Most of the European movements have started in the Scandinavian countries and they set the targets for Corporate Governance, Equality, Education, Work-Life-Balance and of course for a turn-around in economics. Now the oldies like Shell und BP recruit nordic talents from the techie-field (read later).
Scandinavia is well known for its IT-Innovators like Linus Torvalds who changed the laws in internet for ever with Linux open source. There is Nokia in Finland and Ericsson in Sweden for Technology and Ikea for inventing the new management philosophy of good design for all. And for me there is Celemi, one of the smartest design companies for learning and change programs, who have worked with most of the top-shots in Sweden worldwide.
But not only in small companies and technology, there have been very new steps in politics: The politics in Norway work hard on their change with the “Woman on Board” program initiated 2002. The Norwegian quota law (to have 40 % women on board) was introduced by the conservative Minister for Trade and Industry Mr. Ansgar Gabrielsen. The number of women board directors was 6,8 % these days and due to the law changed to 39,5 % this year - as this is the deadline - or you are out of business. This had a dramatic impact on recruiting and Norwegian companies started diving for pearls in the Scandinavian sea: The search for female executives has led to cross-border recruitment drives - especially in neighbouring Nordic states - as well as company-led initiatives to cherry-pick and promote the best existing female talent.
Jump over the sea: Europe is picking up. (Not) Surprisingly Shell and BP, the very big energy companies, need to look into the future. They need a CEO who is not afraid for a turn-around and has a clear focus and visions. Interestingly - these companies went Scandinavian. Jorma Ollila from Nokia Finland was asked to move to the Board of Shell to Den Hague in the Netherlands and this week BP finally announced that Carl-Henric Svanberg will join the BP board as chairman designate and as a nonexecutive director on Sept. 1. Forbes gave it a nice headline: “BP Goes for Technie Svanberg“. The new man was chief executive of Swedish telecommunications network supplier LM Ericsson. Both are not from oil - but from telecommunication and technology. They follow the trend, as Lars Josefsson, CEO of Vattenfall in Stockholm, who is also a Techie - coming from Ericsson and was advisor to the Swedish Government in the 90ies. This mix of cultural background, innovation driven sector and Scandinavian routs might lead to a new strategy towards sustainability, technology and new concepts for energy and management. Wonder when the first Scandinavian female Board member is exported. See EWMD blog:
This morning I found a little but interesting report in the Handelsblatt, my second breakfast. It is written by Anja Müller who referes to an academic study published in the UK. “Marketing in uncertainty“, a study comparing behaviour of entrepreneurs to corporate company people in marketing - very intersting results about risk management, trust in figures, planning and checking finance, etc. If you are an entrepreneur yourself it is nothing really new - of course you take risks and if you fail you pay with your own money. You are much more carefull where you invest and how much money at all and you will check on cash flow, which is not a buzz word for you, but the money on your own bank account. As easy as that. The entrepreneur has full transparency - the manager has his monthly figures or the EBIT at the end of the quarter.
I will use this story in my future seminars to show the different decision making of people - but this is triggert by responsibility. As the entrepreneur puts in all her/his money, the manager is only responsible for EBIT - and most of the time he/she has no influence on this key indicator anyway … as marketing cost are still small compared to total operational cost … this makes them going easy. You get what you measure !
Enjoy reading the detailed study byStuart Read, Nicholas Dew, Saras D. Sarasvathy, Michael Song, & Robert Wiltbank, Published in the Journal of Marketing, Volume 73, Number 3, May 2009
Implement an ERP System …. and make it work - needs experience
Very often, strategic analyses show a strategy that is most likely to lead to a better business performance. What has to be done, and what will be the outcome, is quite obvious to analysts. However, members of the organisation might not agree or, for any reason, show resistance to the planned changes. Take, for example, the implementation of company wide software platforms that facilitates management of business processes. There are hundred of examples where such projects have faced severe problems during the implementation phase. A case study published in CIO shows how Nestlé has learned this the hard way.
“If Dunn were to do it over again, she’d focus first on changing business processes and achieving universal buy-in, and then and only then on installing the software. “If you try to do it with a system first, you will have an installation, not an implementation,” she says. “And there is a big difference between installing software and implementing a solution.”
ERP projects are notorious for taking a long time and a lot of money. Jennifer Chew, Forrester Research, found that 54 percent said that their project lasted more than two years . Nestlé USA’s project “sounds on the high side” for both time and money. Still, success is ultimately measured by what the project accomplishes. Chew points out that Kmart had to write off $130 million for an ERP project that was never completed.
Celemi, the swedish learning company, has put all the knowledge what will and might happen in such an IT-implementation-phase into a hands-on simulation. You go through the project and you get all the resistance, ignorance, late buy-in, to late requirements …. and need to deal with it. The challenge is: Make it work and get the business value.
Advice for companies: Make your team of IT sensitive what will happen, so they can prepare. “The first time they never believe that this is going to happen, but I know too many ERP-people who said all the 100 cases discribed in the simulation happened in my project.” So - why not investing a day of sensitivity training and avoid three terrible weeks of rework? Try the business simulation Cayenne - before your projects gets hot. This is risk avoidance by knowledge.
Claudia Schmitz, Cenandu
Organisational Development (Organisations-Entwicklung OE) has changed in the last decades. From a Top-down perspective of hierarchical pyramids with their little boxes listed underneath the profession has changed into a kind of Change Experts, who support the organisation in getting the structures right with the strategy. Others are supporting the strategy process and help the companies to link it to their cultures and own dynamics of innovation. More and more it has to do with the System Company or Organisation and the way to work in it or with it is more similar to an anthropologist, who lives with his tribes, than an external neutral observer. When you work with a group - you are part of it.
Not alone is there a large group of “schools” in Germany, but also in the European neighbourhood. What are our roots and backgrounds, what is the way we work most efficiently with and how can we create a kind of orientation for new consultants for a new system of companies to come. What is the future like - networks of project managers?
We want to find out and the German Organisation GOE ev and the international Association IODA come together to a learning event in Cologne for a weekend to exchange views, learnings and perspectives within a future search conference model.
Good question about leadership: Is Blanchard right with Servant Leadership?
“Sadly, too many top managers still think leading in this way will lead to mutiny. They conjure up images of the inmates running the prison or leaders trying to please everyone. Instead of becoming successful servant leaders they become the opposite; they become self-serving leaders, who ultimately set themselves and their organisations up for failure because of their destructive influence.” Read this very interesting article on Training Zone - the UK portal.
But it is not only about leadership - it has also to do with Learning and Training. This is why there is a big difference in mindset of so called “consultants”, who do a lot of interviews with the people in the company, bring it all together in a “Board-format” on 150 PowerPoint-slides, and finally the CEO listens to the voice of his people, but he never knows. The role of a “facilitator” is much different to this: They believe that the customer knows much more about the business than anybody from outside and they create settings of “Organisational Learning” where the different points of views come together and share and discuss topics, solutions, ideas and cuts. The facilitator takes away the hierarchy and opens windows for those, who usually do not speak or ask. The big difference: This is in public, a joint meeting and everybody knows who had the idea. There is transparency, openness and pride of ownership. So - the facilitator needs not to be an expert in topics, but an expert in group dynamic and system thinking. Some of the methodologies are known: Open Space, World Cafe, Future Research but it can also be small interventions like Fish bowl (experts, observers and critics). For me it is a sense of belief in your own people.
Great Document about Large Group Interventions: Whole System Approaches to Organizational Change by Thomas J. Griffin, Ameritech Corporation, Ronald E. Purser, San Francisco State University
Interview wit the Spanish Consultant José Ochoa in Madrid with Claudia Schmitz, Consultant in Cologne. (Starting in Spanish – the interview is in English)
Claudia Schmitz has done a learning journey with the international manager network EWMD to India in January 2009 and takes about her impressions and learnings:
The Goal of the Trip: How is the real work life in India?
Action: Meeting Indian Companies Perot System and Mindtree in Bangalore
Problems: communication on both sides
Claudia Schmitz gave a short input on “Behaviour in Corporate Structures” and their change along the growth curve at the Celemi Partner Meeting in Budapest, April 24, 2009. Her colleague Jose Ochoa from Madrid used the new technology of livescribe and visualised the content and recorded the voice of Claudia at the same time. This documentation gives an insight into the abstract concept of how a Management Holding is different to a Finance Holding (specially in leadership) and why people still think they are in head office and behave accordingly, though the situation in a Finance Holding is very different to that: They should just be in service and provide support. All the decision-making-power is in the divisions. Organisational structure drives leadership - and some managers wonder, why the some ideas do not work out as they should. The answer is systemic behaviour of organisations - as they are systems and follow their own flows. To understand in which organisation you really work and which dynamic is driving behind, gives an inportant insight into why thinks work out or not. Claudia refers on her experience with similar organisations and tries to point out how the network structure of the future will work, as the management in head office will disappear. The final version will be written down in May - here are the slides to start thinking about it. Structural behaviour
Today poeple talk about collaboration and go for value creation through joint efforts. In the fragmented companies and business-unit-silo-thinking this is not easy to do and a big impuls from leadership and corporate culture is necessary. “Organisational agility is critical for successful businesses in the current economic climate, with 81 percent of business leaders viewing knowledge management and collaboration as the main drivers for increased productivity, enhanced performance and rapid innovation, according to a new report. http://www.knowledgeboard.com/item/2993/23/5/3
My perspective on this topic: A lot of organisations lead by financial key-indicators and try to set up common values. The finance language is too much buzz-words for most of the operating people and they feel threatened but not embedded. The so called corporate culture values are so vage, that they could be told by anyone. The big question is: who is that company and what does it stand for. More important than ever is the branding towards the employees and this is connected with product, values, believes and loyalty.
What is very interesting in this context is: it is not new at all. Here some insights from the pionieer time.
We had crisis before and we had thinkers before. One of the management pioneers is Mary Parker Follett, who was talking about collaboration already as early as 1918, just after World War I and the early industrialisation, shortly after Frederick Taylor has started his measurements in the American plants. A very interesting study about the female view in management is originally presented as an habilitation script of Birgit Althans in 2005, Freie Universität Berlin, “Das maskierte Begehren: Frauen zwischen Sozialarbeit und Management” (document is online with 253 pages in German language)
The individual is created by the social process and is daily nourished by that process. There is no such things as a self-made man. What we possess as individuals is what is stored up from society, is the subsoil of social life…. Individuality is the capacity for union. The measure of individuality is the depth and breadth of true relation. I am an individual not as far as I am apart from, but as far as I am a part of other men. Evil is non-relation. (Follett 1918: 62)
Organizations, like communities, could be approached as local social systems involving networks of groups. In this way Mary Parker Follett was able to advocate the fostering of a ’self-governing principle’ that would facilitate ‘the growth of individuals and of the groups to which they belonged’. By directly interacting with one another to achieve their common goals, the members of a group ‘fulfilled themselves through the process of the group’s development’. http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-foll.htm
Follett’s is a philosophy of engagement and encounter. Through thinking about our experiences, questioning their meaning and truth and looking to the people we are, it is possible to learn. But there can be dangers in this process if approached narrowly.
The people who ‘learn by experience’ often make great messes of their lives, that is, if they apply what they have learned from a past incident to the present, deciding from certain appearances that the circumstances are the same, forgetting that no two situations can ever be the same… All that I am, all that life has made me, every past experience that I have had - woven into the tissue of my life - I must give to the new experience. That past experience has indeed not been useless, but its use is not in guiding present conduct by past situations. We must put everything we can into each fresh experience, but we shall not get the same things out which we put in if it is a fruitful experience, if it is part of our progressing life… We integrate our experience, and then the richer human being that we are goes into the new experience; again we give ourself and always by giving rise above the old self. (Follett 1924: 136-137)
Find a link to Linked to Robert Putman. He put up the facts in the 80ies ” The original ‘Bowling Alone’ article generated a great deal of interest. It is easy to see why, when Robert Putnam talks about the significance of social connectedness and just how pervasive are its effects. Today we find the book “Community”, community work by Peter Block.
Peter is part of a group of volunteers in Cincinnati called A Small Group , which is committed to the creation of a restorative and reconciled community. Its strategy is to discover ways to engage the disengaged through working with existing associations and through direct invitation. Its work focuses on direct efforts to bring into conversation those groups of people who are not in relationship with each other. His book: Community: The Structure of Belonging (Hardcover), was published only in 2008.
The community of people who work with simulations and games in their consulting is growing. Complexity cannot be managed by more rules and more knowledge, but to see the basic principles. (See great article in Handelsblatt about rules in complexity: Kognitionsforschung - Mach es wie die Ameise)
This is what interactive learning is all about. The Sagsaga-Organisation, a community of simulation designers and users, will have their first bi-national meeting in Cologne 18th April, Dutch and German experts and partners. Please download the invitation .Sagsaga Programme
The bi-national learning experience is organised by Sagsaga and all people interested in it please contact [eric.treske (at) intrestik.de] or [Claudia.Schmitz (at) Cenandu.de]
Claudia Schmitz is one of the workshop facilitators and presents a dialogue simulation called Medici Game, designed by Celemi in Sweden, based on the book of Frans Johansson. The Workshop is set up to reflect on our idea of Innovation and show the impact of real break through innovation compared to continuous improvement processes and lean management. It has a lot to do how we see the world and what we belief is true.
A little insight in the workshop: See the film of last year event ….. Innovation
Was tun wir hier eigentlich - wer braucht all dieses Fachwissen? Und wieso passiert (trotz alle diesen vielen Wissens) diese riesige Finanzkrise? Verkümmert Knowledge-Management dahin, dass wir alle Web 2 einbauen und noch mehr Daten ablegen? Haben Sie sich diese Frage auch schon mal gestellt?
Sehr spannend zu dieser Frage hat sich nun Hans Willgerodt (85) geäußert, der Aufstand der pensionierten Professoren der Universität Köln, wie es an anderer Stelle im Handelsblatt hieß. Hans Willgerodt hat sich am 27. Februar 2009 eine ganze Seite in der FAZ reserviert und sich ausgiebig mit der Frage beschäftigt, was denn die Klammer ist, die all das Wissen der Betriebswirtschaft zusammenhält. Mir hat dieser Passus sehr gut gefallen, den ich hier zitieren möchte: “Ohne genaueres Wissen über gesamtwirtschaftliche Zusammenhänge erhält man kein zutreffendes Bild über die Wirkungen spezieller, etwas branchenbezogener Wirtschaftspolitik. Man hat dann Teile in der Hand,”fehlt leider nur das geistige Band”. Die Notwendigkeit der Einordnung von Einzelheiten in größeren Zusammenhängen im Denken und Handeln ist heute kaum irgendwo dringender als in der wissenschaftlichen Wirtschaftspolitik. Das gilt umso mehr, als diese Synthese in der politischen Praxis mit ständig wachsender Beharrlichkeit verweigert wird. Sie kommt auch nicht notwendig schon dadurch zustande, dass man “interdisziplinär” die Spezialisten … an einem runden Tisch versammelt, um irgendeinen Kompromiss auszuhandeln. …. die notwendige Zusammenarbeit der Spezialisten muss von einerm übergeordneten Systemdenken geleitet werden.”
Wie er ganz richtig fragt, wo soll das herkommen? Nun, die Praktiker die das lesen, verstehen das Problem - denn auch in den Unternehmen ist die Fragmentierung des Wissens weit fortgeschritten und auch hier sitzen zwar viele um einen Tisch - aber es fehlt die gemeinsame Betrachtung der höheren Systemebene und oft fehlt schon die Sprache dazu.
Die dringend notwendige Systemtheorie wird man schwerlich in der Volkswirtschaft finden, auch nicht in der Betriebswirtschaft und wenn diese dann bei der Spieltheorie in der Psychologie auftaucht, durchsetzt mit viel Mathematik, dann ist die Frage, wie kommt sie ins Unternehmen? Bei Google-Aktionen landet man dann entweder bei den Wienern … oder in der linearen Systemtheorie der Regelsysteme von Technik. Halt: Die Soziologen in Bielefeld darf man nicht vergessen, die die Tradition von Luhmann hochhalten, aber das ist auch nicht jedermanns Sache.
