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Archives for July 2008

Success Built to Last

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Success in the long run has less to do with finding the best idea, organizational structure, or business model for an enterprise, than with discovering what matters to us as individuals…For the most part, extraordinary people, teams, and organizations are simply ordinary people doing extraordinary things that matter to them.

Success Built to Last – Porras, Emery and Thompson

cited in Make the Impossible Possible by Bill Strickland pg 120

Wally on Leadership

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I regularly read Wally Bock’s blog.  He is always coming up with great insights and ideas.

In a recent post he reminded us that:

  1. Leadership is behaviour.
  2. Theory doesn’t count unless it turns into behaviour.
  3. Principles don’t matter until you incarnate them.
  4. If it doesn’t find its way into what you say or what you do, it can’t be leadership.
  5. Leadership is situational.
  6. One size doesn’t fit all.
  7. What works in one situation may not work in another.
  8. Your choices of what you say and do depend on the situation.
  9. If you aspire to leadership, understand that leadership is about actions measured by results in a specific situation.

Much the same can be said of management. I even agree with the situational nature of leadership – although I also believe that a single, simple management system can provide the basics of good organisational practice in the vast majority of situations.  A system where you:

Thanks Wally.  You can read the full post here.

Personal e-mail and reflections on transformation, humanity and compassion!

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I got  a wonderful e-mail this morning from an old friend, Jim McLaughlin.

In it he said:

“I love this marriage of science and heart.

It’s where the human potential movement meets good organisational practices.  In fact, if people in organisations were enabled to be their best human selves – loving, forgiving, caring, open, courageous – there would be wonderful organisations.  But somehow we change the rules of what is expected when someone brings their work self into the office/hospital/factory.”

Now why didn’t I put it like that!

One of the real sources of advantage is the ability to retain humanity and compassion while developing excellent organisational practices.  However this is a trick that many organisations with ‘transactional’ rather than ‘transformational’ cultures have managed to miss.

On a good day I would like to think that the compassion and humanity that attracts so many of us to third sector would make this transformation trick a straightforward one to play.   However the evidence suggests that many organisations in third sector quickly become as transactional as so many of their private and public sector cousins

Thanks Jim!

Demos Enterprise Report

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Demos have just published a collection of essays on the future of enterprise from contributors such as:

  • John Bird
  • Tim Campbell
  • Peter Day
  • John Elkington
  • Gordon Frazer
  • Howard Gardner
  • Peter Grigg
  • Martha Lane Fox
  • Jim Lawn
  • Raj Patel
  • Carl Schramm
  • Simon Woodroffe

As DEMOS say in the blurb for the report:

Enterprise is all too often associated with making money. Yet, there is so much more to it: enterprise is about creating a culture of initiative, creativity, risk-taking amongst young people and adults. It is about using entrepreneurial energy to drive change.

Britain is doing well when it comes to enterprise.

More people are trading on Ebay than ever before and TV programmes like the Dragons Den and the Apprentice are extremely popular. Small firms and individual entrepreneurs also greatly contribute to the British economy and dynamism.

But is there more to it?

This collection argues that a successful and thriving enterprise nation will have to go much further than that. The future face of enterprise is one that will need to start at home and at school; that will be found in basements and small offices as well as in big corporations and the web. It will require new skills and new talent to answer to the challenges of tomorrow. There is already a strong desire among young people to use their ideas for change, but more needs to be done to cultivate the mindsets and foster the support that tomorrow’s entrepreneurs will need if young people are not to be discouraged from trying.

This collection of essays articulates some of the key features of the future face of enterprise. Progressing this thinking into ideas for action is the next challenge.

You can download the report here.