Change happenings
Observer September 16th, 2007
As a thirty-something I wished I’d been young in the sixties, but with the passage of time, I got to think that being twenty-something in the eighties was not a bad deal either. April 1989, the City of London’s Guildhall, history in the making as Mikhail Gorbachev’s Zil cavalcade sweeps by to lunch there with Margaret Thatcher and captains of British industry. The crowd, the flags, the village that the City is, and these heavy motor cars ploughing through. The memory gets more thrilling the further back it recedes. Glasnost, perestroika, and later the Berlin Wall. Who’d have thought.
Cycle on to this week for a view of what monumental change agents these two leaders proved to be and how much closer by now some previously unfathomable arguments of ideology. Gordon Brown receives political foe Baroness Thatcher for tea at Downing Street, and Gorbachev is to be found selling glossy fashion hold-alls on the inside cover of The Economist. To borrow the coinage of a global insurance company, change happens. Not always at the pace or in the specifics wanted – change being messy – but happen it does. And as with the history of these two leaders from twenty years ago, burning platforms certainly help.
Categories: Behavior , Communication | Comments Off on Change happenings | Print this post | Email this Post
BlackBerry and Apple
Observer August 31st, 2007
Idly musing on a holiday journey a couple of years back I asked my 8 year old companion did he know what each of an iPod and a Blackberry were. He passed on the first but for the second, ventured…. “A berry that’s black?” Trying again this year, a bit of a holiday ritual this, for the first I got “a noise machine” and for the second, “a noise machine with buttons”. Oh so true this month as the BlackBerry kept alpha types fidgetting their lifeline to the office through the market turmoil.
I’m betting that what builds a brand more than anything is that it does what it says it will do with striking reliability. Attributes and brand marketing aside, when all is said and done, we only really fall in love with products that we cannot, just cannot, once initiated, do without. But neither the iPod nor the BlackBerry are making it onto Business Week’s list of Best Global Brands (though Apple does so at number 12). Hard to fathom how some of the stuffier perceived financial services firms come out ahead.
Categories: Communication | Comments Off on BlackBerry and Apple | Print this post | Email this Post
Great oratory, great help
Observer June 22nd, 2007
Not rare to find among middle managers (that much maligned group in large companies) the tut tutting about so and so’s being advanced on seemingly ‘great presentation skills’, and not much else. The innuendo, that selection committees are somehow blindsighted to shortfalls in other skill areas, so dazzled are they by the candidate’s energy, mastery of message, and delivery in front of an audience.
There’s every chance that presentation skills are overvalued, and may give the occasional break to lower true potential candidates, but at the end of the day we know that substance matters too for sustainable success. So following now Barack Obama after following Segolene Royal, can he deliver from a standing start the policies to match the passion? It’s energizing indeed for the dems to have such a naturally capable orator. And a rich personal story doesn’t harm either. If nothing else he helps bring people back, and younger people in, to the political discourse, stimulating political debate in families and communities in a way that has, across the developed world, being remarkably zoned out and latent over the past several years.
Categories: Communication | Comments Off on Great oratory, great help | Print this post | Email this Post
The long goodbye
Observer May 31st, 2007
As the UK lays in waiting for Mr Brown to take over from Tony Blair, with the latter’s reputation dwindling further still as he dawdles his way out of office, one can’t but think that he’s failing a major test of leadership, that of taking his leave. The setting down of power, to put it in his own words. And with that he adds himself to a growing group of former crowd-pleasers that just hung on too long. Calling time on a powerful career must be a bit like calling the top of the market, pretty difficult by recent accounts. The longer the leaving the dodgier the judgement? May be. Even championship agents of change may well resist it for themselves. They are human after all. Lord Browne, Mrs Thatcher, Percy Barnevik and even Jack Welch. Their good names took plenty of damage late in the day after years of lionizing and enviable reputational equity.
Categories: Behavior , Communication | Comments Off on The long goodbye | Print this post | Email this Post
Sharing the limelight
Observer April 15th, 2007
.. a priceless vignette in the new thumper on and for Andy Grove, named as such, by Richard Tedlow. It speaks to Grove’s resentment at not getting credit for his increasingly pivotal role in Intel’s early days. The public face remained co-founder Bob Noyce even while his day to day involvement decreased. This ‘got on Grove’s nerves’. The fix? His wife Eva calls Noyce to express as such, and lo and behold, things change. As often, behind every great man, a great woman (and it may be trending to the vice versa these days too). Or maybe the Groves together are just a crack team.
There’s no question of Grove’s managerial excellence, mastery, and natural leadership characteristics. But between the lines of this book, while Grove comes across as a force of nature, one cannot be convinced he was always a positive force for those working closely with him day in day out. For sure he stretched people to perform beyond themselves, and many became multimillionaires. But was Intel a good place for the soul? Was the culture an asset or a liability? What gets forgiven in the way of behavior when performance is strong? And what the forgone contribution of associates inhibited by fear?
Categories: Behavior , Communication , Good to read | Comments Off on Sharing the limelight | Print this post | Email this Post
Reputation-reality gaps
Observer February 1st, 2007
…interesting piece on reputational risk in this month’s Harvard Business Review, on how divergence of perception and reality, in and of itself, comprises a risk to reputation. When the walk and the talk don’t match up, we know intuitively that it won’t wash long term. To quote (alas, I don’t know who to attribute) “..you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”.
Categories: Behavior , Communication | Comments Off on Reputation-reality gaps | Print this post | Email this Post
Why blog?
Observer January 10th, 2007
…..to habitualize the writing, offer a point of view, get known, collect and build a salient body of interesting to compelling content on leadership communication and behavior in corporate life. Marketing as much as anything. It may well be that blogging is peaking, but not quite passe. In any event I’m going to run with it. If it’s good enough for Tom Peters it’s going to be good enough for me.
Categories: Communication | Comments Off on Why blog? | Print this post | Email this Post
