Quotation from: Milton Friedman
It's hard to know what is meant by business ethics. Only people, not businesses, have ethics. Ethics is me, the individual, as a person. I'm ethical or unethical. If I'm employed in a business that I think is unethical, I have a clear choice. I can get out of that business and find something else to do. It doesn't seem to me it's ethical for me to do unethical things because the business can let me do it.
Original Source: Stanford Business

In times of uncertainty and financial turmoil how important is it to foster strong leadership at multiple levels in the organization to deal better with crises and other unexpected circumstances? Ideas? Opinions ?
We will try to dig deeper into this hot subject during the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned…….

Quotes

It is in times of turmoil and strife that true manliness is shown. A life without adversity makes a man weak, dull, and effeminate.

Seneca

The Art of War

Attack Your enemy where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.

Payback

Description:
If you're like most people, you bet your career and company on innovation--because you must. Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation offers you a new way to think about and manage innovation that will dramatically improve the odds of success. Authors James P. Andrew and Harold L. Sirkin, senior partners at The Boston Consulting Group, describe an approach to managing innovation based on the concept of a cash curve--which tracks investment against time. They ask the questions you need to ask: How much should you invest in a new product or service? How fast should you push it to market? How quickly can you get to optimal value? How much additional investment should you pour into sustaining and building the product or service? Payback offers you practical and economically sound advice on when to pursue cash flow indirectly by first pursuing other benefits, such as brand and knowledge. It also shows you how to reshape the cash curve by using different business models--integrator, orchestrator, and licenser--each of which balances risk and reward differently. The authors then present a short list of decisions and activities that you must make--not delegate--to achieve a high return on innovation. You won't find facile answers in Payback. Instead, you will find valuable insights and practical guidance for mastering one of the most challenging and critical business activities: innovation

Source: Harvard Business Publishing

Quotes

People are willing to adjust their behavior to facilitate teamwork, but they expect others to make a similar effort.
— Irina Gaida, BCG

Quotation

If the primary aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in Port forever.
"Thomas Aquinas"

When is a Innovation profitable ?

An Idea becomes an Innovation as soon as it generates cash in a profitable way.

the elevator pitch

An elevator pitch (or elevator speech) is an overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride (say, thirty seconds or 100-150 words).
The term is typically used in the context of an entrepreneurr pitching an idea to a venture capitalist to receive funding. Venture capitalists often judge the quality of an idea and team on the basis of the quality of its elevator pitch, and will ask entrepreneurs for the elevator pitch to quickly weed out bad ideas.
It is said that many of the most important decisions made on the floor of the United States's Housee or Senatee are made "within the span of an elevator ride" as a staff aide whispers into a Congressman or Senator's ear while they head down to the floor to cast their vote.
A variety of other people, including entrepreneurs, project managers, salespeople, evangelists, job seekers, and speed daters commonly use elevator pitches to get their point across quickly.
An effective elevator pitch generally answers questions like...
What the product is
What it does for the buyer (e.g. the benefits)
Who we are

Source: Wikipedia

Some Key Characteristics of effective Leadership

Effective leaders have the ability to understand themselves and others, are great listeners strong communicators (both oral and written) get and keep people in action and develop a drive for achieving positive results consistently.

Why are Communications skills so important…..

The ability to communicate effectively is the most important skill you need to develop, whether you're giving speeches, pitching ideas to your boss, sending off an email, leaving a voice message or having a face to face discussion.
In a recent survey, conducted by the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Business School among HR managers from companies with more than 50,000 employees, communication skills were cited as the single most important decisive factor in choosing managers. The survey points out that Communication skills, including written and oral presentations, as well as the ability to work with others, are the main factor contributing to success.
Employees in organizations spend more than 75% of their time in an interpersonal situation; therefore it is no surprise to find out that at the source of a large number of organizational problems we find poor communication.

As a consequence of that, employers are looking for more than a specific set of skills, they are looking at a candidate's flexibility, at their ability to change and to be trained for different roles. But, fundamentaly they are also looking for those who have strong communication and interpersonal ability .

Power Point .............

I have mixed feelings towards PowerPoint®. Used porperly, it can be a great presentation tool. Used wrongly (unfortunately its too often the case ) they are a unbroken stream of boring slide shows narrated by mediocre communicators.

Sex, Leadership And Rock N' Roll

"At last, a book that cuts through the jargon of leadership and personal development. It offers a real world source of inspiration and provocation in areas such as: creativity, innovation, relationships, motivation, leadership, high performance, learning and reinvention. The unique approach springs from the mix of leading edge concepts with the wisdom of the street in the form of rock music. This is served up in a quirky, challenging but intelligent way. Peter Cook has skillfully synthesized these diverse viewpoints using his background, both as a business academic, MBA graduate and tutor, strategy consultant and thought leader as well as a musician, writing and performing music, in rock bands. The book examines the issues using the analogy of "Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll" rather than the language of prophets, consultants and gurus. In this context, the letters MBA stand for "Management By Attitude." Let there be Rock n Roll Leadership!"

Source: Amazon

A shift in paradigm

In order to be successful in the future we need to change our attitude towards work in general and management practices in particular; instead of working harder we should focus on working smarter, and do this by:

• Increasing the speed of decision-making. Decisions need to be made faster, even if not always 100% right, we need to take our decisions embedded in a lot of uncertainty under a volatile environment.
• Much slimmer structure around organizations, much more entrepreneurship and initiative taken by individuals.
• Shift from “power and status” to “ownership and achievement.”
• Seek for new ways of compensation and reward, with more participation in the risk of Profit & Loss with ALL levels of employees involved in the business structure, enhancing the opportunity of bigger pay-offs.
• Start to shift the term employee to business partner.
• Foster higher level of creativity and innovation among all key stakeholders and extended it to all parts of the company.

The Future of Management

:For me, management innovation is about innovation in management principles and processes that ultimately change the actual practice of what managers do, and how they get it done. That’s different to operational innovation, which is really talking about how the actual work of transforming inputs into outputs, gets done. "

Gary Hamel

InnoExecution

Is a leadership philosophy developed from the result of a study focused on Corporate Leadership and goal achievement of enterprises. The study aimed to find out the reasons and solutions of the following problems common to most organizations under a competitive environment:
Most of the enterprises cannot meet its goals effectively? Why?
What is the most important factors affecting its performance?
What is the most important capability of an enterprise?
To answer these questions, extensive research has been conducted by Mr. Ka-Keung Chan on a large number of corporations and organizations in the following status:
Successful organizations
Growing corporations
Falling organizations
The study extended to historical events, fall and raise of nations, important battles and the leadership of their generals.
The result: Successful corporate leadership relies on the art of identifying the driving forces of an enterprise, and the balance of them
The most important factors that affect the value and existence of an enterprise is:
1. Innovation power - create new product or services for the client
2. Execution power – realize what is innovated
Innovation power is the ability to create new product to meet the changing needs of the market. Executive power is the ability to deliver the new product to the market effectively.

Source: Wikipedia

Power Map

“Sometimes at IMD we use a questionnaire called the Power Map to help participants identify their own culture (i.e. values they cherish, leading to certain behaviors), to identify other executives' profiles and discuss consequences on communication and leadership in a team.
To simplify, the four main types of profiles that our survey identified are:
People who like to 'control things' and introduce processes, develop more the 'now';
People who are more concerned with people, develop more the impact on people;
People who are more concerned with getting things done, start with key actions;
People who are more concerned with ideas, frame proposals in concepts. “

Jacques Horovitz is Professor of Service Strategy, Service Marketing & Service Management at IMD, one of the world's leading business schools.

Quotes#16

There comes that mysterious meeting in life when someone acknowledges who we are and what we can be, igniting the circuits of our highest potential."
-Rusty Berkus

Big Think Strategy

Bernd H. Schmitt argues that Business leaders need bold strategies to stay relevant and win. In "Big Think Strategy," the author explains ( based on some corporate examples) how one can bring bold thinking into current business by sourcing big ideas and executing them creatively.
According to Schmitt any leader can overcome institutionalized "small think"--the inertia, the narrow-mindedness, and the aversion to risk that block true innovation. A great Book from the Harvard Business School Press

Why is it that by presenting a new idea/challenge/project; people tend to see things from different perspectives? While some might search for the positive points in it looking at ( for example) new business opportunities , others will tend to search for roadblocks and for reasons not to go for it ? Is the glass half empty or half full? according to Wikipedia this is a common expression, used rhetorically to indicate that a particular situation could be a cause for optimism (half full), pessimism (half empty) or as a general litmus test simply determine if an individual is an optimist or a pessimist. The purpose of the question is to demonstrate that the situation may be seen in different ways depending on one's point of view and that there may be opportunity in the situation as well as trouble.