are cause and employees are effect. Stewardship inverts this and suggests that employees are the central point and bosses need to earn their right to govern.Goods We Can Build UponAll these forces create some positive counterforces that support and reinforce the shift in our thinking toward stewardship. For example:• The longing for hope, stability, and optimism is as strong as ever. In the world of religion, while participation in the traditional churches has declined in the West, the emergent churches here have strong growth. They make fewer demands to embrace specific beliefs and focus more on creating a successful lifestyle and being part of a community. They give their members an opportunity for connection that has disappeared from the neighborhood and the workplace. Around the world we see growing resistance to the materialism of the West. It is frightening in some of its forms but is clearly a reaction to witnessing the disruption of tradition and culture in the West.• The environmental movement is touching our lives and our organizations. At a surface level, every business has turned green, at least in its advertising. Government is now also turning green, and proud of it. This is a good thing. This means that conversation about the environment is commonplace. The social responsibility of business is on the table. All these support the steward.• There are always organizations that strive to create an alternative to the traditional command-and-control cultures. Most high-tech companies seek less social distance between levels. They create more informal ways of being together, make the office more like home, and encourage sociability. They are valuing more ownership from employees and more decisions at lower levels. Some older major companies, like Mars and Crown Equipment, still value the importance of employees, appreciate the importance of learning, and work to keep trust strong by using high engagement and many of the stewardship practices described in this book.• One response to the increased isolation and cultural force of the digital world is the growth of localism. This is a face-to-face, close-to-home effort. It is the decision to work, shop, and play within walking distance. Given the downsizing and loss of faith in larger institutions, the choice may not be entirely voluntary, but it has become a strong social movement, a convergence of the food, environmental, and anticonsumer movements. Cooperative enterprises are in a growth mode. Local agriculture, neighborhood building, and the desire to buy less and create more on our own are all on the rise. Just one example is that at this writing there are more than thirty cohousing efforts in the United States alone. In cohousing, fifteen or more families buy a common property, and on this property they have private houses but also common space for eating, raising children, and feeling connected to others close at hand. It is the re-creation of the village and community life that the industrial and information ages have set asunder.• Finally, as always, there is a large group of young people seeking something more than economic success. They want to serve society. They are open to larger purposes for an organization than being successful in a marketplace, necessary as this might be. They are choosing stewardship and service over self-interest.The hope of this new edition of this book is that the ideas and practice of stewardship are still a useful framework for thriving in the complexity of this modern age. Stewardship provides a spiritual, values-based anchor in an era that constantly drives us in the direction of speed, control, and efficiency. Stewardship is an alternative way to create a future that transcends the pressure of lower costs and short-term results. It holds a restorative set of values, centered on creating high performance by putting the future in the hands of each member of an organization. It is a voice for the common good as an answer to the growing individualism of the culture.If the idea of stewardship is elusive, it is because this idea changes with the times, and it is not formulaic and so gives great latitude on the form it takes. It also suffers from ambiguity and having no definitive template or compelling testimony or evidence. Sorry about that. The good news is that it invites you to cocreate the idea and practice and thus imagine its possibilities, and make sense and meaning of it in your own way, out of your own context. Which is what we have to do with our lives anyway.Foreword by Steven PiersantiWelcomeIntroduction to the Second Edition: What Has Changed?It's a Digital WorldWhat Is Good for Business Is Good for the WorldSide EffectsGoods We Can Build UponPART I TRADING YOUR KINGDOM FOR A HORSE 1 Replacing Leadership with Stewardship Something more is requiredThe essence of StewardshipChoosing Partners Choosing Empowerment Choosing Service We Don't Act on What We Know The Leadership Question The Underbelly of Leadership The Stewardship Answer Three Organizational Challenges 2 Choosing Partnership over Patriarchy Creating Order Distributing Ownership and Responsibility Partnership as the Alternative Balancing Power Four Requirements of Partnership 3 Choosing Adventure over Safety The Wish for SafetyEntitlement Is Empowerment Run Aground Choosing Empowerment Stewardship Begins at Home 4 Choosing Service over Self-Interest A Model of Stewardship Teaching Revolution to the Ruling Class The Realm of ManagementRank without Privilege Connecting the Heart and the Wallet The Point PART II THE REDISTRIBUTION OF POWER, PURPOSE, AND WEALTH A Case Study: Sometime Later in the Week 5 Defining the Stewardship Contract Principles for the PracticeThe Stewardship Contract Life in the Balance6 Upsetting Expectations: The Emotional Work of StewardshipThe Trail Is Inside Out Facing the Wish for Dependency and Dominance Freedom's Just Another Word for Escape from FreedomUnstated Emotional Wants: Breaking the Pattern Just Say No I want my mentor7 Redesigning Management Practices and Structures Full Disclosure Management Practices Changing Basic ArchitectureBoss as Banker and Broker8 Rethinking the Role of Staff Functions In the Service of Top Management Police and Conscience to the Line Mandated Supplier Mandated Services Offering Choice and Building Capability Service Guarantee 9 Financial Practices: Creating Accountability with Self-Control The Money Is about control Building Widespread Financial Stewardship Living within the Law 10 Human Resources: Ending the Practice of Paternalism Institutional Caretaker A New Purpose and Role The Structure of Human Resources Human Resource Practices That Support Stewardship 11 Compensation and Performance Evaluation: Overturning the Class System The Divine Right of Kings Pay Reinforces Class Distinctions Performance Not for Sale Rank Individualism Confusing Boss Evaluations with Performance Pay for Empire Reward Systems That Support Stewardship The End of Caretaking PART III THE TRIUMPH OF HOPE OVER EXPERIENCE 12 Cosmetic Reform: When the Disease Becomes the Curenothing is next The Open OfficePatriarchy Recreating Itself13 Recreating Our Organization through Stewardship Stewardship Strategy for Political Reform Steps toward Political ReformA Case Study Continued: The Answer to the Power Company Story, “Sometime Later in the Week” 14 Cynics, Victims and Bystanders The Power of the Cynic Rescuing the Victim Facts Won't Help Treating Caution as a Choice15 The Answer to “How?”How “How?” Is a Defense 16 Stewardship for the Common GoodThe Business PerspectiveThe PointReferencesIndexDesigned Learning The Author The Artist
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Affiche du document The Art of Business

The Art of Business

Stan Davis

1h06min45

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89 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 1h7min.
Stan Davis is author of the bestselling books BLUR (more than 250,000 copies sold), 2020 Vision (more than 100,000 copies sold), and Future Perfect (more than 100,000 copies sold) Shows how bringing an artistic sensibility to business can improve business performance and increase personal work satisfaction Includes detailed, practical advice for implementing the ideas in the book, as well as a wealth of real-world examples The arts are important to many people in their personal lives, but they don't see any way of incorporating art into their work and business. In this groundbreaking book, visionary business authors Stan Davis and David McIntosh argue that not only is this possible, but that applying an artistic sensibility to business will actually improve business performance. Traditionally, business focuses only on the economic flow of inputs (resources, raw materials), outputs (products and services) and processes that help get you from one to the other (research and development, production, distribution). Davis and McIntosh show that there's an artistic flow that operates the same way, but with different particulars. Inputs here include things like emotion, imagination and intuition; and outputs include things like beauty, meaning, excitement and enjoyment. To bridge these aesthetic inputs and outputs, the authors show how to apply creative processes from the arts to business, and how to connect with customers the way great performers connect with audiences. Through real-world examples and practical advice, The Art of Business shows how applying this concept of artistic flow enables you to come up with more creative solutions to problems, develop better new products, and provide your customers with the kinds of emotionally and aesthetically satisfying experiences they've come to expect in this high contact, mulimedia age. It gives you an additional--rather than alternative--approach to the established economic model of how things get done. And it will make your own work experience infinitely more satisfying.
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Affiche du document Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance

Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance

Ellen Augustine

1h57min00

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156 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 1h57min.
Reveals the profound impact of the global corporate economy on our daily lives Details 75 immediate and long-term Action Steps for empowering ourselves both individually and as a society Offers specific tips, ideas, and resources on how to pare down our lives and open up our time Provides questions for reflection that help readers to think in new ways about what matters most to them Corporate structures, products, and processes permeate our society -but what do they really mean to us in our daily lives? The bottom-line mentality that drives corporate America, say Ellen Augustine (formerly Schwartz) and Suzanne Stoddard, is creating a world unresponsive to human needs, corrosive to the democratic process, and destructive to the planet itself. Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance shows the links between our mundane everyday struggles and the global corporate economy, image-driven media, and the relentless pace which consumes us all. And it tells us how we can change things by transforming both our work and leisure. The authors use hard-hitting examples and illuminating personal vignettes about confronting fear, anger, death, family problems, and the stultifying effects of staying in the "comfort zone." They detail over 75 steps for personal and societal actions-some quick and immediate, others in-depth and long term-for retaking control of our lives. The authors include provocative questions for reflection that shock, prod, and jump-start the reader into thinking about what matters most to them. Deeply moving, outrageous, encouraging, compelling, and inspiring, Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance blends unrelenting candor with the comfort of real-life stories of hope-and ultimately shows us that choice is the most important tool we have for reviving our lives and our world.
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Affiche du document The New Management

The New Management

William E. Halal

2h13min30

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178 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 2h13min.
A guide to the parallel revolutions in technology, organizations, and leadership, this practical yet thought-provoking book presents a wealth of evidence to show that the two recurrent themes of democracy and enterprise are transforming our institutions. Organizations are becoming changing clusters of entrepreneurial units working together to form "internal markets," while this diversity is being integrated into a "corporate community" that unites the interests of investors, workers, clients, business partners, and the public. Even fierce competitors are cooperating.o "Serving enterprises" make customers working partners in the creation of valueo "Knowledge entrepreneurs" form teams of self-managed internal enterpriseso "Internal markets" and "Corporate community" harness external forces to drive continuous changeo The power of "inner leadership" unites liberated workers, critical clients, and temporary business partnerso "Intelligent growth" offers strategic advantage that is ecologically benignIllustrative examples, survey data, trends, anecdotes, and exercises offer original insights into the use of New Management principles. In addition, mini-case studies of MCI, Saturn, The Body Shop, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Southwest Airlines, Home Depot, IKEA, Wal-Mart and other great companies illustrate vividly how creative managers design and lead organizations in an era of global competition, constant change, and empowered people. The author also analyzes critical issues, such as the nagging old conflict between profit and society, to provide managers a comprehensive, stimulating guide to where their craft is heading.Halal argues that the transition to a New Management is almost inevitable because it is being driven not by altruism or even good leadership, but by the relentless advance of the Information Revolution. Only small entrepreneurial teams operating from the bottom-up can master today's exploding complexity, and gaining stakeholder support is now essential because a knowledge-based economy has made cooperation a competitive advantage. Rather than fussing over quick fixes, The New Management points the way toward more fundamental solutions to the massive changes that will confront all institutions as the transition to a knowledge society rolls on into the 21st century.From Capitalism toDemocratic EnterpriseMinding the Economic Imperatives of KnowledgeIN LATE 1997, Bernard Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom, a small, obscure firm in Mississippi, announced that he was buying MCI for $42 billion of his company's stock. It was the largest takeover in history. How could this unknown man, a former gym teacher, emerge from nowhere with no capital to seize control of the second largest telecommunications company in America and gain immediate dominance over the global communications market?Ebbers forged this empire with little more than a keen understanding of how a jumble of diverse companies could be integrated to deliver a complete stream of communication services around the world—a task that eluded AT&T, MCI, and foreign telecom giants.1 Because he grasped the underlying insight needed to create this system, all else followed.Countless other examples show that today knowledge is the most powerful force on earth, primarily responsible for the collapse of communism, the restructuring of economies, and the unification of the world. After decades of glib talk about the Information Age, companies are becoming “learning organizations,” developing their “intellectual assets,” and hiring “chief knowledge officers” because we now see that knowledge is the source of all productivity, innovation, and competitive advantage. It is suddenly blindingly clear that knowledge is a boundless source of infinite power that promises to flood the world with creative progress. Bill Gates told a group of CEOs that information technology will “fulfill their wildest dreams.”2THE CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN CAPITAL AND KNOWLEDGEThe problem, however, is that this vast divide between a limited past and a boundless future has left business adrift in confusion—the flavor-of-the-month management fad syndrome—because we lack what economists call a workable “theory of the firm” for a knowledge-based economy. The “Old Management” of the Industrial Age is dying because it was based on capital-driven economics, and we now know that enterprise is no longer powered primarily by capital. Former Shell executive Arie De Geus says, “The critical resource is now people and the knowledge they possess.”3 This means that most corporate practices of today no longer make sense for the world we are entering.Corporations comprise economic systems that are as large as entire nations, yet ironically our most admired companies remain committed to roughly the same type of centrally controlled hierarchy that failed in the Soviet economy. We have seen a few marginal changes, but the bulk of useful knowledge lies unused among employees at the bottom of the firm and scattered outside its walls among customers, suppliers, and other groups—while most decisions are made by executives at the top.This yawning gap between promise and reality is merely a hint of the enormity of the upheaval that lies ahead. The entire social order is being uprooted by the move from a capital-centered past to a knowledge-centered future—even while we remain confused about what to do, where this is going, and what it all means. Without a theory of the firm based on the logic of knowledge, today's struggle for survival will remain an endless exercise in bewildering change and management fads.A NEW FOUNDATION BUILT ON AMERICAN IDEALSI want to suggest that a well-established foundation for a “New Management” of the Knowledge Age is readily available if we would simply look in the right place. America's heritage of democracy and free enterprise could serve us exceedingly well in this new frontier. Unfortunately, we tend to relegate these ideals to political elections and competition between firms. But if managers could extend the liberating power of democracy and markets inside business corporations, government agencies, and other social institutions that govern the daily flow of ordinary life, their widespread use would have a profound impact.This is not some hopelessly utopian quest because, as I intend to illustrate, trends are moving rapidly in this direction.To survive a world of constant change, massive diversity, and intense competition, leading corporations are dissolving their rigid hierarchies into fluid collections of self-managed units that use local knowledge to carve out successful market niches. As I will show later, this bottom-up approach should in time bring the power of enterprise to fruition as organizations melt into a churning sea of “internal markets” offering all of the creative dynamism of external markets—call it “the flowering of enterprise.”The move to democracy is equally apparent in the way creative managers now work closely with tough competitors, empowered employees, and discriminating clients. After a long history of conflict, collaborative working relations have become one of the most powerful forces in business because companies have come to the hard realization that the mutual sharing of knowledge with other parties is beneficial. Some companies, such as GM Saturn, are uniting their stakeholders into complete “corporate communities”—think of it as “the extension of democracy.”If managers could take a fresh look at these rich but misunderstood trends from the perspective of our traditions, the emerging pattern could guide our way ahead with confidence. As this book will demonstrate, the power of democracy and enterprise promises to transform institutions for a new era.Why should we be surprised? This is the philosophy that gave birth to the United States and that has brought down dictatorship after dictatorship. Free markets and democratic governance are the twin pillars supporting modern civilization. They are proven methods that we have found most useful because they involve us all in making decisions that govern our society.THE COMING PARALLEL REVOLUTIONSThis book describes leading-edge concepts and practices derived from my continuing study of the successful experiences of progressive companies. It's a strategic plan, a guidebook, designed to help us figure out where we are going.Follow me through the many examples, surveys, forecasts, and mini–case studies I've organized in the following chapters and you'll learn about three parallel revolutions that make up this transition to knowledge-based organizations. The figure on the facing page sketches out the flow of revolutionary advances along three major paths:1. the Information Revolution that is driving this transition2. the resulting transformation of business, government, and other institutions3. the creative new forms of leadership emerging to handle all this changeNote that these trends follow a rising exponential curve that is characteristic of all change today—the typical “J curve” depicted on the cover of this book. Whether it is the number of computers in use, strategic alliances, or new ventures, the trendline is curving sharply upward.THE TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION:JUST THE BEGINNING OF UNSTOPPABLE CHANGEThus far we have seen only the first rumblings of the information technology (IT) explosion that is yet to come. The simple changes are over and the most innovative, wrenching innovations lie ahead. I conduct a forecast of technological advances every two years, and the latest study detailed the arrival of eighty-five revolutionary breakthroughs.4 This wave of technological change is poised to crash over society during the next few decades as the rising power of IT feeds back to improve itself. Technology is basically knowledge, and the widespread use of IT is now driving our understanding of technical knowledge at ever faster rates. Here's a rough timetable of three major breakthroughs:2003 +/− 2 years. Interactive multimedia should be used by people everywhere to work, shop, study, and conduct all other activities electronically over life-sized wall monitors. Electronic commerce is expected to reach $12 billion by the year 2000 alone.2009 +/− 3 years. Smart machines, robots, and software should be able to interact with people, learn and reprogram themselves, and translate languages. Bill Gates said, “The future lies in computers that talk, listen, see, and learn.”PARALLEL REVOLUTIONS IN TECHNOLOGY, ORGANIZATION, AND LEADERSHIPimage2014 +/− 4 years. Optical computers and storage devices (as depicted in the Superman movies) should be available to process limitless information in any form. Andrew Grove, CEO of Intel, said, “Computer power will be practically free and almost infinite.”In short, this is just the beginning of historic changes that seem destined to alter all aspects of life. The IT of today—PCs, the Internet, cellular phones—will look primitive in a decade or so. The U.S. stock market has advanced roughly 1000 percent between 1985 and 1998 because Americans sense the economy is entering an era of almost limitless progress.THE ORGANIZATIONAL REVOLUTION:MANAGEMENT FROM THE BOTTOM-UP AND THE OUTSIDE-INThe heart of this book shows how the two principles of enterprise and democracy form a theory of the firm based on the laws of knowledge—The New Management. Two heretical applications follow from this philosophical foundation:• Internal Markets. Complexity is best managed not through planning and control—but by permitting widespread entrepreneurial freedom at the bottom of organizations.• Corporate Community. Economic strength flows not out of power and firmness—but out of the collaborative exchange of knowledge among the community of corporate stakeholders.Top-Down Control Destroys the Bulk of Corporate WealthDuring the 1990s, the decade of Capitalism Triumphant, we have constantly heard about the evils of central planning and authoritarian control, but anybody in business will tell you that the prevailing corporate system remains a centrally managed hierarchy adorned with a few gentle touches and good intentions. Despite fervent claims about empowerment, networking, teamwork, and other hot management concepts, this has also been a decade of harsh downsizing, top-down change, and extravagant executive pay.For instance, IBM's Louis Gerstner may have pulled Big Blue back from the brink but only by reinforcing fierce discipline and hierarchical control. IBM managers described their new boss this way: “His blunt style sent tremors through the organization.” In 1997, the value of IBM's individual divisions totalled $115 billion while the parent company was valued at $65 billion; the missing $50 billion was consumed by corporate bureaucracy. IBM's managers claim the software division alone wastes $200 million each year getting headquarter's approval for its 10,000 software projects.5Meanwhile the shock therapy approach to restructuring has become a way of life in America—even though this method is now notorious for creating meager economic gains, overburdened staffs, badly served clients, and alienated employees. In 1998, for example, GE's John Welch was planning to close plants, sell divisions, cut wages, and lay off thousands.This top-down approach may work in the short term, but like paint over rotted timbers, it masks the underlying weakness and invites catastrophes, such as we've seen in the decline of AT&T, Sears, GM, and many other former corporate giants. Top-down management is not going to withstand the massive changes looming ahead as relentless hypercompetition drives open a frontier of new products, markets, and industries that nobody really understands. Andrew Grove of Intel put it best: “The Internet is like a tidal wave, and we are in kayaks.”6Downsizing, for instance, seems to make sense from a capital-centered view, but the knowledge held by employees comprises 70 percent of all corporate assets!7 To put it more sharply, the economic value of employee knowledge exceeds by far all of the financial assets, capital investment, patents, and other resources of most firms. Firing people is akin to throwing the bulk of corporate wealth out the window.Downsizing can be best understood as a palliative, ritualistic practice, akin to bloodletting in primitive medicine, that reveals a far more serious organizational illness. Corporations shed workers repeatedly because they suffer from a chronic inability to create growth in a confusing new economic frontier. Instead, they downsize. It is like a bad habit, providing temporary relief by reducing labor costs while actually draining energy as companies lose skilled workers, creative ideas, loyalty, and other vital assets.Internal Markets Release Knowledge from the BottomThe solution is a fundamentally different approach that harnesses the creative talents lying dormant in average people. While Fortune 500 dinosaurs downsized by laying off three million employees during the 1990s, smaller firms and new ventures upsized by creating 21 million new jobs. This salient fact shows that the key to vitalizing organizations is to bring the liberating power of small enterprise inside of big business.In short, we need to shift the locus of power from top to bottom, to think of management in terms of enterprise rather than hierarchy. I know this sounds revolutionary, but this is a revolution as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution. We tend to hear the Information half of the phrase Information Revolution but ignore the Revolution half. The idea that Communism might yield to markets seemed preposterous a few years ago, but it did happen. Now similar change is needed in big corporations—“Corporate Perestroika.” Robert Shapiro, CEO of Monsanto, put it this way, “We have to figure out how to organize employees without intrusive systems of control. People give more if they control themselves.”8The following chapters offer hundreds of examples describing the clever forms of internal enterprise being used to solve problems directly, creatively, and quickly. Pay-for-performance plans are being expanded to form small, self-managed units that are held accountable for results but free to choose their workers, leaders, strategies, work methods, and generally “run their own business.” Line and support units are being converted into profit centers that buy and sell from each other and from outside the company, converting former monopolies into competitive business units. MCI, Xerox, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Siemens, Lufthansa, and other companies have developed fully decentralized bottom-up structures that form complete “internal market economies.”9 ABB's 4,500 independent profit centers stand out as a model.It only takes a little imagination to extend these trends to the point where the logic of free markets governs corporations rather than the logic of hierarchy. Internal markets have profound implications for business because they shift the source of knowledge, initiative, and control from top to bottom, thereby providing the same benefits as external markets: better decisions through price information, customer focus, accountability for economic results, and as much entrepreneurial freedom as possible.Yes, markets are messy, but they are also bursting with creative energy—roughly like the Internet, our best model of a self-organizing market system. Nobody could possibly control the Internet's complex activities, yet by allowing millions of people to pursue their own interests, somehow the system grows and thrives beyond anything we could imagine.In the final analysis, only a new form of management based on enterprise can meet the explosive challenges lying dead ahead. The hope that “participation,” “team spirit,” “inspiring leadership,” and other vague ideas can create dynamic action among tens of thousands of people in the typical organization is little more than pious wishing. Anyone who has ever managed knows that it is almost impossible to get more than twenty people to agree on anything. Mayor Steve Goldsmith of Indianapolis told me that he struggled for years trying various management methods, but nothing worked as well as turning his departments into self-supporting units competing with outside contractors.Difficult issues are involved in this change, of course, and we will explore them in the following chapters, as well as many progressive new ideas. For example, here are three simple but bold actions that highlight surefire ways to jumpstart your organization:• Link resources to performance. Rather than use budgets and other crude controls that are unrelated to results, link resource allocations to economic and social value created by units.• Allow units total freedom. Allow all units almost total operating and strategic freedom, including the right to buy and sell from partners both inside or outside the firm.• Replace downsizing with self-sizing. Let units handle their own staffing rather than impose layoffs. That is, use “self-sizing” instead of downsizing.Why would tough-minded executives yield control over these crucial matters? Because they can thereby lead an organization where everyone shares the responsibility for success.The Profit-Motive Destroys the Power of Social PurposeThis does not mean that CEOs give up power or that corporations are balkanized into warring camps. The role of executives shifts to designing these self-managed systems and providing leadership to unify diverse interests into a strategic whole—the concept of “corporate community.” Saturn, The Body Shop, IKEA, and scores of enlightened companies develop trusting relations with clients, share power with workers, and cooperate with suppliers, while also making more profit for investors.It's important to stress that these companies are not simply “doing good.” They create value by pooling knowledge among stakeholders to solve management problems. In other words, corporate community is economically effective.Beyond its many benefits, however, lies a vast and more powerful world of meaning and purpose. Corporate community is also essential to help us find our way through a turbulent world engulfed in an avalanche of expanding information. It is a great paradox that having so much more data often leaves us more confused because of its sheer limitlessness. We are beginning to understand that information is meaningless if it is not guided by relationships, values, and vision—all those subtle but very real qualities lying beyond knowledge.Unfortunately, these concepts run counter to the ideology of capitalism. The traditional idea that corporations owe their allegiance to shareholders and profit places managers in an unrealistic position where they are opposed to the interests of employees, customers, and others whose support is essential. Employee pay and training, for instance, are viewed as simply costs to be avoided. But the reality is that employee welfare and profitability are perfectly compatible. Companies that form employee partnerships enjoy huge returns on their investment in labor.10Consider how the health care industry provoked the public's wrath by cutting patient services to improve profits. Congress passed laws banning such practices, and 2,000 physicians called for change because HMOs (health maintenance organizations) are “destroying the soul of medicine.”11How did a great profession dedicated to serving humanity get into such a mess? In pursuing today's notion of good business, HMOs lost sight of their social purpose. It's obvious that we must control costs and investors must be rewarded; however, any business must also serve society to survive.This business-society conflict has everyone confused, wasting energy rather than working together toward common goals. Robert Haas, CEO of Levi Strauss, explained the problem. “People look through the wrong end of the telescope, as if profits drive business. Employee morale, turnover, consumer satisfaction … that's what drives financial results.”12Corporate Community Draws Knowledge from Outside GroupsIf American executives can look beyond the bottom line, they will find vast opportunities for profitable business flowing directly from joining with the interests of their stakeholders.In the health care industry, for instance, progressive HMOs are involving all parties in decisions to improve health care while reducing costs. Typically, physicians, nurses, and other staff are organized into self-managed practices that are accountable for performance but given wide freedom and support. Education programs assist patients in better managing their own health and in preventing illness by adopting healthier lifestyles. And to keep the system honest, states provide access to medical performance data to let market forces work. Doctors are now often stunned to see patients show up with a clutch of medical research reports in their hands.Here we see the power of knowledge-based enterprise. Progressive HMOs are redefining medicine into a more effective system of collaborative problem solving among administrators, medical staff, patients, their employers, and government—corporate community in action. This approach allowed Oxford Health Plans to double in size each year to serve one million members,13 Other companies in every industry could make a similar transformation.But doesn't this approach compromise the need to make money? A knowledge economy is changing the old assumption that profit and social benefits are opposed. Unlike capital with its fixed limits, knowledge increases when shared, which is why cooperation has now become efficient. For instance, today's wave of strategic alliances is fueled by the pooling of technology, market access, and other forms of knowledge to increase value for all partners. Ray Smith, CEO of Bell Atlantic, calls it the principle of loaves and fishes. “Unlike raw materials, knowledge can't be used up. The more you dispense, the more you generate.”14If cooperation can multiply the value of alliances with business partners, why shouldn't it be effective for social alliances with employees, customers, and other groups? Results reported in this book from my “Corporations in Transition” (CIT) survey of 426 managers show that more than 80 percent understand the need to collaborate with stakeholders.Although I like this idea because it resolves the age-old clash between business and society, I do not argue this case on moral grounds. Corporate community is not social responsibility or business ethics—it's one of the few remaining ways to sustain competitive advantage.In the following pages you will read detailed accounts of fascinating companies and business leaders who have pioneered this frontier. Imagine how the following creative but tough actions would electrify your organization with fresh knowledge from the outside parties you depend on to succeed:• Democratize Corporate Governance. Invite responsible, well-informed representatives of employees, clients, and business partners to seats on the board of directors and other bodies.• Evaluate Financial and Social Performance. Develop measures of performance that reflect the contributions and benefits of all stakeholders, as well as traditional financial performance.• Collaborate among Stakeholders. Use this democratic form of governance and performance measures to engage all stakeholders in joint problem solving to improve the overall system.These changes are not a luxury but a necessity for any business that hopes to meet the test of social purpose. The disorders of our time represent a vast frontier crying out for a new type of enterprise that creates value by integrating different interests to serve all needs better.THE LEADERSHIP REVOLUTION:RELINQUISHING THE ILLUSION OF CONTROLIf I am right, organizations are heading toward some sort of “economic reversal”—a passage from hierarchy to markets and from conflict to community. We seem to be roughly halfway through this passage, and the principles of a New Management are quietly gathering momentum. Exploding complexity is forcing decentralized controls, while the benefits of collaboration are attracting diverse parties into pockets of shared understanding.The way ahead seems clear. To manage organizations in a new era when ordinary people offer the most valuable resource available, leaders will have to push authority down to the bottom and out to all affected parties—a New Management based on shared leadership from the bottom-up and the outside-in. My CIT study shows that managers generally understand this shift is coming, and they expect it to arrive between the years 2000 and 2005.It is certainly needed. Today's creative destruction of free markets is uprooting the old social order, with mounting potential for a serious economic backlash. The income gap between the top and bottom classes in the United States has returned to the levels seen prior to the Great Crash of '29, while indices of social well-being have reached new lows.15 And much more turmoil lies ahead because world industrialization is likely to increase tenfold. The industrialization of China alone will triple the use of scarce resources, global competition, social diversity, and pollution. George Soros, the most famous capitalist of our time, called today's market system “The Capitalist Threat.”Moving through the Passage: Leaders as GardenersI suspect the only way this conflict can be resolved is by moving through the passage—by harnessing the potential of a New Management based on the laws of knowledge. The key is to see that capitalism is dying but enterprise and democracy are just beginning to flower. To realize these possibilities, however, leaders have to relinquish the illusion of control to adopt a more humble but realistic role of nurturing rather than commanding their organizations.The new science of complexity and chaos theory shows that organizations today must become shifting clusters of self-controlled autonomous units, a living superorganism of countless small cells that constantly adapt to a turbulent world. The Old Management was good for mechanistic business, but the New Management asks executives to give up their old role as captains of commerce to become “economic gardeners” of organic systems.I experienced an example of this coming role shift when attending a fundraiser at my son's high school recently. These used to be loud, hard-sell events that auctioned prizes to the highest bidder, leaving people dazed but feeling sort of loyal for attending what was basically an unpleasant bash. This time we were invited to enjoy a quiet dinner with a few other parents and teachers at small tables. The result was a meaningful dialogue about the raising of our children and the role of the school. Rather than leave the event with a headache as I usually did, I left this fundraiser with a deeper appreciation for the institution I entrust my son to. And the school benefited not only from our heightened support but from the more generous checks we willingly wrote after an enjoyable encounter that left us all feeling connected.It seems to me that this is what leaders have to cultivate today. The glitzy marketing, brutal treatment of throw-away workers, and all the other relics of a more exuberant but thoughtless economic youth must yield to a maturity that is quieter but more powerful. Leaders must find a way to serve unmet social needs, develop information systems to sharpen our understanding, help employees organize into self-managed units, and form collaborative relationships to resolve the old conflicts between workers and managers, sellers and buyers, and all the other divisions we can no longer afford.Leaders can't force people to do any of these complex tasks any more than gardeners can force nature to produce what they want. Gardeners have to be attentive to the subtle signs of need in their gardens. They must provide the right amounts of water, light, and nutrients and then lovingly allow plants to grow as they should. In other words, they must let go. Listen to how Bob Kuperman, CEO of Chiat/Day, described this new role:Basically our organization is now a living thing with a life all its own. Management can support it and guide it, but not control it. If you let it design itself, it takes off and people use their best possible abilities. We've got to make this succeed because the old way doesn't work anymore.16Heritage, Heresy, and the Laws of KnowledgeOne particularly crucial, symbolic action would signify these three revolutions, help us grasp them, and live up to the challenge. Drawing on our heritage as a nation born through revolution, Americans should summon up our traditional courage to proclaim a modern heresy—our economic system should no longer be thought of as “capitalism.”Capitalism is an outmoded type of market system dedicated to the pursuit of capital, profit, and the other material factors that worked in the industrial past. The main thing impeding us at this point is sheer ideology. If we want to draw on the energy of the future, we should define our economic system in terms of the laws of knowledge that define the future. Economic success is no longer powered by capital but by free enterprise and democratic community. I suggest a more accurate, fitting name for our system would be “Democratic Enterprise.”Corporate executives are the primary candidates for creating this system because business is the most powerful institution in society. A system of democratic enterprise would allow us to more easily navigate this economic passage, and managers could then shed their old role as the bad guys to assume their rightful place as the heroes who make a knowledge society work.WILLIAM E. HALALWashington, D.C.July 1998Foreword, Raymond E. Miles Acknowledgments Introduction: From Capitalism to Democratic EnterpriseChapter 1: Management in Transition: Bridging That Divide Between the Old and the NewPART ONE: Redefining the Foundation of ManagementChapter 2: From Hierarchy to Enterprise: Internal Markets Are the New Form of Organization StructureChapter 3: From Profit to Democracy: Corporate Community Is the New Form of Organization GovernanceChapter 4: The New Management Synthesis: Uniting Internal Markets and Corporate CommunityPART TWO: Building an Entrepreneurial CommunityChapter 5: The Serving Enterprise: Relinquishing Our Grip on Self-InterestChapter 6: Knowledge Entrepreneurs: A Working Contract of Rights and ResponsibilitiesChapter 7: Intelligent Growth: Balancing Ecological Health and Economic ProgressPART THREE: Leading in the New Economic OrderChapter 8: Continuous Change: Rooting the Organization into Its EnvironmentChapter 9: Inner Leadership: How to Handle the Coming Power ShiftChapter 10: Managing a Unified World: Global Order out of Local InstitutionsConclusionDrawing on the Power of HeritageAppendixesA B CThe Organization ExerciseThe Stakeholder Meeting Corporations in Transition StudyIndex The Author
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Affiche du document Human Resource Management in the Knowledge Economy

Human Resource Management in the Knowledge Economy

Cyndy Lengnick-Hall

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124 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 1h33min.
Offers a fundamentally new conceptual model for the human resource function to meet the challenges of the knowledge economy Provides concrete suggestions for implementing this model, including numerous examples of effective practices from leading-edge firms Synthesizes current thinking on knowledge management and intellectual capital and identifies how human resource management can make a value-added contribution As more organizations recognize the importance of intellectual capital and knowledge management to competitive success, you would expect human resources (HR) to move to the forefront of organizational leadership. Yet, to the contrary, HR continues to be criticized for its operational and bureaucratic focus and its inability to keep up with changes in the environment. Human Resource Management in the Knowledge Economy examines how human resource management must change if it is to remain a vital part of the organization. The Lengnick-Halls show how HR departments can move beyond a simple operational focus on attracting, selecting, developing, retaining, and using employees to a more strategic focus on managing human capital and managing knowledge. The book identifies the most important features of the knowledge economy and details four new roles HR must adopt in order to help organizations succeed in this new environment: human capital steward, knowledge facilitator, relationship builder, and rapid deployment specialist. Each of these roles is defined and described in detail using examples from leading-edge businesses. Human Resource Management in the Knowledge Economy describes how human resource management has evolved and continues to evolve to meet the increasing demands of organizations for sources of competitive advantage.
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Affiche du document Formula 2+2

Formula 2+2

Doug Allen

45min45

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61 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 46min.
The latest volume in Berrett-Koehler's Ken Blanchard Series Includes a foreword by Ken Blanchard, an introduction by Bill Cosby, and a mid-book message from lunar astronaut Buzz Aldrin Offers managers a simple system that will increase their effectiveness and improve employee morale and productivity Written in the accessible and compelling Blanchard storytelling style In today's fast-paced and rapidly changing business environment, frequent feedback and "course correction" is absolutely vital. But about the only time most managers offer employees feedback is during scheduled (and generally infrequent) performance appraisals, which tend to be stiff, formal, and-whether intentionally or not-adversarial, and therefore ineffective. Formula 2+2 offers a simple yet powerful approach to revolutionizing feedback conversations. It details the five secrets of effective feedback: making it timely, balanced between compliments and critiques, focused on high priority areas, supported with specific examples, and reinforced with appropriate follow-up. The book tracks the transformation of Pauline, a strong but traditional leader whose attempts at coaching and feedback are failing miserably. An old friend introduces her to Formula 2+2 and walks her through the five secrets of effectively implementing 2+2 feedback. Pauline discovers that providing feedback is not a necessary evil, but can become a welcome part of the manager's job. Formula 2+2 shows how to foster a culture of continuous feedback which increases the effectiveness of the manager, protects the spirit and dignity of employees, and provides a systematic approach to reinforcing and improving employee performance.
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Affiche du document The End of Diversity As We Know It

The End of Diversity As We Know It

Martin N. Davidson

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125 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 1h34min.
Well-intentioned diversity programs are failing to create true workplace equality; Martin Davidson provides a new model for the future that makes "leveraging difference" a critical business strategy, not just politically correct window dressing.The idea for this book came to Martin Davidson during a disarmingly honest conversation with a CFO he worked with. Look, the executive said, clearly troubled. I know we can get a diverse group of people around the table. But so what? What difference does it really make to getting bottom-line results?Answering the so what? led Davidson to explore the flaws in how companies typically manage diversity. They don't integrate diversity into their overall business strategy. They focus on differences that have little impact on their business. And often their diversity efforts end up hindering the professional development of the very people they were designed to help.Davidson explains how what he calls Leveraging Difference turns persistent diversity problems into solutions that drive business results. Difference becomes a powerful source of sustainable competitive advantage instead of a distracting mandate handed down from HR.To begin with, leaders must identify the differences most important to achieving organizational goals, even if the differences aren't the obvious ones. The second challenge is to help employees work together to understand the ways these differences matter to the business. Finally, leaders need to experiment with how to use these relevant differences to get things done. Davidson provides compelling examples of how organizations have tackled each of these challenges.Ultimately this is a book about leadership. As with any other strategic imperative, leaders need to take an active role-drive rather than just delegate. Successfully leveraging difference can be what distinguishes an ordinary organization from an extraordinary one.IntroductionA New Possibility for DifferenceWhat does it take to create an organization that can do this?Multinational manufacturer Procter & Gamble's business is innovation. With more than $2.9 billion in annual sales in Canada, the company is constantly trying to improve its products and develop new ones. The global business service unit at P&G in Canada is in charge of designing business solutions and is composed of about 150 multifunctional professionals. They come from more than 40 nations, including Venezuela, Japan, Israel, and Ghana, and speak more than 20 languages.To build and foster a culture of innovation, P&G has entrenched diversity as a key principle in the workplace and leveraged the skilled immigrant talent pool. When faced with the challenge of offshoring and outsourcing in 2002, group members realized, if they wanted to keep their jobs in Canada, they needed to adapt and leverage this diversity in a way no one else could. Now, the global business service unit in Canada has a unique position within the company. It is one of only four groups in the world devoted to sourcing and supporting P&G services such as IT, employee benefits and payroll, business analytics, and purchasing on a global scale.In addition to creating a diverse employee mix internally, P&G is open to and prides itself on collaboration with external partners. It has formalized this strategy through its Connect and Develop program. Historically, P&G's best innovations came from connecting ideas across internal businesses. Taking this one step further, the company decided to set a goal to acquire 50 percent of innovations from outside the company. The move was not meant to displace P&G's own staff, but to leverage them by exposing them to even more diverse ideas, people and products. P&G can now identify promising ideas throughout the world and apply its own research and development, manufacturing, marketing, and purchasing capabilities to create better and cheaper products faster.P&G's leaders turned difference into advantage in other ways as well. It was quickly apparent they could only meet their growth goals through a combination of organic growth and growth through acquisition. They decided that these did not have to be disparate activities. Indeed, they realized that learning could be bidirectional.1This description of Proctor and Gamble Canada was excerpted from an article entitled Companies Embrace Power of Diversity. As the title suggests, the goal of the story was to highlight the importance of diversity in organizations. But this is not the typical diversity story, the one extolling the virtues of inclusion and highlighting a variety of diversity best practices like targeted hiring, employee networks, and mentoring. This one is different.First, this diversity story starts with the company's overarching strategy. P&G is an innovation company and it focuses on the kinds of diversity that help it to be a better innovation company. As a result, the article never mentions race, gender, sexual orientation, or age. It's not that these differences don't support innovation. But P&G Canada is much more focused in its approach to diversity of talent. It emphasizes national cultural diversity as most critical to supporting its strategic imperative to innovate in this particular business context. It seems that P&G Canada has a larger goal than simply being an employer of choice for people of various diverse backgrounds.That larger goal becomes more apparent through initiatives such as the Connect and Develop program. It is designed to cultivate internal and external partner relationships as a way of generating new ways to think about the business. The idea is that supporting diverse collaborations that extend beyond normal corporate boundaries can create even stronger, more innovative results. The program has helped the company apply its innovative process in creating products all over the world.Diversity is also evident in P&G Canada's growth strategy. Company leaders recognized that cultivating new partnerships would infuse the organization with tangible resources and novel perspectives that would help it grow and compete more sustainably.In sum, this diversity story is really about how P&G Canada capitalizes on difference in the broadest terms. The company connects with globally diverse stakeholders, and it uses those stakeholders to create value in unique and powerful ways.The breadth of the P&G Canada example surfaces an uncomfortable truth about traditional methods of managing diversity: they don't usually go far enough to really make companies better. In many organizations, the indicators of whether diversity efforts are successful have been how many people from group X are hired or promoted or fired, or how much product is sold to group Y. This approach doesn't begin to do justice to the potentially positive effect that differences can have on an organization like P&G Canada. The real value of diversity emerges when exploring difference becomes standard operating procedure. Organizations that excell in the global marketplace aren't thinking of diversity as a tangential activity handled by the HR department. Rather, diversity is mission critical. Differences are present-among employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, acquired or acquiring organizations, and governments. Success comes not from shying away from these differences, but from fiercely and skillfully capitalizing on them.Traditional ways of managing diversity won't always help leaders take advantage of those differences. In fact, sometimes these approaches actually cause problems that destroy, rather create, value. This book is about how organizations can thrive by making the most of the diversity that is right there among their stakeholders. The Leveraging Difference approach is designed to foster superior firm performance, both in the present and the future. Drawing on examples from organizations in the United States and around the world, my goal is to guide readers in moving from traditional methods of managing diversity to fully leveraging difference.My First Glimpse into Leveraging DifferenceA few years back, I worked with members of the leadership team of a Fortune 50 company. The focus was on developing leadership abilities, and I had designed a curriculum that emphasized the role of diversity in leadership. I confess I was more than a little intimidated. Here I was, an untenured (that is, expendable) faculty member preparing to work with a group of thirty-five executives, of whom thirty-three were senior white males, one was a white woman, and one was a multiracial male. I worried that most of them were fairly jaded when it came to diversity and would be bracing themselves for more of the same old rhetoric. I really wanted to make my sessions engaging and stimulating, and I wasn't sure I knew quite how to do so.Over a four-day period, I spent time with them in four sessions of about ninety minutes each, interspersed between presentations on other topics by two colleagues. My first session went fine. The material was strong, I thought, and I also felt that I was working with a tailwind. This group was energized, upbeat, and excited about engaging in new ideas-in part, I realized, because of some great classes they'd already taken with my colleagues. Thanks to that bonding experience, they were open and ready for learning. By the way, this was in stark contrast to the usual modus operandi for the group. This was a high-performing company that generated terrific results in its industry, but theirs was not a culture of positivity or high energy. They did a job, did it well, and moved on to the next task, all the while critiquing why the job done well hadn't been done better.My second and third classes with them were also okay, though certainly not great. My prediction at the time was that the leaders would evaluate the sessions as fine (and then critique them) but that our time together would have little lasting impact on them.And then something happened.The company's CEO stopped by to speak to the group. This was routine for such programs. This CEO was renowned as a strong and thoughtful leader who held his people accountable for results. His task here was to share some of what he had learned by taking the program a year earlier (before I was part of it). He began to speak about the benefits he'd derived from the program, and then-to the surprise of many-he wandered into a critique of leadership development programs like the one we were part of at that moment. His question wasn't whether our program was good or bad (he thought it was quite good), but rather whether such deep explorations into learning and leadership weren't actually indulgences that distracted from the real business at hand: bottom-line results. He proceeded to lay down the company's law of performance and to remind everyone that they were accountable for results.When he'd finished speaking a half hour later, the group sat in stunned silence. After a few moments, people engaged in polite and sometimes challenging Q&A, but mostly they sat glassy-eyed. The CEO had left me fairly speechless, too. But I figured that was just how things worked in this company, and I left to prepare for my next day's class.When I showed up the next morning, the buoyant, energetic group of executives I had been working with all week now sat dejected and disengaged. We went through the motions until, disturbed by this marked shift in mood, I called time out and asked what was wrong. Needless to say, it was all about the CEO's talk the prior afternoon. People expressed their disappointment and sadness about what they had heard. They felt duped and resentful about having really opened up to new possibilities, only to have their sponsor slap them down. Indeed, some confessed to having felt the need to drown their sorrows in a drink or two the night before.As I listened, something occurred to me. I had worked with one of the company's African American employee resource networks. In the unit I'd visited, younger African American employees had been struggling, and turnover was unusually high. I had been struck by how these conscientious and committed young professionals were convinced they couldn't be successful in this company because of its difficult culture. Now, as I looked at these executives, I was struck by how much they resembled those disenfranchised African American employees. Both groups were de-motivated and unhappy. Both were frustrated and resentful. I shared my observation and summarized by saying, You know, in this moment you are just like the black people in your company, the very same people that are the source of concern and consternation to so many of your managers.They were shocked. To be honest, so was I. But the connection seemed critical for them, and in retrospect it was critical for me as well. The essential insight from my conversation with that mostly white, mostly male group was that they actually had a great deal in common with their African American employees. What they all shared was a common experience of how people were managed in the company. The firm's style and culture had a distinct effect on its people, and while some of that was constructive-they were high performing-some of it was not.The relentless focus on results to the exclusion of empowering, appreciating, and celebrating the people who created those results was detrimental-even toxic-for many. And the black employees were the canaries in the coal mine. They were the ones who, by virtue of being marginalized in the company, were more vulnerable to this negative side of management style. When they voiced the challenges they felt around the lack of employee empowerment and autonomy, and the diminished opportunity to advance, they were highlighting a vulnerability that every employee in that company faced, regardless of race.Until that moment, these executives had operated under the illusion that they would never have the same disempowering experience those black junior employees had. That illusion was now over. Everyone was in it together.Several years later, this company has evolved, and its culture and management style are shifting. Not surprisingly, this has been fueled by leadership transitions and by the influence of newly acquired companies from around the globe. But in my time with that group of leaders, I caught a glimpse of why difference is so critically important for organizations. The new perspective-the extraordinary dissent-emerges because there is an opportunity for improvement and a need to change the status quo. It is the critical resource for helping organizations to innovate and operate more effectively. And the ability to look for and listen to these different perspectives-or to proactively solicit them-is one of several core skills that I'll expand upon in this book.2Overview and Roadmap for the BookTraditional diversity efforts-in this book I call them Managing Diversity-focus on recruiting and integrating people who represent a varied but limited set of diverse identities. Following the Hudson Institute's prescient Workforce 2000 report in 1987 forecasting dramatic demographic changes in the U.S. workforce,3 organizations have evolved numerous Managing Diversity initiatives to help them deal with this new workforce. These initiatives have had a significant impact over the past two decades. The best ones have made organizations more welcoming for traditionally excluded people and helped companies enter new and diverse markets. But even the best of these initiatives are now falling short of solving the challenges of competing in the complex modern marketplace because they unduly narrow the potential impact difference can have on an organization.Traditional diversity efforts frequently emphasize how to develop workplaces in which people with different perspectives and identities work well together despite (and because of) their differences. For example, Northrop Grumman Corporation, one of DiversityInc's Top 50 Companies for Diversity, has as its diversity and inclusion goal to attract, develop, and retain the best and brightest from all walks of life and backgrounds. This requires an organization to have a culture of inclusion where all individuals feel respected, are treated fairly, provided work-life balance, and an opportunity to excel in their chosen careers.4 PricewaterhouseCoopers, the third-ranked company on DiversityInc's list, states that its diversity initiatives and strategies are designed to attract, develop, and advance the most talented individuals regardless of their race, sexual orientation, religion, age, gender, or any other dimension of diversity.5This goal of attracting and engaging employees with varied identities and perspectives is a necessary part of any significant diversity initiative. But it isn't sufficient in itself to take full advantage of what those differences can offer. Organizations that truly leverage difference cultivate the capability to engage with and learn from diverse stakeholders, including employees, customers, partners, and communities. They use what they learn to explore how they can do the work of their organization more effectively. They are able to apply lessons of difference to domains as wide-ranging as customer engagement, operational procedures, and alliances with community resources. With time, these organizations can become difference factories. But first leaders must move beyond thinking about diversity simply as race, gender, culture or personality differences. In the following chapters we will explore the larger mosaic and begin to map out how leaders and organizations can leverage the many kinds of difference that might make a difference to their businesses.The first chapter-The End of Diversity as We Know It-argues that traditional approaches to diversity (those we call Managing Diversity) are not very effective in contemporary organizations. Drawing on the best research in the field, it takes on some diversity sacred cows and outlines when diversity helps and when it doesn't. It then highlights shortcomings in the Managing Diversity approach that are tough to admit but that need to be discussed. The second chapter, The Beginning of Leveraging Difference, introduces a remedy and shows how the Managing Diversity approach or frame differs from what I call Leveraging Difference. Managing Diversity is not an inherently bad way to deal with difference-it has often been effective in past decades. But it isn't going to be effective in the coming decades. A new frame is necessary: Leveraging Difference.In chapter 3, The Leveraging Difference Capability, co-author Heather Wishik and I begin to define how organizations can apply Leveraging Difference to change the way they operate. One of the shortcomings of the Managing Diversity approach was that it wasn't well integrated into organizational strategy; in most cases it was either a component of or a tactical add-on to HR management. Conceiving of Leveraging Difference as strategic for the entire organization moves diversity to center stage and makes it the job of every manager and leader, not just an HR diversity specialist. Developing that Leveraging Difference capability requires moving through a cycle of seeing, understanding, and engaging difference, and we use a detailed case from Wipro Technologies to show Leveraging Difference in action.Chapter 4, Seeing Difference, describes the first phase of the cycle in detail. This is the point at which leaders identify what differences are likely to be strategically relevant for them. Key competencies for seeing difference are discussed, including understanding the enterprise strategy, having a mindset that assumes that differences are there (and do affect the organization), and managing the filters and biases that keep us from seeing difference accurately. Chapter 5, Understanding Difference, explores the point at which leaders learn how those differences are affecting the organization, and how they might enhance bottom-line results. I also discuss how learning is accelerated when leaders build healthy relationships across difference and learn to manage charged emotions and conflict that can emerge in those relationships. And finally the chapter discusses ways to build systems in organizations that provide information about relevant differences whenever needed.The last part of the Leveraging Difference cycle is discussed in chapter 6, Engaging Difference. This is when knowledge is translated into coordinated action. Engaging difference projects are experiments that allow organizations to explore ways to use relevant difference to generate results. The case studies in this chapter, co-authored with Heather Wishik, show organizations as they move through the three stages of the cycle: seeing, understanding, and engaging difference.Chapter 7, Discovering Leveraging Difference, offers insight into what organizations that have developed a Leveraging Difference capability look like, and it describes in more depth the dynamic quality of the cycle. It explains what leaders can do to help organizations shift from simply conducting successful engaging difference experiments here and there to truly implementing a Leveraging Difference capability.The book's epilogue, The Power of the Margin, addresses more directly the challenge of not dismissing intractable differences like race, gender, or sexual orientation because they appear not to be strategically relevant differences. Rather than breathing a sigh of relief at being able to avoid these perplexing differences, leaders should engage them eagerly. Each country and culture has it hot spot differences, the ones that are most emotionally charged and difficult to come to terms with. These could be precisely the differences that can help organizations learn to develop their Leveraging Difference capability most effectively.Who This Book Can HelpI wrote this book for an unusually disparate audience of leaders. I believe that it can help senior executives, middle managers, chief learning officers, human resource professionals, corporate diversity professionals, and management consultants-especially those who focus on diversity. I don't subscribe to the notion that leaders are found only at the tops of organizations. Leaders are everywhere. Some have titles, some don't. One of the most powerful insights to come from our work with diversity is that leadership often is present in unexpected places, demonstrated by people we didn't think had it in them.Senior executives will be able to use the book as a roadmap to helping create value for their businesses. One of the book's main tenets is that diversity activity should flow from an organization's comprehensive business strategy. Difference is an important but neglected resource that leaders can use in the development and execution of that strategy. Concrete leadership actions are presented for developing an organizational capability for leveraging difference.Middle-level managers can use the book to make sense of the diversity demands their organizations place on them. Having a leadership perspective is incredibly useful, even if you aren't yet a senior leader, and this book can encourage that mindset. From a practical point of view, it offers concrete steps for building positive professional relationships with colleagues, subordinates, and superiors. The techniques that are useful for managing across differences are often just as useful for managing someone you think is just like you.Dealing with traditional Managing Diversity efforts is often the most challenging for middle managers. It puts pressure on them to operate in ways that aren't always comfortable, and that can breed resistance. This can be especially challenging for managers from majority groups-in the United States, straight white men (in other countries, it might be someone else). This book offers a clear and compelling rationale for being open to learning about groups different from one's own. And it can help majority managers better understand their role in leveraging difference.Chief learning officers, human resource and corporate diversity specialists, and diversity consultants-those tasked with being experts in diversity-can benefit from this book for many of the same reasons as executives and managers. The book offers a new set of tools to help them develop their expertise, and it provides them with useful strategies for influencing their organizational constituents.The Research MethodologyInsights and recommendations in this book are based on data from a number of sources. My colleagues and I collected survey and interview data from managers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds in a variety of U.S. organizations. In addition, we interviewed senior executives in the Americas, Europe, and Asia as part the Successful Global Leadership Project sponsored by the Batten Institute at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia. We also conducted in-depth case and action research with more than twenty organizations spanning multiple industries. And we drew on a range of archival data available in the public domain.In the research we conducted with domestic managers, we examined what practices and processes best create a climate in which managers with diverse identities feel they can succeed. Our survey sample of managers included 133 African Americans, 111 other managers of color, and 244 white managers, for a total of 488. Of those, 34 African American managers (26 percent of those surveyed), 79 white managers (32 percent), 13 Hispanic managers (29 percent), and 8 Asian American managers (12 percent) responded to our survey. We followed up by conducting individual interviews with thirty-two of the managers, half of them white and half managers of color.To expand our inquiry, we collected interview data from twenty-three senior executives (as well as their superiors and those who report directly to them) as part of the Successful Global Leadership Project. We investigated how globally diverse leaders and companies develop people and practices to leverage differences within their organizations, among customers and markets, and on leadership teams. We examined what they have learned about the processes, assumptions, understandings, and leadership skills that equip leaders and managers to develop critical and strategic relationships. Seven global enterprises were selected for the project, operating in the United States, South America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and Asia.These projects yielded in-depth case material. We were able to collect data on strategy, marketing, product development, client relations, operational effectiveness, and talent management practices for a subset of the organizations. We also drew on our research with multiple organizations noted for effective work involving diversity and difference.All the examples and case studies in the book come from this research. One of the challenges of writing substantively about real-world diversity is that companies cannot always be forthcoming about their identities, and I have respected that. Therefore, organizations and individuals that have been disguised are marked with asterisks when introduced in the text. All other companies are not disguised, and their experiences can be explored further if the reader is interested.Searching for the AnswersAs I wrote this book, I frequently reflected on my desire to write something that would provide answers to all the burning questions about differences in organizations. I talk with leaders all over the world who earnestly want to know how to deal more productively with differences. I cannot provide all the answers-I don't believe anyone can. But I'm not sure that is such a bad thing. There is something powerful in the collective endeavor of searching for those answers.It makes sense that no one person can answer these important questions. Really answering them requires that many diverse individuals, holding diverse ideas and perspectives, come together in an empowering context to work in partnership. Their gathering places may be boardrooms or community centers or kitchen tables. They may be discussion boards or chat rooms. Wherever this coming-together happens, that is where the best answers will be found. My hope is that this book can be a resource for anyone engaged in the questioning and the learning.INTRODUCTION: A NEW POSSIBILITY FOR DIFFERENCEWho This Book Can HelpOverview and Roadmap for the BookThe Research MethodologyConclusionCHAPTER 1: THE END OF DIVERSITY AS WE KNOW ITCurrent Approaches to Diversity Are FailingThe Problem with Managing DiversityHow It Can Be Done DifferentlyKey TakeawaysCHAPTER 2: THE BEGINNING OF LEVERAGING DIFFERENCEAfter Managing DiversityContextLeadership PerspectiveStrategic FocusScope of Differences EngagedImpact of ChangeThe Intersection of Managing Diversity and Leveraging DifferenceWhat Next?Key TakeawaysCHAPTER 3: THE LEVERAGING DIFFERENCE CAPABILITY, by Martin N. Davidson & Heather R. WishikThe Leveraging Difference CapabilityThe Case of Wipro TechnologiesThe Leveraging Difference Cycle at WiproKey TakeawaysCHAPTER 4: SEEING DIFFERENCEThe Cost of Not Seeing Relevant DifferenceHow to See DifferenceConclusionKey TakeawaysCHAPTER 5: UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENCEHow to Understand DifferenceHow Understanding Difference Encourages Seeing DifferenceKey TakeawaysCHAPTER 6: ENGAGING DIFFERENCE, by Martin Davidson and Heather WishikHow to Engage DifferenceOffer a Vision of Business Benefits to Be SeizedInvolve Multiple StakeholdersSupport Innovative ApproachesStay the CourseBe Open to Being ChangedCaveat: Not All Engaging Difference Experiments Are SuccessfulConclusionKey TakeawaysCHAPTER 7: BECOMING A LEVERAGING DIFFERENCE ORGANIZATION, by Martin N. Davidson & Heather R. WishikHow You Know When You Are Leveraging DifferenceHow Leaders Move their Organization to Leveraging DifferenceConclusionKey TakeawaysEPILOGUE: THE POWER OF THE MARGINTaking from the Margin to Rethink the WholeNotesBibliographyAcknowledgmentsAbout the Author
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Affiche du document Mother Teresa, CEO

Mother Teresa, CEO

Louis Faust III

54min45

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73 pages. Temps de lecture estimé 55min.
When most people think of Mother Teresa, they think of a saint—a spiritual hero of extraordinary humanitarian accomplishments, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. But Mother Teresa was also the leader of one of the world’s largest and most successful organizations: the Missionaries of Charity. Since founding it in 1948 she has raised millions of dollars and, with over a million volunteers in more than 100 countries, it remains one of the most recognized brands in the world. How did one nun who never received any formal education in business build such an impressive global organization? Frank, realistic, and firmly grounded in practicality, Mother Teresa’s leadership style helped to inspire and organize people across the world. This book shares ten essential leadership principles drawn from Mother Teresa’s example and applies them to today’s business world. Authors Ruma Bose, an entrepreneur who volun- teered with Mother Teresa, and Lou Faust, a leading business expert, are the first to examine her in this light—as a leader whose management style and dedication to a singular vision led to one of the world’s most unlikely success stories. Mother Teresa may have been a saint, but her spectacular success was not a product of divine providence. Her genius was the simplicity of her vision and her dedication to its implementation. It was in the way she treated her people, refusing to distance herself from the everyday work of a typical sister of the Missionaries of Charity. It was in how she handled tough choices—like accepting donations from brutal Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. These were the principles that made her the great leader of a global organization, and they can be applied by anyone in any organization—no sainthood required.
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