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Category: Business & Communities

Have a 4-Hour Workweek just like Tim Ferris

Published September 16, 2009 by Jo Jordan

This post is a little presumptuous.   I have never met Tim Ferris, but like most people who spend a lot of time with computers, I have read his blog and watched some of his talks.   I want a 4-Hour Workweek too!

So what does Tim Ferris do?

As a trouper in first year lecture halls, you must forgive my penchant for turning everything into a 3 part list.

These are my thoughts.

1.   Tim’s sells “action art”

Tim decides to learn the tango, and wins the world championships.   He wants to gain muscle and he is The Incredible Hulk in weeks.  He learns to swim as an adult and is winning races in no time.

Whatever Tim does is breath-takingly audacious and gob-smackingly successful.

2.   Tim doesn’t just make art.  He packages it for sale through his blog & public speaking.

His big sale, of course, is his book, The 4-Hour Workweek.

3.  Tim also does his own marketing and he is his own agent

Tim has an active blog. He watches his numbers. And he manages the office for the “Tim Ferris” enterprise.

What Tim doesn’t do – is his own accountancy or his back-office operations.  He outsources the clerical work of his business to offshore firms offering clerical services.

What is Tim’s business model ?

1.  Tim centres his business on what he loves to do, what he does well, and on what we love him to do.

2.  Tim takes his work directly to the marketplace.

3.  Tim took the initiative to create a business structure around himself and does a fair share of the skilled and expensive management work himself.

What can you and I copy?

  • Do what we love, do what we do well and do what the world loves us to do.
  • Finish the task and go out to meet our audience.
  • Take the initiative and create and run the business we need to support the work we want to do.

Are you in a hurry?

Oh, we usually are!

So much so, we scamper over the first question.  Then we freeze in fright as soon as we think of selling our work for money.  And we never get round to thinking about business processes, let alone take charge of them.

Can I persuade you to spend 10 minutes trying?

Grab your favouite beverage, a pen and an old envelope!

1.  Of all things you do, what brings you that sense of deep pleasure of a job you know you do so well? Write down three things in 30 seconds!

2.  Done that? Now turn the envelope over and draw your value chain. On the left, put the raw material that you work with, draw a line across the page, and jot down all things you need to turn that raw material into whatever it is you make.

You can make a fish bone diagram with fish bones coming into a spine. My fish bones included headings like “access”, “willing people” “time”, “credibility” – all the deal breakers if I don’t get them right.

3.  Now you have your fish. On the tail at the left is your raw material. You probably have five or so bones coming in from either side. And the head to the right is the finished work.

Let’s finish off.

Draw some more lines (3 to 5) parallel to your fish’s spine. Label each line with things that need to happen for you get the resources you need.

It is quite likely that each of these represents a learning curve for you.  Which one’s can you get help with, and which one’s will you take responsibility for?

Do a quick cross-check that you have covered all the functions.

CEO: You

Operations: The work you love

Marketing: How you build connections

Sales: How you close deals

Buying: The source of critical physical resources and knowledge

Technical: Any equipment and technical skills you need

Accounting: Keeping count and keeping the taxman happy

HR: You

One more business model for a 4-Hour Workweek done-and-dusted!

Does this work for you? Did it take you closer to an action plan?

Do you feel you could surround yourself with the business you love?

Can you list what you need to learn to do and cheerfully put your learning goals in order?

Can you identify what you need to learn and throw the questions at Google?

I hope so. I made progress once I could get myself to pick up the envelope and the pen.

Apologies, Tim. I don’t know how much I’ve distorted your business but this is what I learned from you. So thanks.

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How much lifestyle are you earning?

Published September 16, 2009 by Jo Jordan

I am about to depress you.  So grab a cup of coffee, or your favorite beverage, and put your feet up.  And put your arithmetic head on.  I am about to turn numbers upside down and talking some shocking truths about how hard you have worked for that cup of coffee and how much you have to be paid to earn a lifestyle of luxury.

Or to be mischeivious, how much we have been paying some very well paid people for having lunch and going to sleep.

Thought Experiment 1: You are worth $1 or GBP1 or Euro1 per second. Count 1 potato, 2 potato, 3 potato. Click, click, click.  Count it out like a metronome. Click, click, click.

Each click is a dollar coming in.  Not a lot, is it?   Barely pays for the coffee you are drinking, the sofa you are sitting on, your broadband connection.

Actually, it is is $30 million a year.

I put it on a graph for you. You might want to check my arithmetic again. I’ve done the calculation several times but I am getting old and I’ve begun to make mistakes with numbers.

Compare with $1 per sec

Thought Experiment 2: Over the shock? Well, lets count 30 seconds. 30 potatoes – wow, that takes a long time.

Wait – patiently. $1 arrives.

Count another 30 seconds, another $1 arrives.   $2 dollars per minute.

Coffee is beginning to seem really expensive.

How much is that? $15 million, of course.

No, $1 million a year.

You have to divide by 30 not 2. You are now earning 1/30 of the person earning $1 every second or $30m a year.  Shock?  That long wait is $1m a year.

Compare with $1 per 30 secs

And look again.  The person earning $1 per minute, every 60 potatoes, is earning half what you are earning (500K).

Thought Experiment 3: Now imagine earning $1 every 15 minutes.  I am not going to ask you to count to 900 potatoes.  It will feel an age.  Certainly long enough to linger over your coffee and check your mail.  $1 by the time you have finished.  That’s all.

That 35K a year.  A respectable salary in England.

Compare with $1 per 15 mins

Thought Experiment 4:  And now imagine $1 per hour.  What do you do with $1?  Buy a packet of crisps?  That’s less than 9K a year.

Compare with $1 per Hr

Thought Experiment 5: And finally let’s look at the minimum wage.  75c an hour.  Around $6500 a year.  Green line at the top. Less than a litre of milk.  Half a loaf of bread.

Still it is better than $1 day which is the green line second from the bottom.

The red line underneath that is $1 per month.

Compare with 75c per hr

Seeing the other picture?

You are probably feeling a little muddled.  Good.  It’s good to turn numbers upside-down and inside-out and get another perspective.  So what have I done, here?

  • I’ve reminded you that employers quote wages by the hour because accountants use that number to do their costing.  This number doesn’t concern you.  What concerns you is the total per year (after taxes) and either the amount per second or the time it takes you to earn $1 – which is what I’ve shown you.  That’s the lifestyle you’ve earned.  Total after taxes divided by (365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds).  At a dollar per second that comes to over 30m a year.
  • I’ve shown you how the gap between pay rates gets very big, very fast.   The way pay rates are quoted encourages us to make mistakes.  $1 per 30 seconds and we think half-a-minute and think we have half-the-lifestyle, when actually, we have 1/60 the lifestyle, or 1/60 the lifestyle, or 1/360 the lifestyle.

Forget about costs to your employer.  Let them run their own business.

You should be concentrating on the lifestyle you earn.

Ask: What do I earn per second because I am alive every second of the day not just the time I spend making money for other people.

Every second of the day.

Now tell me what you earn per second and how you intend to drive that up!

P.S.  If you want to play with the numbers or the graph, it is on Chartle.

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Do you make any of these mistakes of job design and sabotage your organization?

Published September 14, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Classical ideal feedback model. The feedback i...
Image via Wikipedia

I’ve just been reading a post from an ambulance driver (woops, they don’t like that title).

It is a privilege, because I might not otherwise have the chance to observe the nuances of their job, and even if I did, to learn the same might take hours of interviews and hours of rewriting.

So we are lucky to have this blog.  It also teaches lessons for the general practice of job design – which it did today.

Briefly, feedback is a key idea in job design. Yet, it gets forgotten for procedures and targets.

This is what is critical.  For every task anyone does, they must get feedback on how well they have done before they begin that task again.

Experts often get feedback as they move from one part of a large task to another.  That’s what makes them expert.  The ability to detect feedback that will mean nothing to anyone else.

But at some point a task is handed over to someone else. When and how do they get feedback on how well their work fitted into the next process down the line?

If they don’t get feedback, what sense are the supposed to make of their work?   What sense will they make of their work?  And what of evidence-based practice, if the people doing the work do not get ‘knowledge of results’ before they start the same task again?

This is the story

The ambulance man and his colleague raced a severely dehydrated child to hospital rather than attempt to re-hydrate the child themselves. They drop off the child, but hear nothing more about what happened next.

There appears to be no mechanism to tell them if their decision was correct and whether equally trained people would have made the same decision.

The blog post talks about the decision points in the job.  It is worth reading in the original for the pattern of thinking that is typical in skilled people.  We are constantly on the look out for this thinking to inform our understanding of the information that experts use and need.   And indeed, who is an expert and who is not.

You will also see the confusion and overload that’s caused by not getting feedback quickly.

So what can the organization do to provide adequate feedback?

I don’t know what the NHS does. I’ve never worked with the NHS in a professional capacity and I don’t know any work psychologist who has.

What I would expect to be happening is a regular psychological audit of each and every job to look out for situations like this.

We want to know that in each and every situation, a skilled and experienced worker is able to set a goal, lay out a plan, and obtain feedback before they begin that task again.

Why might that feedback not be available?

1.  The task is handed over, and for some reason, the feedback loop is not in place.  It might have gone AWOL (in which case alert the line managers and check that they put it back).   It might never have existed (in which case which psychologist slipped up).  The job might have drifted (in which case re-analyse it and adjust the feedback system).

2.  There is one other scenario that is more tricky.  Managers have been known to hijack feedback because making people wait for information makes them feel powerful (and sometimes allows them to distort what is said).   An organization has to come down on such practices like the proverbial ‘ton of bricks.’   Withholding information causes stress and overload, delays learning, and potentially causes accidents, which in an organization, like the NHS, may lead to loss of life.   If managers are intercepting feedback, that has to be reversed.   In a hierarchical organization, usually we have one meeting with the manager concerned, and if that does not produce immediate redress, we have an urgent meeting with his or her manager.

Who guards the guards, so to speak?

The system does not stop with psychologists keeping jobs properly balanced.    The file on the job (not the person – the job) should have the internal auditor’s signature on it confirming they have checked that the psychological audits are taking place and are being conducted properly.

And there should be another file with copies of the report that the internal auditors routinely send to the Chief Psychologist to report on the quality of the psychological audits.

A lot of work?

Organizations are a lot of work.  That’s why we have to consider whether we want one at all.  But once we have one, we have to run them properly and ‘prevent rather than cure’.  Good systems reduce crises, problems and accidents.

I don’t know what the NHS does exactly but as the largest employer in the world, I imagine they have sophisticated management systems in place.  Feedback failures are one of the many things that ‘staff managers’ count, monitor and resolve.

Does anyone know how the NHS, or other large British employers, manage their feedback systems?

For further reading on the 3 tier system of

  • Doing
  • Directing
  • Reviewing

.

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5 rules of motivation for the lazy psychologist

Published September 13, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Cheese on a market in Basel, Switzerland
Image via Wikipedia

I’m not moving until I can see the cheese

And Google is not coming without lots of keywords. This post is about MOTIVATION and all the misunderstandings and controversies that seem to swirl about us endlessly.

1  Motivation is distance to your goal

The mouse runs faster when it sees the cheese!

Motivation is not constant.  We aren’t motivated by cheese.  We are motivated by distance to the cheese.

Motivation gets stronger when we can see what we want and our goal comes tantalizing closer as we move toward it.

2  Motivation blinds us

When the mouse sees the cheese, it moves towards it . . . and the mouse trap.

That’s why business people and politicians like greedy people! So easy to dazzle.  So easy to trap.

3  Motivation is never so strong that we ignore a better cheese

So we put the cheese where the mouse can see it, and the mouse takes off . . .  Will it keep going, no matter what?

Yes, . . . unless we put a better cheese next to a dull cheese, or a duller cheese a little closer.  Our mouse is as fickle as the English weather.   It doesn’t matter whose day it spoils, the mouse will go where it is easier or better.

We make rapid calculations about what we will gain and change direction in a flash!

4  Motivation makes us stupid

Yet, when someone moves the cheese, we are temporarily confused. The trouble is that seeing the cheese focused our attention. And we forgot everything else. We forgot that other cheese exists. We forgot there are other routes to the cheese.

Take away the cheese suddenly, and we get cross and disoriented. Though there are plenty of alternatives, for a moment we can’t see them or remember them.

5  Motivation needs to be simple

And if we put two equally attractive cheeses in opposite directions, one to the left and one to the right, we get a confused mouse.

Come on cats, now is your chance.

Worse, if two or more mice are discussing which way to go, we may be there all week.

We need to toss two coins – the first to see if we go together or in different directions, and the second to see which way we go.  Most times we just argue. We don’t think of laying out the problem so tidily.  Two cheeses – we can have one or the other.  Shall we go together or not?  If not, who goes first and in which direction? If we are going together, in which direction?

Action is hard . . .

We can’t move, we won’t get moving, until our choices are simple and the end is in sight. We are easily distracted by alternatives and paralyzed by thought.

.  .  . and action it is also dangerous

We are easily entrapped by our greed – or to be kind to ourselves – easily engaged by the plain fun of scampering towards our cheese and wolfing it down.

Someone has to manage the cheese

We do have to work hard to keep the cheese-system simple and to fend off distractions.  While we are busy managing the cheese, we make ourselves vulnerable because we are just as blinkered in that goal as the cheese-chasers are by the cheese-chase.

So we need people to manage the people who manage the cheese

This is beginning to sound like a nursery-rhyme.

We do need lookouts to watch out for when we are getting blinkered.

We also need our lookouts to challenge us and to ask why we need to chase this cheese at all?  Well, the answer is as always, for the fun of it. We’ll chase something, just for the fun of it.  So, the question is which cheese will we chase?  And who will be sufficiently above the action to referee the debate and not get blinded by the thrill of the chase?

We do need some people to manage the people who manage the people who chase the cheese.  That will be their job, their only job.  Because if they get involved in the action, they will be blinkered too.  We will give them their share of the cheese if they ask us, over and over again, whether we should be chasing the cheese at all.

We must have these people.  Or the cats will have us

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Selling organizational acumen: my how-to has a gap

Published September 10, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Not a popular profession

I’ve always been a ‘managerialist’- a dirty word, I know.

But I’ve been a managerialist because I am fascinated by good management.

Bad management is just annoying, if not disgusting, in the way we always find cultural incompetence dispiriting – dirtying. Yuck.

So I don’t necessarily love managers. In the way, I don’t necessarily love cricketers but I appreciate a well played game that entertains us.

I just like watching managers.  I like figuring out what they do. And I like it when we can spot how to simplify operations.

  • It’s fun to figure out some back-room system that makes life for people on the front line a lot easier.
  • It’s fun to figure out a set of shelves that cut out 15 minutes of daily rummaging in filing cabinets and operate simultaneously as a kanban system, alerting us to when we need to reorder.
  • It’s fun to automate a clerical system so something repetitive can be dispensed in with 1% of the work.
  • It’s fun to throw out a computer system and use a simple diary to record what we do because that is easier.

But our fun should always result in ways that let people do their jobs more easily and more effectively.

An indecipherable profession

Of course, people don’t always say thank you. They might not have a strong sense of how a little order in the background cuts down a lot of day to day irritation.

Yet, it is fun to watch them perform more smoothly and more elegantly as a result.

Who has written on the selling of management consultancy?

I don’t recall reading anything about the relationship between people who sell management ideas and the people they sell them too.

Anyone?  Or is this just one particular case of selling services?

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10 questions I ask about a venture’s readiness to win

Published September 10, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Fast Break

There is nothing I relish more than a “fast break”. I love the way that we can turn a rebound into a few deft passes and race the opposition to a slam dunk.

Carpe diem ! Sieze the day!

Can you take the Fast Break when it comes?

The conditions are right. The rewards are there.

Are we organized to dispatch our fast break specialist, take that rebound and pass it down the court, with ball and fast break specialist arriving together – right foot down, left down, into the air, done! 2 points?

Are we organized?

Well, there are the permanent spectators in life.  There are some who have a go, but don’t really get it.

And there are some who understand the game.  They get ready in advance.  They practice with others.  And when the opportunity breaks, they are running immediately, moving at speed in coordination with their prepared team, and they score. Sweet!

What are you ready for?

1.  What is the equivalent of the ball and the equivalent of the basket in your business?  2. What do you win by putting the ball in the basket?

And when you can tell me that, tell me this.

  • 3.  Who is working with you? 4.  And who must you outpace to pull this off?
  • 5.  What is the signal that sends the fast-break specialist off?  6.  Who is taking the ball off the back-board?  7.  Who is the play-maker (mid-fielder) in the middle?
  • 8.  When do you train together?  9.  When do you celebrate your wins?   10.  How long will you play together?

10 questions . . . oh, but do remember this is a game.   When we are straining too hard, to get this done, it is time for a coffee break to think again.

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Social media: revolution or same-o same-o?

Published September 9, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Ready for Take Off
Image by D.Reichardt via Flickr

Yesterday, Paul Seamen published a long post on why he think social media does not pack the revolutionary punch celebrated by enthusiasts such as Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky and the leading lights in UK social media.

I must declare my position at the outset. I am a social media enthusiast. Rather than rebut any particular points in Paul’s long contrinution, I thought it better to print out his post, read it carefully, and try to get to the nub of what he is saying. After all, I don’t have to agree with him; but if I am serious about a career in social media and about espousing its potential to others, I should be able to explain positions other than my own.

So this is my attempt to disentangle what is new about social media

Paul makes an important point that we form institutions to bring together diverse groups of people to accomplish something together. We have schools which cater for all children in the neighbourhood. We have companies in which we can all buy shares.

The very nature of an institution is that it takes on a separate persona, recognized in law. A school can speak for itself. A company can speak for itself.

And the agents, or the Directors or the management or the front line staff, speak for the institution, not themselves. They leave their personal views at the door so to speak, because they speak of and for the common purpose.

It is their role to continuously interpret the institution’s purpose ‘faithfully and robustly’ in terms of the specifics of any situation in which they find ourselves.

An institution thus has a sharply different purpose than that of social media which is an essentially personal medium. In social media, each of us speaks for ourselves. There is an essential tension, therefore, between the purpose of social media and the purpose of any corporate communication.

If I have summarized Paul’s position correctly, then I agree, wholeheartedly. I teach management and related subjects for a living and this is the essence of what we teach. It is the essence of what we do as accountants, lawyers, etc. We run the collectives of contemporary life, and in that capacity, we represent the common purpose, not our own personal purpose.

What is the general position of social media mavens?

It is my general understanding that social media mavens are noticing the emergence of a new collective action – much as the commercial company emerged around the time of the South Sea Bubble. And they are describingtthe mechanics of those collectives as they emerge, piece-by-piece. Because the emerging forms are still very new, there is still a lot of experimentation, deliberate and accidental, and their observations take the form of “look at this, look at that” – a point that has already been made by Clay Shirky.

What is the debate?

The debate comes when we consider whether any of the old institutional forms will fade away. Will the old forms be displaced by the new forms?

Paul does not think so and I do not think the old forms will fade entirely either – for many reasons, one being that we won’t change what we are used to until we have to. Convents and monasteries still exist, after all.

What is the issue?

What matters for any one of us as individuals, or what matters for any institution or type of institution, is whether the institutions we work for or depend upon for income, will be displaced. What will their position be in the ecology of human purpose in five years, ten years, etc.?

My reasoning

There is an basic rule-of-thumb in management (and military) studies that broadly says theory doesn’t matter a toss.

In management-speak, we say that structure is contingent on circumstances. In the words of Sun Tzu, we say “Know the situation, know the circumstances”. In general military parlance, we say that “no plan survives meeting the enemy”. In short, we plan to pre-load relevant details into our heads so that we can act quickly and effectively in the cut-and-thrust of battle.

In short, we can talk in broad terms about what will happen but we have no way of knowing exactly. What counts is how we monitor unfolding events and how we position ourselves as events unfold. And as we are all jostling for positions that we believe to be advantageous to ourselves, what emerges is not the result of what any one of us wants, but what we all want , how well we play the game, and probably a large amount of happenstance.

This is my summation of the broad direction that social media is taking

Existing institutions

It is entirely likely that many of Paul’s clients will be largely untouched by social media . Their challenge is to think very carefully about the muddling of the personal voice, which has been made more clamorous with social media, and the institutional voice, which they are charged with expressing ‘faithfully and robustly’ on behalf of us all.

And they should attend to that with speed because the two are already well and truly muddled in public affairs.

New social movements

It is likely that other collective processes will emerge to aggregate the clamours personal voice enabled by social media, and it is the role of self-appointed community leaders to work out the responsibilities for the temporary and permanent associations that they stimulate and represent.

Examples of these processes include the tweeting of events like the Mumbai bombing and inadvertently providing the perpetrators with information; and tweeting in the Iranian elections and risking the ire of the prevailing authorities.

Emerging institutions

I increasingly suspect new types of institutions will emerge through social media . These institutions will be much the same as institutions that I described at the top of the post, at a very general level, but they will have been made possible by the technology of social media and they might change the relationships between people working within them.

I also think the profit-and-loss process might change. I’ll save discussions of these issues for other posts because these developments are embryonic anyway.

(This argument goes a beyond causing the destruction of old institutions by reducing transaction costs.)

My summary of the opportunities and imperatives of the social media age

To sum up, I agree with Paul that many large institutions formed in pre-social-media days will continue to exist for the reasons that they were formed. And I look forward to how they disentangle personal and institutional voice and start incorporating the essential precepts in the undergraduate curriculum. It is a fair test, I think, that they can layout out their principles clearly for a MGMT101 class.

I also think the Social Media crowd can help with this process and perhaps need to try to see the issues through the lens of the obligations of these institutions.

The work on social movements I find interesting, and as I have taken an active role in some effective social movements, I am happy to pass on any tips to people heading in that direction.

My main interest though is in the new institutional forms that are emerging:

  • New social media businesses
  • New markets for traditional businesses such as small town shops
  • New frontiers of competition for small towns and possibilities of strengthening local economics
  • Businesses (such as Boeing) who have re-jigged their business model to take advantage of the new communication possibilities
  • And the skills and roles in running these new enterprises including developments in commercial law.

I don’t know if I have summarized Paul’s position correctly. I hope he will comment. He makes a host of other points too.

And I don’t know if I have clarified anything for anyone else. That’s for you to say!

But I have benefited from trying to see the issues through Paul’s eyes.

Now let’s see if the debate continues to be productive.

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WANTED: A 5 yr forward bank-integrated cash-flow system

Published September 9, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Who has an expenses, budget and payment system that they are happy with?

When I was growing up, we were paid neatly on the 25 of the month, all our bills were raised on the last day of the month, bills arrived during the first week of the month and you had 30 days to pay.

One evening each month, you sat down and reconciled your bank account, you paid your bills, and if you were really organized, you entered your payments into you cash flow plan.

Isn’t life complicated now? Employers happily pay you in the first week of the month. Credit card periods end any time. Some credit card payments are due in 3 or 4 days;others in 30 days.

Some firms want direct debits but beware – if they allow a fraudster access to your account, which happens quite often, you will spend ages cleaning up the mess and restoring your credit record.

Needed: easy cash flow payment systems

What we need are some easy cash flow payment systems. I have seen one, I forget where, that liases with a bank but that is pretty frightening. I can’t get into my internet bank reliably as it is (British banks don’t seem to get computers.)

So how do we solve this conundrum?

I am looking for a simple system to manage expenses and to plan payments at least 5 years ahead to cope with payments like domain registrations that get forgotten.

Do you know of such a system?

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The Secrets of Leaders Who Step Up in Bad Times

Published September 8, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Leading in shocking times

Because I have lived in shocking times, I’ve spent some time thinking about leadership when the situation is hopeless – by any objective standards – hopeless.

It is a horrible time to lead. People want us to make the problem go away.  And we cannot make the problem go away.  When the ‘people’ are angry, they can become quite abusive.  They can make a horrible situation worse.

Though not horrific, in today’s world, we get a lot of low level practice of this sort in airports.  It is quite interesting which passengers take the lead and which do nothing.  I might be wrong, but some people seem scared to take the lead.

We also get practice in economic downturns, when we have the unpleasant task of announcing and administering budget cuts.

What can we do as leaders when the situation is hopeless?

Here is what we must NOT do

Get angry ourselves.

Our dignity is not the point here.

Tell people not to be angry, scared or dejected.

They are not fools. The situation is bad.  We can show respect and listen to their emotion courteously.

Tell people to be rational.

They might sound irrational but rationality is not the issue.  They understand – as we do.  We all feel foolish already.

Ask people to share the blame.

Rehearsing our mistakes is not going to take us anywhere.

Lament their disorganization or lack of initiative.

Well, if you believe something should be done, do it!

Here is what we can do

Be calm and pay attention.

Repeat the goals aloud.

Be positive and realistic. “Our first preference is X. If we cannot achieve X, then we want to achieve Y.”

State our shared values out loud.

People want to know they still belong to the group and the group still belongs to them.

Gather resources and note the strengths we have among us.

Reassure people that we will use our resources and strengths well.

Identify actions and ask people to take charge of what they are uniquely able to do well.

When we are informal leaders, as we might be at an airport, we might hesitate because we are not “in charge”.  We might also hesitate at the “edges” of our job when we aren’t paid to do more than what we are doing.

But isn’t it easier to do something than to sit and fret?

Do you take charge when a situation is hopeless?  Are there some steps I am missing or that I have got wrong?

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Succession Planning: Goodbye Baby Boomers, Hello Gen Y

Published September 6, 2009 by Jo Jordan

Weak succession planning has led to weakness in the management chain

I was sitting in the office of a thirties-something – a young, dynamic and intelligent man.

We noted that in many firms there is a horrible gap between the Baby Boomers and the next level. Sometimes there is a gap of 20 to 30 years.  Do you see that gap in your company? Grey hair – a long gap – slightly inexperienced manager?

If there is any succession planning, it is certainly not evident.

Generational demographics

The breaks in the chain are largely a function of demographics – the number of babies who were born.

Baby Boomers, as the name suggests, are many. They are also used to dominating politics with their votes, and dictating taste with their purchasing power.

Gen X are few. Generally, while Boomers had 3 siblings, they had none. They are outnumbered by Boomers at least 2:1. Known as the latch-key kids, they are used to cleaning up the world after the Boomers have swanned-through. They are the unseen generation.

Gen Y are more numerous and are having more children than themselves.

Can we mend the breaks in the chain?

The gap between those in charge now, and those in charge tomorrow, is horrible. It even became an issue in the American Presidential election. “Obama is too young (47!) and has too little experience”, people cried. The gulf is much bigger in business.

How will the mantle of leadership be handed on from Boomers to Gen X or Gen Y?

I wanted to know how my young friend thought change would come about.

He smiled and said: “One day, one of them will go out to play golf. And his friends will follow.”

All over in day?

How will the mantle of leadership be passed from one generation to another in your industry? And what will be the consequences?

Chaos from lack of skill and exposure? A breath of fresh air?

What are the elements of succession planning with these unusual demographics before us?

How will the generation shift affect you?  Good or bad?  And if it is sudden, will it be in your favor, or not?

UPDATE:  Perhaps we can begin by not slagging off Gen Y, be reopening management training schools and having explicit policies to pass on the mantle of leadership?

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