by Charles Plant | May 3, 2012 | Management
Well duh? Of course effective leadership matters. Did we need a study to tell us this? Actually, we probably did. For some reason, we are predisposed to give people positions of power and authority without any training in management and leadership. Development Dimensions International published their 2011 study on leadership. You can read a good blog summary of the findings here.
“The research demonstrated that organizations with the highest quality leaders were 13 times more likely to outperform their competition in key bottom-line metrics such as financial performance, quality of products and services, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction.”
by Charles Plant | Apr 30, 2012 | Management, Video
If you think you might like to be a manager, listen to Kerri Golden’s video blog about something you might like to consider.
http://vimeo.com/35910889
by Charles Plant | Apr 26, 2012 | Innovation
The press seems littered these days with articles bemoaning Canada’s poor record at Innovation. Unfortunately, I think much of what is written and said misses the point. Let’s go back to what Innovation actually is: It is successfully taking a new idea, product, process or something to the market. As such, this process involves two distinct parts. The first part involves coming up with the idea, developing it into a product etc., and this is what everyone looks at. They use patents and such to measure new idea creation. However the second part of innovation is actually the most important part. That is taking the idea to the market. This is marketing, sales, business development, whatever you want to call it. In formulaic terms:
Innovation = Idea + Marketing
People who comment on innovation continually forget the importance of marketing so they don’t measure it in looking at innovation. Statistics show that rapid growth of new software companies is more of a function of marketing that it is of R&D. The more successful startups spend much more on sales and marketing than they do on R&D and the ratio is 2:1. If marketing is twice as important in successful startups as R&D then this same sort of ratio must hold true for larger companies. This if you want to find innovators, you must look for marketing as a much more important factor than R&D in the success of innovators.
Marketing is the more important part of the innovation formula.
When people talk about innovation, when governments fund it, when companies do it, they forget the second part of innovation, that of marketing and this in fact is the most important factor in success of innovation.
by Charles Plant | Apr 25, 2012 | Management
When I was growing up, calling a person on the phone after 10:00 pm was just something you didn’t do. Nor did you butt ahead of people in line or call an elder by their first name without being explicitly invited to do so. There has always been some form of social contract governing individual behavior in society and people who flouted that social contract were to others, outcasts.
There has always been a social contract at work.
Just as there has always been a social contract between individuals and their government and in society, so too has there been one in work. Before the ICT Revolution, there were things that you just did not do in a working environment. There was a way that the corporation as represented by one’s manager behaved in relation to each and every employee. There were acceptable modes of behavior and unacceptable ones.
But for some reason, the social contract has been broken.
The net result of all of the change at work due to computerization is that the social contract that existed between workers and their employers has been broken. We need to either return to the old social contract and change our behavior or we need to develop a new social contract to recognize the impact that technological change is having on our lives. While firms have done an excellent job developing mission and value statements, they need to work to develop social contracts with employees and state these directly so that everyone can understand what is acceptable behavior and what is unacceptable.
by Charles Plant | Apr 24, 2012 | Management
I heard an interesting story from someone who was patient enough to listen to my mentorship for several years. One of the things that I had emphasized was that: Responsibility is taken, it is not given. The point of this blog though is not about what I had said but about how it had travelled. The individual I was mentoring told me how she had passed it on to someone who she was mentoring and this individual had passed it on to her husband who was then trying it himself at work. It proves the point that:
When you mentor someone the mentorship doesn’t just stop there.
Instead, if you have meaningful mentorships, the knowledge and experience is passed down through many people and hopefully for many years.
It takes a community to build a leader.
