Sep

29

Creativity Requires Courage

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“Every act of creativity is an act of faith. The essence of faith is to proceed without any real evidence that our effort will be rewarded. The act of faith in choosing to live out a way of operating that we alone believe in gives real meaning to our work and our lives” - Peter Block in “The Empowered Manager“

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Sep

15

Management Practices Matter!

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An article from the Economist supports the view that management practices do matter.

“An intriguing new study by Nick Bloom and John Van Reenen, of the London School of Economics, and Stephen Dorgan, John Dowdy and Tom Rippin, all consultants at McKinsey……… based on interviews with managers at more than 730 manufacturing companies (none of them McKinsey clients), ranging from 50 employees to 10,000, in America, Britain, France and Germany…….[found that] …….Differences in management practices do seem to matter. The authors estimate that they account for 10-15% of the gap in total factor productivity (after stripping out differences in capital inputs) between American and British firms. And higher management-practice scores correlated with higher returns on capital employed, sales per employee, sales growth and growth in market share.”

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Sep

9

The Solutions Focused Way

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I believe that a positive approach to life is the most effective. There are some downside to an overly-optimistic worldview, but the upside out weights the downside in most day-to-day situations. The primary benefit of a optimistic approach is the increased proactive response to circumstances, pessimism creates passivity and withdraw.

An interesting article mentions three key principles to working in a solutions focused way (de Shazer and Berg, 1995):

  1. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
  2. Once you know what works, do more of it.
  3. If it’s not working, do something different.

I like the positive approach, it encourages experimentation whilst keeping focus on what’s working.

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Sep

7

Leaders Are Masters of Their Context

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This article from Fast Company, entitled “The Three Ways of Great Leaders“, provide and interesting perspective of leadership. The crux of the article details how top business leaders, from the past century, mastered their context by “seized the resulting opportunities”.

“…..in building their list of the top business leaders of the past century, Harvard Business School professors Anthony J. Mayo and Nitin Nohria have unearthed an immutable attribute that’s shared by all of the giants of business: They had an innate ability to read the forces that shaped the times in which they lived — and to seize on the resulting opportunities……… Henry Ford, Ray Kroc, Estee Lauder, Jack Welch — these business masters had more than their fair share of what Mayo and Nohria call “contextual intelligence.” That is, they possessed an acute sensitivity to the social, political, technological, and demographic contexts that came to define their eras. And they adapted their enterprises to best respond to those forces. Their outsized success at sensing opportunities and capitalizing on them had a dual effect: Just as the times profoundly influenced these business masters, they, in turn, profoundly influenced their times…….’We’ve always treated the historical context of a particular time as a kind of sidebar to any discussion about business leadership,’ says Nohria…….. ‘But we’ve found that context is far more salient than we ever imagined.’…..As the pair dug into the lives of their 1,000 leaders, they began to glean how contextual intelligence is an underappreciated but all-encompassing differentiator between success and failure. Seeing how context creates different kinds of business opportunities….”

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