Strengths Worth Coveting
February 7, 2008
Nongovernmental organizations have four strengths that corporations would be well served to heed. They are legitimacy, awareness of social forces, distinct networks, and specialized technical expertise. The public bestows the first,and the second is a function of the NGOs’ mission. The latter two refer to competences that NGOs have developed by venturing where corporations usually don’t go.
Legitimacy. According to a poll conducted by the Edelman public relations firm, both Americans and Europeans said they found NGO spokespeople more credible than either a company’s CEO or PR representative. Some fraction of the public, especially in Europe, sees NGOs as dedicated first and foremost to serving an aspect of the general social welfare. While many companies produce direct benefits to society–those in the pharmaceutical and food industries being obvious examples–the public interprets those benefits as by-products of the companies’ profit motive rather than as the direct result of their desire to feed or care for their fellow human beings.
Suspicion of companies’ motives can become so entrenched that the soundest solutions aren’t given a fair hearing. The fate of Shell Oil’s Brent Spar storage and tanker offloading system is one such example. After conducting a thorough analysis of what to do with the platform, Shell concluded that towing it into the deep water of the North Atlantic and then sinking it was the best alternative from an environmental standpoint. (It would also be £40 million cheaper than dismantling the platform on land.) Outraged by the plan, Greenpeace organized a boycott of Shell products in the UK and sent protesters to occupy the facility. Ultimately, Shell succumbed to public pressure and hauled the rig ashore for dismantling.Greenpeace subsequently admitted that it had overstated the amount of oil residues in the tank and thus the harmful environmental effects of scuttling.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Turning Gadflies into Allie
February 4, 2008
Multinational companies are the driving force behind globalization, but they are also the source of many of its most painful consequences, including currency crises, cross-border pollution, and overfishing. These remain unsolved due to two kinds of failures. For one, such issues are, by their nature, beyond the scope of individual governments to avoid or resolve. For the other, transnational organizations, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, have proved unequal to the task.
Into the breach have leaped not-forprofit, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of concerned citizens.Realizing that news of cross-border problems can also cross borders, NGOs have sponsored angry protests in Seattle, Davos, Göteborg, and Genoa. While these are perhaps the best-publicized demonstrations of nongovernmental organizations’ activism, they are hardly the only ones. NGOs have seized on all forms of modern persuasion – from advertising to boycotts and even sabotage – in order to influence public sentiment toward global traders, manufacturers, and investors.The NGOs hope that they can effect policy changes in this way.
In many NGOs’ view, companies that incorporate offshore to avoid taxes or that send jobs overseas demonstrate a lack of allegiance to their country of origin. At the same time, by failing to bring with them the labor and human rights standards prevailing in the developed world, these companies appear unconcerned with the welfare of the countries where they do business. Yet their economic power frustrates official efforts to control their activities.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Turning Gadflies into Allie
February 4, 2008
Multinational companies are the driving force behind globalization, but they are also the source of many of its most painful consequences, including currency crises, cross-border pollution, and overfishing. These remain unsolved due to two kinds of failures. For one, such issues are, by their nature, beyond the scope of individual governments to avoid or resolve. For the other, transnational organizations, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, have proved unequal to the task.
Into the breach have leaped not-forprofit, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of concerned citizens.Realizing that news of cross-border problems can also cross borders, NGOs have sponsored angry protests in Seattle, Davos, Göteborg, and Genoa. While these are perhaps the best-publicized demonstrations of nongovernmental organizations’ activism, they are hardly the only ones. NGOs have seized on all forms of modern persuasion – from advertising to boycotts and even sabotage – in order to influence public sentiment toward global traders, manufacturers, and investors.The NGOs hope that they can effect policy changes in this way.
In many NGOs’ view, companies that incorporate offshore to avoid taxes or that send jobs overseas demonstrate a lack of allegiance to their country of origin. At the same time, by failing to bring with them the labor and human rights standards prevailing in the developed world, these companies appear unconcerned with the welfare of the countries where they do business. Yet their economic power frustrates official efforts to control their activities.
Read more
Getting to “Just Enough”
February 1, 2008
If you pay attention to the four categories and their relation to one another, you can enrich the potential for any activity to satisfy you on numerous dimensions, whether at work, in your leisure time, or in some other aspect of your life. The high achievers in our study were able to accomplish great things for themselves and others by recognizing they had multiple goals that were critical to their idea of real success and by being fully committed to whatever activity they were engaged in. By switching and linking, they limited their attention to one task, and when other needs pressed, they were able to make lightning fast changes of focus and emotional energy. Instead of feeling cheated because they couldn’t get it all, they were renewed by following the cycle of attention to each category.
How do you know when it’s time to stop your work in one category and switch your attention to another? That’s where the concept of “just enough” becomes critical. Conventional interpretations of “enough”don’t capture its full potential. People tend to use the term to express dissatisfaction, as in, “That’s it! I’ve had enough!”or as a code for mediocrity or passivity, as in,“If I’m just happy every day, that’s enough.”We mean something else by enough, closer to its root definition: occurring in sufficient quantity or quality to satisfy demands or needs. If you have a firm idea of the big picture in your kaleidoscope of success, it becomes easier to determine and appreciate “enough” in any one activity.Without losing your energy for high aspirations, you set reachable goals.“Just enough”is the antidote to society’s addiction to the infinite “more.” Seen in that light, it becomes a vehicle for actively making choices that allow you to do and get more, not less, through achieving satisfaction in more areas of your life.
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
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.”
Read more
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.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
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.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
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.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
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.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
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.
Read more
Posted by Maximillian | Filed Under Insight
Next Page »
