Style Dynamics



A chinese lion statue

Style Dynamics works to connect and promote talented leaders to full potential, at each of individual and institutional levels. Focused on the inter-related areas of Talent & Culture, Brand & Reputation, we work at aligning perception and reality, to secure full, fair and sustainable value. With an outcomes orientation, Style Dynamics brings insights that inflect actions, to embed change. Services.




Welcome to the Blog



The blog reflects on Talent & Culture, Brand & Reputation in corporate and public life. And their dynamic influence on people and performance. The rules of engagement? Common courtesy and fair sparring.



High Performance at Heathrow

January 20th, 2008

Twenty five seconds is what the co-pilot had this last week in which to make his landing decision on behalf of 152 people on BA38 from Beijing. There can be fewer real time tests of performance than that of making a call in landing a non-responsive aircraft. In the event things went very well relative to what might have turned out. It has to be to the enormous credit of both pilots and the entire cabin crew that passengers generally did not perceive anything to be amiss until they were on the ground. And with an emergency evacuation instigated, were clear of the plane in 3 minutes. BA’s people served their customers brilliantly on this occassion, with remarkable presence of mind. No doubt a rigor of training is in place for eventualities like this, however improbable the possible occurrence. But that should not diminish the gratitude, commendation and admiration now expressed to the plane’s high performance team.



Giving

December 31st, 2007

More than a dozen years ago I worked for a company that had a foundation doing great, hands-on, in-the-field work in developing countries. At the time, the standing policy on publicizing this good work was essentially one of let’s not be so crass as to use it to curry favor. Meanwhile, the fields of both corporate responsibility and private philanthropy advanced enormously. And while much remains unseen and unsung, the demands for increased transparency and accountability in all forms of institutional life, including foundations and NGOs, has shed more light than ever on efforts seeking to rebalance inequities across a globalized world. For an inspiring read, chock-full of ideas on donating in all its forms (time, money, skills etc) take a dip into Bill Clinton’s newish book, Giving. Of the many moving and innovative examples, my personal favourite, “Chess in the Schools“. He also covers giving throughout the life cycle, from kids and students to midlife ‘made it’ generation, to octogenarians. The book got me checking on planned posthumous giving to children’s charities. Two questions for me: Is that enough, and what am I waiting for?!



It’s the humans…

December 1st, 2007

The wonderful in-his-own-words memoir of Alan Greenspan (yes, Alan Greenspan), former Chairman of the Federal Reserve brings to mind a parody of the lament “It’s the economy, stupid”. Noting the influence of Russian born philosopher Ayn Rand on his life, Greenspan reports “I was intellectually limited until I met her. All of my work had been empirical and numbers-based, never values-oriented.” …Rand persuaded Greenspan “to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it…”. The turbulence of his book’s title, owes much, aside from fundamentals, to factors of “it’s the humans, stupid” and moreover the full range of their feelings, from fear on the one hand to exuberance on the other. Feelings, that drive thoughts, that drive behaviors. The book’s right up there with Katherine Graham’s Personal History as a compelling first person account of US public life, spanning several presidencies and not a few crises.



The charisma thing

November 18th, 2007

The ‘charisma thing’ seems to characterize as much of the chattering around what makes for good leadership as does ‘the vision thing’. As Jim Collins shows in Good to Great, the level 5 leaders have done extremely well for their companies often in the absence of this ‘magic’. But we know nevertheless that when we see it we tend to respond to it. History shows us that charisma can work for tremendous good, but also evil. It’s a mesmerizing quality that can drive followers to sometimes bond emotionally to the exclusion of rationality. Joseph Badaracco in his excellent Questions of Character illuminates, with the help of F Scott Fitzgerald, the notion of reverse causality around charisma. That’s to say that it comes with success, the role, its power and span of influence as much as due to any personality traits. A sobering thought, and something former high profile leaders may wryly concur with.



Data and denial

October 31st, 2007

For the numerically challenged, a grreat little book, The Tiger that Isn’t, by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot. Fit-for-purpose in times when spin has so often gotten the better of substance. If you suspect “the data” that underpins “the story”, the former Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies offers clear and accessible guidance through the thicket. The book deconstructs and demsytifies statistics in an engaging way that deepens understanding based on our experience in daily life. While it won’t turn out armies of Carol Vordermans it advocates, as it teaches, a reluctance to accept the drama of headlines at face value. And it shows well the knowledge-at-large about both politicians and press in terms of selective opportunism in disclosure. So as ever, buyer beware.



Into the public domain

October 24th, 2007

Many freshmen CEOs this year at very big firms, and several of a younger generation. Of all the demands on a new man in the top job, it’s the exposure to investment analysts that probably brings, at least in the normal course of business, the most exacting scrutiny. Oftentimes, and even with some earlier experience with this audience, the onerous demands of roadshows and quarterly reporting can come as a shock to the executive system. Not only for the required command of detail and disclosure discipline, but also the amplification of every conceiveable nuance through live webcasts and media reporting. To err with this audience can have an immediate and visible impact on the shareprice. More challenging still when the new incumbent is relatively unknown. In many cases the mentoring and supervisory role of prior CEO as ongoing chairman will offer the market comfort, but the exposure is not for the faint-hearted and requiring of high levels of representational acumen. Along with a fair wind in terms of business fundamentals and outlook.



Brand extensions

September 30th, 2007

After Brand You (Tom Peters), the Employer Brand (Simon Barrow and Richard Mosley), now the Leadership Brand (Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood) offering insights on the value of a strong leadership brand. The attributes? Consistent and predictable quality of leaders across levels, and across generations of CEOs. The effective transitions from Reginald Jones to Jack Welch to Jeffrey Immelt is held up as evidence for GE’s capability at this over the years. Good for continuity, for corporate culture, and ultimately, for shareholders. The authors also argue that leadership development in the firms that do this well is of a higher order than the usual exhortations about the need for vision, direction and energy. And there’s a grain of something in this. Certainly GE, P&G, Johnson & Johnson, and McKinsey leaders have a distinctive and common identity once beyond their company of origination. All these firms export a lot of leadership talent arising no doubt from positive perceptions about the sustained strength of their corporate performance. And by association, the quality of management. For the quick version on these arguments see Harvard Business Review July 2007.



Change happenings

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.



BlackBerry and Apple

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.



Picking winners

August 9th, 2007

Some food for thought for the business community in its ‘war for talent’ at an exhibition on gallerist Vollard presently at the Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Focusing on his promoted artists from the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries the exhibition includes many of the greatest painters of the early modern period, in a richly rewarding selection.

A champion of potential, actively encouraging and mentoring his charges, the bets Vollard placed on relative unknowns or shunned artists appear to have been made good with uncanny dependability. A lawyer by training he combined dealmaker skills with soft people skills to brilliant effect. And those soft skills as applied to artistic temperaments must be the hardest-to-master soft skills of all. For the corporate setting, think prima donna, high maintenance, diva, and so on.

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