All Posts Tagged With: "shared vision"
Lessons from India’s Business Leaders
Peter Cappelli writes for Harvard Business Review today about the commitment of Indian leaders “to social goals that extend beyond the interests of their firms.” (“Indian Companies: Doing Well Because They Do Good”) Cappelli and his colleagues interviewed the leaders of the 100 largest companies in India. “Every executive we interviewed described the main objective of their company in terms of a social mission,” writes Cappelli, who contrasts the dark path American companies have taken (corporate lobbyists subverting the public good, excess executive compensation, second worst shareholder performance among developed countries over the last decade) with the bright future of Indian companies (second best overall growth rate in the world, competing and winning in high-skilled service industries, acquiring foreign companies that then perform better).
For Indian companies, “business strategy rests on the social mission.” Bharti Airtel’s business strategy focuses on getting cell phones into the hands of people who have no means to communicate. ICICI Bank’s business strategy focuses on providing financial help to those with no access to banking. Dr. Reddy’s business strategy focuses on addressing the healthcare needs of the poor worldwide.
Dr. Reddy’s, a pharmaceutical company, provides for the healthcare needs of 40,000 children. Such charitable support is another…
12Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBackdoor Access to World-Class Performance
A CEO recently enlightened me about the transformative power of a robust safety, diversity, or ethics program: It can institutionalize a culture of employee engagement, process management, open communication, and continuous improvement.
Safety, diversity, and ethics have value in and of themselves. Where they have value beyond themselves is in their ability to align people with a shared vision. Everybody shares the vision of a safe workplace. Everyone shares the vision of a diverse workforce (well, maybe not everyone, but nobody’s going to argue against it). Everyone shares the vision of working for an ethical organization.
Leaders can use safety, diversity, and ethics to rally people around ambitious goals and get them nodding in agreement, establish the habit of adhering to policies and procedures, focus people on measurable results, communicate a consistent message, pursue process improvements, and celebrate success. In other words, safety, diversity, and ethics are levers that leaders can use to transform their organizations. They are large-scale pilot projects for how to make your organization more systematic, holistic, and aligned.
For example, if you are an executive for a bank with dissatisfied customers and employees, declining revenue, and escalating costs, and you want to do something about it, you may want…
9Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMaking Your Organization Adaptable
Last week, Alan Alda spent an hour on “The Human Spark” on PBS exploring why modern man survived and Neanderthals did not. The likely answer? Adaptablity—and it’s still the key to survival.
“There’s probably no organizational attribute that’s more important today than adaptability,” writes Gary Hamel, author and the world’s leading expert on business strategy, according to Fortune magazine. “In our topsy turvy world, every organization is teetering on the brink of irrelevance, and unless it can change as fast as change itself, it will soon tumble off the ledge.”
Baldrige organizations promote adaptability by valuing agility, a focus on the future, and a systems perspective. They constantly and systematically renew themselves by questioning what markets to serve and what the customers in their markets require, how to make their processes more efficient, and how to engage their employees in change and innovation. Rather than reacting to change, they deploy processes that help them adapt and grow.
In “Outrunning Change—the CliffsNotes Version” on WSJ Blogs (October 21, 2009, click on Part 1 here and Part 2 here), Hamel shares his thoughts on how to build a highly adaptable company:
Anticipation
- Face up to strategy decay.
- Learn from the fringe. “The future will sneak up on you unless you…
Co-Creating a Shared Vision
Ryan Martens at the Agile Development Blog recently talked about strategies for adopting Agile in larger organizations and he referred to a 5-stage process described by Peter Senge and others in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Currency Doubleday, 1994). Senge’s books are bibles for systems thinkers. In the section Martens refers to, the book outlines a strategy for building a shared vision.
A shared vision replaces command-and-control management. Leaders used to be able to get people to do things by commanding them to do it. Some still do that today. The problem with this approach is (a) the hierarchy it demands is slow and no organization can afford to be slow any more, (b) employees who only do as they are told are not as innovative, productive, or engaged as the organization needs them to be, and (c) most employees hate it.
The alternative to telling people what to do is to involve them is creating a shared vision, “a sense of purpose that binds people together and propels them to fulfill their deepest aspirations,” according to the field book.
The book identifies five stages, shown in the diagram above, to help build the listening capacity of senior leaders and the leadership capabilities of the rest…
14Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Priorities of Leadership
“The more senior your management position is, the more important it is to connect the organization or the project to the outside world,” said Alan Mulally, president and chief executive officer of Ford. “How does this fit in with what we’re doing? What is the real goal, the real mission? And it makes you think about: What business are we in?”
The comments come from an interview for The New York Times, “Planes, Cars and Cathedrals,” published online on September 5, 2009. Throughout the interview, Mulally addressed the first questions asked in the first category of the Baldrige Criteria:
- How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?
- How do senior leaders deploy your organization’s vision and values?
- How do senior leaders’ personal actions reflect a commitment to the organization’s values?
“I think the most important thing is coming to a shared view about what we’re trying to accomplish—whether you’re a nonprofit or a for-profit organization,” said Mulally. “What are we? What is our real purpose?”
High-performing organizations focus through a shared vision. Creating such a vision requires leaders who will listen to employees and customers and find the common themes and interests that everyone can support. “The higher the calling, the higher the compelling vision that…
16Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
