Kelly points me to a list of blogs for MBAs. There's a mixture of new ones and older ones in the list (looks like this blog just made it on the page at #100). I'll have to check out the list (and add a few to my newsreader) as my involvement with various business school communities has been increasing as of late.
Leadership Is Innate (Part 2?)
Three years ago I wrote a post entitled "Leadership Is An Innate Skill?". In that post, I essentially avoided the core topic (because I didn't have an opinion), but I made some anecdotal points about how one could foster one's leadership style (which I thought was a more important point). My views on leadership haven't changed fundamentally since my original post in that I believe that some leadership skills can be learned, there are many different leadership styles, and contextual and organizational items play a role (e.g., can influence one to diverge from one's own leadership style or enhance it).
That said, reader Tom Hartly has brought to my attention a new book entitled, "Leadership Is Innate". I've not read the book, but one can peruse a bit online and figure out which side of the coin is being argued. The description reads:
Top CEOs will tell you that leadership traits come as "part of the package" and "can't really be taught". Scientists have recently begun to discover how genetic differences contribute to key leadership skills.
Anecdotes on Consulting Versus Interim Management
Whether to use consultants versus interim managers can be a bit of a loaded topic, and I'll choose not to address every angle in one post. Here I will just scratch the surface and paint some color by relating some anecdotal experiences. Depending on interest level, I may follow-up this post with additional discussion at a broader level.
To set the context, here's a couple of working definitions that I'll offer up:
- Consulting – use of a third-party (potentially a team) to help a company solve a particular business problem (for example, evaluate business opportunity for offering mobility applications to consumers, provide an independent assessment of a failing call center)
- Interim Management – use of one or more experienced individuals to take or play the role of a manager or executive within the company (for a limited period of time or trial period).
Now my deeper attention to the term "interim management" first started when I worked back in the 90s at the management consulting firm, PRTM. As context for those not familiar with PRTM, I characterized PRTM (back then at least) as firm that balanced strategy and operations engagements. As such, the firm got involved with both early strategic planning and later-phase, tactical design of business capabilities. At risk of oversimplifying, PRTM consultants were not just pure strategy guys, but they were often people with actual implementation and management experience. There used to be a firm motto that floated around to the effect of, "Results, Not Reports". This motto was essentially a shot at strategy firm practices of delivering stacks of analyses and reports that never had an impact. One of the partners (who had just rolled off an assignment as interim CEO) described to me his view on interim management something to the effect as follows, "Interim management is something [infrequent] that the firm only does for special clients. Unless approached correctly interim management can create a dependency between the firm consultant and the client that is hard to wean the parties off of. But interim management can offer a variety of benefits, particularly when a company wants to move forward with operational execution immediately."
Since then, here's a few examples I've heard from clients over the years which are indicative of a lean more towards use of interim management over consulting approaches:
- "We don't have the management skill set internally, and we need to fill three management roles in finance, services, and technology pretty immediately while introducing more sophisticated practices that can be transferred to the larger organization as we grow."
- "We are exploring this new geography for our products and services, and we need someone to help us as a general executive (covering all entity and operational requirements) to see if we can get things to pan out."
- "Our marketing VP will be going out on parental leave, and we need someone to fill the role for six- to nine-months."
- "We need someone that can fulfill the corporate development function with total dedication, but we need the option to release this person once we have met the objective of securing a beachhead in the North America enterprise market."
Thoughts on Living in a Company Filing for Chapter 11 Creditor Protection
Disclosure: In early March, members of my team and I will most likely be casualties of the economic downturn and inferred strategic changes by our employer, Nortel. This post reflects my perspectives only and not necessarily those of my employer and colleagues.
As background, the past few weeks have been quite tumultuous at Nortel. After many years of work in trying to turnaround and restructure the company, Nortel filed for creditor protection on January 14, 2009 (under the Chapter 11 code for the U.S. region). For those folks that will continue with the company, turnaround work is not yet done. Although I've worked in a number of environments, prior to this experience I have never lived *within* a company that has filed under the Chapter 11 code. I write this post simply to share some thoughts on both social media situations and management styles I've seen in this environment. In no particular order:
- Companies need to be aware of blog posts by directly involved parties. Here is a blog posting that chronicles communication of the ex-Nortel employees with the CEO, Board, officers, and the Monitor. The content of the posting is written professionally, and it seems to both chronicle a sequence of events and communications that indicate a number of "disconnects" in the communication process between employees and CEO (primary target it seems). Given the electronic environment that is a regular part of our lives, managers and workers need to know that histories can be traced more than ever before. I, for one, never saw this thing kind of thing ten years ago.
- Third party blog sites should also be monitored. For example, blogs such as All About Nortel cover the happenings in the industry with specific focus on Nortel. Whether one loves the AAN site or not, I have found that employees to look to these sites both for information and as an outlet. People discover things that they did not know (of course many things need to be verified). For example, in one of the comments sections of a recent All About Nortel post, I saw a disturbing comment by a potential distributor and customer of Nortel. I forwarded that information to a regional manager I knew - soon the blog post had circulated to a VP level for escalation and verification.
- Managers should treat their employees like adults where possible. Sounds like a basic one, but as an example, my manager gave me (and my team) straight talk and opinions during the process (outcomes which are still unfolding). Even when things weren't set in stone and when potential results were ugly, he managed to be up-front. On the other hand, in another situation at Nortel I did have a manager in the chain who (from my vantage point) chose to gather information to make himself look good while "rolling people under the bus" without having an adult conversation with the affected parties first. Little did this manager know that people were willing to be rolled under the bus for the cause but instead felt betrayed when the adult conversation never occurred and they were simply rolled over.
Although I didn't really address anything about the issues related to creditors, suppliers, and partners, from the above, my largest takeaways would be that fairness, transparency, and communications are critical things to balance in a company under duress.
Update 2/11/09: As sample exhibits, I also wanted to point out some user-generated video on the Internet. Here is a YouTube video (apparently posted post-Chapter 11 filing) covering a pep rally as part of the "I Believe" grassroots campaign within Nortel. To contrast this is a more cynical YouTube parody as related to the blogpost/letter I cited above in point #1.
Update 2/15/09: CEO provides a YouTube update to the "public".
Update (6/21/09): The end of Nortel is near (post).
Update (8/10/09): CEO of Nortel (Mike Zafirovski) to step down. Another era has ended. Note the slideshow provides an historical view of a great Canadian company (more than 100 years old) that has come to an end.
A Perspective On Client Facilitation Skills
When I first started as a management consultant back at Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath, one of the hardest things for me to grasp was the concept of "client facilitation". Many of the consultants I knew where eager to apply standard MBA frameworks like Five Forces (for competitive and profitability analysis), NPV and financial analysis tool, statistical regression, and the marketing 3Cs/STP/4Ps, but few talked about client facilitation in explicit terms.
In my mind, client facilitation refers to the processes (and skills) that a consultant uses to get a client organization to critical decision points, deep understanding, and committment to move forward or redirect.
A master of client facilitation is a person that can:
- Master analysis skills of the trade: use top-down logical reasoning, use many analytical frameworks, work analyses from multiple directions
- Communicate well: whether it be via face-to-face conversation, writing, phone, or instant messaging (yikes)
- Teach and frame things properly: because interactions with parties may be varied, quick and because parties may have varying levels of knowledge, one must be able to ramp-up conversation levels quickly and put them in the proper context
- Recognize where the organization is at and how decisions are made: is the marketing department behind in their understanding? who does the CEO look to as his/her right hand? if so, what are the steps to getting the right hand on-board or up-to-speed? how do we get things to tip? can we get there in one step or will it take two steps?
- Lead people *without formal authority*: can you educate people, empathize with the organization, get the organization to trust you, and pave a vision and/or outline a set of tradeoffs with such clarity that motion must happen?
In my opinion, the last skill is probably the most important aspect to master regarding client facilitation. I daresay it is the essence of client facilitation, but I am pretty damn close to it. Client facilitation skills are specialized leadership skills which are all about leading people without formally being in charge.
Update 2/20/08: Gautam Ghosh points me to one of his posts that does an excellent job of discriminating between other types of "consulting" and "facilitative consulting". Again, this topic is not one that I’ve seen many people write about outside of more terse, academically-oriented publications. That said, the subject of facilitation is a very, very important aspect of management consuting and in my mind applies to more than 90% (just to pull a number out of the air) of the engagements I have ever been on or run.
The Kellogg Post MBA Program
I just ran across Kellogg’s Post MBA Program, which is targeted at people that have MBAs that have aged more than ten years. This is an interesting market to target, and not one that I’ve seen before.
A more detailed curricula is outlined in their brochure, which is prefaced by text including the following:
The curriculum for the Kellogg Post-MBA Program has been created for executives who already have earned an MBA degree and want to gain a fresh perspective on leadership. The first two weeks of the program address a broad range of recent management developments such as globalization, hyper-competition, outsourcing, the shift to a knowledge-based economy, the growth of innovative financial instruments, the appearance of truly global capital markets, distributed information processing capabilities, and new communications technologies. Five months later, participants return for a leadership week that focuses on developing one’s own personal leadership capacity while also equipping people to lead change in today’s complex environment.
What is interesting to me is the characterization of recent developments. As time passes and if people don’t adapt, it can be easy for workers to get stuck in old ways, whether that be having historical prejudices, using traditional management styles, or carrying about old conceptual models on how things work.
The spirit of the Kellogg program seems good. It is great to reflect on how things have changed over the years and how one needs to adapt continuously.
Of course seeing the first curriculum item of "The Sarbanes-Oxley Act" nearly made me pass out …
Delaying Decisions As Opposed To Being Indecisive
My family’s vacation was marked by an incident that led to my first 911 call in my life. I have reflected upon this incident for many days with a mixture of thankfulness for the safety of my family (and others on the boat) and personal anguish that I could not have done more.
We were on a whale watching cruise miles off the coast of Monterey with about 40 other people on a 50-foot some boat. On the return trip back to shore, there was a malfunction that caused the exhaust pipes and roof to catch on fire. The engine was cut by the captain as it seemed it might have been a driver for the fire coming out of the exhaust. Life boats were on top of the cabin on fire. Life preservers were all in the cabin on fire (with the exception of the two preservers my two kids were wearing who had put some on at the beginning of the trip). All the fire extinguishers were spent quickly, and the flames just got worse as time passed. Shore seemed to be a long ways away, but at least we were not out 30+ miles (I’m guessing) from where we started. There were very few boats that we could see, and there was a lot of smoke coming off our boat. A 911 call was made from my mobile phone, and I handed the phone to the naturalist on the boat who was (potentially) better equipped to identify our location and condition. A number of people were panicking, and many gathered in the very back of the boat to distance themselves as much as possible from the fire and smoke. Things did not look good by any measure.
I had been in the water a few days before. The temperature was not too discernible from ice water from my perspective. I had seen seals, so I was hoping that there were not any sharks in the water.
A question raced through my mind a number of times. Was the situation bad enough that I should I pitch my kids into the water? Then there were intervening questions entering my mind … what happens if something explodes before I make a decision? The boat is rocking pretty violently … can I actually pitch them far enough from the boat that they won’t get walloped by the swaying boat? Would they survive long enough in the cold water? The questions going through my mind were endless.
I chose to delay my decision to throw them into the water. (After the trip, I realized my wife had the same thoughts going through her mind)
The fire continued to spread. Eventually the life boats were released. No sign of the Coast Guard. A small boat came alongside and threw us two fire extinguishers. The other boat was too small to take many people, and very soon the new extinguishers were exhausted. Smoke got worse. Maybe five minutes passed.
What to do?
At some point, the captain decided to restart the engine. Though I didn’t speak with her after the trip, I presume that she decided our chances were better if we tried to gun it to shore (even though speeding up the engine could have increased the fire). We gunned it towards the nearest point on shore. The increased exhaust may have served to cut some of the flames, but who knows.
We made it to shore to be greeted by the fire department and the local news (the incident was the lead story on the news that day and made the front page of the paper the next day). Coast Guard arrived 10-20 minutes later. Everyone was safe. No one needed to go into the drink.
Did I make the right decision to delay throwing my kids in the water? Was I indecisive? Did the captain make the right decision to take command and gun it to shore?
In my opinion, the captain made the right choice. We were out of options to put out the fire, and it was not clear that we were going to get any help in the near term.
As for whether I should have delayed my decision to throw my kids in the water, I am still at odds with that. True they are safe, and the direct threat at the time may not have been imminent, but in reality, I am a layman about boats, and the threat could have been imminent for all I knew. But delaying the decision to throw them in the water allowed me time to gather additional information, such as whether some other boat might come to our aid, whether the fire was spreading, or whether we would get feedback from the crew about our distress calls.
In numerous business settings, I have found that delaying decisions can be beneficial, more often in cases when one is trying to gather additional information that will make subsequent decisions more informed and definitive (e.g., you should posture yourself as ready to make a decision once information comes in as opposed to just being indecisive). Sometimes this can be counterintuitive to those in the business world, where things seem to be driven by a culture of being decisive and making decisions with whatever information is on hand.
Why I Dislike Microsoft Project for Management Consulting
Sort of as a follow-on to the post about project management and b-schools, I thought that I would post something (a bit one-sided) about the use of Microsoft Project in management consulting projects. I dislike the tool and sometimes even discourage the use of the tool by consultants running projects. Here’s some reasons why:
- While project management is a function that moves things ahead, Microsoft Project as a tool can create barriers to communication. For the average user, there’s generally not enough flexibility to do things like highlight workstreams in an engagement, create a view of danger/risk points in a project, show progress to plan plainly, and summarize a project plan on one chart.
- Because the tool is not part of everyone’s basic software configuration, there are additional barriers to communication because the native file format often cannot be easily exchanged with clients, colleagues, etc. who need to work and update things in real-time. Project plans in Microsoft Project need to get exported to things like PDF files, etc.
- Updating the project plan can become a project in of itself and prevent the project manager from doing other important things like communicating with stakeholders, managing risks, working to solve problems, and completing tasks.
Getting the theme behind my dislike for the software?
I much prefer using something like Powerpoint or Excel for developing project plans. I like Powerpoint because of its visual nature (which can be helpful in managing projects and leading people). I like Excel because of its greater structure over Powerpoint and ubiquitous availability to business people.
Am I right? Probably not entirely, but I have definitely seen the types of recurring problems described above in many engagements. The negatives often outweigh the benefits of using a more structured tool fit for purpose.