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31 January 2012

Roots are for vegetables?

Posted by Ed under behavioural change, communication, motivation, relationships | Tags: , , , |
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The title is a quote, fittingly from a food critic turned journalist and documentary maker: Jonathan Meades. Equally fittingly, Meades television output has a distinctly ‘marmite’ flavour: some people will lap up the breadth of source material and viewpoints, while others will blanch at some of the sourer notes or just flinch facing a monstrous feast of syllables. Mangling a culinary metaphor mercilessly, Meades is a man who serves up curate’s eggs by the dozen, some highly nutritious, some possibly addled. Approach iPlayer with caution. But, returning to earth – or, rather, Earth – he actually wasn’t talking about food. He was talking about how different cultures think about and value diversity.

Even if you are a BBC4 watcher with a thesaurus perched next to your remote control, some background might help. Apart from his print and TV work, Meades is also Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and (in the language of its own website) a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association. His work, as blogger Aethelred the Unread describes it by comparison with the documentary-maker Adam Curtis, has a point to make:

Like Curtis, he’s not so much a polemicist for a particular viewpoint as he is a polemicist for the necessity of thinking for oneself. Like Curtis, he’s interested in unorthodox juxtapositions (especially of apparently serious and trivial things), and in approaching weighty topics from unusual angles.”

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26 January 2012

Faith, value and returns on investment

Posted by Ed under behavioural change, communication, leading performance, learning transfer, line managers, motivation, relationships, reward and recognition | Tags: , , , , |
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Like so many words that start with ‘f’ (fairness or federalism, for example), faith can be a topic that leaves some of us slightly twitchy. As a word, its roots are actually secular: it derives from the Latin word for trust, and the religious sense was a 14th century acquisition. But for all the trouble humanity has wrought upon itself around faith in a theological sense, is it worth asking if we have successfully mastered the idea of faith in the broader, earthly sense?

I came across an old adage – “Fear can keep us up all night long, but faith makes one fine pillow” – that left me wondering if we don’t put too much emphasis on what we believe about the world around us, rather than on being mindful or receptive to the faith that others have in us? Most of us appreciate the merits of a fine pillow: whether we hold to a religion or live as atheists or agnostics, our lives are still touched by sorrow, frustration, setbacks or doubt, and a little pampering never goes amiss.  In terms of the comfort or sense of strength that it can bring, faith can definitely be its own reward. But I’m thinking about the idea of faith in a less … well, self-centred way: the benefits we can bring about by showing faith in others.

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19 January 2012

The day the Net went black: SOPA or Soap Opera?

Posted by Ed under behavioural change, communication, organisational development, relationships, reward and recognition | Tags: , , , , , , , , , |
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Anyone who relies on Wikipedia to maintain their position as most knowledgeable spark in their milieu might have struggled yesterday (particularly if they hadn’t Googled how to ‘View Source’ beforehand). If you missed it, several of the world’s largest Internet sites ‘took action’ yesterday in protest against the proposed SOPA and PIPA Acts currently being discussed in the different chambers of the US parliamentary system. This would be an awfully long blog posting if I stopped to explain them; thankfully the BBC News pages provide an overview and the (now-restored) Wikipedia can also tell you more.

Essentially, the arguments are around intellectual property rights and digital piracy: as we embrace Web 2.0 and user-content (and, by extension, social media, crowd-sourcing and many other topics you may already feel you’ve read your fill of), it’s technically far too easy for people to upload copies of films, music and so on that has someone else’s copyright legally attached to it. (Unless you’ve never watched anything on YouTube or burned a copy of a friend’s CD to iTunes, it’s a fair bet you’ve broken copyright law.) Because it’s easy, it happens; because the end result is free, other people watch, listen to or re-download it. Various high profile websites’ issue isn’t so much with the problem as with the proposed solution: if someone uploads a copy of a Hollywood movie to Wikipedia or YouTube, SOPA would – if enacted – mean that Wikipedia/YouTube has broken the law and could be taken down in total, Google could be forced to remove links to them, and so on … That’s why you either had to do your own thinking or find it in a book yesterday.

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17 January 2012

All work and no play: how to strangle innovation

Posted by Ed under behavioural change, communication, HR, leading performance, learning theory, learning transfer, line managers, management, motivation, relationships, reward and recognition, talent management | Tags: , , , |
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HRZone recently published an interesting article by Emma Littmoden, partner at The Living Leader, called Can HR devise rules that stimulate not stifle innovation? A question that begged for a response – possibly a fairly abrupt one – from the organisational equivalent of ‘the cheap seats’, I thought, so it’s lack of comments so far comes as a surprise. Perhaps everyone else’s HR departments have issued memos banning employees from posting comments at HRZone?

There were quite a few points I wanted to pick Emma up on, in the nicest possible way. First of these was her surprise at Apple’s apparent introduction of stern social media protocols, given the money it makes from handheld devices that encourage ‘the free-flowing ideas of the individuals on the payroll’. Once some of the world had stopped loading candle apps on their iPads and leaving £400’s worth of hi-tech equipment outside shops to mourn Steve Jobs (I’m no accountant, but a tea-light would have said the same, and been far cheaper and less of a personal data security risk), I got the impression that the control-freak tendencies of the recently deceased were aired more freely than previously. And Apple, for all the design savvy of its products (for which thanks should strictly speaking go to Johnny Ive), is a company that makes it very hard to dig beneath the OS, install open source software, and is very keen that we load our (very profitable) new toys with apps, tunes, books, movies and so on bought from an online store that very much runs by their rules. Apple’s version of the world is impeccably stylish, but pretty tightly closed. I’m not sure everyone wants to rule the world, but Apple is keener than most: their internal application of the tendency didn’t surprise me in the least.

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12 January 2012

Book Review: Getting Naked by Patrick Lencioni

Posted by anton franckeiss under behavioural change, book reviews, communication, motivation, relationships | Tags: , , , , |
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As a highly successful business author, Patrick Lencioni may well need no introduction, although his individual style – imparting lessons through business fables – is very much a personal hallmark. From my first encounter with his book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team (which my colleague, Chris Rogers, reviewed here), I was immediately drawn to the way that he delivers his lessons in the form of a story, complete with characters, drama and plot. I had to consciously leave aside my reservations that his approach omitted the structure, methodology and models to support his argument… but as it turned out, I did not have to wait too long to sigh with relief. I found everything I sought at the back of the book.

It helped to draw me in that the first two dysfunctions he tackled were lack of trust and avoiding conflict, themes and experiences that chimed with my own thoughts and frustrations when dealing with many global senior managers and executives. Won over by the style and approach, I read on through the remaining dysfunctions and found myself appreciating a very satisfying read. (Satisfied enough to turn to some of his other works, where I found rich material on a range of approaches and ideas to free up thinking, manage meetings and handle change.)

His most recent book, Getting Naked: A Business Fable about shedding the Three Fears that Sabotage Client Loyalty, differs from his earlier output. Rather than the global CEO/CIO population, Lencioni has aimed this book at “anyone whose success is tied to building loyal and creating sticky relationships with the people they serve” – including not just service providers of many stripes but also people in his own trade: consultants.

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12 January 2012

Absolutely fabulous: the power of fables

Posted by Ed under behavioural change, book reviews, communication, management | Tags: , , , , |
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In 1983, the Nobel Prize for Literature was judged to be a closely-matched contest between two British writers: Anthony Burgess and William Golding. The prize went to the latter, which the former didn’t always take with great grace: he judged Golding not so much as a novelist but as a writer of ‘fables’. (If there’s an immediately relevant fable about eating too many sour grapes affecting your outlook on life, I’ve not yet found it – but your suggestions would be welcome.) There’s probably a debate to be had about the purpose or point of literature, although it’s one most people would gladly leave to the Nobel judges. But one of the interesting points about fables is that they really do have one …

The word fable has come to us from the Latin, and just means a little story, but one that is intended to impart a moral lesson. (Myths and parables fall into the same category, and the technical differences need not worry us for the point we’re making here.) But the idea of the fable – a short, memorable tale with an equally memorable learning point – didn’t just come from the Romans. Cultures around the world used fables both as part of the oral, storytelling tradition and as a way of passing on valuable lessons. There are fables in The Bible, for example. The Arabian Nights stories are fables, and we get the idea of The Tortoise and The Hare from one of history’s most famous fabulists, Aesop.

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10 January 2012

Film Review: The Iron Lady

Posted by Ed under communication, leadership development, motivation | Tags: , , , , |
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Looking at the coverage that The Iron Lady – a biopic of Margaret Thatcher, for those who’ve somehow managed to miss it – has so far inevitably collected, opinion is fittingly divided. Knowing I was going to see it, as it was a friend’s choice as part of her day of birthday events, I’d been following newspaper articles for a while. It struck me that the first of many ironies about the film was that those who were speaking out against the film had almost certainly not seen it. One of the leading character’s repeated points in the film is that feeling has taken precedence over ideas and thinking in modern life (one wonders what she’d have made of this recent article), yet many of those speaking out against the film seemed to be doing so as they ‘felt’ it was inappropriate or wrong. One wonders what the lady herself would have said to them. (Although wondering is something that the film is likely to generate a lot of.)

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22 December 2011

Book Review: Leaders Make The Future by Bob Johansen

Posted by Ed under behavioural change, book reviews, communication, HR, leadership development, leading performance, learning transfer, life, management, motivation, organisational development, relationships, teamwork | Tags: , |
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The future is a tricky thing. An opening sentiment I’m sure many economists, policy makers and politicians would agree with right now, but also a logical truism. Books about the future and what it will bring always set themselves to invite ridicule a few years down the line, and have an inevitable lack of concrete foundations: what the future holders, even for professional futurologists such as Bob Johansen, can only ultimately be subjective guesswork. Whether we are looking at the future of work (as Richard Donkin did in another book reviewed here), of leadership, of organisations, or of society, it’s worth remembering a lesson from talent management: past performance is not a reliable guide. Yet, as Marshall McLuhan once observed, “We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.”

As a former President and Board member of the Institute For The Future, Bob Johansen should be as qualified a guide to what lies ahead as we are likely to find, drawing on four decades of experience of future casting for some of the world’s largest organisations. By its very nature, the future has always been uncertain; recently, the level of uncertainty seems to be increasing and leaders can no more be immune for anxiously wonder what it will mean for them than anyone else. Books such as Leaders Make The Future are, perhaps, only to be expected: that Johansen is one of a small number of authors essaying serious attempts to address this audience is to be welcomed.

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