First break all the rules

I was first attracted to this book by both the title, and the fact that it was co-written by Marcus Buckingham, a proponent of the ’strengths’ philosophy that I have embraced in the work place.

This is a deck of slides I have compiled for the Alt-MBA group that has spun out of Seth Godin’s Triiibes.

UPDATE:  Slideshare selected this as a featured presentation.  Nice to know it resonated with some.

Skills to survive and succeed at work

On 10th December, I was invited by the University of Malta to give a lecture on business skills in the work place.  The lecture was part of the DegreePlus programme, which provides young people with practical skills and formative experiences.  I like this programme – it always strikes me that most people are totally unprepared for the ’shock of entry’ in the work place.

I used a Microsoft-sponsored study on  essential skills in business as the catalyst for the talk, grounding the principles in real-life stories.    I’ve embedded the slides here, as they may have some relevance to a wider audience.  

Reinventing yourself

Isn’t it strange? Sometimes you are thinking of something, then your eye drifts over the NetVibes feeds and a post leaps up to reinforce what was on your mind just before your eyes landed on the text.   Or else you purposely visit one of your regular sources, and find that Hugh MacLeod has again posted something inspirational.

I am part of a generation of restless 40-somethings.  The first to be constantly reinvent itself.  To have had multiple careers, lived in different countries, and moved seamlessly from fixed term jobs to entrepeneurship and back to short term assignments.  We consciously, regularly, push the ship of our lives into different directions.  Looking to spread ourselves over many things.  After the best part of a year working on a large project, I again feel the need to diversify.  Tomorrow I will kickstart a telecoms research project.  I’m quietly exploring a start-up with two partner companies.  And I’m toying with the idea of further study.  A perennial item, which surfaces every time I raise my head above the barricade of whatever I’m doing. I want to explore all of these things, right now. Some will work, some will remain on the drawing board. The important thing is to channel my restless energy positively. Creatively. Restlessness works.

About five weeks ago, I connected a friend of mine in Rio, a former Andersen Consultant, with a former partner, the CEO of a well-funded technology start-up with offices in London and Malta. Three conference calls later, both parties took a big leap of faith, and she has just moved from Rio to London to work on Entropay’s new marketing programs. She’s 45. She believes most times we make our own luck, but there is always a time when you can move things quickly, and other times when you need to wait for the right time. She believes that no experience is wasted.

Another close friend Joe, an ISO process specialist, is battling with a life-threatening disease in hospital. When we meet, in his ward at St Luke’s, we now talk about the really important stuff. Two months ago, I told him his business model needed to be readdressed. We were exploring creating a new vehicle together when his illness struck. I know we still will.  But this temporary hiccup, in his life, is forcing us both again to take stock.  Of what is important.  Of how to put our time to better use.  And how to do something meaningful.

That’s all that matters, right now.

Letting go

Every external change agent knows the time has to come when you have to let go. Over the past weeks, it became clear that I was reaching the end of the road with a project I have been running for a client company for the best part of 17 months.

Several things have been unusual about this one. For a start, I was involved in managing and driving four very different areas: ICT infrastructure; software development of an inhouse business support system; e-business (from SEO all the way to design and build of web solutions used in the sales channel); and knowledge management. And then there was the intensity of the programmes – many things had to be built from the base up – and the longevity of the project. A lot happens in 17 months. Bonds are made. You become part of the furniture.

Change Agents can can only be effective if their passion for change is matched by the appetite of whoever championed it. Still, the writing is always on the wall when it is time to move on.

Symptoms a Change Agent needs to look out for in determing an exit:

• Those who initially denied there was a need for any change (and put spokes in your wheels) start telling you things you told them months ago
• The team you set up to implement change needs little direction to get on with the day-to-day
• People start lifting parts of your presentations
• The CEO starts behaving as if you are a subordinate /direct report
• Targets have been surpassed
• What used to be change is now process
• You start getting restless

Sometimes I think there is something seriously dysfunctional in the work change agents do. We identify problems, devise solutions, roll our sleeves, get on with it, win some friends, make some enemies, build a legacy, and then.. just as things start to purr… we move on. We devise the exit strategy, agree handover timeframes and prepare to go back on the outside.

At times like this, I always delve into Patrick Dixon’s excellent Building a Better Business. Open any page. If you see something that resonates, in the change you have been driving, you will know that you have done a good job. And that it is time to get on with something else in your life.

It’s not about the code

London always gets me to do some soul-searching.  There are days when I wonder why I turned my back on it, in the nineties.  Whenever I am in the city, I guess I reconnect with the part of me I leave behind – and my old ghosts. 

I moved to London in 1985.  Costa Coffee and Bar Italia were the closest to a real cappuccino.  Ken Livingstone was about to be kicked out of the Greater London Council.  The Brixton Riots designated chunks of South London as a no-go zone.  The Who were planning a 25^th Anniversary concert.  Music was just plain horrible.  It was the first time I had seen a PC, one of those first IBM ‘portables’ with a screen built into the case and a keyboard dangling out of a socket.    Six months after my arrival, I qualified as a Chartered Accountant and my boss told me that now I had a licence to make money.  The statement was not exactly prophetic.  Eighties London was rubber-stamped by bean counters, Margaret Thatcher and Loadsamoney.  I wasn’t particularly taken by the concept of making money, but I knew I wanted to travel and that something in strategy was probably more life-rewarding than accountancy.  So my natural habitat became multinationals.  On the day I was interviewed for a European controller job with IP Sharp (IPSA), a Canadian computer timesharing and consulting Group, I was informed that Reuters were close to a takeover.  In other words, the risk of LIFO loomed over any eventual appointment.

As it happened, I spent two years immersed in restructuring and change management – and understanding the promise and limitations of technology.  At face value, the IPSA / Reuters deal was a marriage made in heaven.  IPSA specialised in data warehousing, yesterday’s information, Reuters in today’s, the Reuters screen.  Reuters decided early on to integrate the IPSA product into its core service offering, believing it could corner the market.  What Reuters failed to understand was that Sharp’s product had been developed by a network of brilliant, but highly ‘un-corporate’ APL software developers.  People who worked weird hours, often from home, and in many cases were accountable to nobody other than their own whims.  The clash with Reuters’ blue-chip corporate culture where information was transient, and nobody was indispensable, was immediate.  Reuters’s frustration grew by the day as the Special projects team charged with the integration realised that:  the APL developers were indispensable; that IPSA was a ‘people’ business as opposed to a technology platform; and that there the company they had purchased was worthless without some major culture changes in both organisations – and a leap of faith from both camps to try and get the deal to work.  Being the new kid on the block, my job quickly evolved into working with IPSA country managers to prepare people and systems for the inevitable integration and determine who could make the transition.  I also became a conduit to the Reuters guys whose job was on the line to ‘complete integration’ within two years.  By the time this period had flashed by, I had worked in many countries in Continental Europe, learnt about the idiosyncrasies of multinationals, saw some people resist and others thrive on change.  There are always winners and losers in acquisitions and mergers.  Some of IPSA’s best people could not accept the new suits and moved – in some cases, with crippling consequences on the core product.  The more political elements (sic. sales and marketing) were in a rush to move their desks to Fleet Street from Victoria.  And in typical fashion, having got through my two-year project and being told to ‘cruise and wait for the new dream position in Reuters Special Projects Department to be approved ‘ – I decided life was short, and moved on to Hitachi Data Systems.   

This week, in London, I ran a Forum for key users of a legacy business support system, built over some eight years by a Delphi developer.   I had to use whatever powers of persuasion I have to convince my client that it was worth the investment to get people round a table to take stock of developments over the past 12 months and address the thorny issues of standardisation.  This in an environment where customisation was the name of the game, where system changes were made ‘on the run’ and in many cases undocumented, and where the developer and his team were in a never-ending spiral of design, build, customise, support, design.  User training was sporadic and had to be fitted around the developers’ support time.  User and technical documentation was virtually non-existent.  Twelve months ago, the CEO lived in perpetual fear that the developers would move and leave the company stranded without the backbone of its successful business model.   Which was why I was called in.

The situation with the legacy system twelve months ago reminded me of the scenario Reuters inherited when it bought IP Sharp.  The mistake Reuters made then was to ignore the people side of things (‘soft’ was the buzz word then) and try and rail-road the solution by focusing on getting the technologies to talk to each other.  I decided the only way round the undocumented legacy system was to engage with the people behind it and get into their headspace – before developing a strategy to get out of the never-ending spiral of customisation and ‘software development on demand.’  I made mistakes, tried to move things too quickly, retrenched, did the drinking / listening / bonding bit.. whatever it took.  Ultimately, developers demand respect, like anybody else working for a living.  In this case, these guys had just barricaded themselves in.  Slowly, I gained some level of trust.  To enable us to get out of crisis management mode into starting to establish clear arms-length relationships with the non ICT literate users of the system.  In 12 months, the system was documented, users were forced to stop bickering and request changes via formal channels – significantly reducing the number of changes until they trickled into nothing.  We focused on user interfaces as opposed to more development changes.  I engaged a process specialist to map out the company’s core business processes as I was convinced that the system had simply evolved to support the whims of the more vociferous elements of management instead of what core business required.  We made some major changes within the organisational framework of the system to mirror the real life processes.  We did some stuff like relabelling and designing new icons to help navigation.  And on a particularly inspired evening, we branded the system Elvis, to send a playful signal to the rest of the organisation that the system had a life of its own, and was no longer the domain of a particular developer.

I guess sitting with ten people in London with people who caught trains and planes to engage in a discussion on an IT system they loved to hate was a bit of a coup.

Sometimes I wonder whether middle age is when déjà vu really kicks in.  Sometimes I feel l can see the movie of my life flash past.  When mainframes ruled at IPSA and we shared files over our global networks and used email many years before the Internet made it all pervasive .

Then I see my four year-old, clicking a mouse and laughing at the clips I have uploaded on Google Video and realise how we all have to relearn what we thought we knew.  Every day. 

The never-ending search for learning

Next Tuesday I’m off to Berlin for Online Educa Berlin , a get-together for technologists and strategists in Europe.  It’s the first time I’m attending, so I’m really curious about what I’m going to find.  I must admit – I’ve never been a great networker at events like this – even though the event is pitched as ‘enabling participants to develop multinational and cross-industry contacts & partnerships, as well as to enhance their knowledge, expertise, and abilities’.  It’s a character trait that I have learnt to live with.  I am very comfortable delivering workshops with large groups – or doing the odd presentations to demanding audiences.  And equally so in one-to-one meetings, including those where there are some tough negotiations to get through.  But put me in a Conference corridor surrounded by people with mobiles and name tags and juggling coffees and my first instinct is to find a corner and watch from a distance rather than into the ‘cold-call’ hand shakes and networking.  I really have to work hard to get over this.

But – I’ve always been interested into Technology Supported Learning and this time I know what I’m looking for - technologies that can be customised, rebranded and launched as proprietary products.  So I’m looking forward to next week.  As I wake up into my mid-forties and official middle-age (!), the desire to learn new stuff  has accelerated, instead of going into some sort of decline.   There’s a lot of talk about your hunger for life and success diminishing as you race past your twenties and thirties.  With us, the exact opposite has happened.  We juggle raising a young child with having to think out of the box every day.  And increasingly, our knowledge comes from our networks of connected people, some of them on different sides of the world, and the usual eclectic mix of blogs and wikis.  I still get a kick out of reading something like 37 Signals’ Getting Real.  I still love the fact that despite the cynical age we live in, there is still so much knowledge-sharing going on.  The old adage about information is power is still true - and yet, we live in this exciting time when we have it all at our finger-tips. 

The only inevitability about middle-age is that you end up working with younger people.  Somehow, somewhere along the line, you became the peer group.  Which is scary.  But always energising.  As long as you keep obsessed with learning - wherever it comes from:  your Economist, your neighbour, or the blog of some geek in Illinois – there is just too much to do to worry about losing your edge.

If the Berlin trip pans out the right way, I’ll post some material after that. 

Outside In

There’s something mildly dysfunctional about being a consultant engaged to work as part of a team on the inside.   

In most cases, as a change agent, your role within the client’s corporate environment is fairly clear.  You’ve been called in to devise solutions to long-standing problems – normally within a short period of time.  You’re a catalyst for initiatives that have to be embraced by insiders.  Occasionally there are those calls when the client thinks he knows what he needs to change but feels he has to engage an outsider to move forward (these are rarely great gigs).   But as an external change agent, you know your parameters.   You hit the ground running.  There’s the client – the company, with its unique political environment and value systems.  And there’s you – the outsider, with your own baggage, looking in.  You just get on with it.

In much of the work that we do, the insider / outsider roles get purposely blurred.  As an example:  over the past 12 months I have been engaged as an outsourced CIO in a business that is going rapidly multinational.  I have set up a new department, hired new staff, and manage them on a day to day basis.  I do all the things that CIOs do, including constantly aligning ICT and the new B2C channel with the company’s successful operating model that to date has relied virtually exculsively on B2B channels.  But I am also the chief evangelist for e-business and knowledge management.     When it comes to ICT, my job is essentially operational.  With e-business and knowledge management, I am a change agent working on the inside – driving innovation and cultural change.  And I also form part of the company’s Executive Team.  It makes for an interesting existence.

For a start, there are issues relating to staff management and motivation to absorb.  You have to lead from the inside.  You move seamlessly from devising strategy to securing buy-in to full implementation mode – sometimes within a day.  And you also have to thread more carefully than usual.  You cannot come across as an outsider who is not committed to last the course, or serve the cause.  Most important of all, there are corporate cultures to absorb, manage – and even embrace – before you can start becoming effective.  

There is a clear linkage between corporate cultures and value systems  - you cannot be effective as an Insider Outsider if you ignore that.  The challenge is when you find yourself in situations where the client thinks that corporate culture means ‘homogeneity’.  In other words, that to fit into the corporate culture, you have to be a certain ‘type of person’. 

One of the most effective effective managers I ever come across was a pin-striped suited, ex RAF engineer, at a Vice President level.   Rumour had it that Alan was not ‘hot on management techniques’.  He readily boasted that he did not like all the people who worked for him – but they were ‘all brilliant at what they did, and kept him in an incredibly well-paid job’.  I am not sure that this won Alan many friends with his peers.  But there was always something tongue in cheek in the bravado.  For a start, Alan’s direct reports (and I admit, I was one of those) would always go the extra mile for him.  He let us get on with our jobs, and never interfered in our management styles.  He was a master in the art of delegation and arms length management.  He was also highly-skilled  in hiring the right people, even if at face value, there appeared to be little in common between them.  Alan intuitively realised that teams need to have edge.  The result was creative energy and debate – loads of it.  But the guy would always, at the end of a session, rein people in, unruffle feathers and, having listened to the various points of view, map out the next move, clearly, succinctly.  And we would move on, together, as a team.

Too often, we come across situations where a difference of opinion is interpreted as conflict; where different reactions to a common challenge risks putting someone in a bad light.  We continue to live in an age where the old Pirandello notion that ’You are not who you are, but who other people think you are’ continues to prevail.  We have seen many CEOs make bad decisions by judging their teams at face value; by interpreting difference of opinion as dissent that needs to be stifled; by subconsciously only listening to people who agree with them and blinkering themselves from getting the whole picture. 

The best managers, the best strategists, have always intutively known that diversity is what makes the Belbin theories so compelling.   It is possible for people with very different backgrounds and modes of behaviour to gel together in a team.  In many cases, sitting on the fence, and absorbing different points of view before making up one’s mind, will lead to a better decision. 

It all sounds very simple.  In real life, we continue to allow our own ‘baggage’, our own filters, our own need for affirmation, to get in the way of seeing the wood from the trees.

So when I find myself in that kind of situation, when I am starting to shut out something I should be listening to, I think of Alan and his multi-cultural, mildly dysfunctional management team.  And of Groucho Marx, reminding me that he never wanted to belong to any club that would accept him as a member.

There is freedom in diversity.  Always.