Building Your Own Kaleidoscope
January 29, 2008
To create your own kaleidoscope, start by sketching out your framework. Take a piece of paper and draw four intersecting circles. Label them happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy. In each circle, list self, family, work, and community. This will enable you to do a full inventory of the mix and determine how each piece falls in the context of each major domain of your life. (See the exhibit “My Personal Kaleidoscope.”)
Next, quickly jot down examples of your successes or great satisfactions.You don’t have to come up with one for every item in every circle – this is just a quick sketch of your beliefs about yourself, not the full picture. Don’t spend time worrying about whether you should put a particular target next to a particular item. Just work with your first impulses.
Take your college degree as an example. You may feel that graduating from college was a major achievement, a benchmark in your overall career plans and something you will value for your whole life.Your degree represents a mastery of skills. You had to compete successfully to get there and get the grades. You felt satisfaction when you were successful. So you would write “college” in your achievement chamber, next to the word “work.”
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Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
The Kaleidoscope Strategy
January 26, 2008
We compare an effective success strategy to a kaleidoscope – that simple mechanical device with a lens,mirror, and a long tube housing separate chambers. Each chamber holds pieces of glass that constantly shift as the tube is moved. Although the chambers are separate, the eye sees one unique picture made up of the various chambers. Mirrors reflect the entire set of glass chips and enhance the complexity of the pattern. The beauty of that pattern comes from the variety and symmetry of the design. Although the patterns in a kaleidoscope are inherently unstable, changed by your own movements or by outside forces, the pieces provide ongoing satisfaction as they take their places within new patterns.
Now imagine a slightly different kind of kaleidoscope, one that is your own vision of a successful life. This kaleidoscope also has four chambers – happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy – and you can add brilliant glass pieces (goals sought and fulfilled) over a lifetime, making your unique pattern richer and richer. In this metaphor, success is about choice, movement, pattern, and a structure that holds all the separate activities together. And, just like a kaleidoscope, you have to hold this pattern up to the light. By regularly assessing the picture you are creating in all four chambers, you can quickly spot “holes” – places you feel require more attention – in your activities and be assured that you are justified in interrupting other work to attend to them. The rest of the chips will be enough for the moment, but not enough for the rest of your life.
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The Complexity of Success
January 23, 2008
Success involves more than a heartpounding race to the finish line. Our research uncovered four irreducible components of enduring success: happiness (feelings of pleasure or contentment about your life); achievement (accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others have strived for); significance (the sense that you’ve made a positive impact on people you care about); and legacy (a way to establish your values or accomplishments so as to help others find future success).
These four categories form the basic structure of what people try to gain through the pursuit and enjoyment of success.Take away any one component, and it no longer feels like “real”success. If you were wildly wealthy because you had mastered a certain business problem but couldn’t experience pleasure, for instance, would you consider yourself successful? If building your power base kept you from being there for others, would your success feel morally right? If you left your career to be a fulltime parent, would you have enough of an outlet for your talents? Just as a steady diet of the same four foods would hardly be satisfying over the long term, the four components of success cannot be satisfied by the presence of a single flavor in each category. That is why you cannot neatly categorize the realms of your life, assigning happiness to self, achievement to work, significance to family, legacy to community.
Unless you hit on all four categories with regularity, any one win will fail to satisfy. You’ll experience what we call the “wince factor”: You know you’re doing what is right, but it still feels like a loss.You’re preoccupied with thoughts of the other things you could be doing or getting. Your achievements and pleasures fade almost as soon as they occur. By contrast, success that encompasses all four kinds of accomplishment is enriching; it endures. You can create this synergy within a single event, but you can also create it through a juxtaposition of activities. Taking time out in the middle of a high-stress period or stopping to give back to the community while in the midst of pursuing your most self-advancing goals are good examples of this.
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Success That Lasts
January 20, 2008
Our research took a fresh look at the assumptions behind success. We were interested in real, enduring success – where getting what you want has rewards that are sustainable for you and those you care about. This type of attainment delivers a sense of legitimacy and importance; its satisfactions endure far beyond the momentary rewards of a bonus or a new position. Lasting success is emotionally renewing, not anxiety provoking.
Unlike an equation for a successful market strategy, no one person or company can fully embody lasting success for others. Everyone (and every business) has a unique vision of real success, and that notion changes over time. A family-oriented person would hardly call the absentee life of a top executive a success but might find travel and adventure just the ticket after the kids grow up. A born investment banker would hardly regard mixing cement as a successful career, whereas a construction worker who just completed an extraordinary bridge might point to the structure with pride for the rest of his or her life. No one, however, has unreserved success, not even the most obvious winner.Recognizing how important it is for each person to understand and develop his or her unique definition of success over time, we chose not to report on one or two well-known examples of success as the perfect model to follow.
Nonetheless, for the purposes of research, we posited five common characteristics of individuals who by most standards had achieved enduring success: high achievement, multiple goals, the ability to experience pleasure, the ability to create positive relationships, and a value on accomplishments that endure.
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The Bottom Line: Better Business Performance
January 17, 2008
Senior teams that have engaged in this process have been able to make dramatic changes in how their businesses were organized and managed – and in their firms’bottomline performance.One Hewlett-Packard division improved profitability ninefold over a seven-year period; managers and employees engaged in a conversation each year using the strategic fitness process. Senior corporate executives reported that the division’s senior team had transformed the division from the worst to one of the best in the sector. Ten country organizations in Merck’s Latin American region were transformed when senior vice president Grey Warner, who headed the region, introduced this process at the country level. In just three years, these top-down organizations had developed customer-focused, more participative cultures in which employees at lower levels felt empowered to contribute. Substantial improvements in financial performance accompanied these changes. At Mattel Canada, the process uncovered conflicts between sales and operations and helped the company move from last to first in profitability among Mattel’s international subsidiaries.
Six weeks after Lynne Camp and her team tested their plan with the task force, SGDU was operating as a decentralized, business-focused, accountable organization. The speed of SGDU’s transformation is not uncommon; rapid transformations of this sort are possible because senior management teams are made to feel accountable to the organization.
Just as important, success that begins with honest conversations begets future conversations that further improve performance. The first time is, of course, the hardest. Once everyone has had a chance to see that real change does emerge out of initially painful truth telling, the organization gets better at having an honest collective conversation. The managers whose leadership actions were questioned the first time are typically seen as leading more effectively if they embraced the process and responded to feedback. Lynne Camp’s stock went up dramatically because she courageously acknowledged her role in the organization’s problems and responded by changing the organization and how she managed. By enabling a complicated organizational truth to emerge, senior managers reduce cynicism, increase trust, and develop selfless commitment.As a result, they create a mandate for change that even the most entrenched and resistant power centers cannot resist.
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Driving Change, One Step at a Time
January 14, 2008
In the pages that follow, we’ll outline the process we’ve developed to support productive, organizationwide conversations about barriers to performance (summarized in the exhibit “The Strategic Fitness Process”).We’ll focus on important points to remember as this conversation unfolds. These points – and the principles underlying them – hold true in any setting where top management truly wants strategic change.
Start the conversation with the leadership team. Businesses are designed with a built-in directional gyroscope – the senior team. These individuals oversee the parts of the organization that need to work together to implement business strategy. Yet our consistent finding in many companies is that these built-in gyroscopes are broken. The senior management teams are not doing the fundamental work that their organizations expect of them– setting direction, resolving conflicting views about priorities, and creating the context and culture that will enable the firm to deliver results. In an extraordinary number of companies, unclear strategy and conflicting priorities obstruct performance. The cause, as perceived by people at lower levels as well as by members of the senior team, is an ineffective senior team. When these teams meet they tend to review results, focus on specific problems, or discuss administrative matters. They do not dig into or resolve fundamental strategic issues. All of this was true at SGDU. During senior team meetings people tended to interrupt one another, ignore one another’s comments, and engage in a lot of side conversations. As a result, the group had difficulty achieving consensus and making timely decisions,particularly about the politically charged issues of strategy and organization design.
The responsibility for building an aligned organization cannot be delegated. The senior managers must work together to define the business strategy as well as the capabilities and values essential for long-term success.
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Crafting a Conversation that Matters
January 11, 2008
After more than a decade of implementing the process and researching its consequences,we have identified several overriding lessons that we believe are relevant in any organizationwide conversation, whether or not leaders use our particular process. To wit:
A conversation about strategy needs to move back and forth between advocacy and inquiry. Most failures in organizations start when top management advocates a new direction and begins to develop programs for change without finding out what influential people in other parts of the organization think of the new focus. They thereby set themselves up to be blindsided by concerns that emerge much later. A smaller number of well-intentioned top managers make the opposite mistake. They do not advocate at all. Instead, in the name of participation and involvement, they depend entirely on inquiry – assembling a large group of managers and asking them to define a direction. The result is often widespread frustration. Managers and employees look to leaders to articulate a point of view about where the business is going, a point of view to which they can respond. Leaders need to advocate, then inquire, and repeat as needed.
The conversation has to be about the issues that matter most. To energize the organization, the conversation must be focused on the most important issues facing the organization – the company’s strengths and the obstacles to performance. It’s all too easy for senior managers to become swamped in the operational details of managing a business.What gets crowded out are tough and honest conversations about the fundamental issues that will determine long-term success. Do we have a distinctive business strategy that key managers believe in? Do we have the capabilities to execute that strategy? Is our leadership effective?
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How to have an honest conversation about your business strategy
January 8, 2008
Despite widespread rhetoric about the need for organizational agility, an astonishing number of businesses stay stuck in neutral when they need to implement a new strategy.
Consider the situation that Lynne Camp faced in July 2000. Camp, the vice president and general manager of Agilent Technologies’ Systems Generation and Delivery Unit (SGDU), was charged with creating a single global company from a set of fragmented businesses in Asia, Europe, and the United States. To gain control over product decisions being made by the regional teams she had inherited, Camp and her senior team had originally adopted a functional organization structure. This enabled them to exit many marginal, local businesses and focus on the opportunities that were most promising from a global perspective. It also allowed them to introduce more efficient shared processes.
Despite these strengths of the new structure, problems began to emerge. The functional departments didn’t give the new businesses the attention they needed. The staffs of the regional field organizations were in a funk; they thought their customer perspective was being overlooked. Conflict between the functions, the businesses, and the field organizations was growing. The senior team was slow to make decisions, and no one took responsibility for the performance of the developing businesses.
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All Systems Go
January 5, 2008
Once these three gears are aligned and locked together, IT organizations and systems tend to deliver results rapidly– in many cases within six months. Yet despite the obvious benefits of these gears, some businesspeople may ask themselves,“Do we really have to do all of this ourselves? Can’t we simply outsource to firms that already know how to do this stuff? And wouldn’t outsourcing be a cheaper alternative in the long run?”
The answer to all these questions is yes and no. Over time, fewer and fewer CIOs will run their own networks and data centers, and much development may be augmented by partners. However, the “gears” become even more critical when you bring outsourcing and offshoring into the picture, because management complexity rises. You can’t abdicate the leadership and vision for these critical functions. And when you have a number of long-term contracts with various suppliers, the long-term plan must be extremely well articulated (Gear 1). When you work with a number of vendors that have their own tools and methodologies, it’s critical to orchestrate an overarching common framework under which everyone can work productively (Gear 2). It’s also much easier to build a highperformance culture when you own the human resources (Gear 3). In operating a multi-company workforce, it takes extraordinary leadership to create the esprit de corp required for high performance.
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A High-Performance IT Culture
January 2, 2008
There’s no reason why most companies can’t develop a long-term IT road map tied to corporate goals. There’s also no reason that given sufficient discipline and resources, most can’t develop a unifying IT platform. But without a high-performance IT organization in place – one that looks very different from those found in most companies– a messy IT business will persist.
For years, corporations have treated IT people differently – a holdover from “glass house” data processing culture of 30 years ago. Treating IT as if it were a separate corporate entity sets up a vicious cycle. Allowed to work in their own tribes, IT folks feel less affiliation with the company than they do with their own projects. Like the soldiers building the bridge on the River Kwai, they grow so isolated that they forget what the war is about.
By contrast, the people in a high-performance IT organization don’t feel different from other corporate citizens; in fact, they are business-savvy leaders in their own right. They operate according to the same corporate values as everyone else and are measured by the same tough performance standards.
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