Let me elevate the question of ‘differentiation’ to a higher level. Product differentiation? Sure. How different is different? That is the question. No, wait a minute, this is not the question. The question is how others (consumers, clients) perceive the difference.

Service differentiation? Sure. Again, is the difference in the service itself, or in the experience of the service? More questions. What if your world does not want anything different? What if the perception of reality is contaminated by sameness?

We, in our consulting work, have this issue all the time. People want a workshop, or a keynote, or ‘three days consulting’, because they don’t have any other form to articulate a need. Keynotes, workshops and ‘days consulting’ are what all consultants offer. It is hard (but we succeed) to elevate the discussion to a higher level: value. Once this is done, the ‘activity’ (vehicle, tool, presence) is secondary. And I still do those keynotes…Lots of them.

What about leadership differentiation? Is it the degree of charisma, the ability or delivery? To me is (1) what the leader stands for and (2) how unapologetic he is about it. Nice words? Let me be a bit unkind here: I am finding it more and more difficult to find leaders who really, really, really stand for something. That is, beyond the word permutation automatically generated in a mission statement engine. But the ones who do stand for something, they also stand out. I don’t have to agree with them but, of those, I know where their heart and soul is.

In the world of sameness, the right hearts and minds stand out quickly and easily. There was a time, not long ago, where it was fashionable to say, ‘why different for the sake of being different?’ I think today the answer is clear. Because of the sameness virus. That’s it.

A few years ago, the top of a top corporation hired me as a consultant. I knew what their challenges were. I had articulated them. They kept hiring me to a point where it was not clear to me anymore what I was supposed to do. So I asked. Why are you still hiring me? The answer surprised me a bit at the time: ‘Because you think differently’. I tried hard to get to the bottom of that. Surely, there will be a ‘so what’ and then another ‘so what’. No, there was not. The top executive kept saying: ‘Because you think differently’. I was quite flattered, but that did not last long. I have my ego a bit domesticated. But it made me think. The point was, simply, to think differently. There was no ‘so what’, no immediate ‘delivery’ (I really hate that word), no serious ring binder report to be handed out. But, I am pleased to report that I provided quite a lot of value.

Before that time, I was perhaps of the school of ‘what is the point of thinking differently for the sake of it?’ Not anymore. Pushing product, services, ideas, operations, process, systems, conversations to a ‘different’ dimension is the only way to go. It’s a discipline, a praxis. Even if, after the push, the conclusion is not to cross the Rubicon (yet) and continue with established things.  I am more than OK with that. But the question must be asked: ‘can we do this differently?’.  It’s a discipline, a vaccination against sameness, a quest for standing out and standing for. It applies to all we do. It applies to being a leader.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[1], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[2] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[3].

His latest book, The Flipping point – Deprogramming Management ^[4], is available at all major online bookstores.

 

Audiences receive messages, whether at your Town Hall meeting or your keynote speech. Communities use what they have ‘in common’ to join forces, collaborate, help each other or make things happen. But communities are not a team structure either, with leaders, members, milestones and deliverables.

All these structures are legitimate. You can have whatever you like but don’t mix them up. You don’t create a community by bombarding the members with top down information. You don’t create a good team by saying ‘this is just like a family’. You don’t call the audience ‘this big team’ if they are not.

In many organizations, the team is the structural unit of collaboration. We have created huge teamocracies and, in the process, forgotten that there are other collaborative structures such as communities and internal social networks.

Language matters.

Yammer ^[5] users are not just a community by the fact that there are many of them. The ‘common’ needs to be translated into collective action. Facebook friends may not be friends, and your friends may not be in Facebook. LinkedIn followers are just a click away, and they are not necessarily your ‘community’.

Organizations create lots of audiences and then they label them with a more elevated label.

Not everything that looks like working together is collaboration.

If you watch out for the language, and take a critical view of the labels, you’ll be doing well on the path of efficiency and effectiveness. There is nothing worse than wrong expectations.

An audience is not a community. A community is not a team. A team is not an audience. Keep going …until what you mean and what it is called really meet.

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Continue the conversation…..register now ^[6] for our next free, live webinar on 2nd July – the second webinar in our Feed Forward Webinar series.

 

Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration? ^[6]

Yes we can. You can have a diagnosis. Learn how 3CXcan provides this analysis based on the highest scientific principles of network sciences. In the current environment it’s important to base the recovery and the post Covid-19 organization with full understanding of its formal and informal connections, communication channels and internal collaboration. Suspend judgement about your assumptions and find the truth. This webinar will show real examples of this kind of diagnosis performed in real companies. Understanding the real organization, which may or may not be the one you assume it is, will show a completely new baseline upon which to navigate the future.

 

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Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of Leandro Herrero’s new book: The Flipping Point ^[4]

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am your customer, you are my customer. When I need to provide you with something, you are my customer. When you need to do the same for me, I am your customer. I am marketing, you, finance, are my customer when you ask me for data.  I am corporate finance, you, country finance, are my customers. I am R&D, my customer is marketing and sales. I am sales, my customers are the consumers. I am information management, the rest of the company is my customer.

The customer-centric mantra that has been in place for many years has created this muddle. Not pronouncing the word ‘customer’ is so politically incorrect that we tend to pollinate our thinking and our language with it, to make sure we don’t miss it. There is an historical point and reason behind this. Many organizations work in silo mode with low grade cross-communication and cross-collaboration, so, it made sense at some point to inject a bit of ‘consumer mentality’ to make the point that we are all serving each other, in one way or another, within the organization. However, by over customer-izing the language, the real customer gets lost or neglected. There is only one customer, the ones who pays the bill. This is the external customer – an individual in Business to Customer (B2C) a company in Business to Business (B2B). Anything else is muddled thinking.

I encourage my clients to make language choices. The internal “I serve you, you serve me’ may need a different language: call it client, business partner, co-workers, co-dependents, chums, internal service providers… I am playing silly language games here on purpose. Find a way, other than ‘customer,’ so that we can have a real conversation about the real customer. So, a simple rule such as ‘the customer is always external’ could do the trick. Of course, there may be more than one external customer, of course.

Cleaning up internal language is important. Customer-izing the internal organization may be nice and rewarding. It may create a good feeling of cooperation, but it dilutes the external focus. And since many companies spend 90% of their time looking inwards and 10% outwards, a bit of ‘externalization of the customer language’ would do nicely.

From time to time you see the occasional and mostly not very solid comparisons between ‘the company’ and a religion. It is usually done in the context of explaining the need for extraordinary commitment, a sort of Mother of All Employee Engagement models. These comparisons are not taken very seriously and it’s easy to understand why.

Another model of engagement has compared the commitment of employees to the military ‘tour of duty’. A kind of time-limited mutual contract in which for the commitment to the ‘tour’, the employee gets compensation, protection and skilling.

I think that new generations of employees are pointing us to a different direction. Even if it is a gross generalization to talk about ‘new generations’, Millennial for example, it is true that there is a shift towards ‘purpose’ and being part of it. Equally tempting and risky is the generalization towards ‘purpose’, particularly social purpose and societal impact. However, all these shifts, overestimated or not, should makes us think of the reasons why employees may join an enterprise in future. The modern enterprise, and the one described in textbooks, or even the one in existence until recently, is not anymore a solid model for the future. There is little ‘built to last’ around, but little excitement as well for ‘maximising shareholder value’ as the Mother of All Motivations.

I believe ‘the cause’ may give us better clues. Joining a cause, small or being, is joining a common sense of purpose and a shared commitment to action. Asking ourselves about ‘the cause’ that may be behind what we do in organizations, goes well beyond the rather cold description of missions and visions. The problem is that many leaders may have difficulties in articulating their cause, their company cause. They don’t think in these terms. Take this as an example.

Is the cause of pharmaceutical company X to (a) develop a medicine for Y; (b) cure Y; (c) eradicate Y; (d) transform the way Medicine is practiced when dealing with Y; (e) bring total health to Y sufferers; (f) prevent Y; (g) have and give immense joy and fun for employees working there; (g) enhance the shareholder value of people putting money in?

At this point, our minds get uncomfortable with the multiple choice and start looking for the comfort behind ‘surely some of them; they are not incompatible’. But I think this is a trick. Other than possible incompatibilities (e.g. the company is simply not set up to fully prevent Y), this is not a true ‘pick your own’. One or some are the cause, the rest is music. Pick one. Which one? Which two? What is the real, real, real cause? Well, you’d better have a clear idea and a clear answer for people joining you.

I deeply believe that these are not simply semantic games and that we need more clarity on ‘causes’, or the lack of them. I would welcome the fact that this makes some people uncomfortable and dismissive, if this is a trigger to take it seriously. If not, not serious, complete dismissal or sheer inability to articulate the real cause, I am very sorry for you, have a pain-controlled decline.

PS. Spare me the ‘to make money’. Drug dealers make money; human traffic makes money; corrupted governments make money.

Whilst the holidays roll on, here is a leadership theme to consider

Picture this organization.  Closed culture, culture of secrecy, dictatorial CEO. Perhaps a bit unkind, but I have said before, speaking to a large audience of technology executives (and pushing my luck) , that the Soviet Union was never fully dissolved since it reincarnated itself in Cupertino, California, with an apple as a logo. Would you like to work in a secretive culture under a dictatorial CEO? Well, the dictator has left us with an enormous legacy, and the company is today the biggest in the world as measured by market capitalization.

How do you fit the Apple case in the organizational and management world? A model of management? Of organizational culture? Which bits do you want to copy? The market capitalization? The culture? The dictator? Their world leadership in innovation? The Secrecy? The personality cult? All of the above?

The trouble with iconic leadership is that it is not usually transferable. There was only one Steve Jobs, and one set of circumstances around him. You can try to wear black polo neck shirts and jeans but that will not make you his clone.

Banking on those one off, heroic leaders to come to your rescue is not a good idea either. As somebody said: ‘If you don’t have a Steve Jobs, have a plan B’.

Interestingly, any simple digging into the circumstances around the one-off, hero-leader, often offers some more complex findings. For example, the frequent uncovering of the ‘second’ in command. A person sometimes equally important who did not attract the same public treatment. In the case of Steve Jobs, this person was Steve Wozniak.

As put in the 99U.com blog (The Narrative Fallacy: Why You Shouldn’t Copy Steve Jobs), ‘Steve Wozniak created Apple. Steve Jobs was a paper pusher and marketing guy. He never created and designed anything. Without “The Woz” it’s likely that Mr. Jobs would have simply been the most annoying waiter in California’.

And as a commentator put it: ‘And if “The Woz” didn’t have Steve Jobs he would have been a really bright, life-long employee of HP that only people within HP would have heard of.’

But, even if non-transferable, iconic models are useful as a source of inspiration (or the opposite). This is inevitable. Before Jobs we had Jack Welch at the helm of GE. He was treated as a saint in management thinking. I personally disliked his ‘contingency leadership’ style, switching ways of treating people ‘depending on what was needed’. We have of course the ubiquitous Richard Branson, who discovered the Elastic Brand. These figures command a whole industry of books, business cases, and their own ‘place’  in business school programmes (example, quotes, benchmarks). At the time of Welch in GE, it was impossible to attend a conference, leadership seminar or business school presentation without numerous references to him.

Iconic, one-off, perhaps larger than life leaders and their organizations, are a good place to visit, check-in, see the panorama, and return home in the same day. Dwelling there has little benefit. The real world is somewhere else. Get your souvenirs, write your postcards, post your pictures, take it all in and then get on with shaping your own life.

The fastest and best way to build a creative culture is to have lots of creative people together. No kidding. It works. Hire creative people, they will create a creative environment (because the leaders will be creative) and we all will be creativists.

I am not pulling your leg. The issue is that we often hire lots of non-creative people, people who have never created anything (seriously, never, not even in school) and then we say: we want an innovative culture, we want you to be creative. It does not work.

Problem two (the above was problem one) is the inverse. We hire or gather lots of creative people, but we ask them to recite the yellow pages in search of the Big Idea. Bad idea.

Back to the creativists. Many people can innovate and be creative if, and there is an if, the environment pushes them that way. Innovation is going to the mental gym every day. No gym, expect arthritis.

Creativity is very sensitive to suppression. It’s actually quite easy to curtail. The education system in many places is a benign straitjacket. Entering the school system as a question mark, leaving as a period ^[7], a la Neil Postman.

Leaders have to create the conditions for creativity and innovation. I don’t buy the functional and professional boxing: accountants are not creative, engineers neither, and designers (particularly the ones in a garage) are full of uncontrollable creativity (And don’t try to put the accountants in the garage, you will waste your time and it annoys the accountants). I have met incredibly creative engineers ( and accountants) and lots of emperors-with-no-clothes designing in garages.

Bottom line. Expect miracles if you wish, but to accelerate that thing called creativity and innovation, (1) transplant those people and give them the space; (2) add not-so-innovative people; they will copy the others.

Even in the case of creativity and innovation, Homo Imitans ^[8] works.

Suddenly purpose is back.

We are told that Millennials want purpose. Which may be true. As much as many other non-Millennials. I wish we could stop talking about Millennials as if they were a particular type of android.

When used in business, purpose usually means social purpose. Social purpose is a noble aim which could be easily hijacked and absorbed into mainstream management speak with little meaning.

Maria Hengeveld describes very elegantly her presence at a conference in which she was supposed to write in the back of her badge ‘her purpose’. She also criticised ‘Davos style platitudes’ and how purpose could become a political correct device. See her piece here ^[9].

I suppose  in the same way ‘social corporate responsibility’ is in many not terribly responsible places.

In a recent contract we have been asked to state  our social corporate responsibility activities.  My team did a bit of head scratching . We occasionally get requests from Procurement Departments, particularly of large clients, to describe our ethical source of materials. It is clear that nobody in those departments has bothered to understand our consulting business because I don’t think they mean the source of our paperclips, or toners for our printers. I think.

We call ourselves (with pride) ‘organization architects’ and I often get emails inviting me to Grand Designs type of events or greenfields with planning permissions. No, we don’t build houses, but their algorithm does not know. Tick, tick, tick

Will purpose become a new box to tick?

PWC has a ‘Chief Purpose Officer’. That is a symptom of commoditization. Do we need Chief Ethics Officers, Chief Customer Officers, Chief Kindness Officers, Chief Values  Officers?

Business love institutionalization. It thinks that giving a structure and a title solves any problems.

I support any of those things provided that their goal is to self-destroy in a year or two. Proving that they are not needed anymore.

Let’s not have purpose hijacked as well .  ‘Melted in the air’?

If one thing has become clear after all these decades of management soul-searching for more or less universal truths, this is one of them: cultures make or break. Culture is probably your most important asset. Entire companies thrive commercially on the back of a culture, or fail miserably because of it.

Culture is never ‘done’, like a project finished and milestones achieved. Culture is in construction every day. Also, it’s not the simple  sum of components, process, systems and behaviours; written and unwritten rules, leadership and fellowship. Even the type of furniture and the size of the windows is a component of the culture.  The size of your inbox is also culture, the number of meetings per week and per capita is also culture. Leaders eating in the cafeteria, or not, is also culture. Certainly the  voice at the other end of the telephone in the call centre is culture.

Culture is the smile of the receptionist, the way a nurse introduces herself in a hospital, the hotel room service, the speed of a reaction to a complain.

All working practices are culture. All ways of doing, all airtime, the concept of a priority, and the differences, or matches,  between the values on the wall and behaviours on the ground.

For years I have tried to navigate company culture; when I was on somebody elses payroll and when I was outside the walls, looking inside. I’ve seen places where happiness is contagious and places that would have deserved Dante’s sign and the entrance of Hell: Abandon Hope. I have seen suffocating cultures dressed as human. I have seen very human cultures without trumpeting their values.

Having been in my old past through a great deal of corporate toxicity, I have become cynical of the ones that talk too much about them. But this is a conversation for another day,

You can start anywhere you want but, not just my own heuristic (full of bias) but all those decades of soul searching, leads me to one point of departure and one point of destination. The alpha and omega of culture is behaviours. Behaviours create cultures. I don’t have to study reams of corporate documentation; tell me what behaviours you have and I will tell you what culture you are in. Tell me what you do, not what you think, not what you proclaim

Culture is simply strategy in action. Magnificent or sloppy, ambitious or middle of the road, thriving or broken.

Culture is strategy

Some organizations that are very good at (external) marketing, are terrible at internal. Grand market(ing) plans, but can’t sell a thing internally: ideas, buy in, reasons for new investment.

Some functions that have Corporate Reputation as the job or part of the job, have terrible internal reputation.

Some companies that have proper multi Brand management, manage the internal (employee) branding poorly.

Some enterprises with strong External/Investor Communications function, are very weak in Internal communications.

The Internal-External disconnect is a big problem, very often overlooked. Branding, for example, is behavioural branding, or it isn’t. It’s not about logos and colours but behaviours with and within the market. Those behaviours should be reflected in internal behaviours, in the behavioural DNA of the organization. And the other way around.

An organization run in a schizophrenic, internal-external mismatch mode, is dysfunctional.

Since ‘behaviours’ or ‘culture’ are now owned by a particular function (certainly not HR), all those constituencies need to talk and agree on a set of non-negotiable behaviours.

Leadership need to be brokers and gluers.

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MOBILIZING MASTERCLASS!
A blueprint for social movements inside the organization and society
Trailer and Introduction freeview ^[10]

In October 2013, a ship carrying migrants sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. 300 people drowned. As The Guardian journalist Kenan Malik put it:  ‘It was not the first time that migrants had drowned in the Mediterranean. In fact, at that time it was estimated that in the previous 25 years at least 20,000 people had died trying to reach the shores of Europe. The real figure was most likely much higher. But that sinking in October 2013 was the first time that such a tragedy had truly impressed itself upon the conscience of Europe’

Then we got expressions of outrage and anger by most European and world leaders. The Pope went there on July 8. It seemed the beginning of the end of these kind of tragedies … in a sea next door. But of course it wasn’t . Since then, it has happened many times, barely making the news anymore.

In the world stage there are always shock windows, Lampedusa ones, Aleppo ones or Tiananmen Square ones. It would be insulting to compare those peaks of human tragedy with our more  parochial peaks in organizational life. But I am going to do it. It’s all about human behaviour and our ability to get sucked into an emotional peak, followed by an equal ability to forget it.

In our average organizations we are not confronted  with Lampedusa, Aleppo or Tiananmen moments. But our own ‘event shocks’, maybe small, maybe not tragic, follow the same fate. Here they are, tomorrow gone.

I suggest that a good leader needs to grab that possibly ephemeral story to make use of it. To point in a direction, to attract attention to a problem, to show what must or mustn’t be done.

We all witness out of the blue, bad business news, front page unexpected and unwelcome news, or big deceptions. If we can grab them, and make something good of them, then we would have won. If we react emotionally, perhaps panicking, perhaps  allowing full unsettling of our teams, and then hope it will pass, we may just be missing an opportunity for good things.

As readers of Daily Thoughts would know, I am very fond of Nassim Taleb’s intellect and writings, whilst still shocked every day by his ‘high moral ground’, unstoppable tweeting machinery, standing against almost everybody, mostly what he calls the IYI (intellectual, yet idiot) who are, pretty much everybody with a non Taleb opinion (somebody called him the other day The Teleban). One of his books is entitled ‘Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder’. The title says it all. I recommend its reading (or Fooled by Randomness, or The Black Swan, or his latest Skin in the Game; prepare yourself to be irritated)

‘Things That Gain From Disorder’ is a good leadership driver. Grab those ‘event shocks’ (that may not last that such) and make something bigger. Note I am not saying, adapt, counteract, clarify, refute, respond, but ‘gain form the disaster’. If we could simple think, ‘how can we make a little piece of greatness from this piece of smallness, incompetence, slap in the face, wickedness, or ‘shock in the system’, pick one or many, then we can lead with eyes on the building of a shared future narrative and future journey.

Since most of us are in front of those moments, perhaps monthly, perhaps weekly, perhaps daily, we will not be short of opportunities.

Yesterday was International Receptionist Day. Perhaps it was buried in a myriad of International Days of Something. But the receptionist is the most  important employee in the company. Together with the guy at the phone in the call centre, the porter, the first nurse you see in an Emergency Department in a hospital, the first shop assistant who either floods you with the most intrusive ‘can I help you?’ and follows you round the shop, or the first shop assistant that looks at you as the enemy and makes you get out as fast you got in. We have a name for these people: front line. A bit of a military term. Well, I have news for you from the front.

If you are at a high position in the company and don’t know what is going on there, you don’t deserve to be at that very high position, It may be that you simply do not do, do not understand front line. Meaning you have never bought airline tickets on the phone, or queued for a cashier in a supermarket, or needed to wait 2 hours in a waiting room in a hospital. Apparently, these people do exist.

Paul Spiegelman and Britt Berrett, who wrote a wonderful book under the provocative title ‘Patients Come Second: Leading Change by Changing the Way You Lead’, wrote this lovely paragraph that made me smile. A lot.

Nobody comes home after a surgery saying , “Man, that was the best suturing I’ve ever seen!” or, “Sweet, they took out the correct kidney!”  Instead, we talk about the people who took care of us, the ones who coordinated the whole procedure – everyone from the receptionist to the nurses to the surgeon.  And we don’t just tell the stories around the dinner table.  We share our experiences through conversations with friends and colleagues and via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

If you don’t know what is happening in the human-to-human interaction in your multiple front lines of some sort, you are missing the most important piece of strategic information. At your peril

I did not say that. Natasha Jen did. She is a designer who has given some provocative presentations under this title. It’s worth seeing one of them ^[11].

What Jen is doing is what not many people has dared to: to call out the worship of Design Thinking as the best thing after the invention of sliced bread and a solution for all ills of mankind. Its simplicity has always been one of its attraction: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test.  And its blessing and embracing by big names from Stanford to Ideo has given this field immense visibility.

A whole paraphernalia of terms, a dialect jungle, from ‘seducible moments’ to ‘summative testing’ dominate the practice, together with what Natasha Jen jokes about, a huge dose of 3M Post-its.

I don’t think Design Thinking is totally bullshit, just a little emperor getting cold because it has thin clothes. After all ,having the end user in mind and having a process to listen to them and create accordingly can’t be bad. Jen’s contention is that designers do that and have been doing so for ever without the need to have process with steps and outcomes.

The huge popularity of Design Thinking may be due to the need we all have to have maps, a process that gives us the comfort that we are following the path of others. As a map, Design Thinking does the job well. However, there are many people who just simply attach the term ‘Design Thinking’ to anything they do in an attempt to legitimise a task or a  consulting project, or a set of skills.

What do you do? Such and such and Design Thinking. For me, this is a bad business card.

Design Thinking is going to stay around for  a bit longer, for as long as people needs those maps. It does the trick but legitimises nothing if what is behind has no intellectual solidity.

Watch that video ^[11] if you can

Unless we call ‘problem’ to any management activity, as many people do even without acknowledging it, and, in which case, the organization becomes a machinery of providing solutions, we will have to define ‘problem’ with some critical thinking attached. The cardiovascular system in the human body is a solution for bringing oxygen all over the place, but Medicine would hardily use this definition, a bit equivalent to ‘the brain as a solving the problem of thinking’. This is simply not a credible definition.

Yes, the language of ‘problem’ easily contaminates the narratives. The semantic trick of calling them ‘challenges’ and ‘opportunities’ may be useful at times but it does not solve the primary question: the essence of management and the essence of the organization. I am not talking about the reason for its existence, or the philosophical ‘what is a company for’ ( an old question in Charles Handy’s writings). I am talking about the mental frames that preside and override everything we do in everyday management.

This is getting too philosophical in itself, so allow me for a colossal reductionism. There are two types of organizations, the Problem Solvers and the Builders of New

The Problem Solvers produce solutions. They may produce fantastic, beautiful ones. They may be proficient at that. So proficient that, as I have written many times, they not only thrive on problems but tend to create internal ones . They behave like a mixture of management of intellectual challenges, hieroglyph deciphers or riddle competitions, and are composed by inhabitants of an Expert Nirvana. There may be technical problems, marketing problems, scientific problems, etc. But ‘problem’ is at the core of the language

The Builders of New, build new ideas, new concepts, create new spaces in the world. They surprise themselves, surprise the markets, and, in the process, act as a huge magnet for some people. In short, they build new stuff. They may solve problems as well, of course, like anybody else, but would not have this at the centre of the narrative, like ‘the brain is there to solve the thinking problem’.

This caricature in black and white serves the purpose of highlighting the importance of the mental frame and the language. These are important because they will inform everything we do.

I do push the envelope with my clients many times, getting them away from ‘the problem solving narrative’ as the main one. It’s hard work sometimes because they see managers as ‘problem solvers’. I do push to embrace the building narrative, because I know that solving problems will not be forgotten, anyway.

But I am quite fundamentalist about this. If you give most of the airtime to ‘problems’, you will shape a particular organization that may be healthy, and successful, but not necessarily ahead of the game.

It’s a caricature. But all mental frames are. Chose the one you want before the mental frame choses you.

I, for one, choose the builders.

Today I have presented my views on Employer Branding at a conference in Berlin. The trouble with this area is that overlaps with so many others such as Employee Engagement, Employee Value Proposition and many more that have created a sub-industry of their own.

Yet, the frame is very valid if it helps us  to understand the purpose of the organization, their values, the ‘why working there’ and the image that it projects to the outside word. But the elephant in the room is called ‘culture’. And for me, culture is behaviours. Scale behaviours, get culture. Get culture, you get Employer Branding and Employee Value Proposition, all in one, for the same price.

If so, there are principles at the core of creating and shaping ‘culture’. These are:

1. Behaviours create culture, not the other way around. Divert your energy to behaviours instead of discussing culture too conceptually,
2. Cultures are not created by training. No revolution was created in a classroom
3. Behaviours multiply by imitation, not indoctrination. Find our who has the power to be imitated, at a scale
4. Culture is an infection business, not a broadcasting one. Master the infection maths, not the communication ones
5. Communication is not change. It may be necessary but nor sufficient to create change. In fact, too much of it switches people off
6. Engagement is an outcome, not an input. You don’t inject ‘employee engagement’
7. The best Employer Branding programme is the one that is not needed
8. Culture is the elephant, engagement is one of the legs
9. Shape culture, get employee engagement and employer branding all in one
10. Company culture is a social movement. Create one

We, as a company, create social movements inside the organization, by embedding the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform ^[12], a true company Operating System that can enable any ‘project’ and ‘change’ where large scale behavioural scale up is required.

If you are interested in the slides shown in Berlin, please send an email to laura-proctor@thechalfontproject. com

Nothing is more rewarding than having a CEO who says world-changing things in the news, and who produces bold, enlightened and progressive quotes for all admirers to be. That organization is lucky to have one of these. The logic says that all those enlightened statements about trust, empowerment, humanity and purpose, will be percolated down the system,  and will inform and shape behaviours in the milfeulle of management layers below.

I take a view, observed many times, that this is wishful thinking. In fact, quite the opposite, I have seen more than once how management below devolves all greatness to the top, happily, whilst ignoring it and playing games in very opposite directions. Having the very good and clever and enlightened people at the top is a relief for them.  They don’t have to pretend that they are as well, so they can exercise their ‘practical power’ with more freedom. That enlightened  department is covered in the system, and the corporate showcase guaranteed.

The distance between the top and the next layer down may not be great in organizational chart terms, yet the top may not have a clue that there is a behavioural fabric mismatch just a few centimeters down in the organization chat.

I used to think years ago, when I was older, that a front page top notch leader stressing human values provided a safe shelter against inhuman values for his/her organization below. I am not so sure today. In fact, my alarm bell system goes mad when I see too much charismatic, purpose driven, top leadership talk. I simply smell lots of alibis below. And I often find them. After all, there is usually no much room for many Good Cops

Yet, I very much welcome the headline grabbing by powerful business people who stress human values, and purpose, and a quest for a decent world. The alternative would be sad. I don’t want them to stop that. But let’s not fool ourselves about how much of that truly represents their organizations. In many cases it represents them.

I guess it all goes back, again, to the grossly overrated Role Model Power attributed to the leadership of organizations, a relic of traditional thinking, well linked to the Big Man Theory of history. Years of Edelman’s Trust Barometer, never attributing the CEO more than 30% of the trust stock in the organization, have not convinced people that the ‘looking up’ is just a small part of the story. What happens in organizations has a far more powerful ‘looking sideways’ traction: manager to manager, employee to employee. Lots of ritualistic dis-empowering management practices can site very nicely under the umbrella of a high empowerment narrative at the top, and nobody would care much. The top floor music and the music coming from the floor below, and below, are parallel universes.

Traditional management  and MBA thinking has told us that if this is the case, the dysfunctionality of the system will force it to break down. My view is the opposite. The system survives nicely under those contradictions. In fact it needs them.

Brand (identity), whether big brand or small brand, is a behavioural powerhouse. Strictly speaking I would say a Pull-House, because it should pull behaviours and multiply them at a scale.

The sense of belonging to a tribe, a brand, a concept, a ‘place in the world’ is today not merely emotionally or aesthetical, it is full blown behavioural. We, the tribe, the inhabitants of that space in the world, the ones hosted by the brand, do things in a particular way, have a particular DNA, have borders (even porous) and a particular way of understanding relationships.

How the (corporate) brand projects itself outside, to the market, should be a mirror of how it does internally (employees). Very often there is a disconnect. The funky external look is not that funky inside; a fabulous external marketing machinery has a very poor internal marketing of ideas; what people see outside and what happens inside is often night and day.

Brand strategists should be behavioural strategists. No focus on behaviours, no brand work worth the label.

Behavioural strategists are natural brand shapers.

The brand is the people magnet and the behavioural trigger and multiplier. Everything else, from logo to ‘brand guidelines’ are artifacts.

Show me how you behave and I will tell you about your brand.

Uniqueness is a tough concept. I’ve got countless examples of clients pushing back  over the years. ‘Come on, this is a manufacturing line, we don’t reinvent the wheel, this is how plastic bottles, or drug capsules, are made, everywhere. I don’t need creativity’. That one has been very common!

But the argument is almost always flawed. We are mixing uniqueness (maximum differentiation) with creativity (alternative ways, but not necessarily unique) with innovation (different, not tried application of ideas).

The robots… will take care of many repetitive, mechanical, unique or not, processes.  That we know. They will also take care, via Artificial Intelligence, of a lot of thinking. And if the idiot machines can learn, and master the master of all algorithms, then, well, Mars is probably a good option.

Seriously, I am obsessed with uniqueness of product or services as an aspiration, not always reachable. If in my company we did not aspire to uniqueness, I would perhaps not be here, writing my Daily Thoughts.

For me, there is no limit as to how unique you want to be, whether it’s possible or not. It is the Michelangelo aspiration quoted a million times: ‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark’.

Besides, should we really dismiss uniqueness as aspiration when we are each of us a live representation of the concept of ‘unique’? There is no other like you, not even your twin brother.

Here are five areas of uniqueness to explore:

• Making unique the otherwise repetitive
• Aspiring  to be unique in an particular area/topic/expertise
• Creating truly unique experiences (with customers, colleagues, stakeholders)
• Making your personal contribution unique
• Interviewing new people in a unique way

To me, the magic question is ‘what would it take to achieve it?’ It may not be obvious. It may be hard. It may be easy to dismiss. But the question is one of the strongest one can ask in the professional world.

How can I/we be unique on X,Y.Z?

What would it take?

I am (in) IT, I work for X (company)
I work for X (company), I am in IT

These are not the same. It tells me where the sense of belonging is, where home is, where loyalty may be, or divided. Both are neither good nor bad. They express what they express. They are different.

Change IT for R&D, Commercial, Regulatory etc. if you wish.

But some tribes are particularly good at preserving their belonging. Medical doctors is one. ‘Being a medical doctor’ becomes part of some sort of special form of being that sticks. Lots of pages in social psychology manuals explain why, including one that made me think for many years, when I was briefly teaching Medical Psychosociology in the University: the so called ‘access to your body’. The plumber, the engineer, the roof fixer, the driver or your manager do not have (usually) access to your body. They may have access to your time, your money or your emotions but usually not your body. That is an anthropological privilege when looked through those lenses.

In my many years doing time in the pharmaceutical industry, I was always struck by the medics, some reporting to me, who would always put ‘the medic’ bit before the company paying the salary. ‘I am a doctor, I work for X (company) as Medical Director’ was always, always, far more prominent than “I work for X (company) as a Medical Director, comma, I am a medical doctor’

Here, the order of factors does change the product.

Similarly, for a company composed of parts or business units or acquired businesses.

I am in Y (part of a company Z, or we are just being acquired by Z)
I work for Y, now part of Z
I work for Z, they just bought us, Y

Here, as well, the order of factors does change the product.

Months, even years after an acquisition, some groups or individuals have not made the transition yet. They still belong to the previous entity.

Also, the more de-centralised, devolved, an organization is, the more it is acting as a host, as an umbrella. As such, the overall brand may or may not be stronger than the individual de-centralised branded units. We see this all the time. People are often more loyal to a product-brand, or a service-brand, or, indeed a geography-brand, than ‘the firm’.

The issue is not whether the decentralised business units retain high levels of loyalty and belonging for employees (what is wrong with that?) but whether the parent brand makes the whole thing even more attractive. The more decentralised, the greater the need for an overall glue, a neat common home to be. The onus to be a good magnet is on the host/umbrella/mother/father. Not on the children.

 

 

The purpose of the organization is… The objectives of the strategy are… The reason why we have restructured is…

From then on, any word used will dictate more than a few actions. What comes after is the frame, which is the same as saying the box, the borders, the spirit behind. So, for example, here are some frames: fixing, building, creating, protecting, solving, defending, and winning. Each word decides a set of values, a course of action.

Solving a poor customer relationship system is not the same as building a culture of customer-centrism.

Defending the brand is not the same as creating a community of brand fans.

Winning a position in the market is not the same as creating a market.

The frame dictates.

I can hear people saying that it is the other way around, that first is the intention, then strategy and then the words. But I see day after day the use of words that nobody knows exactly why they are used and that seem to be (vaguely?) related to the purpose. In many cases I know, the words have taken over. Perhaps irreversibly. In that case, words dictate, they are not dictated.

Words are cheap, their consequences are not.

Restructuring to align process and systems better, to concentrate leadership and/or serve a customer sector in a better, more logical and more effective way, may be done for all those purposes, but simply heard as cost cutting and people leaving. The latter may be so, but in reality, a new structure (I am not making a judgement as to whether good or bad, sensible or not) is born. Taking this under the building mode, for example, may just create a completely different future. Building, as a forgotten frame, is a lost opportunity to align people on a new and exciting journey.

It is far from semantic games. Words dictate us, not the other way around. Words produce emotions, from excitement to boredom, from emotional engagement to cynicism, from possibilities gained to paradise lost.

Framing is a key skill for leaders. Poor leaders will take this as a word game that an advertising or consulting agency will craft for them. Good leaders will start with asking others around to choose a frame, to explore the consequences, decide and stick to it.

 

 

 

I think the current life cycle of a ‘best practice’ is a month or so. And this is benevolent. In the old days ‘best practice’ was a way to copy the good things that others have done. Like benchmarking, they were rear view mirrors of a race already won by somebody else. Today, if you navigate in ‘best practice’ and ‘benchmarking’ mode, you’ll perhaps be able to stay afloat, but will never win the race.

OK, these concepts are not going to disappear. But they will not come up any more in the format of big conferences, big retrospective dossiers and other forms of rear view mirror management.

You see ‘best practices’ by reading them in social media, by reading some books, by subscribing to cool newsletters and blogs, by having lots of free Google alerts. They are there in front of you in great quantity, for you to seal, copy, get inspired, frustrated, dismiss them or fall in love, all in one afternoon if you wish.

If you are still fond of these two sisters, Best Practice and Benchmarking, invite them for dinner, have a chat, see what they have to say, have some fun, and call it a day. Don’t let them live with you permanently. They are charming and other people may fall in love with them. Before you know it, they will take over the house.

A key strategic question for you (company, group, team, individual) is: are we benchmarkable? Would anybody see this as best practice?

If the answer is yes to all, congratulations, but remember it won’t last. Plan your next ‘ahead of the game’ move.

If the answer is no, I am very sorry to hear that, my condolences, let me know the time and place for the funeral.