LEADING THOUGHTS

C.K Prahalad gave us core competencies, the bottom of the pyramid, constrained innovation, and a few other mind-bending management theories. Until his dying days, he believed that individuals, not institutions, were central. Institutions are merely “different ways of combining skills and capabilities of the moment.” Go to article

Learning and development pros have been getting an easy ride when it comes to showing the business value of training. Lame surveys no longer cut it. Fortunately, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America can show how to tie training to key business performance metrics. Go to article (registration required)

Beefy bouncers at Manhattan nightclubs can tell us a thing or two about status cues and how rewards are doled out. I’ll let you connect the dots to organizational life. Go to article

Besides being a good friend of Leading Thoughts, Nick Nissley is Executive Director of The Banff Centre’s leadership development unit and a well-respected thinker in the area of arts-based management education.

Of late, Nick has been exploring the idea of “narrative leadership,” basically the use of stories — personal and otherwise — to effectively lead others. He delivers an entertaining overview of the idea, and throws in a few stories for good measure, in a TedX presentation from Calgary.

If you’re in a story and you don’t like it, change the story.

Here’s the clip. At the 6:00 minute mark, Nick tells us what researchers are learning about “narrative competence.” Researchers with the Center for Creative Leadership, for example, looked at how leaders develop; how do they learn what they need to know? The answer: 50% comes from experience; 20% from hardship or failure; 20% from mentors; and 10% from formal learning. That means that 70 percent of what leaders learn comes from their experiences, both positive and negative. “And we make sense of these experiences through stories,” Nick says.

At the 8:40 minute mark, Nick explains how effective leaders know their own story and lead with it. He follows it up at at 9:00 minute mark with the story of the M.S. Hershey Foundation and its role in lifting Nick out of life-limiting storyline and giving him a new script.

At the 13:30 minute mark, Nick says “we become the stories we tell ourselves,” with the implication being that we can change the world by changing our stories.

I just realized that I have quite a few papers in the queue relating to corporate social responsibility (CSR). If there are no objections, I’ll offer super-abbreviated overviews of these articles in this one post. That means you’ll be spared CSR posts for at least another two months. Deal?

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“Is the socially responsible corporation a myth? The good, the bad, and the ugly of corporate social responsibility,” by Timothy M. Devinney; Academy of Management Perspectives; (May 2009; pp. 44-56)

Devinney (Australian School of Business) argues that a socially responsible corporation is a “fundamental impossibility.” He writes that we must be willing to accept the good and bad character of the corporation. “We want the corporation to engage in good social activity, but to be nice and not use it for competitive advantage that forestalls competition. We want managers to act benevolently when making choices about the social investments of corporations, but to do so in ways that align with our conceptions of what is socially right. But all of this is impossible. We must accept that as a social organism the firm will be a complex mixture of virtues and vices that cannot be separated.” Devinney also offers several challenges that will bedevil researchers trying to measure CSR activities.

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“Making the most of corporate social responsibility,” by Tracey Keys, Thomas W. Malnight, and Kees van der Graaf; McKinsey Quarterly (December 2009)

In the ill-defined world of CSR, “smart partnering” is emerging as an effective way to create value for both businesses and society. In these partnerships, business are not seeking to avoid risk or burnish their reputations but instead to improve their “core value creation ability by addressing major strategic issues.” The authors, from the Swiss-based International Institute for Management Development, offer two examples of creative partnerships involving Unilever in India and Kenya. They figure there are three principles guiding smart CSR partnerships: concentrate your CSR, build a deep understanding of the benefits, and find the right partners.

Download this article (registration required)

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Valuing social responsibility programs,” by Sheila Bonini, Timothy M. Koller, and Philip H. Mirvis; McKinsey on Finance (No. 32, Summer 2009)

Companies with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs have difficulty linking operational metrics (say, tons of carbon emitted) to real financial impacts, often claiming that such programs are too deeply embedded in the core business to be measured meaningfully. The McKinsey consultants counter that some companies are developing hard data to measure even long-term or indirect value of ESG programs. Some examples:

• Growth: Access to new markets through exposure from ESG programs
• Return on capital: Higher employee morale and lower costs related to turnover or recruitment
• Management quality: Development of employees’ leadership skills and ability to adapt to changing political and social situations by engaging local communities.

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“What matters to managers?: The whats, whys, and hows of corporate social responsibility in a multinational corporation,” by Esben Rahbek Pedersen and Peter Neergaard; Management Decision (2009, Vol. 47 Issue: 8, 1261 – 1280)

To explore the different managerial perceptions of CSR, the researchers conducted a survey of 159 managers plus interviewed 10 top-level managers in one multinational manufacturer. Most of the managers surveyed consider CSR “the right thing to do,” though a large number also see their company’s CSR initiatives as relating to image and brand. While managers generally feel CSR is well integrated in their company, CSR is of second-tier concern because it is not tied to managers’ bonuses. The authors discuss how the alignment and misalignment of managerial perceptions are likely to affect corporate social performance. One possible benefit of “misaligned managerial perceptions: it can be a source of development and innovation.

photo credit: edmittance

Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook, wikis, and blogs are making their way into organizations, in many cases brought in by employees rather than as part of an enterprise strategy. Some organizations, however, are proactively exploring how new collaborative tools can change the way people work for the better.

Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management, sizes up this trend in the book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. In this interview with McKinsey Quarterly, he discusses some of his findings.

At the 9:08 mark (note: the video clock counts down), McAfee talks about the top-down versus the bottom-up approach to adopting new technology. In the end, he believes culture change is more likely to result when it is led by senior managers.

At 6:26, McAfee talks about the forces that can undermine Web 2.0′s enterprise-wide adoption.

And at 3:54, he talks about what Web 2.0 means for middle managers. If you see yourself as a gatekeeper of information, McAfee says, you’re in for a rough ride. “If you have another view of yourself, which is that you’re someone who’s responsible for output, you’re someone who’s responsible for making good things happen in your team, then these tools should be your best friend.”

CEO of Yahoo! Carol Bartz argues in The Economist (Nov. 13, 2009 issue) that, in the age of ubiquitous information, traditional management is “impossible, or at least ill-advised.”

“The hierarchical, layered corporate structures in which company information was carefully managed and then selectively passed down the line have crumbled,” Bartz writes. “The online era has made command-and-control management as dead as dial-up internet.” Ouch.

The problem, she says, lies in the stream of 24/7 commentary and instant opinion and gossip generated and amplified by bloggers, tweeters, and their ilk. It makes it impossible to control the message and hampers decision-making. So what’s the answer?

Learn to live with it, for one thing. Develop a thick skin. And understand “how important they [leaders] can be to their own team by interpreting both the news and the disinformation that swirls around them,” Bartz writes.

Bartz advises leaders to identify and mentor thought leaders, employees who have the ability to digest and interpret information for others. “Grooming these in-house ideas people helps foster a culture of openness to fresh thinking—the greatest energy an organization can have.”

photo credit: nregimbal

Here is a nice six-minute story from Fabienne Munch, Director of Ideation at Herman Miller, about how she transformed and energized her 15-member team in the space of five months.

Stealing an idea from Google’s playbook, Munch gave members of her team $5,000 each to pursue an idea of their choice. There were three conditions: the project had to relate to Herman Miller’s mission; the staffers had to invite an outsider to participate; and they had to be open to the idea of pooling resources with their colleagues. At the five-minute mark, Munch talks about what happened next.

In the final two minutes, Munch talks about workplace trends that are informing how Herman Miller is designing work spaces.

Leading Thoughts is built on the assumption that in the world of people management, there is yawning chasm between practice and research. The gap is twofold: HR practitioners are generally not aware of the latest HR-related research findings that impact on their work; and HR practitioners and researchers are interested in different issues.

Researchers Diana L. Deadrick and Pamela Gibson (Old Dominion University) wanted to determine how consistent that gap has been over time and what issues have dominated the practice and research fields over the past 30 years. To answer those questions they went on a massive reading binge. They content-analyzed more than 6,300 articles published in four HR-focused journals between 1976 and 2005 according to 14 topic areas. Two journals were geared to practitioners and two to academics.

Deadrick and Gibson found:

• Issues relating to HR development (training and development, careers) dominated the field over all time periods. Next most common topic over time was staffing (such as job analysis, testing), followed by motivation-related topics (job design, satisfaction, stress).
• Two topics — teams and organizational exit — were the least popular in all the time periods studied. Teams did experience some growth in interest during the past 20 years, though organizational exit continued to be off the radar.
• HR development and staffing issues were the dominant issues for both practitioners and academics. The gap in interest narrowed over time for employee/labour relations and widened for compensation and rewards (with growing interest among practitioners and decreasing interest among academics.

The researchers say they want HR practitioners and academics to assess the field and determine what is most important to HR as a coherent discipline. “If we want to progress as a field, we need to articulate the common values and body of knowledge that sets up apart from other disciplines,” they write. “What is the mission statement of the HR discipline as a whole? What are the core values underlying the field of HR? Are those values reflected in our publications?”

Good questions indeed.

Note: The four journals studied were: HRMagazine, Human Resource Management, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Personnel Psychology.

Revisiting the research–practice gap in HR: A longitudinal analysis, by Diana L. Deadrick and Pamela A. Gibson; in Human Resource Management Review 19 (2009) 144–153.

If you cannot find this paper in your local library, email me for a copy: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: ThomasThomas

MIT Sloan Management Review features a Q&A with Thomas Malone, Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and founding co-director of the Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. Malone talks mostly about sustainability but he also takes aim at the cherished hierarchies of modern organizations.

Here is an excerpt:

Q: Now I’d like for you speculate with me for a minute. Imagine I’m an executive, interested in understanding how my organization is going to need to function differently in the fast-coming future as the result of growing concerns about sustainability. What would you say I should be prepared for?

Malone: One thing, I think, will be a reconsideration of the “centralized mindset,” a term that comes from another MIT colleague, Mitch Resnick. The idea is that most of us have grown up with the concept that hierarchy is the answer to most organizational problems. That if there’s a problem to be solved, we should put someone in charge of it, and if things are not well organized, that’s because there isn’t strong leadership. It’s very pervasive in our world—and for good reasons, because it actually has worked quite well for the last century or so.

But organizing things this way is becoming less useful in many situations. There are now more decentralized ways of organizing things that are becoming more desirable in many situations. In Wikipedia, for instance thousands of people all over the world have created a very large and very high quality intellectual product with almost no centralized control. And in Linux, a loose band of programmers, with very limited top-down control has developed an operating system that rivals Microsoft Windows. As these examples show, sometimes, the best way for a leader to gain power is to give it away.

Q: What’s going to get in the way of that happening?

I actually think the toughest part will be dealing with our own assumptions about what’s true and what’s not. Peter Senge uses the term “mental models.” The basic idea is that we all have a lot of assumptions about the world and how it works. Some of those assumptions will need to change. Not all, of course, but some.

LINK TO FULL INTERVIEW