Increase Your Desire to Learn

Don't let your ego get in the way of your desire to learn. Successful leaders keep their minds open to new things because they know that no matter how high their level of mastery, there is always more to discover. If you've become an expert in one field, seek out other fields where you can transfer and apply your expertise. When facing challenges, even ones you've faced many times before, adopt a learner's approach-ask questions or find new ways to solve the problem.

Take Responsibility for Your Growth

Responsibility for your professional development lies squarely on your shoulders. No matter your situation, use these tips to keep sharp:

Meet with two former coworkers each month. Talk about your industry and where it is headed. This will keep you tapped into the community.

Have one major learning experience each quarter. If your work isn't giving you the necessary challenges, seek out other oppor tunities. Volunteer for a nonprofit, attend a conference, or take a class.

Give yourself a performance review. Reflect on your growth and performance, whether through a formal process or not. Be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses and what you should focus on in the coming year.

Source: book management tips Harvard Business Review 

Blue Ocean Leadership Summary

The best and most empirically supported strategy book I have ever read is Blue Ocean Strategy and the authors of the 2005 book, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, just published a great article on the Harvard Business Review, “Blue Ocean Leadership.” The need for blue ocean leadership is highlighted by the statistics that only 30 percent of employees are actively committed to doing a good job, 50 percent just put their time in while 20 percent act out their discontent by negatively influencing co-workers, missing days on the job and driving customers away through poor service. Just step back and re-read that last sentence: 20 percent of all employees in the US act in counterproductive ways.

Poor leadership is the cause of this widespread employee disengagement, according to US polling agency Gallup. People do not intend to be poor leaders but they lack a clear understanding of what changes it would take to bring out the best in everyone and achieve high impact. The authors extend their research and theory from Blue Ocean Strategy, which essentially is a framework for turning non-customers into customers, and applies concepts and analytic underpinnings to help leaders release the blue ocean of unexploited talent and energy in the organization.

The key insight is that leadership should be considered a service that employees “buy” or “don’t buy.” Every leader has customers, the bosses the leader must deliver performance and the followers who need the leader’s guidance and support to achieve. When people value your leadership, they are effectively buying your leadership. They are inspired to excel. Conversely, when they do not buy your leadership, they disengage, becoming non-customers.

How Blue Ocean Leadership is different

Blue Ocean Leadership rapidly brings a step change in leadership strength. There are three overarching ways that is differs from traditional leadership:

Focus on acts and activities. Blue Ocean Leadership focuses on what acts and activities leaders need to undertake to boost their teams’ motivation and business results, not on who leaders need to be. It is much easier to change people’s acts and activities than their values, qualities or behavioral traits. Activities are something that any individual can change, given the right feedback and guidance.

Connect closely to market realities. Under Blue Ocean Leadership, the people who face market realities are asked for their direct input on how their leaders hold them back and what those leaders could do to help them best serve customers and key stakeholders. When people are engaged in defining the leadership practices that will enable them to thrive, those practices are connected to the market realities against which they need to perform, and they are then highly motivated to create the best possible profile for leaders and to make new solutions work. Their willing cooperation maximizes the acceptance of new profiles for leadership while minimizing implementation costs. Traditional leadership development programs tend to be quite generic and are often detached from what companies stand for in the eyes of customers and from the market results people are expected to achieve.

Distribute leadership across all management levels. Blue Ocean Leadership is designed to be applied across the three leadership levels: top, middle and frontline. It calls for profiles for leaders that are tailored to the very different tasks, degrees of power and environments that you find at each level. Extending leadership capabilities deep into the front line unleashes the latent talent and drive of a critical mass of employees, and creating strong distributed leadership significantly enhances performance across the organization. Conversely, most traditional leadership programs focus on executives and their potential for impact now and in the future.

Four steps of Blue Ocean Leadership

Kim and Mauborgne lay out four steps to Blue Ocean Leadership as follows:

1. See your leadership reality

Without a common understanding of where leadership stands and is falling short, you cannot make a forceful case for change. Many businesses discuss changes in leadership before resolving differences of opinion and perception over what leaders are actually doing.

The first step is to gain this understanding. To achieve this goal, the authors created an as-is Leadership Canvas, analytic visuals that show just how managers at each level invest their time and effort, as perceived by customers of their leadership. An organization begins the process by creating a canvas for each of its three management levels (top, middle and frontline).

You should select a team of 12–15 senior managers for this project. Choose leaders who cut across functions and are recognized internally as good leaders so that the team has credibility. Then break the team into three sub-teams, each focused on one level and charged with interviewing its relevant leadership customers—bosses and subordinates—while ensuring a representative number of each are included.

The goal is to uncover how people experience current leadership and to begin a company-wide conversation about what leaders do and should do at each level. The leaders’ customers are asked what activities, either good or bad, spend most of their time on and which are key to motivation and performance but are currently neglected. Crucial to the success of this phase is learning the specifics; the as-is Leadership Canvas needs to be grounded in acts and activities that reflect each level’s specific market reality and performance goals.

Kim and Mauborgne comment that the results of as-is Leadership Canvas are often eye-opening. In their research, they often find 20-40 percent of the acts and activities of leaders at all three levels provide only questionable value to those above and below them. They also found that it is common leaders to be underinvesting in acts and activities that 20-40 percent cite as important.

2. Develop alternative Leadership Profiles

The second step is to explore what effective leadership profiles look like at each level. The sub-teams then go back to their interviewees with two sets of questions.

The first set of questions the sub-teams ask try to pinpoint the extent each act and activity on the canvas is either a cold spot (absorbing leaders’ time but adding little/no value) or a hot spot (energizing employees and inspiring them to apply their talents, but currently underinvested or not addressed at all).

The second set of questions prompts interviewees to think beyond the bounds of the company and focus on effective leadership acts that they have observed outside of the organizations, particularly those they believe would have a strong impact if implemented in your organization. This is the phase where new ideas emerge about what leaders can be doing but are not. The ideas may come from a teacher, coach, grandparent, scout master, former boss, general, etc. During this step, you must get interviewees to detail the acts and activities that would add real value to them if undertaken by their current leaders.

The authors have developed a grid, similar to the one they built for Blue Ocean strategy, to process these finding:

Start with the cold-spot activities and acts, which go into the Eliminate or Reduce quadrants depending on how negatively interviewees judge them. You will immediately see the benefits of stopping leaders from doing things that add little or no value. Cutting back on these activities also gives leaders the bandwidth to add activities that improve their performance.

From the cold-spots then move to hot spots, which go into the Raise quadrant if they involve current acts and activities or Create for those not currently done by leaders.

Based on this input, the sub-teams should draft 2-4 “to-be” Leadership Canvases (as opposed to as-is canvases). These analytic visuals illustrate Leadership Profiles that can lift individual and organizational performance and provide a powerful contrast to the as-is canvases. The sub-teams crate a range of leadership models, not just one, to thoroughly explore new leadership space.

3. Select to-be Leadership Profiles

Once the sub-teams are comfortable with the to-be Leadership Canvases, they are presented to the entire management team (from board members to front line managers). This event (when the canvases are presented) starts with members of the original senior team presenting the three as-is canvases (one for each level of management). Using these canvases, the teams shows why change is needed, confirms that comments from all levels were considered and sets the context against which the to-be Leadership Profile can be understood and appreciated. Only discuss the profiles at the aggregate level so individual leaders remain open to change and feel everyone is in a similar situation.

Once the current situation is assessed, sub-teams then present the to-be profiles. Attendees then vote on the canvas they find most compelling. Senior leaders then discuss with everyone why they voted as they did. The top managers then meet privately — with the information on the current state, preferred to-be state and comments — and decide which to-be Leadership Profile to move forward on each level. They then return and explain their decisions to the team.

4. Institutionalize new leadership practices

The fourth and final step is to put the new to-be Leadership Profiles into practice. First, original sub-team members communicate the results to the people that they interviewed. Second, the company then distributes the agreed-on to-be profiles to the leaders at each level. Third, the sub-team members hold meetings with leaders to walk them through their canvases, explaining what should be eliminated, reduced, raised and created. Since every leaders is the buyer of another level of leadership, all managers will be working to change, knowing their bosses are doing the same thing on the basis of input they provided.

The leaders then pass the message to their direct reports and explain how the new Leadership Profiles will allow them to be more effective. To keep the new profiles top of mind, the to-be canvases should be posted in the offices of both leaders and their reports. Leaders also need to hold regular, at least monthly, meetings where they meet with their direct reports and elicit honest feedback on how they are making the transition to the new profiles.

Execution

One of the key strengths of the Blue Ocean Leadership plan is that it builds execution into all four steps. Realistically, any change initiative will be met with much skepticism, “here we go again,” either publicly or behind the scenes. Blue Ocean Leadership is different as its four steps are founded on the principles of fair process: engagement, explanation and expectation clarity. The application of fair process generates buy-in and ownership of the to-be Leadership Profiles and builds trust, setting the foundation for implementation. The most important practices in implementing a fair process are:

Respected senior managers spearhead the process. Senior managers need to conduct interviews and draw up the canvases, not just be on the list of those involved. This involvement strongly signals the importance of the initiative, which makes people at all levels feel respected and gives senior managers a visceral sense of what actions are needed to created a significant change in leadership performance.

People are engaged in defining what leaders should do. With employees input shaping the to-be profiles, people have confidence in the changes made. The process also helps connect them with their leaders, as they have greater ownership of what their leaders are doing.

People at all levels have a say in the final decision. Though the top leaders have final say on the to-be profiles, a slice of the organization across all three management levels gets to vote in selecting the new Leadership Profiles.

It is easy to assess whether expectations are being met. Clarity about what needs to change to move from the as-is to the to-be Leadership Profiles makes it easy to monitor progress. The monthly review meetings help the company check whether it is making headway.

As the authors point out, “the gift that fair process confers is trust and, hence, voluntary cooperation, a quality vital to the leader-follower relationship.”

Using Blue Ocean Leadership to be great

For those who are students and fans of Blue Ocean Strategy, as I am, the concept and process that Kim and Maubergne lay out for Blue Ocean Leadership is incredibly compelling. What is beautiful is the process is very detailed and thus easy to implement. Moreover, the underlying logic is clear and it is easy to see how following Blue Ocean Leadership can help you and your company be much more effective.

Key takeaways

Leadership is broken.Currently, only 30 percent (less than 1/3) of employees are committed to doing a good job. Although sobering, this statistic shows a huge opportunity for improvement.

Replicate the Blue Ocean grid. The best way to improve leadership is to extend the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid that has proven successful in creating strategy to improving your company’s leadership.

Blue Ocean Leadership incorporates a fair process, necessary for success. The steps for Blue Ocean Leadership ensure a fair process (one that includes engagement, explanation and expectation clarity) that leads to buy-in and ownership throughout your organization.

Businessess Strategy by Brian Tracy

The “Principles of Effective Strategy”

To succeed, put these seven principles to work:

1. “The principle of the objective” – Success requires having a firmly established goal. You must know how you will accomplish it, and your employees must know what they are supposed to do. Alexander’s goal was to become ruler of the world. That required defeating the Persians and getting rid of Darius. Alexander communicated his battle plan and strategy to his generals, so everyone would know what actions to take.
2. “The principle of the offensive” – Napoléon Bonaparte said, “No great battles are ever won on the defense.” To succeed, go on the offensive with “new products, new services, new processes and new ways of doing business.” Alexander knew the only way to defeat the Persians was to take the fight directly to them. To beat your competitors, do the same to them.
3. “The principle of the mass” – Generals defeat enemy armies by massing their forces “at a critical point at a critical time.” Alexander beat the Persians by creating a breach in their lines that he could exploit. In business, take advantage of this principle by delivering the best products or services in your niche. Don’t expand into other product or service areas until you lead your niche market. According to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the most important element in business is focus. Always focus on the products and services that your company does best.
4. “The principle of maneuver” – Generals who prevail outmaneuver their foes, just as Alexander outmaneuvered the Persians. Expert strategists remain flexible; they consider “what might happen” and plan accordingly. Be ready to “move forward, backward and sideways in the market, if necessary.”
5. “The principle of concerted action”– Teamwork is paramount. Alexander knew he could count on his troops because he trained them to be the world’s most disciplined soldiers. Promote a culture of teamwork where employees always speak of “us, we and our” and see the company as a “logical extension of themselves.”
6. “The principle of surprise” – Alexander surprised the Persians and kept them off-balance. Do the same to your business rivals by introducing innovative products and services and by using novel strategies and processes.
7. “The principle of exploitation” – Once you achieve your goals, don’t stop. Keep moving ahead to exploit your advantage. Your competitors will do everything they can to make up lost ground. Stay on the offensive.

Five Critical Strategic Questions

Strategize to improve your company’s return on investment, secure a new position in the marketplace, exploit opportunities and spearhead new actions. To carry out strategic planning, ask: 1) What’s your current situation? 2) “How did you get to where you are today?” 3) “Where do you want to be in the future?” 4) “How are you going to get there?” and 5) “What do you need?” That is, can you identify the assets, such as “skills, resources or money,” that you require for achieving your goals? Strategizing includes conceptualizing an “ideal future” for your company and working backward to figure out the steps required to achieve that future.

Strategic Planning Principles

Include everyone who will directly implement your strategic plan in the process of formulating it. The senior executive “ultimately responsible” for implementing the strategy should participate in the entire process. Otherwise, this executive will have no investment in the strategy and may prove reluctant to fully support implementation. Corporate strategy concerns “products, services, customers, markets, finances, people, technology and production capability.” Whatever your focus, make sure your goals are clear. Communicate them to everyone in your company and to your shareholders, stakeholders and consumers. Follow four strategic planning principles:

1. “Specialization” – Focus on what you do best. If you expand beyond your core products or services, move only to an “adjacency area” – a new product or service line that expands your core business.
2. “Differentiation” – Separate your firm and its offerings from your competitors.
3. “Segmentation” – Target the ideal customers most likely to buy your goods.
4. “Concentration” – Apply your resources where they will do the most good.

“Formulation and Implementation”

The Kepner-Tregoe consulting firm suggests a five-phase plan for creating and implementing strategy:

1. “Strategic intelligence gathering and analysis” – Use only the best data available.
2. “Strategy formulation” – Include a time frame and an endpoint. As you formulate a plan, catalogue your “current, modified and new products.
3. “Strategy master-project planning” – List and prioritize all your projects. “This pool of projects is your master plan for the strategy.”
4. “Strategic implementation” – Put the proper structure in place. Align your strategy with your organizational structure, and communicate your strategic plan.
5. Monitor your strategy – Update as necessary.

“First…think about and agree on the foundation principles of your business.”

Everyone in your organization must team up to make your strategy work. The business units must integrate their actions. Offer incentives tied to the strategic initiative to motivate employees. Implement the necessary controls to keep everyone on track.

The strategy you choose determines who your rivals will be; their responses will require further strategizing. Make the effort necessary to ensure that your customers view your products or services as their best choice.

“Driving Force”

Consultants Benjamin Tregoe and John Zimmerman stress the importance of identifying your driving force, that is, your primary strategic concept and your “quantitative principle.” This force is the “point of the spear” of business planning. Each of these factors can be a driving force:

• “Product or services” – Align your offerings to fit the scope of your market.
• “Market needs” – Provide what consumers want.
• “Technology-driven driving force” – Structure your business by using the latest technology.
• “Production capability” – Ensure that you possess the capability to keep up with your projected growth. Ikea, for example, constantly creates more and improved furniture for greater numbers of consumers in markets that keep growing.
• “Method of sales” – You could use “retail, wholesale, direct mail, Internet, distributors or manufacturer’s representatives.”
• “Size and growth” – For example, automaker Toyota’s motivating force is to consistently increase its market share. As sales grow, Toyota applies “economies of scale” to lower production costs and increase profits.

“KWINK”

Sometimes, the most important strategic insight to embrace is “knowing what I now know” (KWINK). This means honestly accepting that certain initiatives – no matter how much you want them to do well and no matter how extensive their sunken costs – aren’t working. When you identify dysfunctional or underperforming products or services, ruthlessly discontinue them or divest them.

“The most successful men and women in the world seem to be those whose values are clear to them. They refuse to compromise them for any short-term gain or advantage.”

To move forward, you may have to abandon products or functions that worked in the past. Having to divest should never make you cautious or lead you to think small. Be ready to create an entirely new market if you find a promising niche, product or service. When Netscape introduced its web browser – which reshaped the video rental business, consumer viewing habits, film and television distribution and audience polling – it fearlessly unveiled a “new product for unknown customers.”

The Importance of “Your Corporate Mission”

Strategy should carve out and delineate the path to accomplishing your mission, whatever it may be. Stating a crystal-clear mission requires knowing “your values, your vision…and your purpose.” Use a specific and measurable mission statement to spell out your goals to everyone in your organization.

“Get the facts. Get the real facts. Not the apparent facts, the hoped-for facts, or the obvious facts. Get the real facts based on analysis. Facts don’t lie.” (Harold Geneen, ITT)

You can start with a generic mission statement as a model and insert your company specifics. A generic statement might read: We will provide the finest example of our product to the correct market to create significant improvements in our consumers’ professional and home lives. We will always upgrade the quality and functionality of our offerings and never stop seeking out, finding and selling to new and ever-more loyal consumers. We will increase our market share and profits by at least 20% annually.

“Peter Drucker once said that, even when a business is starting out at a kitchen table, if the business does not dream of world leadership, it will never be a big success.”

Your strategy should reflect your company’s qualitative – never quantitative – values and foundational principles, such as “integrity, quality, customer service, innovation, entrepreneurship and profitability.” Your strategy should also support your vision. The right strategy can make your vision – however ambitious – a reality.

Profit from the Core

Jack Trout said in The Power of Simplicity, "One of our biggest business problems is that we offer too many products and services at too many different price points, to too many different customers in too many different markets."

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996, the company was producing 104 different products and was in serious financecial trouble. The company had only enough cash to last for another ninety days. One of the first things that Jobs did was announce that Apple was discontinuing 100 of those 104 products, as quickly as possible. By doing so, he freed up financial resources and personnel (engineers and developers) to focus on the "next big thing," which turned out to be the iPod.

The rest is history. Within a few years, Apple was the mos valuable company in the world.

Focus and concentration on your greatest opportunities and areas of highest profit potential have always been the keys to financial success in business.

Source : Book Busines Strategy by  Brian Tracy