The Obvious?

I am sometimes asked to sign NDA’s (Non Disclosure Agreements) when working with clients. These are basically written promises on my part not to talk about things I need to know in order to work with the companies I do. Each time I do it, and I occasionally say no, it rankles me a little. It is invariably down to immutable corporate policy but it also feels like a sign of mistrust which is unfortunate happening as it does at the start of a working relationship.

It also occurs to me that as more and more of us live our lives online it should become increasingly unnecessary. Any indiscretions on my part will be much more obvious online and even if not clients would have the ability to do real damage to my online reputation if I ever behaved inappropriately. It feels much more accountable to have an online reputation I am keen to protect than to have a piece of paper filed away somewhere never to be seen again.

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Mark’s Daily Thought – Ideas from Mark Fritz to help you Get Ahead, Stay Ahead and Be Successful

Look at successful sports coaches, and you will notice something similar in their team’s practice sessions. Successful coaches always structure practices to help simulate real game pressures. This helps to have their team reproduce their practice performance in real game situations.

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Martin Scorsese sits down and talks about Fran Lebowitz and his documentary. For more information, go to itsh.bo Watch HBO Documentary Films online at HBO GO® itsh.bo With HBO GO, you can watch every HBO Documentary Film on your iPad® (itsh.bo iPhone® (itsh.bo or Android™ (itsh.bo smartphone. Free with your HBO subscription through participating TV providers. Connect with HBO Docs on Facebook & Twitter: www.facebook.com www.twitter.com

The Obvious?

When I talk with friends about their jobs as managers in organisations of all sorts they often express frustration at the various things that cause them pressure at work. I am forever thinking of ways that social tools might help them relieve some of that pressure. I don’t often say anything as I would soon start losing friends if I banged on about social media every time we met. It is hard to resist the challenge though to map what I know to the problems they describe.

Each time this happens I come back to the same thing. Forget grandiose plans for fancy Enterprise 2.0 solutions or even long term “the world of business is changing” polemic. No, every time I find myself thinking “you should start blogging”. Even if they only ever did it in private, I am convinced that the self reflection encouraged by blogging would be a first step in them dealing with whatever problems they face.

Most of us know the answers to our problems most of the time deep down. We just don’t always articulate them even to ourselves. Even if the solution appears to be out of our direct control, sitting down and thinking about how you are going to convey the problem, or the solution, to say for instance your boss has to be the first step. Blogging is a great trigger to doing this. If your blog is visible to others you will probably have to abstract the problem to avoid compromising others involved in the situation but this abstraction is partly what helps. It helps to depersonalise things and get to the root of what is really happening.

And this is how you actually bring about the large scale organisational stuff too. One person at a time, one step at a time. Not “driving adoption” or simply moving business bollocks online, but helping real people solve their own real problems in very real, and often very modest, ways.

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Mark’s Daily Thought – Ideas from Mark Fritz to help you Get Ahead, Stay Ahead and Be Successful

Successful leaders invest in understanding their people’s strengths, and then focus their people’s work on using those strengths to the fullest. When people have the majority of their focus within their strengths, they will always perform at high levels and create more success for them and their team.

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Mark’s Daily Thought – Ideas from Mark Fritz to help you Get Ahead, Stay Ahead and Be Successful

Our desire (what we really want) releases the energy inside us. The stronger the desire for what we want, the more energy that desire releases to help us go get it. When you focus on growing the desire within you, you also grow the energy to go make it happen.

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The Obvious?

Reading John Naughton’s piece in The Observer today about how much of a mess the teaching of computing in schools is prompted me to think of the experiences of my thirteen year old daughter.

As you might have guessed both of my daughters have been used to having all sorts of Macs around the house and using them since they were old enough to walk to do all sorts of interesting things. Mollie, who at thirteen has to take ICT as an obligatory subject, is having her head done in by a curriculum that assumes that she will end up with some wage slave job using Powerpoint and Excel. Not only does the curriculum not include much of the geekier possibilities that John talks about in his article but it doesn’t even touch on the exciting creative and social possibilities of computing.

Mollie has achieved a level of sophistication in her use of computing that amazes even me. Having shown her Scrivener she has tapped into her love of reading and has now written about 30,000 words of her own, very impressive, novel. She has taken the narrative of her novel and cajoled the avatars in Sims 3 to act it out and then done screen movies of their “acting” which she edits, adds music to, and shares on YouTube. She has also recently scripted, shot, acted in, and edited a video of four short humorous skits as part of her Spanish course. She then finds and connects with other youngsters doing cool stuff with their computers on YouTube and ends up meeting up with them at Summer In The City and talking about all the amazing things they are creating.

Sure, computers are just a means to an end, but that end can be life enhancing. Steve Jobs said a computer should be a bicycle for the mind. Shame the school system seems determined to confine them to being little more than the modern equivalent of the typewriter. Wouldn’t it be better to inspire youngsters with their potential to change the world and giving them the tools to do so?

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Mark’s Daily Thought – Ideas from Mark Fritz to help you Get Ahead, Stay Ahead and Be Successful

Some conversations can only be successful if the people have trust between them. Successful communicators know this, and focus on building the right level of trust first…before even attempting to have the conversation on that particular topic. Remember, building the trust first enables you to then have the conversation you want.

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Mark’s Daily Thought – Ideas from Mark Fritz to help you Get Ahead, Stay Ahead and Be Successful

In every organisation, good teamwork and collaboration drives the development of good solutions and the execution of those solutions. However, to move solutions forward it always requires decisions, and the ability to get to a decision shows you have great collaboration in your organisation.

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Max Blumberg

In a post below, I asked how much value is added by people-related activity in organizations using this model:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v480/maxblumberg/PeopleValue.png

The model can be used to assess how the extent to which people-related activity adds to Total Shareholder Return (TSR). TSR reflects total equity growth and is the ultimate outcome measure chased by senior management in most `commercial organizations*.

I suggest that we have little evidence about the value added by People in many organisations. By People, I mean employees (payroll, workforces, human capital, talent) and people-related investments (cradle-to-grave: attraction, selection, onbboarding, development, succession planning, engagement, retention, exit). The size of People investments vary by industry, but as long ago as 2002, CFO Research Services reported that as a percentage of of revenue, it was 37% in TMT, 25% in Heavy Manufacturing, 45% in Pharmaceuticals, and 43% in Financial Services. I can only suspect that investments have increased since then. Thus a Financial Services company with $5bn turnover would be spending $2.25bn on People.

This is a lot of money and if the statistic is correct, presumably senior management believe that this investment is yielding a better TSR than investment in alternative investments. Again, as suggested in a previous post here, this diagram presents alternative possible investments that senior management could have made to maximise TSR:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v480/maxblumberg/Humancapital.jpg

Senior management must therefore decide which mix of investments in tangible assets, intellectual capital, and financial capital is likely maximize TSR (in other words, it is a portfolio management problem). On what do they base this decision? As scientists, we would suggest that the effective method is empirical research. But senior management are nervous of research for the following reasons:

o Robust valid research is often difficult – if not impossible – to achieve in the ‘real world’ because of the reasons cited above (essentially, there are simply too many variables, most of which cannot be controlled to yield robust valid results)

o Research is expensive

o Research takes time and by the time outcomes are known, investment opportunity window may have disappeared or a competitor may have taken the market sooner by making a (admittedly riskier) non-research based decision

o The research may reveal that the asset class (e.g. tangible assets, human capital, etc.) does not in fact yield the greatest returns.

For this reason, instead of relying solely on empirical research, senior management tend to rely on a blend of past experience, intuition – and perhaps some limited research. This outcome may be disappointing to those of us who favour empirically-based decision-making, but that’s the real-world for you.

I would therefore suggest that, with good cause, real-world management is probably less dependent on research for their weighty decisions than one might like to think.

*(It can be argued that Balanced ScoreCard and Corporate Social Responsibility should also be included as ultimate measures, but these are probably better viewed as mediators of people-related activity on TSR – perhaps a discussion for another day).

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