New Project – Leadership Film Project

May 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In April we launched a working group consisting of individuals from various industries that share a desire to make a difference by focusing on leadership. Over the last two months we’ve been working on a film project based on an idea we hatched late last year. The concept has to do with the role models up and coming leaders model themselves after. We conducted a short research project where we interviewed leaders in the target group to better understand their challenges, worries, goals and development areas. We used this information to compile a list of common issues/questions that we could use in interviews with experienced leaders.

When we thought more about experienced leaders, we discovered that we were most interested in those that really practice Leadership, build great cultures where employees thrive, give back to the community (#CSR) and create results.

We conducted our first interview on May 9th with Ingar Skaug, the former CEO of Wilh. Wilhelmsen (a shipping company based in Norway that has a global reach and has a history of innovation on a variety of fronts). Ingar is a visionary leader when it comes to Corporate Culture and Strategy among other things. He also serves as the Chairman of Petroleum Geological Services (PGS) and the US based Center for Creative Leadership (CCL).

Ingar Skaug during our first interview

Our second interview will be shot on June 7th with Pår Larshans, Chief Sustainability Officer for the Stockholm based MAX Hamburgers. MAX has been recognized globally as an innovator in sustainability and employment practice. They have made great strides in reducing the environmental impact of their business and also focused on employing individuals with disabilities.

This summer we hope to conduct to interviews in the US and then increase our pace through the fall until we are able to launch a website where we showcase the insights offered by these Visionary Leaders. We intend to create a place where the world’s up and coming leaders can come for inspiration and input as they choose how they would like to develop during the course of their careers!

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Are we the leaders we need?

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

No doubt you’ve noticed that the world is a pretty chaotic place at the moment. There are unpredictable mechanisms in motion in most regions of the world. Some are catastrophes and some are evolutions that seem like they could just as easily go the other way. During my childhood we had the cold war – which as black and white. Then we had perestroika and it’s idealism – “the new openness” that later gave way to realism. All the while the west enjoyed great prosperity that fueled never before seen growth in China, India and in many other countries in Asia.

When Ronald Reagan demanded that the Gorbachev tear down the wall dividing Germany it was easier to have a grand vision. Freedom, democracy. progress.

The world has gotten more complicated since then. Democracy has been tried using different approaches with varying results in many places. Some have gotten unimaginably wealthy at the cost of the stability of the world’s economy. Only some of them have been punished for their irresponsibility and selfishness.

As a father of three young children, it’s hard not to wonder what kind of world they will live in. Richard Barrett, a leading values guru, wrote an interesting post on the state of leadership in 2011. It was pretty bleak and resulted in one comment (from me, after more than two months). Are we asleep at the wheel merely working to “get ours?”

Have we given up our capacity for healthy values and  vision, and instead settled into a sort of drugged apathy fueled by consumerism? Is this a gap between generation shifts?

For me, these are important questions and they need to be addressed. What will you do?

Will you be one of the leaders we need?

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Adecco Medical Norway show’s us how important values are

February 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The importance of values-based leadership demonstrated by Addecco.

Hindsight is always 20/20, right? It’s easy to be critical of others’ mistakes, however sometimes it’s important to learn from them.

I’m sure the former director of Adecco Medical never intended to end up in the situation he finds himself in now. It’s also impossible to say how and why he ended up there. What causes a respected company that provides a critical service to makes such horrible decisions? We’re talking about the kinds of decision that, once they become publicly known, cause great damage to the company’s business and reputation. Lying about it to the press only makes it worse, especially when the things be lied about are items of fact.

So what happened here and how can companies prevent this sort of thing happening in the future?

In August of 2010 I had a meeting with a CEO where we spoke about corporate values. His statement on the matter sums up how I think many leaders feel about the subject:

“Aren’t values something you just decide and then get back to work?”

That depends on who you and your organization want to be. I’m sure Adecco has corporate values, they may even be plastered all over their business cards, conference room walls, websites and annual reports. The thing we know for sure is that if they have them, they are not lived. They don’t walk the talk.

The fact that businesses are in business to earn a profit makes it extremely important that there is a counter-balance, a human element if you will. If we’re in business only to maximize profits we’ll make decisions to that end and potentially that end alone. In that setting it could be okay that employees work like the employees in Adecco did.

Is that good enough or do we expect something more from ourselves and companies we interact with on a day to day business?

Values help us decide what we should do when we think no one is looking.

Many companies invest a great deal of time on values processes that include the employees and then communication them far and wide.

In fact, the only thing that is critically important once a company establishes it’s values is that the CEO and leaders on all levels ensure that they behave according to them. Not doing so is not only extremely dangerous for the company (ala Adecco), it also creates a counter-productive culture that takes years to turn around.

Read more about the Adecco example:

Synopsis from newsinenglish.no:

Following a Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) investigation last week, which revealed that employees at Adecco Helse’s Ammerudlunden nursing home in Oslo had been working 84-hour weeks for years and slept in the basement, evidence of even more serious illegal activity has now been discovered at the Midtåsen nursing home (also in Oslo) and at Greverud in Akershus. At Greverud in particular, employees have apparently worked 100-hour weeks, with 20-hour days, for as long as 20-day stretches.

In English: newsinenglish.no

In Norwegian: NRK broke the story initially

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Breaking out of the office

November 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Back in June I posted about Cisco’s John Chambers and his views on strategy and innovation at Cisco. There has been a new Cisco funded survey (The Cisco Connected World Report) in the news this week – one that asks if the office is really necessary. Does time in the office lead to innovation and productivity or does it limit us? The results are striking – if you ask employees this question more than 60% believe that being in the office is no longer needed to be productive.

Some of my most productive clients feel the same way. They make sure to find hours of quiet time each week whether its working at home or finding a quiet place in the office where they are less likely to be found.

Here is Cisco’s Dave Evans in a video overview of the results:

Cisco is, of course, interested in the technology and how they can serve that market. I’m interested in the challenge this presents to leaders. Those that dare to challenge the status quo will find there are plenty of opportunities for find creative ways of freeing employee energy. The question is whether or not leaders are ready to allow the latitude and provide the inspiration and direction required for these measures to work. This is the Enterprise 3.0 Dan Pink refers to in Drive.

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Chief Collaboration Officer?

October 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Are you struggling to make cross-silo collaboration work in your organization? In my experience, most are.

This HBR blog post suggests a creative solution. We’re not talking about adding a full-time position but assigning CCO as an additional focus area for an existing executive – specifically one with great collaboration skills.

I like the idea. As the post notes, this is something most often expected of the CEO but he or she typically has a full plate already. Finding another executive in the leader group that doesn’t have any conflicting interests and is a good collaborator could be hard. The payoff, however, could be significant.

Read about our collaboration and conflict resolution training program: Radical Collaboration.

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Is incentive pay actually an incentive?

September 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

“Pay for Performance” is a common compensation technique despite the fact that it has been proven to be ineffective in many situations. Sometimes it even causes performance to decrease.

According to American author Daniel Pink the answer is “sometimes”. He’s written a book that brings together research and experience from the last fifty years to shine the light on this issue. According to Pink this is a great example of a knowing-doing gap. We know something to be true (the research has been done repeatedly on different cultures with similar results) and do something contradictory.

The research has proven that monetary rewards work for simple tasks but when the task becomes more difficult and requires creativity, the rewards often have a negative effect on task performance. So monetary rewards may work on an assembly line but often fall short in the modern knowledge economy.

Why do we think this is interesting? We work with culture and a key part of building performance culture is meaning. People perform better when they find meaning in their work. Meaning is the “intrinsic reward” Pink suggests is the more powerful motivator for knowledge workers.

We highly recommend Daniel Pink’s book DRiVE to business people looking for challenge the working assumptions driving business. The truth is out there, as they say, and it’s not even that hard to find.

We found Pink, as we find many cool ideas, through Ted Talks. Watch his presentation to get an overview!

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What happened @ HP?

August 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The real reasons for Mark Hurd’s resignation from Hewlett Packard are already buried under layers of camouflage. There is a norwegian saying that typically follows such executive departures and translates loosely to “there is no hidden drama in this departure.” There almost always is and the same is true here.

(I particularly enjoyed The New York Time’s article on the subject: Real Reason for Ousting HP’s Chief)

During Hurd’s tenure magazines and newspapers frequently praised his work and HP’s improving results. He and the company he led became the new poster-child of progress and performance in the IT industry, at least in terms of growth and earnings.

But there’s another chapter to this story and its one that is much more interesting for those leading companies and building performance cultures. While the short-term results were stellar, were they being borrowed against the company’s future? In the above linked article and others we read about employees and executive rejoicing at the departure of an executive that “was a cost-cutter who indulged himself”.

The truth remains to be seen but it appears that HP’s board removed a leader who had lost their trust. He had apparently lost the trust of the company’s leaders and employees long before.

What can we learn from this? The closing lines of the New York Time’s article does a good job summing it up:

“What HP needs in its next leader, Mr. House told me, is ‘someone with Carly’s strategic sense, Mark’s operational skills, and Lew’s emotional intelligence.’ (Lewis E. Platt preceded Ms. Fiorina as C.E.O)”

HP fired a CEO who produced 18% growth annually due to cultural fit issues. Now that’s news.

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