Bad Consultant
Innovation isn’t just for things – Part VI
As if there’s any point in providing the history:
Part I – Part II – Part III – Part IV – Part V
From your exhaustive re-reading of all the preceding parts, you’ll know that we have three questions:
- Who is your ideal employee?
A: Those employees most likely to maintain and grow their productivity in the future and who have the most potential to increase value for our future customers
- What proportion of your workforce could be classed as your ideal employee?
- How do you increase that proportion?
In Part V, we were beginning to build the answer to the second question, by looking at how to derive products
All right – I’ll say it… most posts on recruitment effectiveness are gumpf
BadConsultant declares a vested interest in the subject of this post, yet will post anyway in the hope of generating thought and discussion.
We just went browsing for the umpteenth time in the past few weeks for blogs, articles, ezines, etc. on recruitment effectiveness. And, after a little while found we were grinding our teeth.
Here’s the problem.
Efficiency = doing something well (usually against cost, quality and time measures)
Effectiveness = doing the right thing to make the impact you want to make (usually against outcome measures)
And then NBC said “watch out, here comes the boss!”
We wrote a while back about the Winter Oly… Olympic Winter Games and what it could teach us about corporate abnormality. While the sport may be done, the learning continues.
- Hurtling down a bob-sleigh run at 90 mph has gotta hurt
- Canada really cares about hockey and curling
- NBC US really does choose to focus predominantly on US athletes
We know about number 3 because we made use of the NBC online video site
[hideous navigation]
which in turn uses Microsoft Silverlight video player to provide fabulous high-def streaming video – on our iMac the pictures are gorgeous.
I looked up and BOOM! Drive-by Collaboration!
A while back, your trusted adviser BadConsultant elucidated the madness of the Random Act of Leadership
[and boy-oh-boy haven't we seen a few of those in the intervening years?]
which has proven to be one of the most enduring
[legacy]
of our posts. Not a surprise to us, the RAOL is just so common that we all experience it at some point.
But as we were observing the artificial abnormality of the modern organization, we identified a sympathetic bedfellow to the RAOL, for which we now humbly
[yeah, right]
coin the term ‘Drive-by Collaboration’.
What can the Winter Olympics teach us about corporate abnormality?
So, the Winter Olympics
[or, more accurately to their rebrand, the Olympic Winter Games - as if the Olympics weren't brand enough]
are currently being staged in our favourite city in the world, Vancouver. And, this being all things BadConsultant, we thought we’d take a moment to reflect on what we can learn about corporate abnormality from said sporting occasion.
Right now, let us state for the record that this is not one of those pieces where we’ll try and make tenuous links between physical prowess and day-to-day work
[to us, they're as appropriate as animal metaphors]
besides, we’ve already covered a lot of that in “The Strengths Springboard – Is your organization ready?” Instead, we thought we’d share some less obvious observations and inferences. In no particular order:
You’re like who, exactly?
A little while ago, we wrote about the recent
[gimmick]
trend for ‘leaders’ to search out their authenticity. When that quest is coupled to a corporate communications function… well the result was never going to be pretty.
[we will use the term 'authority figure' for leader here on out - not only because it's more accurate, but also because it doubles our word count - and eventual fee]
Here’s the deal:
- The authority figure wants to create an impression of what he is not
- The professional in the communicator knows they need to support the authority figure in creating that impression
- But the writer in the communicator just wants to describe the leader they wish the authority figure was (but isn’t)
Surprisingly, everyone wins – because they all draw upon stereotypes to express themselves. And the funny thing about stereotypes is that… well… er… we all have them – and I don’t have to agree with anyone else about what mine means to me. We can choose the same stereotype and take away very different meanings.
Best and Brightest… or Dumb and Dullest?
Back in a previous life, BadConsultant sat in a room with a group of managers and individual contributors, scoping work to assess which competencies consistently drive performance – the intent being to develop a foundation for sourcing, selecting, placing and developing those competencies.
If you haven’t done such work, the method is straightforward – line up your whole population
[metaphorically, of course]
from lowest performing to highest performing then look at the consistent differences in competency at each end of the spectrum – what do the best do consistently well that the worst don’t and vice versa. Find a way to assess for those differential competencies and you’re all set.
My top 5 problems with Leaders
So, someone wrote to me on the back of recent blogs asking why BadConsultant is so hard on leaders.
After I stopped laughing – and it took a fair few minutes, I can tell you – I thought I’d better set some things straight. Because I believe that leadership is critical. I might say now more than ever, if I were prone to polemic, but I’m not… So I won’t. Oh… I did. Well, never mind.
My issue isn’t with leadership – making tomorrow better than today is always OK with BC.
It’s with Leaders (authority figures who have the capitalized word Leader in their role description or Leadership in their core responsibilities). It’s with imitators. It’s with imposters. And it’s with the sycophantic support structures that perpetuate the myth.
So, without further ado, my top 5 problems with Leaders:
- They start strategic planning with where they are today – iterating the current state to gain incremental revenue growth or cost saving – and run in the opposite direction of any true visioning exercise (see 3 below).
Unnatural Selection – Part I
Many organizations describe themselves as having evolutionary, as opposed to revolutionary, cultures. They say this with something approaching pride, like they’ve somehow achieved a higher level of reality which is not prone to the trials and tribulations of the worker ants in other colonies. “Oh dear, how sad… Have you been forced to change by some pesky external impact?” they say. “S’funny, we don’t suffer from those, we evolve through them.”
All of which would be fine if it were true.
By now, we hope you’ve caught BadConsultant’s drift: delusion is rife throughout the modern organization.
Delusion.
Evolution takes place over hundreds, thousands and millions of years. It’s a long, extraordinarily slow process.
Innovation isn’t just for things – Part IV
It goes without saying that we recommend you catch up with how we got to where we are:
But we also know that this is the web-generation and the idea of reading anything to gain context is, er, like… so, er… rilly, rilly old school. So, let us summarise:
- Your company spends inordinate amounts of money to wring out any new product, process or strategic innovation
- Your company avoids doing anything innovative in relation to people – the one asset which can appreciate with investment
- Your company perpetuates a myth that [spit] “People are our greatest asset”
The net result is that your company has developed, and does everything it can to sustain, a culture of averageness.
Imbalanced scorecard
OK, let’s be really clear. Organizations make no sense. Organizations aren’t natural. Organizations aren’t the way it’s always been.
Organizations are an artificial construct.
So much of what assails us every day isn’t grounded in anything other than the weirdness created by the weird.
Organization politics.
Organization structure.
Organization culture
Organizational power games.
When it come to organizations, this is not a rational universe.
Update to our Literature Search – Part III
- Difficult Truths, Too Big to Swallow
- Update to our Literature Search – Part I
- Update to our Literature Search – Part II
OK – time to bring things up to date – it’s around 5 months since we updated the list, so let’s see just how much paper has been wasted stating the obvious:
- Change Management: 69,481 (65,689; 57,604; 47,416) +46%
- Business Strategy: 71,284 (72,959; 64,603; 56,102) +27%
- Organization Culture: 34,851 (32,944; 28,965; 23,956) +45%
- Talent Management: 11,138 (10,426; 8,970; 7,206) +55%
- People Management: 50,711 (48,019; 41,848; 33,011) +53%
- Leadership: 371,927 (350,084; 302,959; 256,503) +45%
- Management: 981,451 (960,499; Not measured; Not measured) +2.2%
So, what does our cross-indexing thematic meta-analytic framework study tell us?
Hmmmmmmm…
Well, it appears that the tried and tested, traditional stuff (management, strategy, change management) are growing at a slightly slower rate than the newer disciplines of talent and people management – though personally this BadConsultant is a little disheartened to see Organization Culture not hitting the similar growth rates to talent and people
[though it does give us an idea about a book... "BadConsultant's Guide to Building a Culture of Talented People" anyone? Anyone?]
Management books overall continue to creep towards the 1 million mark, and we can’t help but feel it fitting that at around the time that’s happening, the capitalist edifices that are the logical final extension of the 20th century’s adoration of growth through industrialized
[exploitation]
expansion are crumbling left, right and centre; leaving the path open for those smart
[smaller]
organizations that have realized that talented people driving a culture that celebrates their healthy performance IS the competitive advantage.
Oh, and finally from the literature search, note the slight decrease of 1,700 or so books in Business Strategy… Artifact of Amazon’s cataloguing system, or just the shelf of strategy books pertaining to growing through sub-prime derivatives trading?
For now, BC is out – but will be back soon with a veritable litany of observation, inference, practice and learning.
Peace and love,
BC
What If Managers Ran Grand Central…
Tomorrow morning, BadConsultant will once again be hitting the MetroNorth-East corridor into New York, arriving at Grand Central in the midst of rush hour.
[hey, why not say "Hi!" if you spot me?]
It’s a nice trip – I get some quiet time on the train, do some thinking, listen to my iPod, get a little bit of work done – an almost zen-like zone of tranquility.
Aaaahhh… Victimhood…
… You make us so comfortable when you stick around.
A little while ago, we wrote a piece called “Free Agent Nation?” covering what we perceive as the impending exodus of talent from corporations.
Before we extemporize, quantify, clarify and obfuscate, we formally want to tip the hat to Daniel Pink who wrote about the subject in Fast Company and more recently in his book – we haven’t read the book yet, but will be doing so in the near future. Despite our uncanny ability to resell work we’ve previously done, and repackage others’ intellectual property with a facade of our own creation, we absolutely, totally do not steal from our bretheren – we didn’t coin the term Free Agent Nation
[though we did add the question mark]
and want to recommend you read the original article now – it was somewhere in our subconscious as we brought a lot of ideas together over the past few weeks.
OK. That’s over – phew!
Pretty transparent, right? Our owning up to an unwitting terminology ‘borrow’. Not for us the game of “that’s not fair, we didn’t know about it” – no, here at BadConsultant towers, we tell it like it is
[especially at http://www.jobinions.com - have you left a jobinion yet?]
regardless of whether it places us in positions of jeopardy.
Would that the rest of the world would do that.
Instead, we are fed a litany of excuses, blame rants, whining, whingeing, bellyaching, caviling, criticizing, deprecation, disparagement, fault-finding, griping, grouching, grousing, grumbling, kvetching, moaning, nagging, niggling, nit-picking, overcriticizing, quibbling, scathing… Well, you get the picture, right?
Through our multi-variant, cross-referential, do-loop, mega-meta-analysis of conventional wisdom-sapping framework complexes, we’ve identified that for the majority of your workforce, victimhood is a comfortable bed-fellow. For them, it’s all your fault; your fault that…
- they didn’t hit their targets
- their ideas aren’t strong enough to move forward
- there’s in-fighting within the team
- they aren’t able to develop the skills the business needs tomorrow
They’ll whine and complain
[and all those other words we cribbed from an online thesau... er... erm... our knowledge management database]
about all of it. Only they won’t do it to your face. They’ll do it in a bar, in a cubicle, in the park… Anywhere but where they need to do it: In the moment, at work, with you and the team.
To them it’s all your fault.
And guess what? They’re totally and utterly correct. It is. Because, unless you’re naturally talented at bringing people to a highly engaged state, it’s highly, highly unlikely that your own leadership is telling you it’s what’s expected and there’s a complicity between you and the victims you manage – human beings perpetuate the status quo
[here we go-oh... Rockin' all over the world! Cue Americans going "huh?!!!"]
no matter how painful. Put simply, you are comfortable managing victims.
We’re going to let that sink in.
You are comfortable managing victims.
Why? Well, if you do it like you did it yesterday, no-one can hold you accountable for today’s poor results; today’s failure was perfectly acceptable yesterday. So, why change anything?
Anyone…
Anyone…
We’ll be back soon to answer the question.
έως ότου συναντιόμαστε πάλι
BC
Mental Gymnastics (or ‘To all the paradoxes I’ve loved before’)
A couple of weeks back, BadConsultant had the unparalleled joy of mingling with a small, select group of
[patsies]
executives gathered together to pass comment on some pretty astounding internal social networking technology. Cool stuff. Lots of opportunities. Of course, being BadConsultant, we extemporized, categorized, expounded and theorized just enough to bring these potential ‘deep-pockets’ to the edge of understanding of their problems and potential solutions
