Supergran

As leaders we are required to step up and be counted. When the music stops everyone is looking at you as the leader to step up and take control, provide direction and bring the best out of the team to deliver.

We know this is tough and at times we work with leaders who are under pressure and that just want to have a day off – to become just one of the team and even to hide. But as the leader you don’t have this luxury and you have to have your game face on day in and day out……you cannot be a part-time leader. It is easier to lead when times are good.

The next time you are finding your role as leader tough, remind yourself of Zarifa Qazizadah from Afghanistan, a fifty year old grandmother with 36 grandchildren. She has become the country’s only female village chief through force of personality and determination to get things done – even if that means cross-dressing, wearing a false moustache and driving around on a motorbike at night.

It is unusual for a woman to be a leader in Afghanistan and Zarif was married at ten and became a mother for the first time at fifteen. During Taliban rule, she moved to the regional capital, Mazar-e-Sharif where she had her first taste of community work, volunteering to help parents get their children vaccinated. Covertly, she helped teach young girls to learn to read.

When the mother of 15 first sought political office, and told local men she wanted to connect the village to the electricity grid, they laughed. That was in 2004. She lost the election, but she got the electricity anyway by travelling to the Afghan capital, Kabul, and going straight to the home of the Minister for Power demanding to speak to him.
He agreed to see her the following day in his office, and by the end of the meeting he had given his consent. The big problem was that the village itself had to pay for the posts and cables but undeterred Zarifa, who had already sold some of her jewellery to pay for the trip to Kabul, borrowed money wherever she could and remortgaged her house to raise the necessary capital. Now everyone in the village has electricity and Zarifa was subsequently elected to village chief – only the second woman ever to hold that position in Afghanistan.

Zarifa is not passive in her leadership. She deals with issues promptly and at the first sign of trouble she will jump on her motorcycle and go sort things out. Women in rural Afghanistan are rarely seen riding motorbikes alone and Zarifa disguises herself, with men’s clothes and a fake moustache, to avoid attracting too much attention.

She has also been known to come to the rescue of her villagers by wrestling Jeeps out of ditches with a tractor. “She does the type of work that even men are not capable of doing,” says one of her local supporters.

Whilst a village chief in Afghanistan might not be the first place you would look for inspiration in terms of leadership, the story brings sharply into focus the possibilities of what great leadership can achieve. Electricity, a new bridge and a new mosque form just a part of Zafira’s leadership legacy for Naw Abad in Afghanistan’s northern Balkh province.

What will your leadership legacy be?

Fried Chicken

You will be familiar with many of the names of the great astronauts in history – Armstrong, Aldrin, Shepard to name just a few. But there is one name that you might not be so familiar with…..Camilla. Now Camilla is not your run of the mill space cowboy – she is in fact a rubber chicken. A group of students from Bishop, California, have sent her to an altitude of 120,000ft as part of a project.

The journey, which involved attaching Camilla to a helium balloon, was undertaken to test the levels of radiation exposed to the chicken during a solar storm which the Earth experienced last month. She flew twice – once on 3 March before the radiation storm and again on 10 March while the storm was in full swing – to give the students a basis for comparison.

Camilla is already well known among space enthusiasts as a mascot of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, and has more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Camilla was launched into space again by NASA last weekend but this time wearing an outfit knitted from plastic bags. Sue Drage, 62, from Rugby in England was asked by the US space agency to knit a new protective suit for Camilla. She (Camilla that is not Mrs. Drage) was launched to capture the shadow on Earth caused by the annular eclipse, where the Moon moved in between Earth and the Sun.

Mrs Drage started knitting with plastic bags last year, but has been crafting everything from bags to jewellery with recycled materials for years. She has never had a client like Camilla before though.

So what can a space-bound plastic chicken wearing a suit made from recycled material teach us? She is used as a way to educate young people about the space program and science and we got to thinking about the complexity of space and the parallel with the complexity of our business environment. The role of the leaders is to provide clarity around complex issues and while we might not advocate the use of a plastic chicken, there are a few techniques which can be used to bring clarity to complexity within our teams.

When explaining the corporate strategy for example we might use strategy maps. When discussing vision a good technique is to use the analogy of describing a specific object on the horizon. Certainly making the communication of complex issues interesting is key to getting the message across.

Of course the one fundamental in any communication is answering the “What’s in it for me” question. Keeping the communication generic, non-specific and high level will never produce the engagement necessary for truly effective communication. The individuals within your team must know what the message being communicated specifically means for them.

We are not sure what is in it for Camilla but the much travelled space bird will no doubt continue to be used to engage young people to educate them about the wonders of space and our universe. We are not sure if the recycled plastic bag fashion will catch on but you never know.

A Strange Turn of Events

For 35 years, New Zealand has been the only place on Earth to force vehicles turning left to give way to vehicles turning right.  New Zealand traffic drives on the left, as in Britain.  However, at the moment, even drivers turning onto a minor road from a major road have to give way to oncoming cars making a right-hand turn.

The infamous rule has become known for causing sudden halts on fast-moving roads.  That will change at 5am on Sunday, when the rules will be reversed.  No one really knows why the rule was introduced some thirty-five years ago and in general it is viewed by motorists to be rather silly if quite courteous.

The New Zealand Transport Agency, which implements road rules, says Sunday’s switch will speed traffic flows, reduce accidents and avoid an estimated one fatality and 97 injuries per year.

When working with clients we often find examples of processes or rules that exist where no –one currently in the organization can clearly articulate why the rule or process was introduced in the first place.  Nevertheless, regardless of how unproductive the process or rule might be, it is followed slavishly with nobody seeing themselves as accountable for raising the hand and asking the question “why do we do it this way?”

For those of you with good Continuous Improvement programs you will find this strange as a good Continuous Improvement or BPM program encourages the workforce to challenge established processes and routines if a better way of doing it can be demonstrated.  For those without such a program we can say with certainty that there will be plenty of inefficient, out-dated or simply inappropriate processes that are creating drag within your organization.

Continuous improvement is not a fad but a necessary part of the leadership’s obligation to run its company properly. Gone are the days when quality did not matter – the banking crisis remains testament to this.  The new attitude is for higher quality work, and at a lower cost. In attempting to keep pace with the new attitude, a quality management system that helps keep costs down is well worth implementing.

If you don’t have such a program perhaps it is worth investigating one that suits your purpose and organizational culture.  Be it Six Sigma, Lean, a hybrid or one of the myriad of other options available to you, investing in a quality program to reduce the waste and inefficiency will pay dividends in the medium and long term.  Don’t be slaves to the past when the future is where the profit lies.

New Zealand is hoping that all turns out well for them over the weekend and spokesman for the New Zealand Transport Agency, Andy Knackstedt, said the agency is encouraging motorists to give a friendly wave when things go wrong.  And to be clear, he said, a one-fingered wave doesn’t count as friendly…

Safety in Numbers

We have recently come across a new statistical unit – the ‘micromort’. The micromort was developed by researchers at Stanford University back in the seventies and it is defined as a one-in-a-million chance of sudden death.

There are two sorts of risks that affect our lives – acute risks (which could kill us on the spot), and chronic risks (which accumulate trouble for the future). Of course, the same hazard might have both effects.

But let us start with acute risks: the sort where you start the day all fine and healthy, but finish the day dead because of an accident. We are all faced with some acute risk in our daily lives, as even if you stay in bed all day an airplane might crash into your house. So to compare them we need a useable unit of deadly risk – and that is our new friend, the micromort.
This might sound a bit comical, but it is deadly serious as it means that we can translate small risks into whole numbers that can be immediately compared. For example, the risk of death from a general anesthetic in an emergency operation is quoted as 1 in 100,000, meaning that we can expect 10 deaths in every million operations from the anesthetic alone. This is described as 10 micromorts per operation, and we can compare this figure with other average risks, such as skydiving (also 10 micromorts), or riding a motorcycle (you have to go around 60 miles to rack up 10 micromorts).

So a micromort can be seen as the average “ration” of lethal risk that people are exposed to daily.

The US Bureau for Labour Statistics provides some extraordinary statistics on the fate of 130 million workers in 2010. A total of 4,547 workers were killed, a rate of 35 micromorts per worker per year. The most common cause was highway accidents. But, believe it or not, the second most common cause of death, larger than falls or being hit by things, is “assault and violent acts”. This comprises 18% of all work-place fatalities, and includes 506 homicides (this was down from 860 homicides in 1997). So this means that each year US workers have on average around 4 micromorts risk of being murdered at work.

Comparing these figures with the wider world is tricky, as reliable statistics are hard to come by. For example, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said that India reported 222 fatal accidents at work in 2005, while the ILO reckoned the true number was nearer 40,000.

Out of 2 billion workers worldwide in 2008, the ILO estimated that there were 317 million injuries requiring more than 4 days absence, and 320,000 people killed while at work, although they only heard about 22,000 of these deaths through official channels and so had to guesstimate the rest. This makes it an average of 160 micromorts per year per worker.
Apart from niche jobs such as providing security in unstable regions of the world, the highest-risk occupation in the UK today for example is commercial fishing. A recent study found 160 deaths in commercial fishing in the UK between 1996 to 2005, which works out as 1,020 micromorts per year per fisherman. This is staggeringly high – about the same as the risk British coal-miners faced in 1911. Commercial fishing is also the most dangerous job in the US, with a risk of 1,160 micromorts per worker in 2010. Perhaps surprisingly, being a police officer was only the 10th most risky job in the US, at 180 micromorts a year.

So why has Zeitgeist suddenly become a statistics fiend and fan of the micromort? Health and Safety in the workplace starts with the leadership. We work closely with all our clients on Health and Safety no matter what the type of engagement. It is a fundamental accountability of a modern leader to ensure that the people within their teams and sphere of influence return home safe and well at the end of each and every day.

You might be sitting there reading this with responsibility for a team that sits in front of computers all day thinking that you are at a very low micromort statistic but it’s not all about acute risk. In 2009, a scientist called Katzmarzyk studied the lifestyle habits of more than 17,000 men and women and found that the people who sat for almost the entire day were 54 percent more likely to end up clutching their chests than those who sat for almost none of the time. That’s no surprise, of course, except that it didn’t matter how much the sitters weighed or how often they exercised. “The evidence that sitting is associated with heart disease is very strong,” says Katzmarzyk. “We see it in people who smoke and people who don’t. We see it in people who are regular exercisers and those who aren’t. Sitting is an independent risk factor.”

We are going to talk about health a bit more in this blog over the coming months but in the meantime, what action plan as a leader do you have for the welfare of your team? If the answer is “none” then can we suggest that you start creating one today……

el Día de los Muertos

As regular readers of Zeitgeist know, we do like to see innovative ways of confronting a challenge. Challenges take many forms and of course the scale of the challenge is relative. But perhaps this month we have come across an approach that may be hard to match and it relates to perhaps one of the biggest challenges for humans – the fact that we die.

For some though perhaps this challenge is viewed as just another inconvenience which can be legislated away. Let us explain. The mayor of a town in southern Italy has banned dying.

Giulio Cesare Fava passed the law earlier this month because Falciano del Massico, near Naples, has run out of burial space. Clearly this is inconvenient, but they have plans to develop another burial ground but in the meantime the law has been passed to prevent citizens from shaking off this mortal coil……

As we ponder this weird and rather whacky approach, we can certainly relate to certain politicians and officials, past and present, who think, or have thought, that they were in fact omnipotent and not constrained at all by reality. For the rest of us however there are certainly many constraints and restrictions on what we can or cannot practically deliver.

We are reminded of a quote from Brendan Venter, the former South African international rugby player and Premiership Rugby coach who is also a doctor. He said that from his medical training he learned that “Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you know, how committed you are, how much work you put in. Sometimes there are variables that you can’t predict. Medicine taught me to accept that there are some things I can’t change”.

The balance then is to still apply creativity, innovation and relentlessness to delivering change while at the same time being pragmatic in recognizing that not everything can be changed. Picking the battles that you choose to fight is critical and making appropriate trade-offs will lead to success.

Unfortunately two of the residents within days of the passing of the new law are now in serious trouble for failing to wait for the new burial space by inconveniently passing away. It is still unclear what the penalty will be for these two unfortunate elderly citizens who failed to comply with this new regulation but their flagrant disregard for the law surely cannot go unpunished…….

It Sachs to Work Here

Here at Zeitgeist we do a lot of work with clients in terms of creating cultures that enable delivery of a successful strategy and business plan. It is very rewarding work as we help clients define the type of culture that they want and need and then work with them to deliver that culture over time. Culture is a regular theme within these blogs.

Bearing this in mind, we read with interest the recent article in the New York Times from a senior Goldman Sachs executive explaining his reasons for resigning from the bank and his description of the prevailing ‘toxic culture’ he experienced there. Greg Smith, an executive director and head of Goldman Sach’s US equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, wrote the article apparently as a wake-up call for the bank’s board members.

Citing issues such as senior managers referring to clients as ‘Muppets’ and suggesting that the entire focus of the business is about how much money can be made from clients, Mr. Smith suggests that this will eventually bring about the downfall of the 143 year old institution. For him, and us, bad culture delivers bad performance.

Unsurprisingly perhaps the bank has released a statement refuting the claims and of course the article is one man’s perception albeit the perception of a senior individual within the bank.

However, your corporate culture is the foundation for success. It is not something to be tied up in some form of tacky mission statement and it is not what you aspire to be, something that you say you are or something you describe yourselves as. Culture is how you act and this directly affects the results you get.

Leaders set the tone and they create the environment for the culture. Now this can either be done unknowingly by not recognizing that they play this role, or can be done intentionally by understanding that they will get a culture anyway and so determine to be intentional about creating the right culture….

In his article Smith states that when he joined the bank the culture revolved around “teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and doing right by our clients”. He goes on to say “The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years … I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years.”
Sobering words.

Regardless of whether he is right or wrong about the Goldman Sachs culture Mr. Smith clearly gets the importance of having the right culture and understands the risk of having the wrong culture. He writes “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about ‘Muppets’, ‘ripping eyeballs out’ and ‘getting paid’ doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.”

Now we are not rocket scientists but we come across enough good and bad corporate cultures to state unequivocally that those firms with the right culture out perform those with the wrong culture.

How much time do you spend on developing the right culture? What tactics are you using on a day to day basis to shift the culture to one that supports your business goals and how many conversations do you have with your team around values and behaviors?

If you have not yet grasped the link between culture and performance, take time today to give it some thought and decide what needs to change…….

Home Is Where the Heart Is

In what could be the world’s first climate-induced migration of modern times, the nation of Kiribati has got to leave their disappearing island and move somewhere else. Anote Tong, the Kiribati president, said he was in talks with Fiji’s military government to buy up to 5,000 acres of freehold land on which his countrymen could be housed.
Some of Kiribati’s 32 pancake-flat coral atolls, which straddle the equator over 1,350,000 square miles of ocean, are already disappearing beneath the waves. The total land area is 313 square miles and none of the coral atolls rises more than a few feet above sea level.

Most of its 113,000 people are crammed on to Tarawa which lies 1,400 miles from Suva and some of the islanders hold real concerns about whether their culture would survive after the population moves, especially if those who leave first are mainly the young.  A member of the Commonwealth, Kiribati was known as the Gilbert Islands until independence from Britain in 1979.

“This is the last resort, there’s no way out of this one,” Mr. Tong said, “Our people will have to move as the tides have reached our homes and villages.”

The land Kiribati wants to buy is understood to be on Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second largest island. Mr. Tong’s proposal is the latest in an increasingly desperate search for solutions. His government has launched an Education for Migration program, aimed at up-skilling its population to make them more attractive as migrants.

Dr Alumita Durulato, a lecturer in international affairs at the University of Fiji, said: “They are already preparing quite well. They have educated their youth to be able to survive in the new lands that they want to go to. They are going to leave behind their culture, their way of life and lifestyle, which is a little bit different from ours in Fiji.”

Here at Zeitgeist we were thinking about this almost too hard to grasp scenario in the context of managing change and also the impact of change on culture. We regularly see clients struggling to implement change and specifically making the required change stick. We also see existing cultures holding back change or the change being implemented at the expense of retaining and leveraging positive aspects of the existing culture.

When implementing change never take short-cuts on the planning phase. Start early and give yourself plenty of time to prepare for the change. Understand what parts of the existing culture you need to preserve and ensure that the change enables this.

Change is complex and only excellent preparation and planning will deliver success. We hope the people of Kiribati find a new home and we wish them well as they seek to preserve their island nation…….

I, Robot

The fundamental obstacle to understanding where technology culture is heading is that increasingly, it’s about everything. The vaguely intimidating twenty-somethings who we see in technology companies juggling coffee cups, iPad 2s and the next ‘latest gadget’, are no longer content with transforming that part of your life you spend at your computer, or even on your Smartphone. They herald the final disappearance of the boundary between “life online” and “real life”, between the physical and the virtual. It suggests that the days of “the internet” as an identifiably separate thing may be behind us.

If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realized Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed.

You’re still using the web, but without the conscious need to do so. Our phones and tablets are being turned into eyes and ears for applications – motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we’re looking at, and even how fast we’re moving . . . Increasingly, the web is the world – an aura of data, which when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mindbending implications.

Alarming ones, too, of course, if you don’t know exactly what’s being shared with whom. Apparently credit card companies can predict with 98% accuracy, two years in advance, when a couple is going to divorce, based on spending patterns alone.

A related danger of the merging of online and offline life, says business thinker Tony Schwartz, is that we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But “we were not meant to operate as computers do,” Schwartz says. “We are meant to pulse.” When it comes to managing our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: “We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours.”

Schwartz cites research suggesting that we should work in periods of no greater than 90 minutes before seeking rest. Whatever you might have been led to imagine by the seeping of digital culture into every aspect of daily life you are not, ultimately, a computer.

Dealing with Dave

The meeting has already gone an hour over its scheduled time. The participants are restless, eager to close the discussion, make a decision, and leave to get on with some real work. But Dave refuses to end the discussion until he’s restated his position at least a couple more times. By now, everyone else in the room has identified the areas of agreement and disagreement and are ready to tackle the problems. If Dave had only taken a few minutes to listen, instead of relentlessly promoting his own agenda, he might have realized an hour ago that no one was disagreeing with his main points. The participants could have hammered out an agenda that everyone could at least live with.

Any of this sound familiar? Dave’s abound in the business world, wasting time arguing moot points, obstructing processes, and alienating themselves from their colleagues. Continually circling, repeating the same view over and over again, the Dave’s of this world create unnecessary drag to the frustration of the rest of us. By taking the time to understand other people’s agendas and perspectives, Dave could have increased his effectiveness on the job and gained the respect of his peers and paved the way for some meaningful action.

Demonstrating your willingness to look at all sides of an issue to arrive at goals that are mutually beneficial can increase your chances of achieving personal, group, and organizational goals.

Managers who have to win every battle, even at the expense of others, reduce their overall effectiveness as well as their influence in the organization. Because they are so busy championing their own agendas, they may not be aware of the needs or agendas of others. Or, if they are aware of them, these managers tend to ignore the agendas that are contrary to their own.

You can increase your influence and foster greater cooperation by learning when it is appropriate to assert your agenda and when to set it aside for negotiation. Knowing in advance how people are likely to respond to your agendas or action plans is essential for your success. Being prepared for reactions or resistance ensures a stronger presentation and defense of your position. For example, if you know that your manager feels strongly about a particular topic, you can present ideas related to that topic in a way that will show their alignment with your manager’s position.

Accurately anticipating others’ reactions shows your respect for them and allows you more flexibility to compromise.

Don’t be a Dave – listen with your ears and not your mouth. Take meeting productivity seriously and choose your battles.

Why Fight It?

Many business travelers would agree that going without Wi-Fi for any length of time is becoming more and more of an obstacle to effective business practice.
With powerful new hardware and software that fits into our pocket or briefcase it is hugely frustrating that these multi-media devices are frequently rendered almost useless thanks to inadequate quality and quantity of Wi-Fi networks.
Arriving at the airport in plenty of time for a long haul flight only to find out that the cost of logging on for a few minutes to download an e-book can be almost the same as a monthly internet bill at home is infuriating and there is nothing more frustrating than going into the bowels of the New York subway system for example, which is devoid of any Wi-Fi signals, and spending a 45-minute commute wishing you’d remembered to sync devices before you left home.
Just one new product like Apple’s iPhone 4S can cause major headaches within hours of its release and only exacerbates the situation. Instead of sending photos that were 1MB each, owners suddenly want to send upgraded photos that are 4MB each. These newest devices feature data intense apps that are permanently updating, fetching new information or syncing without any prompt from the owner.
On top of this, people expect to be able to update Facebook whenever they want to, or carry out multiple text chats complete with photographic illustrations, or take part in live video streaming conversations with relatives around the world. It used to be that email would do.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look as though the overall situation will get better any time soon as businesses and public spaces continue to be slow in delivering the capacity to meet the capability expectations.
This got us to thinking about capacity planning which is defined as the process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products. Any discrepancy between the capacity of an organization and the demands of its customers results in inefficiency, either in under-utilized resources or unfulfilled customers. The goal of capacity planning is to minimize this discrepancy.
As for all strategic decision making, there is a tradeoff between having enough capacity to meet customer needs and having too much capacity resulting in low utilization of resources.
In our experience few leaders understand or spend any time undertaking true capacity planning within their team, choosing rather to react to demand rather than to be proactive or designing their team around the true demand expected of their function in support of the overall corporate strategy.
As we move further into 2012 make sure that you reflect on your plan for the year and spend time determining the true capacity required from your team in delivering your expectations. If you have insufficient resource you will need to fill the gap and if you are expecting under-utilization of some of your resource look to reallocate that resource to somewhere where increased value can be obtained.
Capacity planning is a leadership accountability so don’t ignore this critical strategic planning activity. Unlike the public Wi-Fi coverage disappointments, create an environment where you have the capacity to deliver on your customer’s expectations.