MY FAVORITE BOOKS

The Seven Ages of the Leader by Warren Bennis

2008-09-04T16:16:00.002+08:00

Reading HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW on THE MIND OF A LEADER is like attending one whole seminar on leadership with leading gurus as trainers. It tells about Leadership—Warts and All, When Followers Become Toxic, Putting Leaders on the Couch: A Conversation with Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, Managers and Leaders: Are They Different, What Makes a Leader?, Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons and Understanding Leadership. And they were written by respected experts such as Barbara Kellerman, Lynn Offerman, Diane Coutu, Abraham Zalesznik, Daniel Goldman, Michael MacCoby and W.C.H. Prentice. Get a copy and learn a lot about leadership. What I am missing is some kind of self-assessment instrument. Well, maybe in a real seminar.

Intriguing is The Seven Ages of the Leader by Warren Bennis. In this intuitive article, Prof. Bennis, founding chairman of the University of Southern California's Leadership Institute, reflects on his own leadership journey from a young lieutenant in the infantry in World War II, as president of a university and as the mentor to a unique nursing student and also shares the experiences of his fellow leaders.

A leader's life has seven ages and they parallel those Shakespeare describes in "As You Like It." To paraphrase, these stages can be described as infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, general, statesman, and sage. One way to learn about leadership is to look at each of these developmental stages and consider the issues and crises that are typical of each.

Infant. For the young man or woman on the brink of becoming a leader, the world that lies ahead is a mysterious, even frightening place. The fortunate neophyte leader has a mentor. The popular view of mentors is that they seek out younger people to encourage and champion, in fact the reverse is more often true. The best mentors are usually recruited and one mark of a future leader is the ability to identify, woo, and win the mentors who will change his or her life. It may feel strange to seek a mentor even before you have the job, but it's a good habit to develop early on. Recruit a team to back you up; you may feel lonely in your first top job, but you won't be totally unsupported.

The schoolboy, with a shining face. The first leadership experience is an agonizing education. It's like parenting, in that nothing else in life fully prepares you to be responsible, to a greater or lesser degree, for other people's well-being. Worse, you have to learn how to do the job in public, subject to unsettling scrutiny of your every word and act, a situation that's profoundly unnerving and for all but minority of people who truly crave the spotlight. Like it or not, as a new leader you are always onstage, and everything about you is fair game for comment, criticism, and interpretation (or misinterpretation). Your dress, your spouse, your table manners, your diction, your wit, your friends, your children's table manners—all will be inspected, dissected and judged. Your first acts will win people over or they will turn people against you, sometimes permanently. And those initial acts may have a long-lasting effect on how the group performs. It is, therefore, almost always best for the novice to make a low-key entry.

The Lover, with a woeful ballad. Many leaders find themselves "sighing like furnace" as they struggle with the tsunami of problems every organization presents. For the leader who has come up through the ranks, one of the toughest is how to relate to former peers who now report to you. It is difficult to set boundaries and fine-tune your working relationships with former cronies. As a modern leader, you don't have the option of telling the person with whom you once shared a pod and lunchtime confidences that you know her not. But relationships inevitably change when a person is promoted from within the ranks. You may no longer be able to speak openly as you once did, and your friends may feel awkward around you or resent you. They may perceive you as lording your position over them when you're just behaving as a leader should. Knowing what to pay attention to is just as important—and just as difficult. The challenge for the newcomer is knowing who to listen to and who to trust.

The Bearded Soldier. Over time, leaders grow comfortable with the role. This comfort brings confidence and conviction, but it also snap the connection between leader and followers. Two things can happen as a result: leaders may forget the true impact of their words and actions, and they may assume that what they are hearing from followers is what needs to be heard. The scrutiny never really ends. Followers continue to pay close attention to event he most offhand remark, and the more effective the leader is the more careful he or she must be, because followers may implement an idea that was a little more than a passing thought. Followers don't tell leaders everything. A second challenge for leaders in their ascendancy is to nurture those people whose stars may shine as brightly as—even brighter than—the leaders' own. In many ways, this is the real test of character for a leader. Many people cannot resist using a leadership position to thwart competition. Authentic leaders are generous.

The General, full of wise saws. One of the greatest challenges a leader faces at the height of his or her career is not simply allowing people to speak the truth but actually being able to hear it. A current example can be seen in Howell Raines, the deposed executive editor of the New York Times. Among the many ways he blocked the flow of information upward was to limit he pool of people he championed and, thus the number of people he listened to. Raines was notorious for having a small A-list of stars and a large B-list made up of everyone else. The two-tier system was unwise and ultimately a career-ender for Raines. His attitude and of his managing editor was that their way was the only way. He should have been a good enough newsman to be able to tell the difference between acceptance and angry silence on the part of those who worked for him.

The Statesman, with spectacles on nose. Shakespeare's sixth age covers the years in which a leader's power begins to wane. The leader in this stage is often hard at work preparing to pass on his or her wisdom in the interest of the organization. The leader may also be called upon to play important interim roles, bolstered by the knowledge and perception that come with age and experience and without the sometimes distracting ambition that characterizes early career. One of the gratifying roles that people in late career can play is the leadership equivalent of a pinch hitter. A leader is able to perform an even better job because he or she brings a lifetime's worth of knowledge and experience but also he or she didn't have to waste time engaging in the political machinations often needed to advance a career.

The Sage, the second childishness. "When you mentor, you know that what you have achieved will not be lost, that you are leaving a professional legacy for future generations. The reciprocal benefits of such bonds are profound, amounting to much more than warm feelings on both sides. Mentoring isn't a simple exchange of ideas. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky lived among wild baboons and found that alliances between old and young apes were an effective strategy for survival. Older males that affiliated with younger males lived longer, healthier lives than their unallied peers. Age is neither end nor oblivion. Rather, it is the joyous rediscovery of childhood at its best. It is waking up each morning ready to devour the world, full of hope and promise. It lacks nothing but the tawdrier forms of ambition that make less sense as each day passes.

Indeed, there is a time for everything and a thing for particular times. The important take away from this article is that leadership is a journey, not a destination. Everything changes, in time. As a true leader, we need to know when our time is up and how to exit graciously.

The Entrepreneur Next Door

2008-03-13T11:22:00.003+08:00

(Reprinted from http://learningandinnovationcamp.blogspot.com/2008/03/are-entrepreneurs-born-or-made.html)

My friend Gigie Peñalosa has been successfully running her own company, VCP Trading International, Inc., while my other friend Gina Camacho is a very successful Paralegal at Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP, Los Angeles, California.

They both have high rational and emotional intelligence and are highly creative. They are both driven and sociable. Gigie is happy to be an entrepreneur and Gina is equally happy to be an employee. Gigie looks back to those days when she was still employed and is exultant that she made that decision to be her own boss, work in her own time and build a business. Gina is delighted to have a steady job, income and perks such as a retirement plan.

Who can be an entrepreneur? Who are comfortable with an eight-to-five routine?

According to Author Bill Wagner, The Entrepreneur Next Door, there is a certain personality type that fits the entrepreneur. He defines personality as a manifestation of a person's core. "It is who people are when they are alone. It is the essence of the person who looks back when that person looks into a mirror. Personality is the stable, least changing aspect of a person's natural style. I discovered and witnessed that if people know and understand the behavioral requirements of a particular position, they have a better chance of manifesting and maintaining those behavior.

"People's mindsets often determine how likely they are to succeed at making changes or how likely they are to fail. Some people believe that no matter what, they can win, whereas others resign themselves to losing before they even begin. Research studies indicate that if you have the right personality to do a particular job your chances of success are five times greater than if you have the wrong personality. There is another side of these studies, and that there is always a small percentage of people with the wrong personality for a job who are successful. It appears that these individuals use a cognitive approach to determine the right behaviors for the job, take the corresponding actions, and therefore achieve the desired results."

These are some of Mr. Wagner's conclusions:

a.. The key to entrepreneurial success is to be aware of the traits you have and to develop or hire the essential success traits that you need to bridge the gap.

b.. True personality traits are difficult to mask especially when someone is drunk, sick or angry.

c.. By understanding your personality, you can leverage your strengths, improve your weaknesses and limitations, and discover the type of organizations that you're best served in creating.

d.. For every strength there is a corresponding and diametrically opposed developmental consideration or potential limitations that can cause us to sabotage ourselves.

e.. Failure to plan is planned failure.

f.. Get yourself a coach or join a CEO/entrepreneur peer group. By reading about and observing the strategies of successful entrepreneurs with different personalities, you can discern what will work for you and how you might leverage that knowledge and awareness.

g.. There are three broad categories of personalities: Generalist (strategic thinkers, big picture, preferring to be measured by overall results, more risk-oriented), Specialist (tactical thinkers, detail-oriented, experts, more risk-averse) and Transition (similar amount of dominance and compliance, thereby making it difficult to really determine the personality).

h.. Generalists are motivated by ego, status, sense of urgency and independence. They have a tendency to learn at a faster pace.

i.. Specialists are motivated by stability, security and structure. They have a tendency to learn at a slower pace.

j.. Female entrepreneurs seem to have more drive and sociability than their male counterparts.

k.. Male entrepreneurs seem to be aggressive and analytical than their female counterparts.

l.. Entrepreneurs are rarely satisfied with either their performance or the performance of their people.

m.. One of the challenges business owners have is that they have very little appreciation as to why others can't do what entrepreneurs so easily accomplish. But if employees could accomplish the same things as entrepreneurs, they wouldn't be their employees; they would become their competition.

n.. Most entrepreneurial types not only have an innate urge to 'get back to work,' many have the inner drive to accumulate wealth and continue to increase their financial security.

Mr. Wagner included a simple entrepreneurial profile survey in his book. You might want to try it.

innovationcamp@yahoo.com; http://www.learningandinnovation.com/

5 Books on Leadership

2007-11-10T12:37:00.000+08:00

BUSH-ISMS: President George Herbert Walker Bush, in his own words
Compiled by the editors of The New Republic
(Workman Publishing, 1992)

THE NATURE OF LEADERSHIP: Reptiles, mammals, and the challenge of becoming a great leader
By B. Joseph White with Yaron Prymes
(Amacom, 2007)

Harvard Business Review on THE TESTS OF A LEADER
Harvard Business School Press, 2007)

LEAD LIKE JESUS: Lessons from the Greatest Leadership Role Model of All Time
By Ken Blanchard and Phil Hodges
(W Publishing Group, 2005)

NANOCOSM: Nanotechnology and the big changes coming from the inconceivably small.
By William Illsey Atkinson
(Amacom, 2005)

Here are some quotes from former President Bush and you will know from whom the current President Bush got his communication flair.

“We’re enjoying sluggish times, and not enjoying them very much.”

“Thank you all very much. And let me just say this, on a personal basis. I’ve screwed up a couple of times here and I’m very grateful for your assistance in straightening it out. God, I’d hate to have had some of those answers stand.” (8/8/90)

“I think that in politics there are certain moral values. I’m one who—we believe strong in separation of church and state, but when you get into some questions, there are some moral overtones. Murder, that kind of thing, and I feel a little, I will say, uncomfortable with the elevation of the religion thing.” (Bush explains his position on church-state issues this way, “We don’t believe in denominationally moving in.” 9/16/84)

“I saw a story yesterday that I went a little ballistic—which is only part true—semi-ballistic.” (12/16/88)

“I’m for Mr. Reagan—blindly.” (11/1/84)

“I know what I’ve told you I’m going to say, I’m going to say. And what else I say, well, I’ll take some time to figure that out—figure that out.” (at a joint press conference with Uruguay President Louis Alberto Lacalde, on the message he was planning to deliver to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. Later, asked if there were room for a face-saving measure, Bush was adamant: “I don’t care about face! He doesn’t need any face!” 12/4/90)

“Fluency in English is something that I’m often not accused of.” (at a White House dinner. Despite his lack of fluency, however, the president insists on controlling the content of his speeches. “inarticulate as though I may be.” 6/6/89)

“You cannot be president of the United States if you don’t have faith. Remember Lincoln, going to his knees in times of trial and the Civil War and all that stuff. You can’t be. And we are blessed. So don’t feel sorry for—don’t cry for me, Argentina.” (1/15/92)

“The democrats want to ram it down my ear in a political victory.” (10/31/91)

”It has been said by some cynic, maybe it was a former president, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’ We took them literally—that advice—as you know. But I didn’t need that, because I have Barbara Bush.” (3/30/89)

“All I was doing was appealing for an endorsement, not suggesting that you endorse it.” (2/3/92)

“I was shot down, and I was floating around in a little yellow raft, setting a record for paddling. I though of my family, my mom and dad, and the strength I got from them. I thought of my faith, the separation of church and state.” (12/5/87)

Hahahahahahahahaha Who says that Americans, and their Yale alumnus President, speak good English?

When I met Bob Pike and his lovely wife in Taipei, Taiwan, last September, he was all praises for their new leadership program Lead Like Jesus with Ken Blanchard. And as he promised, he sent me a copy of the book.

Author Blanchard writes:
The term leader is mentioned only six times in the King James Version of the Bible, while the term servant is mentioned more than nine hundred times. That fact highlights the third distinction between a self-serving leader and a servant leader: who leads and who follows? Self-serving leaders think they should lead and others should follow. Servant leaders, on the other hand, seek to respect the wishes of those who have entrusted them with a season of influence and responsibility.

Throughout His life and leadership, Jesus affirmed that God is not looking for leaders but for servants who will let Him be the Leader and who will focus first on the Kingdom of God. When God came to Abraham, God had the plan and Abraham was instructed to carry it out according to God’s promise. When God came to Mary, she surrendered to God’s will and undertook the role of servant leader with her infant son. When God came to Paul, God had a plan that this passionate man spent the rest of his life fulfilling through his leadership and witness to the Gentiles. When God was the leader and these faithful people were the servants, His plan was effectively accomplished.

On the other hand, whenever we become the leader and try to make God the servant, things don’t work out. Why? Because our EGO gets in the way, and we Edge God Out! If you want your life to be significant, then you have to recognize that it’s all about God, not about you. As the old Yiddish saying goes, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”

We are negotiating to bring the duo of Pike and Blanchard here to do their Lead Like Jesus Program. Abangan!

The executive summary of the article “What to Ask the Person in the Mirror” of this HBR book on leadership reads:

Every leader gets off track from time to time. But as leaders rise through the ranks, they have fewer and fewer opportunities for honest and direct feedback. Their bosses are no longer monitoring their actions, and by the time management missteps have a negative impact on business results, it’s usually too late to make course corrections that will set things right. Therefore, it is wise to go through a self-assessment, to periodically step back from the bustle of running a business and ask some key questions of yourself.

Author Robert S. Kaplan, who during his 22-year career at Goldman Sachs chaired the firm’s senior leadership training efforts and co-chaired its partnership committee, identifies seven areas for self-reflection: vision and priorities, managing time, feedback, succession planning, evaluation and alignment, leading under pressure, and staying true to yourself. The author sets out a series of questions in each of the areas, illustrating the impact of self-assessment through vivid accounts of real executives.

Although the questions sound simple, people are often shocked—even horrified—by their own answers. Executives are aware that they should be focusing on their most important priorities, for instance, but without stepping back to reflect, few actually know where they are allocating their time. Kaplan advocates writing down what you do every working hour for a week and checking how well your actions match up with your intentions. As for feedback, managers should ask themselves whether they’re getting truthful evaluations from their subordinates (in all likelihood, they aren’t). It takes time and discipline to persuade your employees to tell you about your failings.

This HBR collection has other instructional articles like Becoming the Boss, Courage as a Skill, The CEO’s Second Act, Moments of Truth: Global Executives Talk about the Challenges that Shaped Them as Leaders, How Leaders Create and Use Networks, When a New Manager Takes Charges and Leading Change. Go get a copy.

Nanotechnology has always intrigued and amazed me no end. Rick Smally write in his Foreword:

Real nanotechnology isn’t about physical immortality, or killer nanobots, or waking up dear dead Auntie Flo from her long nap in the freezer. Real nanotechnology is more amazing than any pipe dream. It is closing in on structural materials stronger than anything we’ve know; on computers the size of molecules; on complete diagnostic laboratories smaller than your thumbnail; on ways to painlessly cook cancer cells to death; on buildings that stay up despite storms, earthquakes and attacks. Set pulp fiction aside. The genuine nanocosm has sci-fi beat six ways to Sunday.

Author Atkinson writes:

Nanoscience has recently made such staggering gains that it is undeniably on the bring of a true nanotechnology. We have now mapped enough of the nanocosm to let us make educated guesses about the type of world it will soon support. These estimates range from the merely surprising to the wig-flipping outrageous. Some very big changes in business and leisure are about to come to us by way of the very small.

The world is shrinking and lots of things are becoming portable and affordable—thanks to nanotechnology. Remember those monstrous computers that required whole buildings to house them and two-ton battery pack for cell phones of years ago? Now, computers and cell phones are getting smaller and smaller and smaller—thanks to nanotech. Tomorrow, we might not even need to carry them, we could implant them somewhere in our body. Think of a camera implanted at the tip of your index finger—now you can take pictures of anything, anywhere. Scary, but exciting!

What are the implications of nanotechnology for future leaders? Smaller leaders? Hahahahahahahaha

3 Books + RD on Branding

2007-05-23T20:37:00.000+08:00

READER’S DIGEST, May 2007
(Reader’s Digest Asia)

SUPERBRANDS, Volume III
(Superbrands Publications Philippines)

SUCCESS SECRETS OF THE COUNTRY’S 50 TOP ENTREPRENEURS
(Summit Books)

11 STEPS TO BRAND HEAVEN
By Len Weinreich
(Kogan Page)

CNBC’s Erwin Wladawsky-Berger writes in his online column, “If your company has a strong internal culture and set of values, that will be manifest in its external image or brand - that is, the "symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a company, product or service." Every enterprise, institution – or individual, for that matter – has a brand – that is, is seen by the world in a definable way. If that image is not in harmony with the culture and values that person or organization espouses – in other words, if the brand is not truly values-driven – then the gap can be damaging, even fatal.”

“This is particularly the case in today's increasingly transparent world, where people who think a company's behavior is not consistent with the brand image it projects can take it to task over the Internet, using social networking tools like blogs. Every so often, one such disgruntled blog starts circulating over the Internet, gathering more and more readers and significantly damaging the image of the company being criticized. Walking the talk - that is, living by the values you espouse - is more important than ever for companies, especially global companies with a strong brand.”

That said I reread the book, Superbrands, and checked out the list of the country’s strongest brands as judged by a “well-educated and lifestyle-conscious population.” To the question “what makes a superbrand?” some of the answers of the members of the Superbrand Council were:
· Stasch Radswanki (president of Academy Consultants Manila): When brands reach Superbrands status they have become trusted friends of the consumer. The psyche is the home of the Superbrand and to be invite(d) into this domain is the greatest compliment that can be awarded to a brand.
· Mike O’Connor (chairman of MS2 Inc) A superbrand is always top-of-the-mind. It is the brand I won’t exchange for another (even) if it is not available.
· Jose Jesus Roces (professor at Asian Institute of Management): Brands drive businesses in the sense that the battle for shares of the mind is as intense as the battle for shares of the market. The strongest branding is emotional branding, or going beyond rationality as the criteria for choosing one brand over another.
· George Balagtas (chairman of Scope): Its brand name must be ubiquitous and virtually synonymous with the product or service it offers. It should have been in the market for at least 7 years, registered a minimum 5-year sales growth and have major market share of at least 30 percent.
· Karl Mclean (general manager of Superbrands Publication Phils): Think bread think Gardenia, think peanuts, thing Growers, think beer, think San Miguel, think petrol, think Petron, for example. The Superbrand status stands for quality and success.

Some of the identified homegrown superbrands in 2004 are: The Manila Times, Max’s Restaurant, French Baker, Goldilocks, Asia Brewery, Boysen, Casino Filipino, Chinatrust, Gardenia, Globe Telecom, Smart, Greenwich, LBC Bank, Lemon Square, Mang Tomas, Manila Bulletin, Marca Piña, Petron, PLDT, Red Bull, Rusty Lopez, Selecta, Yehey.com. These brands could remain in the exclusive firmament of Superbrands or they could fall off cloud 9 and stumble into oblivion. They need to heed the counsel of aforementioned brand experts.

Do you notice that branding is mostly a result of leadership and sound people management practices? Find out more by attending the 44th PMAP Annual Conference this September 26-28, 2007 in Cebu. Indeed, people deliver if you know how to tap into their inner strengths!

The May 2007 issue of the Reader’s Digest has a supplement containing the result of RD Asia’s Trusted Brand Survey. The most trusted brands 100% voted for by consumers are: Ajinomoto, Citibank, Crown Asia, GE Appliances, Metrobank, Boysen, Coca-cola, Emperador, Honda and Nokia. While those 100% voted for by consumers are: Panda, Petron, PhilamLife, Pilot, PNB, San Miguel Beer, Sony, St. Luke’s and Purfoods Tender Juicy Hotdogs.

RD explains, “The core attribute of a Trusted Bran is longevity. A Trusted Brand bank must be financially sound, reliable, and thus have stood the test of time. It should also have an eye on the future, as banking is a very competitive industry.”

Some companies become super brands on the personality and competences of its founders/owners/management. The “bookazine,” Success Secrets, paid tribute to 50 superb individuals whose names have become popular brands, regardless of what business they go into.

Some started off poor, but they used life’s adversities to achieve big dreams. They are Alvin Carranza (Café Lupe), Filemon Barbasa (Filbar’s), Les Reyes (Reyes Haircutters), Alexander Crisostomo (Biocare Inc) and Victor Tan (Bobson). Some are bold, successful and rich and they’re not even 40: Jonathan Jay Aldeguer (Islands Souvenirs), Steve Benitez (Bo’s Café), The Jose brothers—Quito, Martin and Daniel (Brothers Burger) Cheese Ledesma (The Big Chill Inc) and many others.

Still others preside over multimillion-peso ventures and many aspiring entrepreneurs idolize them for their extraordinary feats in business. They are: Tony Tan Caktiong, George Yang, Socorro Ramos, Rolando Hortaleza and Pacita Juan.

The rest can identify an opportunity when they see one, and have a knack for turning a business into an overnight success. They are: Tess Ngan Tian (Lot’s Pizza), Roberto Gandionco (Julie’s Bakeshop), Michael Trillana (Go Nuts Donuts), Ricardo Cuna (Fiorgelato Ice Cream) and Ben Colayco (Level Up!). And the taipans: John Gokongwei Jr., Henry Sy, Sr., Lucio Tan, Andrew Tan and Ben Chan.

I notice, though, that generations of family entrepreneurs, albeit brands—the Lopezes, the Ayalas, the Concepcions and many others—were not profiled.

What made them successful brands? Jaclyn Lutangco-Chua writes:
· They consider their businesses as their “baby,” even likens it to “raising a teen-age daughter.”
· Entrepreneurship entails hard work; during the start up, they do everything themselves. They acted as cashier and bookkeeper, handled the telephones, did the delivering, mopped and swept the floor, and 100 other myriad roles and functions until they were capable to hire the right people.
· Entrepreneurs are hungry for information affecting their business. They constantly improve themselves and are always on the lookout for new ideas and techniques.
· Successful entrepreneurs persevere, overcome fears, and take risks.
· They are sensitive to their markets, spot opportunities where others see none and waste no time in going after them.
· The taipans, in particular, are not averse to crisis, they make success happen and take control of their future.

Beauty is more than skin deep. Branding is very much rooted in the leadership, quality of people, internal processes and many other goings-on inside an organization over a long period of time. However, some brands become successful through proper positioning and conscious image building. The saga of Surf and Lumen lingers in the mind.

Author Weinreich has 50 propositions to those developing great brands through advertising campaigns. The first 20 are:
1. Never trust anyone who can articulate logically after professing to have been profoundly moved.
2. Buying a campaign requires faith rather than rationality.
3. Faith in a brand equal faith in its myth.
4. Myths defy logic
5. Belief plus passion equals faith.
6. Knock on wood.
7. Brands are strong medicine and carry powerful ju-ju (all the emotions connected with it).
8. Fame isn’t everything.
9. Friendly is not necessarily good for business.
10. The first lesson an author has to learn is that he cannot please everybody.
11. Advertising with ideas is better remembered than advertising without ideas.
12. The communication where you work out the meaning is the communication you remember.
13. The communication you remember is the one that gets acted upon.
14. If you’re constructing the perfect mousetrap, it is vital that you leave room for the mouse.
15. Don’t ever be deluded into believing in your own infalliability. You might have been right every single time up until now; but sooner or later you’re going to be wrong.
16. Stay as far as possible from Caveman’s Conventional.
17. Nobody counts the amount of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.
18. Uninspired mediocrity is invisible.
19. Haemorrhoids are a pain in the neck.
20. To ensure consistency, young brand managers must be kept in line.

And the last two: Pomposity in advertising breeds blandness. Research can trap you into the past.

Very sound advice indeed. These proposition applies in branding a business unit—your HR organization (how are you really perceived by your employees) and a person—you!

3 Books on Management Tools

2007-04-17T08:22:00.000+08:00

Delivering excellent business results to grow a flourishing company or to turnaround a failing business may seem daunting even to seasoned executives. But they need not reinvent the wheel because there are now ready tools that business leaders could use to further improve a going concern or resuscitate deteriorating business conditions without sweating the big and small stuff.

Harry Onsman enumerated and illustrated many of them in his book. For managing the organization, some powertools are: determining strategic intent (vision, mission and values statement); strategic positioning (Porter’s Five Forces Analysis and Generic Strategies); Measuring Performance (KPIs and the Balanced Scorecard); conceiving the future (Scenario Planning); changing culture (Competing Value Framework); growing a diversified business (Product Portfolio Analysis); marketing the business (the marketing Ps; Understanding customers; Improving processes (Process mapping and management) and solving problems using the Pareto analysis.

For managing people, Onsman recommends these powertools: managing performance (goal setting); enabling others (empowerment); developing self-awareness (360-degree feedback); selecting people (behavioral interviewing); controlling tasks and projects (project management techniques); leading people (situation leadership); involving employees through problem solving teams; developing people through coaching; developing teams; and managing time.

Let’s take understanding customers using SERVQUAL customer surveys, the preeminent instrument for measuring the delivery of quality service to customers. It was developed by Valerie Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman and Leonard Berry and first appeared in their groundbreaking book, Delivering Service Quality: Balancing customer perceptions and expectations, a product of their five-year research on measuring customer satisfaction. It has become the instrument of choice for researchers, consultants and practitioners trying to understand the perceptions and expectations of customers based on five perceptual dimensions of service: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. Zeithaml, et al, identified different of gaps as follows:
• the gap between the customers’ expectations and management’s perception of customer expectations
• the gap between management’s perception of customer expectations and what was supposed to be delivered to its customers.
• the gap between what was supposed to be delivered and what was actually delivered
• the gap between what was actually delivered and what customers were told would be delivered
• the gap between what customers expected and what they perceived they actually received

Onsman included the three-part SERVQUAL instrument in his book plus all the instruments for the management powertools discussed in his 284-paged book.

One other powerful instrument for upgrading quality, productivity and results is Six Sigma. It was invented by Motorola, but was made famous by Jack Welch of GE. “While GE used Six Sigma to strengthen an already thriving business, for Motorola it was an answer to the question: How do we stay in business.

“What Six Sigma offered Motorola—though it involves much more today—was a simple, consistent way to track and compare performance to customer requirements (the Sigma measure) and an ambitious target of practically-perfect quality (the Six Sigma goal). The results were: five-fold growth in sales, with profits climbing nearly 20 percent per year, cumulative savings based on Six Sigma efforts pegged at $14 billion and Motorola stock price gains compounded to an annual rate of 21.3 percent.

“For GE, the financial ‘big picture’ is just a reflection of the many individual success; for example:

• A Six Sigma team at GE’s Lighting unit repaired problems in its billing to one of its top customers—Wal-Mart—cutting invoice defects and disputes by 98 percent, speeding payment, and creating better productivity for both companies.
• A group led by staff attorney—A Six Sigma team leader—at one of GE Capital’s service businesses streamlined the contract review process, leading to faster completion of deals and annual savings of &1 million.
• GE Power Systems group addressed a major irritant with its utility company customers, simply by developing better understanding of their requirements and improving the documentation provided along with new power equipment.
• The Medical Systems business (GEMS) used Six Sigma design techniques to create a breakthrough in medical scanning technology. Patients can now get a full-body scan in half a minute, versus three minutes or more with previous technology. Hospitals can increase their usage of the equipment and achieve a lower cost per scan, as well.
• GE Capital Mortgage analyzed the processes at one of its top performing branches and, expanding these ‘best practices’ across its other 42 branches, improved the rate of a caller reaching a ‘live’ GE person from 76 to 99 percent. Beyond the much greater convenience and responsiveness to customers, the improved process is translating into millions of dollars in new business.

The final word is reserved for the guru of all gurus, Mr. Peter Drucker. What struck me in his book is the chapter on “What Business Can Learn from Nonprofits.”

“The Girl Scouts, the Red Cross, the pastoral churches—our nonprofit organizations—are becoming America’s management leaders. In two areas, strategy and effectiveness of the board, they are practicing what most American businesses only preach. And in the most crucial area—the motivation and productivity of knowledge workers—they are truly pioneers, working out the policies and practices that business will have to learn tomorrow.

“Few people are aware that the nonprofit sector is by far America’s largest employer. Every other adult, a total of 80 million plus people, works as a volunteer, giving, on average, nearly five hours each week to one or several nonprofit organizations. This is equal to 10 million full-time jobs. If volunteers were paid, their wages, even at minimum rate, would amount to some &150 billion or 5 percent of GNP. More and more volunteers are becoming ‘unpaid staff’ taking over the professional and managerial tasks in their organizations. ‘Volunteers must get far greater satisfaction from their accomplishments and make a greater contribution precisely because they do not get a paycheck.’

“Not all nonprofits have been doing well, of course. A good many community hospitals are in dire straits. Churches are steadily losing members. Yet in its productivity, in the scope of its work, and in its contribution to American society, the nonprofit sector has grown tremendously in the last two decades.

“Underlying their program and many other effective nonprofit endeavors is a commitment to management. They realize that good intentions are no substitute for organization and leadership, for accountability, performance and results. Those require management and that, in turn, begins with the organization’s mission.

“The best nonprofits devote a great deal of thought to defining their organization’s mission. They avoid sweeping statements full of good intentions and focus, instead, on objectives that have clear-cut implications for the work their members perform. The Salvation Army’s goal is to turn society’s rejects—alcoholics, criminals, derelicts—into citizens. The Girl Scouts help youngsters become confident, capable young women who respect themselves and other people. The Nature Conservancy preserves the diversity of nature’s fauna and flora. Non-profits also start with the environment, the community, the ‘customers’ to be; they do not, as American businesses tend to do, start with the inside, that is, with the organization or with financial returns. Flourishing nonprofits have learned to define clearly what changes outside the organization constitute ‘results’ and to focus on them. They start with the mission rather than with their own rewards and with what they have to make happen outside themselves, in the marketplace, to deserve a reward.

“As a rule, nonprofits are more-money conscious than business enterprises are. They talk and worry about money much of the time because it is so hard to raise and because they always have so much less of it than they need. But nonprofits do not base their strategy on money, nor do they make it the center of their plans, as so many corporate executives do. The nonprofits start with the performance of their mission. It focuses the organization on action. It defines the specific strategies needed to attain the crucial goals. It creates a disciplined organization. It alone can prevent the most common degenerative disease of organizations, especially the large ones: splintering their always limited resources on things that are ‘interesting’ or look ‘profitable’ rather than concentrating them on a very small number of productive efforts. The best nonprofits devote a great deal of thought to defining their organization’s mission.

“Many nonprofits now have what is still the exception in business—a functioning board. They also have something even rarer—a CEO who is clearly accountable to the board and whose performance is reviewed annually by a board committee. And they have what is rarer still—a board whose performance is reviewed annually against preset performance objectives. The key to making the board effective is not to talk about its function but to organize its work. Precisely because the nonprofit board is so committed and active, its relationship with the CEO tends to be highly contentious and full of potential for friction. This has forced an increasing number of nonprofits to realize that neither board nor CEO is ‘the boss.’ They are colleagues, working for the same goal but each having a different task. And they have learned that it is the CEO’s responsibility to define the tasks of each, the board’s and his or her own. To restore management’s ability to manage we will have to make boards effective again—and that should be considered a responsibility of the CEO.”

“Nonprofits are forging new bonds of community, a new commitment to active citizenship, to social responsibility, to values. This development also carries a clear lesson for business. Nonprofits are showing us how to manage knowledge workers for productivity. It requires a clear mission, careful placement and continuous learning and teaching, management by objectives and self-control, high demands but corresponding responsibility, and accountability for performance and results.”

The most successful and oldest (2007 years old this year) nonprofit is the Catholic Church and it is still blooming. It had its ups and downs, a fair share of scandals and an intriguing past. Yet it is here, prosperous and triumphant, so let’s learn from it.

"Polishing" My Favorite Books

2007-04-01T09:04:00.000+08:00

While the website is up-to-date, i.e. all reviews have been posted here, we still have to "polish" the site. Specifically, we're adding more links and more labels so that you can more easily navigate the site, as well as easily find links to how you can obtain your very own copies of books we've reviewed. Until that time, peace to everyone!

2 Books on Labor Relations

2007-03-18T15:09:00.000+08:00

PERFECT SOLUTIONS For DIFFICULT EMPLOYEE SITUATIONS

By Sid Kemp

(McGRaw-Hill, 2005)

HR the VALUE PROPOSITION

By Dave Ulrich and Wayne Brockbank

(Harvard Business School Press, 2005)

When we think of labor relations, we think of unions, NLRC, labor case, litigation, arbitration, mediation, strikes, lock-out and the like. In the center of all labor cases is the manager or supervisor. In her foreword, Kristin Robertson reminds corporate leaders that, indeed, the leader casts a long shadow—and that shadow influences the effectiveness of the group. “The leader creates the tone or environment of a group. Your attitude and approach to people are contagious—they cascade throughout your team. Your mood and emotions set the pace for the whole group. Stories confirm the maxim that employees join companies but leave managers. Sharpening your managerial and interpersonal skills benefits you, your team and your company. The examples and wisdom in Perfect Solutions will help you become a better manager, make better contributions to the organizations, and advance your career.”

Author Sid Kemp cites cases and proposes solutions in situations such as when an employee must be laid off, an office romance gets out of hand, your star performer is hurting team morale, an employee calls in sick but is not really sick, Friday flu, a rule is ignored or forgotten until it becomes a problem, and many other messy situations.

Here are a few examples:

Sometimes, we have to let people go. It is particularly difficult if we chose who was to be laid off. Start with the company needs to lay off. Then add a reason that makes it clear it is not personal. Be prepared to explain the details of departure date and final pay. If several people are being laid off, talk with each separately, but have one goodbye party for all. It is equally important to talk to the team members who remain. Focus on what the team can do and promise to keep everyone informed regularly. Then do keep people informed, even if it’s just to call everyone together and say there is no news.
Sometimes, something about a person’s physical appearance or smell is offensive to other team members. This situation is fraught with complications. If possible work with the other team members rather than the person they say has the problem. Talk with them about inoffensive actions they can take or changes to the way work can be done that might eliminate their discomfort. When you do approach the team member concerned, be circumspect. Ask if the team member is aware of the issue and how it affects others. Describe the experience other team members are having. Be sure to thank the team member for being willing to talk about it and to take whatever steps there might be toward a solution.
When a new employee arrives, the manager is responsible for something called orientation. Because the employee is disoriented on arrival. A new employee if kind of like Michael Jordan switching from basketball to baseball. Even if the employee is good at what she does, she just doesn’t know the rules at this ball field. And it is your job to bring her into the game.
When disaster strikes or war is declared or peace is declared, our roles as people in society and as citizens are more important than our jobs with the company. And having the team members together to support one another is healthy for everyone and for the team. At the same time, we need to be cautious about obsessions and distractions. Help people refocus and be aware of anyone with special needs.

Prevention is always the best solution to problems. While it is good to know what to do to stave off certain problematic situations, there is nothing like planning for the bigger picture and defining the context within which managers and supervisors could lead. Authors Ulrich and Brockbank suggest building an HR strategy that is aligned with business realities and strategy. They cited the case of Motorola:

“Motorola has been riding a roller coaster for two decades. Through the 1980s, the company’s market share was up. Profitability was excellent. In the early 1990s, the world of consumer electronics changed dramatically, as people began spending more and more time out of the office—working from home, on planes, in hotel rooms. They demanded faster, smaller, more integrated and energy-efficient electronics. At the same time, competition for their business grew more and more intense. Major competitors sprang up in Europe and Asia, radically increasing the churn rate in product styling, feature integration, and speed of innovation. The crowded competitive space forced prices down and mandated operating efficiencies, just as the investment community increased its demands for consistent earnings growth.

“It was under these conditions that the Motorola HR leadership team set out to create a more powerful strategy. Their goals:

Link HR practices to customer and shareholder requirements
Help drive business unit strategy while promoting coordination strong enough to have a multiplier effect on Motorola’s value.
Position Motorola as a more effective competitor.
Make Motorola’s culture capabilities with its desired marketplace brand identity.
Engage the enthusiasm and support of management and employees.

“Motorola provides a vivid case. Its experience illustrates the logic and process for developing a powerful HR strategy based on the concepts and best practices described. The company built a line of sight from investors and customers to its management and employees through more powerful HR practices. Working closely with senior line management, the HR leadership team identified the culture that the increasingly competitive environment required. Through this means, the HR leadership provided a powerful agenda for integrating staffing, performance management, training and development, structure, and communications with common business focus and direction.”

This book is not only for HR professionals but also for corporate leaders. It tackles HR practices that add value, process of building an HR strategy, the HR organization, roles for HR professionals, HR competencies that make a difference, developing HR professionals and implications for the transformation of HR. This book is a must for people who work with people and for people.

Website Up-To-Date

2007-02-21T14:02:00.000+08:00

We're glad to announce that this website is now up-to-date. We have reviews of over 70 books, with the latest reviews (January and February 2007) also included. We hope you enjoy the reviews, and the books as well. We'll post a list of all 70+ reviewed books soon.

The latest book reviews are in the "Recent Posts" section on the right. Earlier book reviews can be found in the "Archives" section, also on the right.

Note that some reviews have a "Bookshelf" section at the end. These are other, related books we recommend for future or further reading, and at the time posting, have no reviews yet from this website.

Also, we will soon set-up an announcement mailing list so that you know when the site is updated. Meanwhile, please keep checking back for new book reviews!

Ran out of books and book reviews to read? Head on over to the P&PC Library & Bookstore to browse for new books, or to go to Amazon.com for more books and more other stuff! Or, read articles on Learning & Innovation.

3 Books on the Heart and Soul of Management

2007-02-18T13:57:00.000+08:00

THE LIVING ORGANIZATION: SPIRITUALITY IN THE WORKPLACE
By William A. Guillory, Ph.D
(Innovations International, Inc)

THE ETIQUETTE EDGE
By Beverly Langford
(Amacom)

HEART AT WORK
By Jack Canfield and Jacqueline Miller
(McGraw-Hill)

To get started on developing your heart and soul as you manage, test your Courtesy Quotient (CQ) by Beverly Langford in her book, The Etiquette Edge.

The answer key is somewhere in this newsletter. Some situations may depend more on good judgment than on a widely accepted rule. Choose the one answer with which you would feel most comfortable. You may wish to retake the quiz after reading the book to see if you have changed your mind about any of your answers.

1. You are in the office on the telephone, and another call comes in. You should: (a) ask the person if you can put him on her on hold while you answer the call; (b) let voice mail take it.

2. You call a colleague and put your phone on speakerphone. Another coworker is in the room. You should: (a) mention neither the speaker phone nor the other person in the room; (b) tell the person on the phone that you wish to use the speakerphone, mention the other person in the room, and ask the person on the phone if this is okay. (c) Tell the person on the phone that you are using the speakerphone but don’t mention the other person in the room.

3. You have exchanged a couple of angry emails with a coworker who, in your opinion, is being unreasonable. It’s getting out of hand. You should: (a) stop the communication and let things cool off; (b) send one more blistering email, summarizing the situation and how upset you are with that person’s behavior, and cc the recipient’s boss; (c) change the medium. Call the person on the telephone or go sit down face-to-face.

4. You’re presenting to a potential client. Suddenly his/her body language turns very negative. You should: (a) try to engage the person in some interaction; (b) stop in the middle of the presentation and ask that person what is wrong; (c) ask questions to determine what you said that was upsetting and attempt to rectify the situation; (d) ignore the reaction and finish your presentation as planned.

5. You’re delivering an important presentation that you don’t want interrupted with questions. You should: (a) refuse to answer the first question that someone asks, the rest of the audience will get the message. (b) tell the audience beforehand that you prefer to answer all questions at the end of the presentation; (c) answer questions as they are asked, even though you prefer not to.

6. When communicating across language barriers, putting things in writing (a) should be avoided, it can insult the international visitor’s intelligence; (b) can be helpful, it is usually easier to read English than to hear it; (c) can be confusing, it is usually easier to head English than to read it.

7. Learning to speak a few words of the language of clients, customers, or coworkers whose first language is different from yours is (a) generally a good idea, as the effort communicates respect for the other culture; (b) generally not a good idea because they may feel patronized; (c) generally not a good idea because they might be offended if you make a mistake in vocabulary or pronunciation.

8. If you meet someone whose body language is much more outgoing and expressive than yours, you should: (a) attempt to match it; (b) not attempt to match it.

9. If you meet someone whose body language is much more restrained than yours, you should: (a) attempt to match it; (b) not attempt to match it.

10. True or false: A smile is an almost universal way of communicating goodwill and cheerfulness.

11. When answering a business phone, always answer: (a) with a simple hello, it sounds more approachable and less pretentious; (b) with your name; (c) with your name, department, title, and a greeting.

12. When others are close by, for example in an elevator, it is okay to use your cell phone: (a) for extremely private conversation, after all it’s your business; (b) for lengthy conversations, so you don’t get tied up at the office; (c) for short conversations of a non-sensitive or non-confidential nature.

13. When you reach a doorway at the same time as a person of the opposite sex, the following rules apply: (a) whoever arrives first should open it and hold it for those who are following; (b) men should open doors for women; (c) women should open doors for men to prove they are no longer oppressed; (d) always open and hold the door for someone of either sex if that person has his or her hands full.

14. When exiting an elevator and a more senior person is toward the back, always (a) step aside to let that person exit first; (b) exit first if you are closes to the door.

15. When writing a business letter, the inside address should (a) always contain a courtesy title (Mr., Mrs., Dr.); (b) never use a courtesy title. That’s passé.

16. When having a business lunch, who pays? (a) a business lunch is always “dutch treat;” (b) you always pay for a client’s lunch; (c) you never pay for a client’s lunch, it’s insulting; (c) whoever invited the other person to lunch pays.

17. On a dress-down day, which item(s) of clothing is/are generally considered inappropriate? (a) khaki slacks; (b) solid t-shirts; (c) sweatpants; (d) baseball caps; (e) polo-type shirts; (f) loafers without socks; (h) thong sandals; ((h) jeans.

18. You are in a meeting with a client and several of your colleagues, and you realize your boss’s fly is unzipped. You should: (a) make a joke about it, and put everyone at ease; (b) tell him immediately, even if you don’t know him well; (c) ask someone who knows him better to mention it.

19. You have just head a coworker in the cubicle next to yours speak rudely to a client on the telephone. You should: (a) wait until the call is finished, then tell the person that the behavior is unacceptable; (b) tell your boss; (c) respect your coworker’s privacy and refrain from commenting.

20. If you are managing a meeting when an adversarial relationship is present, try to make sure that: (a) people sit with those with whom they agree; (b) the seating is mixed to encourage open dialogue and discourage an adversarial environment.

In his essay, Rub Somebody the Right Way, in the book Heart at Work, Bob Nelson writes about people that “rub us the wrong way.” “People whose personalities, mannerism or attitudes about life don’t agree with our own and who as a result we choose not to associate with. I think, it’s time we stated calling attention to others who ‘rub us the right way.’ A good place to start is by appreciating others. Practice praisings ASAP.”

As soon: Timing is very important when praising. To be the most effective, the thank you should come as soon as possible after the achievement or desired activity has occurred.

As sincere: Words alone can fall flat; you need to praise because you are truly appreciative and excited about the other person’s success.

As specific: Avoid generalities in favor of details of the achievement because specifics give credibility to your praising.

As personal: Praise the person face-to-face to show that the gesture is important enough for you to put aside everything else you have to do and just focus on the other person.

As positive: Concentrate on the praise and save the corrective feedback for the next similar assignment. The “but” becomes a verbal erasure of all that came before it.

As proactive: Praise toward desired goals.

Canfield and Miller collected about 85 essays managing for self-esteem, caring and acknowledging by known writers such as Ken Blanchard and Art Buchwald that will surely warm your heart not only this February, but always. This might as well be your comfort book.

On the other hand, Dr. Guillory answered a lot of frequently asked questions about spirituality and the workplace.

What is spirituality? Spirituality is our inner consciousness. It is the source of inspiration, creativity, and wisdom. Each of us has a spiritual center or inner core self, which is our connection to this source of inner knowing.

What does the word spiritual mean? That which is spiritual comes from within—beyond our programmed beliefs and values; beyond the survival instincts of the mind. It benefits self and others and creates alignment of others. It comes from surety, creates inner meaning and motivation about work, creates inner peach in one’s self, is a natural desire to help others grow, learn and succeed and respects and values individual and group dignity.

Is there a difference between spirituality and religion? Yes. Spirituality is “essence” and religion is “form.”

What is the relationship between spirituality and work life? Work life has become so demanding, fast-paced, stressful, ambiguous, and chaotic that we are forced to seek values-based answers and ways of achieving personal stability from within. The only source that will sustain our adaptation and stability in the long is our inner wisdom.

In order to compensate for the loss of job security and the continuing need for high-performing employees, today’s productive and profitable workplaces require organizational cultures that integrate humanistic core values with core business policies, decisions, functions, and behaviors; cultures that support the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of its employees.

What is the role of leadership in promoting spirituality? Define how spirituality plays out in your organization, including an appropriate definition of spirituality in your workplace. Define how spirituality is integrated into your strategic plan. Do a spirituality survey. Make certain your performance surveys include an evaluation of how effectively your organizational core values are practiced. Create an environment of trust—where employees feel safe to question, learn and contribute. Require personal development seminars, including values clarification and expected humanistic behaviors.

Aside from direct answers to questions, Dr. Guillory also included in his book a Spiritual Survey and how to be a spiritual leader in your own organization by integrating humanistic values with sound business practices.

Answers to CQ Survey:
1. b
2. b
3. c
4. a,c
5. b
6. b
7. a
8. b
9. a
10. True
11. b
12. c
13. a, d
14. b
15. a
16. d
17. c, d, g, h
18. c
19. c
20. b

Scores:
18-20 You could write this book.
15-17 You usually know how to handle yourself.
12-14 It would not hurt to brush up
Below 12 You may need to do some damage control.

Bobbie: 02.15.07

Welcome back!

2007-02-12T15:30:00.000+08:00

More than 20 book reviews have been posted now (all dated prior to Feb 2007, as they first appeared in their respective publications).

Each post/article contains a review of at least 2 books, with the 2 or more books having a common theme. For example, read reviews of books about marketing, innovation, leadership, corporate social responsibility, and so on.

Check out the Recent Posts, or check out the early book reviews in Archives.

P.S. Read articles by Moje Ramos-Aquino from her Learning & Innovation column at The Manila Times, Business Times Section here.

For the meantime also, check out The P&PC BookStore! Don't forget to have your credit card ready... ;-) Click here to visit The BookStore!

Welcome!

2007-02-07T18:11:00.000+08:00

Welcome to the P&PC Book Reviews page!

More than 40 book reviews and recommendations shall be posted soon! Please visit us again!

For the meantime, check out The P&PC BookStore! Don't forget to have your credit card ready... ;-)

Click here to visit The BookStore!

4 Books on Going Out-of-the-Box for Results

2007-01-21T18:17:00.000+08:00

THE DISNEY WAY
By Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson
(McGraw-Hill)

BUSINESS LEADERS & SUCCESS
By 55 Top Business Leaders
With an introduction from William J. O’Neil
Founder of Investor’s Business Daily

The Book of NO
By Susan Newman, Ph.D
(McGraw-Hill)

WORDS THAT SELL
By Richard Bayan
(McGraw-Hill)

Every time I go to the USA, I am drawn to the theme parks of Walt Disney Company. Disney, indeed, explores beyond and delivers results. There is always something new in their facilities or they seem to be always new. So there is always a sea of young and young-once moving in a pattern around the park.

“Peter Drucker once said, ‘When you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.’ Those who have prospered despite a pathway of obstacles have done so with an inner compass that steers their course: deeply held values that have crystallized and led them to achieve tangible results. Walt Disney, the great storyteller and innovator, had such a compass that defined his enviable empire. His four steps were simple:

1. Dream beyond the boundaries of today.
2. Believe in sound values.
3. Dare to make a difference.
4. And then just go out and do it: Dream, Believe, Date, Do.

“Walt Disney explained his success this way: I dream, I test my dream against my beliefs, I dare to take risks, and I execute my vision to make those dreams come true.

“Dream, Believe, Dare, Do. These words reverberates across the decades of Disney achievement. Everything Walt did—every choice he made, every strategy he pursued—evolved from these four principles.”

In subsequent pages of this paperback, the authors shared the details of Walt’s four steps. Easy read and usable ideas.. Last word from him: “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

Among the top business leaders who shared their success in this book are: media innovator Oprah Winfrey (staying positive helped her climb to the top); publisher Katharine Graham (built her career on persistence and integrity; Paychex’s Thomas Galisano (built business by hiring for guts instead of know-how); Barney creator Sheryl Leach (relied on common sense to help her build a purple empire); aviation pioneer William Boeing (in building his empire, he bowed to just one authority); Nvidia’s Jen-Hsun Huang (his laserlike focus helps keep his company on top); IGT’s Charles Mathewson (relationship-building helped him win big); Nokia’s Jorma Ollila (with innovation and insight, he made his company no. 1 and Starbuck’s Howard Schultz (kept his passion as fresh as the morning coffee).

Let’s focus on 99 Cents Only Stores’ David Gold and how he ignored status quo to break new retailing ground. “Gold’s success story reads something like those of other retailers. He works hard, finds and sells products with good value and focuses on serving customers. But the parallels stop there.”

He was sure that he needs dedicated, loyal employees to grow his company in the healthiest way. So Gold decided award options to every member of his stores. “The one thing that gratifies our family the most is that every single employee gets stock options after six months whether they’re part time or full time. The firm granted options worth 985,444 shares to employees in 1999 alone. No options went to Gold, his two sons, Howard and Jeff, or the president and Gold’s son-in-law, Eric Schiffer. The options hold the potential to enrich each employee, and they also inspire a company-wide drive to succeed.”

On the other hand, Intel co-founder Robert Noyce thought the best way to make a leap forward was to give talented people the tools they needed and then get out of the way. He saw his job as: “People come here because of their abilities. My job is to remove all impediments to progress and give them as much freedom as possible. Optimism is an essential ingredient for innovation. How else can the individual welcome change over security, adventure over staying in safe places?”

Very engaging and inspiring read.

To move forward, we need to say NO!, mean it and stop pleasing people forever so says Dr. Newman. Let’s examine these examples, The Scenario 1: “I have another question. Do you have a minute?” What’s going on here: It’s not yet noon and the guy in the next cubicle has been in yours four times with different questions on the same problem. As this point you want to say, “Just leave it on my desk and I’ll do it.” Don’t!

Response: “Work with the information you have and we’ll talk later.”

Alert: You have to take a strong stand in order to get your own work done and not be manipulated into doing someone else’s work.

The Scenario 2: You boss says, “A new client, a rush job. Can you take it on? What’s going on here? You can feel the weight of the job as soon as the question hits your ears. You can’t imagine squeezing in one more client, and a rush job to boot. Before answering think about what’s on your plate already and if this new client may or may not move you in the direction of your goals.

Response: “Not me, not unless you take me off several projects.”

Alert: When you carry a full load, doing more doesn’t necessarily equate to increased job security. It will, however, greatly add to your anxiety and exhaustion.

Sounds familiar? Dr. Newman has 248 other examples of how to say no with friends, family, really difficult persons and at work. Read the examples, try them and live and work in peace.

Many times the reason we couldn’t move ahead is the negative words in our vocabulary that condition our minds to act and think negative. Author Bayan put together more than 6,000 words and phrases to help you promote your products, services and ideas.

For example, instead of the usual new/advanced, use just published, just released, now available, fresh, sleek new, shiny new, newly minted, amazing new, bold new, innovative, ultramodern,, starling, futuristic, revolutionary, groundbreaking, breakthrough, the next generation of and many others. Hmmm, cutting edge!

For the word suitable, you could use a perfect match, ideally sized, it’s the real you, mirrors your, a welcome addition to your collection, designed to suit your needs, the ultimate in versatility, etc. Try feisty, gutsy, scrappy, sharp, astute, shrewd, potent, daring, forceful, goes the distance, commanding and masterful to mean competitive.

Wow, amazing words that make perceiving and thinking easy. This book is handy reference for when you are stuck with a word and kept repeating it monotonously in the same page.

5 Books on Managing Change

2006-11-13T18:48:00.000+08:00

MANAGING IN TIMES OF CHANGE
By Michael D. Maginn
(McGraw-Hill Professional Education)

WHEN CHANGE COME UNDONE WHAT WILL YOU DO?
Harvard Business Review
(Harvard Business School Press)

LEADING THROUGH CHANGE
Harvard Business Review
(Harvard Business School Press)

MANAGING THE DYNAMICS OF CHANGE
By Jerald M. Jellison, Ph.D.
(McGraw-Hill Companies)

THE ESSENTIALS OF RISK MANAGEMENT
By Michel Crouhy, Dan Galai and Robert Mark
(McGraw-Hill Companies)

Author Maginn defines organizational change as “when the organization is moved from the status quo to something different. “From-to” is the change.” He writes that whether a company is on the upside of the growth curve or fighting to survive, one thing is common: The people working within those organizations are experiencing change in a very personal way. “Employees have to stop what they have been doing and work in different ways with different—or fewer—team members. They may have to work away from home more frequently or move to another facility in a strange, new city. They have to work with new technologies that require new skills, say new things to customers, meet with each other more or less frequently, or do more with less.”

“When people face these kinds of dramatic changes in the way they live and work, the reaction can be negative and unproductive. What had been predictable and stable at work is now replaced by confusion, vagueness, and uncertainty.

“When change affects an organization, the leaders of the organization—from the top executive to line supervisors—need to demonstrate leadership skills as never before. The managers of an organization provide the bridge from the old way of doing things to new work practices. Paradoxically, these managers are also employees who experience the same reactions as anyone else. How can a leader lead when he or she may be uncertain and uncomfortable about the future?”

What comes to mind is the quote,¨ “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails.”

A few of Maginn’s suggested 24 tools for managers, individuals and teams are: understand the “from-to,” choose a productive response; paint a picture of what’s happening; Build new rules for a new game; squash the rumor mill; and customize help for struggling individuals. Pick up a copy of the book and read the interesting and useful details.

On the other hand, HBR on When Things Come Undone offers six fictional case studies on change. One case goes:

“C.J. Albert, the head of family owned Armor Coat Insurance, is just settling in on a Sunday evening when he receives an unsettling phone call from his star salesman. Fifty-two-year-old Ed McGlynn has just returned from a business dinner with his younger technology mentor, and he’s none too happy with the way he’s being treated. If C.J. doesn’t take this attack dog off him, Ed warns, he’s gone.

“C.J. had indeed assigned 28-year-old Roger Sterling—the company’s monomaniacal, slightly anti-social director of e-commerce—to teach Ed about digital strategy and the Web. Reverse mentoring seemed like a good way to create a digital insurance that would allow Armor Coat to keep up with its competitors.

“But there’d been tension between Ed and Roger right from the start—stemming from their personalities and their two departments. So when the two reluctantly agreed to meet for dinner to talk, their conversation didn’t go well. Ed insisted that great sales reps, not the internet, are crucial to selling insurance. Roger insisted that the Web will revolutionalize the way insurance is sold and distributed—that Ed either give in or move on. Ed took off in a huff and subsequently phoned C.J. Roger followed Ed’s irate call with his own weary ultimatum: “Either Ed goes or I go.’

“C.J. faces some difficult Monday morning discussions with both disgruntled parties. What should he do? Six commentators offer their advice to this case.”

As Woodrow Wilson once said, “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”

What, indeed, would you do? Think about it given the context of your organization and compare your answers with those of the commentators. Or simply look up the answers of the commentators; get a copy of this Harvard Business Review book. The other case studies in the book are The best-laid plans, Welcome aboard (but don’t change a thing), The cost center that paid its way, and What’s he waiting for?

In HBR on Leading Through Change, John P. Kotter writes about leading change, “one lesson is that change involves numerous phases that, together, usually take a long time. Skipping steps creates only an illusion of speed and never produces a satisfying result. A second lesson is that critical mistakes in any of the phases can have a devastating impact, slowing momentum and negating previous gains. Kotter’s lessons are instructive, for even the most capable managers often make at least one big error.”

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne writes about Tipping Point Leadership. “The theory of tipping point hinges on the insight that in any organization, fundamental changes can occur quickly when the beliefs and energies of a critical mass of people create an epidemic movement toward an idea. Like William Bratton, police commissioner of New York City in 1994, any manager looking to turn around an organization can use remarkably consistent methods to overcome forces of inertia and reach the tipping point.”

The other writers discuss instructive topics like Why do employees resist change?, Conquering a culture of indecision, Change through persuasion, Moments of greatness, Change without plan and The hard side of change management. If you are having problems with your change initiatives read this book.

What’s common among IBM, Chevron and 3M and even your golf swing? They use the J Curve to manage change. “The J Curve provides a platform for dealing with the human dimensions of change. The letter J approximates the path that most major changes follow, whether it’s introducing a new business process, merging mega corporations, or chaning your golf swing. First, there’s a precipitous drop in performance followed by a ragged period of limited progress, and then a steep climb in performance improvement. If you understand where you and your employees are on the J Curve, you can make sense of all changes, past and present.

“Change is about what happens to performance over time. Whether it’s a whole business unit that’s making the change or just one person, the arc of change normally follows a similar pattern. The J Curve nicely describes the pattern of progress or stages of change—The Plateau, The Cliff, The Valley, The Ascent and The Mountaintop.

“Some changes, though, doesn’t always follow that script. Some changes never climb to the dizzying heights of increased productivity and profitability. Many reasons exist why changes don’t produce the expected benefits. You can help team members and coworkers handle change more smoothly and quickly when you understand what they’re thinking and feeling. You can learn to help them with their doubts and worries as they move along the J Curve’s predictable stages.”

Finally, whenever there are changes, there are risks. Authors Crouhy, Galai and Mark writes: “The future cannot be predicted. It is uncertain, and no one has ever been successful in forecasting the stock marker, interest rates, or exchange rates consistently—or credit, operational and systemic events with major financial implications. Yet, the financial risk that arises from uncertainty can be managed. Indeed, much of what distinguishes modern economies from those of the past is the new ability to identify risk, to measure it, to appreciate its consequences, and then to take action accordingly, such as transferring or mitigating the risk.

“The simple sequence of events (identify risk exposures, measure and estimate risk exposures, assess effects of exposure, find instruments and facilities to shift or trade risks, assess costs and benefits of instruments, form a risk mitigation strategy and evaluate performance) is often used to define risk management as a formal discipline. But it’s a sequence that rarely runs smoothly in practice; sometimes simply identifying a risk is the critical problem, while at other times arranging an efficient economic transfer of the risk is the skill that makes one risk manager stand out from another.

“Risk management is really about how firms actively select the type and level of risk that is appropriate for them to assume. In this sense, risk management and risk taking aren’t opposites, but two sides of the same coin.”

The authors discussed the breadth and depth of risk management in 414 pages, but I assure you it is easy reading and offers practical examples and solutions.

Coming from two holidays, you have a lot of catching up to do with your readings to grow in your career and personal life. Happy reading!

3 Books on Celebrating Contribution

2006-09-19T13:55:00.000+08:00

CAREER IMPRINTS: Creating leaders across an industry
By Monica Higgins
(Josey-Bass) (Pls take note, NOT Harvard Business School.)

REVVED!: An incredible way to rev up your workplace and achieve amazing results
By Harry Paul & Ross Reck
(McGraw-Hill Companies)

THE WISDOM NETWORK: An 8-step process for identifying, sharing, and leveraging individual expertise
By Steve Benton & Melissa Giovagnoli
(Amacom)

This is the first time that my editor, Jun Cabochan, got excited about the theme of our newsletter, “celebrating our contribution.” He says, “beyond rewards, we feel a collective sense of joy and happiness in the triumph of people at work, overcoming challenges and adversity.”

And so I went high and low looking for books that would satisfy Jun’s enthusiasm. And I found five.

The first is Career Imprints by Monica Higgins. The jacket reads: Based on her research of 800 biotechnology companies and 3,200 biotechnology executives, Harvard professor Monica Higgins discovered that one firm—Baxter—was the breeding ground for today’s most successful biotechnology ventures. This phenomena of one organization spawning an industry has also been seen in the high-tech (HP) and semiconductor (Fairchild) industries. However, until now, there has been no suitable explanation of why and how these organizations were able to create the next generation of industry leaders.

Ms. Higgins shows why Baxter was so successful in spawning senior executives and offers an understanding of what it takes for an organization to produce leaders that will dominate an industry for years to come. She shows than an organization’s “career imprints”—the result of company systems, structure, strategy, and culture—that employees take with them throughout their careers is the key to creating great leaders.

The book is filled with the compelling stories from the “Baxter Boys” alumni. These stories of their individual career paths provide a behind-the-scenes look at the processes and effects of career imprinting.

For example, Baxter people had that style of being able to understand quickly that cash is precious, cash is king, of being able to think about the P&L view of the world rather than “I’M a marketing guy,” or “I’m a production guy.” None of these Baxter buys were really that good on the science. They were trained as general managers.

Secondly, authors Paul & Reck shares the engaging story of Katie Adams who, after being passed over for a long-awaited promotion, rose above her own personal problems to rekindle the enthusiasm and support of her team at work. Eventually, Katie got her own just rewards. She realized that “caring costs nothing, it makes you feel good, and it makes those around you feel good because it releases their reservoirs of positive energy. As a result, not only do people feel compelled to care back, but they use some of this newly released energy to care about those around them.”

The book answers the questions: How do you inspire people to work harder, reach higher, and achieve more? How do you get them to support you and go above and beyond in everything they do? How do you get them to care?

It asserts that personal relationships don’t maintain themselves. Like any other living thing, they need to be fed and cared for if they are going to thrive. Three ways of jump-starting your passion and put your self and your team on the road to big successes are: win them over, blow them away and keep them revved.

Thirdly, in every organization, people possess astonishing expertise and insights, yet they are often allowed or encouraged to apply their knowledge to only a narrow range of topics. As a result companies do not take full advantage of all the information, ideas and creativity that reside inside their enterprise.

Here’s your favorite part—the how to. Authors Benton and Giovagnoli propose eight steps to identify, share, and leverage individual expertise by establishing wisdom networks. And, may I add, allow everybody to enjoy the process.

1. Set the scene—establish a network-friendly environment.
2. Magnets—create topics to attract the experts.
3. Support systems—nurture communities that emerge around magnet topics.
4. Boundary crossing and role breaking—ensure diverse perspectives.
5. Hid-and-seek—identify the experts
6. Create organizational stars—acknowledge wisdom.
7. Ideas are not enough—provide implementation options.
8. Performance evaluation—create unconventional measures.

To ensure success of your wisdom networks make sure that at lease some members of the management team are viewed as leaders when it comes to knowledge sharing; create an ongoing corporate discussion about information, ideas, knowledge and wisdom; let sharing evolve naturally; and resist the urge to control wisdom networks or turn them into project teams.

My own take is that everything all boils down to shared leadership initiated at all levels of the organization and a culture of humility, trust, caring, mutual respect and innovation. This is a job for superman, er, Number One with the expert assistance of HR leaders. This is one job that is not delegated, it is shared. One way to teach it is by way of being the role model and setting the example.

The fourth and fifth are in our Bookshelf, but can not be reviewed for lack of space. Read them, anyway.

Bookshelf

THE HIDDEN POWER OF SOCIAL NETWORKS: Understanding how work really gets done in organizations
By Rob Cross and Andrew Parker
(Harvard Business School Press)

EFFECTIVE SUCCESSION PLANNING 3rd ed: Ensuring leadership continuity and building talent from within.
By William J. Rothwell
(Amacom)

2 Books on Corporate Governance, and Executive Compensation & Benefits

2006-08-21T17:48:00.000+08:00

WHAT IS CORPORATE GOVERNANCE?
By John L. Colley, Jr., Jacqueline L. Doyle, George W. Logan and Wallace Stettinius
(McGraw-Hill)

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
By Peter Wallace and John Zinkin
(John Wiley & Sons)

I know that executive compensation and benefits is outside the radar of most HR managers. I know also that every HR manager is pretty curious how much and what else the top honchos are getting. They only have a clue by the number of and car model they drive, the huge and well-appointed house they live and vacation in, the places they visit, where they spend their vacations among others. These are some telltale signs of how high the bosses are in the organization totem pole, the trust that are visited on them by the powers that be and their contribution and importance to the organization or to the power brokers.

Colley and his coauthors write, “One of the more visible tasks a board of directors must deal with is determining the compensation of the chief executive officer and senior managers (including top HR executives). The compensation must be structured to avoid paying premiums for average or poor performance. The task is not simple; the board wants to attract the right people, find the right alignment of their performance and shareholders’ interest in both the short and long term and use the most tax-efficient methods.

“Important factors considered are:
 The value of the CEO to the company. This is, by far, the most important consideration, yet difficult to quantify.
 The company’s capacity to compensate the CEO, reflecting its size and profitability.
 Absolute performance of the company over some time period based on indicators reflecting universal financial standards.
 Relative performance of the company compared to industry comparable companies.
 Achievement of nonfinancial goal, particularly strategic ones.
 External parity with other comparable companies’ CEO compensation packages and prevailing trends in the marketplace.
 Internal priority. Boards should consider the relationship between the compensation of the CEO and the rest of the management team. Frequently, the CEO is paid twice as much as the next senior officer.

“Boards desire to pay CEOs and management teams for good performance. This concept might be simple, but its implementation is complicated. Different business situations, for example start-ups, growth businesses, tough industry conditions, and turnarounds, create very different compensation challenges. Performance in each instance must be determined with the situation in mind.

“A CEO compensation package generally consists of the following:
 Base salary—a guaranteed, fixed cash amount. In some companies with outstanding performance, the base salary is as low as 10 to 15 percent of total compensation. (No wonder, they pay very small income tax) There are even a few cases where CEOs receive no base salary, only at-risk compensation. On the other hand, in companies with weak performance results, a base salary frequently will account for 50 to 100 percent of the total compensation.
 Short-term incentives—bonuses paid for outstanding performance including achieving corporate strategy and goals and other performance measures such as profits and earning per share, revenue growth, ROI, cash flow and strategic measures such as market share. They can be paid in cash and/or company stock.
 Long-term incentives—most difficult to design properly but are the principal means by which the sought-after alignment between the interests of managers and shareholders is accomplished. This includes stock options, restricted shares, required stock purchases, stock appreciation rights and cash awards. Ironically, these incentives are also the instruments through which most of the flagrant abuses in compensation have taken place.”

After you have stopped drooling, do the math. But there’s more.

“Executives normally receive the standard fringe benefits of paid holidays, vacation, life insurance, and long-term disability and health care coverage, although sometimes at more generous levels than lower-level employees. And there are a whole set of benefits and perks that tend to be reserved for higher level executives. They include supplemental executive retirement plans, voluntary deferred compensation plans, membership in clubs, car allowances, and use of corporate or leased aircraft and many others. Some perks can be justified to a point, but in some cases are carried to excess.”

Don’t fret when you notice that your boss spends more time in the golf course than in the office. Remember the saying “it is lonely at the top;” and consider the demands and stresses of their job.

One last, executives are continue to be paid and enjoy perks long after their termination depending on their contract. Remember HP CEO Carly Fiorina, deposed last winter for failing to deliver enough benefits from the company's acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp., received a whopping with a $42 million package of which $21.4 million was severance pay and is now writing a book about her career.

The spate of pay scandals in the US and many parts of the world highlight how difficult it can be for the Board Compensation Committee to fully function and be effective. Authors Wallace and Zinkin write that other than determining the amount and composition of the CEO’s package (providing they do not suffer from mutual back scratching, leading to inflated packages), the committee can serve a useful purpose in:

 Determining whether other managers are paid in line with the company’s policies as already agreed by the Board.
 Understanding the options for and their effect on Director and managerial compensation.
 Establishing the principles and limitations upon the remuneration of the other most senior executives.
 Operating on behalf of the Board any long-term performance-related pay-plan, as it affects the Executive Directors and any other managers who are affected by it.
 Determining on behalf of the Board matters of policy over which the company has authority relating to the establishment of, or operation of, the company’s pension scheme of which the Executive Directors and senior managers are members, if the company has one.
 Nominating on behalf of the Board any trustees of the pension scheme, if one exists.

Two important questions to ask to determine quality of executive compensation are: “Is executive pay tied to strategic goals? and How well is it gauged to the creation of shareholder value?”

BOOKSHELF

BIGGER ISN’T ALWAYS BETTER
By Robert M. Tomasko
(Amacom)

TRUST-BASED SELLING
By Charles H. Green
(McGraw-Hill)

2 Books on Diversity

2006-07-18T17:52:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM

Building on the promise of DIVERSITY
By R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr.
(Amacom)

The ASTD Trainer’s Sourcebook: DIVERSITY
By Tina Rasmussen
(McGraw-Hill)

Even among HR professionals, I seldom hear the word “diversity.” It is as if, it doesn’t exist even. Or if the subject matter comes up, immediately the discussion focuses on differences in race (“Americans vs. Asians), gender (men vs. women) and geographic origin (Visayans vs. Ilokanos). The general conclusion is that never the twain shall meet because of their differences.

So what is diversity? Author Rasmusen defines diversity as “the mosaic of people who bring a variety of backgrounds, styles, perspectives, values, and beliefs as assets to the groups and organizations with which they interact.

She went on to share the Primary & Secondary Dimensions of Diversity by Loden & Rosener, Workforce America!, 1991 (diagrammed here). “This helps us understand that diversity applies to everyone because it includes much more than the obvious dimensions of race and gender. The primary dimensions are those that we are born with. The secondary dimensions are those that we have some control over. These can change throughout our life. You have a choice of whether you want to disclose this information or not.

“Personality type is an excellent example. If you administer the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to a group of 30-year-old while men and a group of 60-year-old Chinese women, both groups would split into the 16 types. You would find that a white man and a Chinese woman who had the same personality type actually think more like each other than the people who share demographic similarities.”

Author Rasmussen writes that diversity IS NOT:
 just a buzzword; it is not something that will ever go away.
 Culture; it does not reinforce stereotypes and an “us versus them” mentality. Diversity extends beyond culture to include all its primary and secondary dimensions.
 Equal Employment Opportunity affirmative action; it is not protecting unqualified people to be given jobs to fill-up quota.
 an absence of standards; it is not anything goes.

Rather diversity IS:
 about demographics, it focuses on demographic changes among its workforce and of their customer base.
 about profitability, it fosters teamwork and helps organizations identify and meet the needs of their customers and other stakeholders
 about values, it has to do with human rights, civil rights and deeply held beliefs.
 about behavior, it is not the workshops that is important, it’s what people do afterward that counts.
 a long term process, it needs to be planted and nurtured.

This trainer’s sourcebook is full of valuable tips on diversity training preparation and conduct of one-day, half-day and one-hour workshops. It also generously contains workshop handouts, learning activities, instruments & assessments and even trainer’s presentation materials.

The ASTD Trainer’s Sourcebook on Diversity is, indeed, a very helpful starting place for HR professionals to draw inspiration and authoritative customizable and reproducible resources.

Similarly, author Thomas defines diversity as “the differences, similarities, and related tensions that exist in any mixture. Note especially that the term includes differences and similarities. Diversity is not limited to issues of race and gender, nor is it confined to the workforce; it refers to any set of differences and similarities in any setting.”

Thomas emphasizes what he calls Strategic Diversity Management “for enhancing the way people make quality decisions in situations where there are critical differences, similarities and tensions. SDM is a learnable craft based on five fundamentals.

“A shared understanding of core concepts must first be established. Although this assertion might appear to be obvious, it isn’t always. Fundamental #2 is that context is key. All decisions must be appropriate for the internal and external environments in which they are made. Diversity efforts are never conducted in a vacuum.

“The basic decision making question becomes: Given our purpose, our external environmental factors, our understanding of what constitutes success, and our need to maintain and advance our competitive standing, how can we identify and respond to the critical diversity issues that require our attention?

“Fundamental #3 is that diversity efforts must be requirements driven. They must focus on what is absolutely necessary to accomplish the individual’s or the organization’s mission, vision and strategy.

“Fundamental #4 states that diversity aspirations of individuals and their enterprises must be considered. Understanding both perspectives and where they mesh and differ allows people to think clearly and to make quality decisions for themselves and the enterprises.

“Finally, fundamental #5 requires enterprises and individuals must apply SDM universally, to whatever mixture is critical.”

The book includes the instrumentation, Mastering the Basics, that helps those who wish to pursue diversity maturity by clarifying their understanding of SDM craft as a critical foundation for attaining diversity maturity which is, in turn, a requisite for becoming diversity capable. The caveat is that it is US-oriented.

Building on the Promise of Diversity is an essential companion book to your volumes on management and leadership. And do share it with your organizational leaders who have to deal with diversity every minute of their work life.

#30#

BOOKSHELF

THE ETIQUETTE EDGE
By Beverly Langford
(AMACOM)
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW ON APPRAISING EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE
(Harvard Business School Press)

MORE RESULTS-ORIENTED JOB DESCRIPTIONS (with CD)
By Roger J. Plachy and Sandra J. Plachy
(AMACOM)

3 More Books on Corporate Social Responsibility

2006-05-04T18:00:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
PMAP Newsletter
May, 2006
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM

MANAGING FOR THE LONG RUN: Lessons in competitive advantage from great family businesses
By Danny Miller & Isabelle Le Breton-Miller
Harvard Business School Press

CORPORATIONS AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Guiding the invisible hand
By Steven Lyndenberg
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

THE PEOPLE BUSINESS: Controlling corporations and restoring democracy
By Lee Drutman & Charlie Cray
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Hallmark. Walmart. Bechtel Group. Levi Strauss. IKEA. Nordstrom. S.C. Johnson. Estee Lauder. L.L. Bean. Cargill. Michelin. The New York Times Company. Coors Brewing Company.

These companies are known mostly as successful family businesses. A not so known fact is that they also generously make social contributions and connect to the inside and outside communities.

Based on an in-depth, multiyear research study, the Millers draw from the experiences of family-run firms to reveal four unorthodox business priorities that any firm, family or not, can use to drive successful strategies:

• Take command: Act as an unfettered steward rather than a servant to shareholders
• Ensure continuity: pursue a lasting mission of substance, not a dollar-driven strategy
• Create a community: nurture a caring collective, not a tournament
• Build connections: secure generous relationships with outsiders instead of one-shot bargains.

These organizations attribute their success to being a good neighbor and partner to their employees, suppliers, clients, value-chain partners, providers of capital and the larger community. These winning organizations build cohesive, gung-ho community of employees. They have kept their people on during recessions, depression and war, when revenues were abysmal.

Likewise, they are benevolent business partners to their suppliers, co-contractors and financiers. They are meticulously honest in their dealings and, many times, deliver more than promised.

They also connect to the market via the socially responsible image they create. They give back to the community that has treated them so well and they view this as an obligation, not as a favor. They do philanthropic or pro bono community work because they believed it was the right thing to do.

In the end, these responsive and solicitous organizations reap untold advantages such as enhanced image of responsible citizenship that brings in clients, public support and eager superior job applicants; more loyal partners with whom they have useful interchange of privileged information that can be a basis for further business; access to resources and business; and many more.

As Earl of My Name is Earl on Jack TV would say, “Do good and good things happen. Do bad and it will come back to haunt you.”

Author Steven Lyndenberg writes that the shifting of assets and power from government to business has led to shift in the public’s expectations of what both government and corporations should do. This shift has also led to unemployment, labor unrest, disparities between the rich and poor created by the markets and their regular cycles of boom and bust. In the past, the proven solution was government supervision, but governments today can not easily return to many of the forms of ownership, price regulation, and direct market control that they have recently abandoned. Thereby, government needs to create new mechanisms to protect certain basic public interests.

There is now a growing interest in socially responsible investing (SRI) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). SRI and CSR are the new invisible guiding hand in the marketplace that operate at the intersections of market value and societal values, profits and wealth, self-interests and public concerns. “But only a concerted effort by government—with the active support of investors, consumers, workers, the general public, and corporations themselves—can bring them into being. Bringing this about will require new data, new organizations to analyze that data, public debate about the data’s significance, and the creation of consequences flowing from this analysis and debate.”

Currently, millions of immigrants, legal or illegal, workers in the USA are making headway forcing US Congress to heed their demand for their right to work and live in the USA.

Authors Drutman and Cray write that The People’s Business is about what ordinary citizens can do to curtail corporate power. They consider a wide spectrum of approaches—from fundamental shifts in how corporations are created and operate, to minor adjustments in corporate governance and regulatory fixes that directly address specific harms.

The authors speak to growing societal concerns about corporate power. They present a vision of society in which the rights of individuals are more important than the rights of corporations, in which generating public prosperity is the driving purpose of corporations, and in which the values of human dignity and community are more sacred than the corporate drumbeat of financial profit above all else. More importantly, they provide a guide to creating a sustainable society where we, the people, have the power.

If our people power toppled the governments of Messrs Marcos and Estrada, we could surely bring down business organizations that are callous and inimical to public interests and the society’s good. The HR professionals and managers could definitely influence their company in becoming better citizens before the people flex their power.

Bookshelf

PROTECTING YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
By Deborah E. Bouchoux
AMACOM

BE YOUR OWN BRAND: A breakthrough formula for standing out from the crowd
By David McNally &U Karl D. Speak
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

NO! How one simple word can transform your life
By Jana Kemp
AMACOM

PERFECT PHRASES FOR EXECUTIVE PRESENTATIONS
By Alan M. Perlman, Ph.D.
The McGraw-Hill Companies

2600 PHRASES FOR EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE REVIEWS
By Paul Falcone
The McGraw-Hill Companies

3 Books on Corporate Social Responsibility

2006-04-18T18:10:00.000+08:00

THE DIVINE RIGHT OF CAPITAL: Dethroning the corporate aristocracy
Marjorie Kelly
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, 2003)

THE ART OF CAUSE MARKETING: How to use advertising to change personal behavior and public policy
Richard Earle
(Mc-Graw Hill, 2000)

THE ANSWER TO HOW IS YES: Acting on what matters
Peter Block
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, 2002)

Are business organizations relevant and beneficial to society given the social ills (wealth inequality, wealth privilege, corporate welfare, industrial pollution and many others) they generate and perpetuate? Author Marjorie Kelly states: “The underlying illness is shareholder primacy, the drive to make profits for the shareholders, no matter who pays the cost. In the interest of making the rich richer, corporations are in effect levying absurd private taxes on the rest of us. Financial powers have become an economic aristocracy. Wealth controls not only corporations but also government.”

“Today, among the world’s one hundred largest economies, fifty-one are corporations. They have revenues larger than nation-states, yet maintain the guise of being the ‘private property’ of shareholders. Ownership function has shrunk to virtually one dimension: extracting wealth.”

That is why there is a growing pressure on business to contribute towards economic democracy and social change, to fulfill the social purpose that was the original reason for their existence and to be part of the solution to social ills, rather than the problem.

These changes need to be more than cosmetic, dole outs and public relations projects. Kelly articulates the need for a new economic ideal of sustainable prosperity for all with fundamental system reform and building a world of economic liberty and justice for all.

Kelly suggests six principles for economic democracy:
1. Enlightenment: Because all persons are created equal, the economic rights of employees and the community are equal to those of capital owners.
2. Equality: Under market principles, wealth does not legitimately belong only to stockholders. Corporate wealth belongs to those who create it, and community wealth belongs to all.
3. Public good: As semipublic governments, public corporations are more than pieces of private property or private contracts. They have a responsibility to the public good.
4. Democracy: The democracy is a human community, and like the larger community of which it is a part, it is best governed democratically.
5. Justice: In keeping with equal treatment of persons before the law, wealthy persons may not claim greater rights than others, and corporations may not claim the right s of persons.
6. (r)Evolution: As it is the right of the people to alter or abolish government, it is the right of people to alter or abolish the corporations that now govern the world.

This book is a stirring, albeit disturbing, reminder and guide for HR when they design and implement democratic and economic change projects. It appeals to the soul.

This whole Lenten Week (Maundy Thursday and Good Friday even!) I was enraged to receive incessant calls from banks, in particular, urging me to get their credit cards and loan products!!!!! Also, the internet and mass media (most newspapers took a rest on Good Friday) did not seem to take a solemn pause this week and continued business as usual.

Indeed every day, we are bombarded by savvy social marketers that prey on our vulnerabilities and make us buy things we do not need. Not to mention advertisements and commercials that insult the intelligences and sensitivities and destroy value systems.

And now comes cause marketing and cause branding that “contribute for the public good.” Author Richard Earle recalls his experience working at Benton & Bowles agency, “I realized then and there that it was possible to use the techniques of marketing in a way that could have an important and beneficial impact on the public—a result that had nothing to do with detergent or analgesic market share.”

Earle defines cause marketing as advertising in the service of the public. It consists of using the skills of advertising to effect social change, to benefit individuals or society at large. He writes, “Cause marketing seeks to impact personal behavior in a number of ways, including persuading the target to:
 avoid or discontinue to risky practices like smoking, drug abuse or unprotected sex
 discontinue antisocial actions such as littering or being careless with campfires
 seek counseling for destructive behavior such as compulsive gambling or spousal abuse
 take preventative measures such as getting inoculated, reducing cholesterol intake, or fastening a safety belt
 seek out and use information about various diseases
 reexamine personal attitudes toward issues like race and sexual preference
 identify and take action against inhumane or discriminatory practices
 organize, join or give financial support to groups that benefit society
 become involved in community activities such as mentoring and monitoring neighborhood crime

Earle asserts that cause marketing can also help create or change public policy, inform about and create action on behalf of a cause.

And, may I add, the idea of stewardship and preservation of the natural environment. Indeed, advertisements and commercials are potent tools for expressing corporate social responsibility. HR can work with top management and their marketing and sales units to make this happen.

I am sure that HR people are now asking, “How?” Who, where and when do we even begin?

Author Peter Block asserts that the work it takes to act on what matters is up to each of us as individuals. “My individual possibility needs to be part of a collective possibility through the concept of social architecture. The task of the social architect is to design and bring into being organizations that serve both the marketplace and the soul of the people who work within them. Where the architect designs physical space, the social architect designs social space.”

Earle writes that certain capacities are required by social architects:
1. Convening: How people gather. Focus on who is in the room. Care for the physical space of the room in which you meet. Include high-interaction activities. Design airspace so that all voices can be heard. Aim at capacities and strengths.
2. Naming the Question: Define the context, the playing field, and the right question to start with. Identify needs of all stakeholders. Stay with questions of purpose, feeling and relationships. Keep broadening the questions. Postpone the How? question.
3. Initiating New Conversations for Learning: We change the world when we create the time and space for heartfelt, unique conversations that discuss values and affirm doubts, feelings and intuition. Support idealism, intimacy and depth. Use high-contact and human being-based learning strategies.
4. Sticking with Strategies of Engagement and Consent: Talk the implications through. Establish commitment and accountability. Decide who should be in the room at various stages and what questions they should confront, and all while keeping to the ground rule that he questions of intent and purpose precede the questions of methodology.
5. Designing Strategies that Support Local Choice: If our intent is to create social systems that people want to inhabit, then the social architect’s job is to demand that the inhabitants join in designing the system. Some call this “participative design.” It may take longer, but the alternative is to be efficient in choosing a plan that will not be supported.

HR could expand their horizon and make their corporate life meaningful by taking on the lead of their organization’s aiming for economic democracy and social change. These books are helpful in that they detail the what, why, who, when, where and how.

Bookshelf
151 QUICK IDEAS TO INSPIRE YOUR STAFF
Jerry R. Wilson, CSP
(Career Press, 2005)

TEN RULES FOR STRATEGIC INNOVATORS
Vijay Govindarajan & Cris Timble
(Harvard Business School Press, 2005)

THE PERSON WHO CHANGED MY LIFE
Matilda Raffa Cuomo
(Book-of-the-Month Club, 2002)

3 Books on Productivity

2006-02-17T13:53:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM

JUST ENOUGH PROJECT MANAGEMENT
By Curtis R. Cook
(McGraw-Hill, 2005)

SIX SIGMA FOR MANAGERS
By Greg Brue
(McGrawHill, 2002)

HOW TO SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE
By Tiki Kustenmachers with Lothar J. Seiwart
(McGraw-Hill, 2004)

In many things we do, we employ project management method for planning, implementing and evaluating our work and results for maximum productivity.

In four easily understood and practical steps featuring useful templates and checklists, author Curtis Cook presents a concise American National Standards Institute standard for project management.

This four-step process involves initiating, planning, executing & controlling and closure. Cooks writes that initiating includes determining what the project should accomplish, recognize whether the project should, indeed, be done, select and bestow necessary authority upon the project manager and launch the project with a Project Charter.

The second step includes the process of developing detailed plan for the project that includes the task list, resource assignments, schedule, budget, communication plan, risk plan and change control process. Once the project sponsor approves the plan, it is known as the project baseline.

Once the plan is approved, work begins. The third step insures that the technical work is being done according to the plan, and the variances are identified and acted on to keep the project on track. Project status reports are generated to keep stakeholders informed.

Finally, the job is finished and the project is closed. However, this step is not as simple as it seems. It requires handover of the finished project to the customer, assessment of how things were done, capture lessons learned to be passed on to others and, equally important, rewarding the project team and celebrating success.

The HR manager could definitely use project management process in implementing hr programs by dividing those “continuous processes” into short-term chunks and manage them accordingly. For example, each performance management cycle could be one project that will run for six-months to one year. This will avoid having repetitive jobs becoming routine and gives the HR person an opportunity to look at the job with a fresh look and to inject improvement every cycle.

I am sure that by now you are familiar with the Six Sigma approach to managing and extracting optimum quality productivity from your organization. It aims to eliminate errors, reduce costs and better satisfy customers. Author Greg Brue gives us the basics of Six Sigma, its methodology and tools. Brue describes Six Sigma as a journey to improve productivity and profitability. HE says it is not theoretical; it’s an active, hands-on practice that gets results. In short, you don’t contemplate Six Sigma; you do it.

Can Six Sigma be used in HR? Yes. It can save you a lot of papers, printing and other excessive supplies and efforts. Brue asserts that Six Sigma is about arming your human “assets” with the training, resources and knowledge to solve problems. “It is also about taking a leadership journey to guide those assets toward ever increasing achievement. It asks hard questions about your processes and gets the data that supports them. It provides solutions that fit your unique processes.”

Everything starts from the way you manage your personal life. Productivity at work starts with productivity in your personal life and cultivating good habits of living. Author Tiki Kustenmacher offers seven practical steps to letting go of your burdens and living a happier life or how to simply simplify your life.

These seven steps are: 1. Simplify yourself with simpler things, i.e., sort out your workplace, unpile your office, clear your environment and overcome your forgetfulness. 2. Simplify your finances to achieve financial independence without complexes by getting rid of your money blockages and debts, breaking out of money spells, stop worrying about security and working out your own concept of wealth. 3. Simplify your time and manage it actively. 4. Simplify your health, listen to your body and conserve your energies. 5. Simplify your relationships; learn to maintain, deepen and enjoy relationships with other people with mutual giving and receiving. 6. Simplify your life partnership; learn to look beneath the current surface of your relationship and to continue on your way—together instead of just side by side. 7. Simplify yourself; learn to understand yourself better and move towards the purpose of your life.

There, if you can manage yourself, you can manage other people; If you can lead a personal productive life, you can lead your organization to increasing productivity and excellent results.

BOOKSHELF:

PLANNING AND MANAGING EFFICIENTLY: A quick reference kit
• MANAGING IN TIMES OF CHANGE by Michael Maginn
• PROJECT MANAGEMENT by Gary Heerkens
• HOW TO PLAN AND EXECUTE STRATEGY by Walace Stettinius, et al
• HOW TO MANAGE PERFORMANCE by Robert Bacal
(McGraw-Hill, 2004, Limited Edition)

Leading Leaders, and, Career Warfare

2006-01-22T18:20:00.000+08:00

Favorite Books
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM

LEADING LEADERS: how to manage smart, talented, rich and powerful people
By Jeswald W. Salacuse
(Amacom, 2006)

CAREER WARFARE: 10 rules for building a successful personal brand and fighting to keep it
By David F. D’Alessandro
with Michele Owens
(McGraw-Hill, 2004)

Author Salacuse asks: How do you leverage the assets of the talented, highly educated, well-trained, experienced and powerful while making sure that egos remain unbruised? How do you lead executives, experts, investors, board members, professionals and other people with and significant resources and contributions to your organization? How do you lead lawyers, physicians, management consultants, investment bankers, research analysts, accountants and portfolio managers, to name a few, whose talents are the firm’s principal assets and who as partners may also be the firm’s owners?

HR heads do face this same situation as you work with fellow executives, managers and knowledge workers on a day-to-day basis and over whom you have limited or no authority at all. How do you lead your organizations’ leaders and professionals? How do you sell them your HR programs and systems? How do you lead leaders and peers?

Salacuse breaks down this unique leadership situation into seven tasks and seven challenges. These are: direction—negotiating the vision, integration—making stars a team, mediation—settling leadership conflicts, education—teaching the educated, motivation—moving other leaders, representation—leading outside the organization and trust creation—capitalizing your leadership.

Salacuse offers these lessons for leading leaders:
• Your ability to lead other leaders arises not just from your position, resources, or charisma but from your will and skill. You have to work at the job.
• The basis of leadership is your relationship with the persons you lead. Leaders will follow you if they trust you.
• Communication is your fundamental tool in building those relationships.
• The key process of leading leaders is communication through one-on-one interactions. You have to engage them and personally connect with them.
• Leading leaders is interest based leadership. Leaders will follow you because they consider it in their interest. You need to convince them that their interests lie with you.

On the other hand, author D’Alessandro writes that in order to win in an arena of hard-working and accomplished leaders, you need to develop a reputation or “personal brand” that convinces powerful people to trust you.

And this is the dilemma of HR people. Your own hard work, accomplishments and high-sounding programs will not ensure ready buy-in for your programs. You need to have the right personal qualities and project them well to people in power.

D’Alessandro offers ten rules to become mayor of your village, not the village idiot. To name a few:
• Try to look beyond your own navel. You can’t build a good personal brand if you can’t see yourself as others see you.
• Like it or not, your boss is the coauthor of your brand. Like it or not, your boss is the coauthor of your brand. Your boss decides how your accomplishments will be viewed by the higher-ups.
• Put your boss on the couch. Understand that almost every nice thing your boss does for you is done not out of love, but to further his or her own bran.
• Learn which one is the pickle fork. Sometimes a single embarrassment is enough to alter people’s opinion of you forever.
• It’s always show time. Reputations are usually built brick by brick by your day-to-day behavior.

Finally, D’Alessandro advises, “Choose a circle of people whose advice you trust to help you bet wisely. You are building your brand until the day you die, so expect to make adjustments. Be conscious every day of what you are building.”

Bookshelf
DEEP SMARTS: how to cultivate and transfer enduring business wisdom
By Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap
(Harvard Business School Press, 2005)

THE HEART OF CHANGE FIELD GUIDE: tools and tactics for leading change in your organization
By Dan S. Cohen
(Harvard Business School Press, 2005)

2 Books on Strategic Execution

2005-11-18T18:52:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM

JUDO STRATEGY: Turning your competitor’s strength to your advantage
By David B. Yoffie and Mary Kwak
Harvard Business School Press (2001)

RESONANT LEADERSHIP
By Richard Boyatzis and Annie Mckee
Harvard Business School Press (2005)

One article I read strongly suggests that being strategic is quite simple: it's about being future-looking; it's about having an inclination to look to the future as much as to the present; it's about being able to read the future (or a range of alternative futures), feel the future, live the future and describe the future in a way which enables others to share and "see" the future with you.

One way of being strategic, authors Boyatzis and Mckee write, is choosing resonance over dissonance. “Resonant leaders are in tune with those around them. This results in people working in sync with each other, in tune with each others’ thoughts (what to do) and emotions (why to do it). Leaders who can create resonance are people who either intuitively understand or have worked hard to develop emotional intelligence—namely the competencies of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. They act with clarity, not simply following a whim or an impulse.”

Additionally emotional leaders manage others’ emotions and build strong, trusting relationships. “They know that emotions are contagious, and their own emotions are powerful drivers of their peoples’ moods and, ultimately, performance. They understand that while fear and anger may mobilize people in the short term, these emotions backfire quickly, leaving people distracted, anxious and ineffective. They read people, groups and organizational cultures accurately and they build lasting relationships. They cause those around them to want to move, in concert, toward an exciting future.” They give us courage and hope and help us to become the best that we can be.

In Resonant Leadership, the authors show the dynamic relationship among mindfulness, hope and compassion to spark the kind of positive emotions that enable us to remain resilient in the face of challenges, even in the unprecedented climate that leaders face today. Boyatzis introduced his own cyclical process of Intentional Change Theory to help leaders journey to renewal.

In 1994-95, Netscape was the hottest company and its flagship product, Navigator, is the dominant browser in the high technology world. Until December 2005 when Microsoft unleashed a declaration of war, driving Netscape’s share price to the ground. By the end of the decade, Microsoft was king of the browser business, and Netscape survived only as a division of AOL.

By the end of 1996, Palm Computing’s Pilot, a handheld electronic organizer, has dominated its market. Eight years after its birth, Palm was not only alive and kicking, to borrow from the Apply lexicon, it was “insanely great” despite Microsoft’s repeated efforts to take over the market.

Why did Palm succeed where Netscape failed? What distinguishes challengers who build successful businesses from those who fall by the wayside despite an auspicious start? Which strategies hold the most promise for companies facing powerful opponents and which are most likely to lead to defeat? What strategy is most likely to succeed when size or strength is not on your side?

Authors Yoffie and Kwak suggest that the lesson here is at the heart of judo strategy. Netscape opposed strength to strength, while Palm studied the competition carefully, avoided head-to-head battles and turned their opponents’ strengths to their advantage.

Judo strategy is a multilayered concept. “At the most basic level, it functions as a metaphor that evokes powerful images about how to compete and win. If you keep the image of judo competition firmly in mind, it will be easy to visualize the moves that make it possible to beat a stronger opponent.”

Judo Strategy explores three principles that should inform one’s thinking: movement, balance and leverage. Each principle provides a different piece of the strategy puzzle. Movement throws competition off balance and neutralizes their initial advantages. Balance helps engage with the competition and survive an attack. And leverage enables to bring the opponents down. When used together, these three principles will help defeat rives of any size.

“In addition to downplaying the role of brute strength, judo strategy puts premium on qualities such as speed, flexibility and innovation. The authors continue to describe the movement at Palm: follow through fast:

The Challenge: You’ve built a healthy lead over the competition, what’s next?
The Solution: Use this window of opportunity to build the strongest position you can: streamline internal processes in order to continue upgrading your products or services at a rapid pace; and don’t be greedy, especially in industries where network effects play an important role, then price aggressively in order to win market share and build a large installed base.

How to beat a judo master? Use the sumo strategy.

Bookshelf
THE WISDOM OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
By Lance Kurke, Ph.D.
AMACOM (2004)

HOW TO GROW A BACKBONE: 10 strategies for gaining power and influence at work
By Susan Marshall
Contemporary Books (2000)

2 Books on Culture and Leadership

2005-10-18T18:13:00.000+08:00

Favorite Books
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM

TEAM BUSH: Leadership lessons from the Bush White House
By Donald F. Kettl
(McGraw-Hill)

WHY GOOD COMPANIES GO BAD AND HOW GREAT MANAGERS REMAKE THEM
By Donald N. Sull
(Harvard Business School Press)

I am not an admirer of George W. Bush, the first MBA (Harvard) president of the USA, but here’s an interesting insight into his leadership style and the culture of goal orientation, discipline and teamwork he installed at the White House. According to the author, Bush did run the Oval Office by the Harvard casebook. Kettl wrote: “He got busy running the country by crafting a business plan for the transition (as Governor of Texas) and his initial months in the Whitehouse even while the outcome of the election was still in doubt. In less than three weeks he completed the task of naming his cabinet. He then made ten-year tax cut his top policy priority. Following the tax vote, which won with a large and quick margin, he focused on his education agenda. He was promoting this phase of his strategy, in fact, when he visited a Florida classroom on the morning of September 1. Finally, Bush envisioned a foreign policy initiative, especially to deal with Iraq and his belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

“Beyond the business plan was a set of basic rules to guide how the White House staff worked and behaved.” He stuck to these rules consistently: Attire—suit and tie required, brevity is a must, be punctual, treat everyone with respect and develop healthy work habits.

Bush quickly worked his way through the basic options and made his strategic decisions. He preferred oral briefings, short background memos, and quick decisions.” Bush is a strong “people person” as he likes people and connects easily and informally with them.

Kettle continues: “Bush builds his approach to the president on teamwork, especially his West Wing staff. He builds a clear strategy and a business plan for implementing it. He insists on tough discipline among his staffers, with a tightly controlled flow of information in and out. He relished the MBWA (management by walking around) approach. He focuses on the big decisions and delegates to subordinates the job of carrying them out.

On dealing with the press, Kettl wrote: “One sign of how successful the Bush administration has been in managing the message is its skill in creating news events. The disciplined message starts with Bush himself. He defines a message, repeats it and relentlessly hammers it home.”

Finally, from W himself: “Governments should be results-oriented. Where we find success, we should repeat it, share it, and make it the standard. And where we find failure, we must call it by its name. Government action that fails in its purpose must be transformed or ended.” Paging Madame Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo!

I still don’t have a hint of admiration for W, but author Kettl wrote a compelling case for Dubya’s winning leadership style.

Along the same theme, author Donald Sull asserts that despite differences in personal attributes, great managers all excel in the making, honoring and remaking of commitments. “Managerial commitments take many forms, from capital investments to personnel decisions to public statements, but each exerts both immediate and enduring influence on a company. A leader’s commitments shape a business’s identity, define its strengths and weaknesses, establishes its opportunities and limitations, and set its direction.

“Defining commitments determine an organization’s course and identity well into the future—but hamper later change efforts. To make the right commitment, ask, ‘Is this a decision we can live with in the long run?’ Don’t define commitments hastily if you don’t have to.

“Reinforcing commitments include daily actions such as customer contract renewals, and occasional big bets like a major acquisition. This build efficiency, sharpen focus, temper risk and attract employees, customers and partners who fit the company’s identity.

“Finally, when disruptive changes strikes, pressure to make even more reinforcing commitments mounts. Instead, force your firm out of the status quo—with new, transforming commitments such as selecting new strategic frames or revamped process; make clear credible courageous commitments that leave no room for retreat; and reconfigure remaining frames, processes, resources and relationships to support your new direction.”

Shull refers to commitment as any action taken in the present that binds an organization to a future course of action. Commitments are essential to management. They secure the resources necessary for the company’s survival, induce potential partners and investors to play ball, provide employees with a clear sense of focus and help them prioritize and coordinate their actions. Commitments come at a cost—it limits a company’s flexibility.

W, like many successful leaders, thrives on managing by commitments. It is a truism that the leadership defines the culture of the organization and signs up everybody for the long haul. What really makes a great manager great?

Bookshelf

TEMPERED RADICALS: How people use difference to inspire change at work
By Debra E. Meyerson
(Harvard Business School Press)

TIME MASTERY: How temporal intelligence will make you a stronger, more effective leader.
By John K. Clemens and Scott Dalrymple
(AMACOM)

Blue Ocean Strategy and Niche Marketing

2005-09-18T17:50:00.000+08:00

Favorite Books
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY: how to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant
By W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
Harvard Business School Press (2005)

MARKETING (4th Edition): Real People, Real Choices
By Michael Solomon, Greg Marshall and Elnora Stuart
Pearson Education International (2006)

I am reviewing some corporate vision/mission statements and I notice that a number of companies want to be “the employer of choice.” How do you make that happen?

Authors Kim and Mauborgne suggest creating value innovation, i.e., instead on focusing on beating competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.

“Value innovation places equal emphasis on value and innovation. Value without innovation tends to focus on value creation on an incremental scale, something that improves value but is not sufficient to make you stand out in the marketplace. Innovation without value tends to be technology-driven, market pioneering, or futuristic, often shooting beyond what buyers are ready to accept and pay for.

“Take Cirque de Soleil as an example. It did not win by taking customers from the already shrinking circus industry, which historically catered to children. Cirque did not compete with Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey. Instead it created uncontested new market space that made the competition irrelevant. It appealed to a whole new group of customers—adults and corporate clients prepared to pay a price several times as great as traditional circuses for an unprecedented entertainment experience. Significantly, one of the first Cirque productions was titled, ‘We reinvent the circus.’ They created a new market space and generated strong profitable growth in a declining industry.”

As a result of this Blue Ocean Strategy, Cirque attracted and kept star circus performers and many aspiring and highly talented artists.

Kim and Maugborgne suggest that while it is important to attract new talents, it is equally important to keep current productive ones. This is done by building people’s trust and commitment deep in the ranks and inspire voluntary cooperation through the use of Fair Process: engagement, explanation and clarity of expectations.

To help us do this, let us borrow some strategies from marketing. Authors Solomon, Marshall & Stuart writes about Sharpening the Focus: target marketing strategies and customer relationship management.

“Reebok started off as a British brand that became known in the 1980’s primarily for its aerobics shoes. However, while women were snapping these up, the company was not enticing many men tot buy its products. At around the same time, Nike began to stake its claim as the brand for “Winners” by signing world-class athletes in virtually every sport to endorse its shoes. Reebok was slow to react to this challenge and saw its overall market share quickly decline. The company eventually tried a “follow the leader” approach by signing its own athletes, such as Shaquille O’Neill and Emmit Smith, but it was too late—Nike already “owned” its position in the market as being the shoe for champions. In particular, Michael Jordan cemented Nike’s reputation as the brand to wear on the court, especially among teenage males.

“Reebok needed a new strategy to effectively target the youth market, but how could it gain credibility and respect among young men? Enter Allen Iverson, a barely 6-foot, 160-pound bundle of energy, movement and coolness. Iverson was a modern-day David among the Goliaths of the NBA, a player with whom kids could identify rather than idolize. Reebok thought he could become the face of urban youth—young, rebellious, talented, loyal to firneds and family, with an “I don’t give a #$%@” attitude. The more adults hated Iverson and said he was bad news, the more youth around the world embraced him and accepted him as their own. He was the perfect counterpart to Michael Jordan. While “Air” Jordan brought the game above the rim with his style and grace, Iverson brought hoops back down to earth with his unique “crossover” dribble. If the 1980s were about dunking and playing in the air, the late 1990s were about beating your man off the dribble. Over a period of six years, Reebok used Iverson to connect with youth and did a good job of changing its image from a brand worn by moms to their aerobics classes.

“Still, Reebok languished in the #2 position without a clear identity other than being the shoe that Iverson wears. Their star endorser was a key asset but not strong enough to single-handedly win the hearts, minds, and dollars of youth culture.”

Now, if you were Que Gaskin, vice president of global marketing, what options do you have and what would you do? If you are having a hard time keeping your highly productive, highly motivated talents and attracting needed talents, what would you do? Why would I want to work with your company? What is your niche, uniqueness, weirdness, competitive advantage that people could identify with proudly?

BookShelf

Human Resource Management
By Gary Dessler
Pearson Education International (2005)

Jack Welch and the 4E’s of Leadership
By Jeffrey Krames
McGraw-Hill (2005)

Super Networking
By Michael Salmon
Career Press (2004)

Coaching at Work
By Perry Zeus & Suzanne Skiffington
McGraw-Hill (2000)

3 Books on Competitive Advantage

2005-08-22T18:50:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM
Paradigms & Paradoxes Corporation

EARLY WARNING: Using competitive intelligence to anticipate market shifts, control risks, and create powerful strategies
By Ben Gilad
(American Management Association)

WORLD OUT OF BALANCE: Navigating global risks to seize competitive advantage
By Paula A. Laudicina
(McGraw-Hill)

THE ANSWER TO HOW IS YES: Acting on what matters
By Peter Block
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc)

Two ways to define our strategy: deterministic (based on what happened in the past and what is happening now and what might happen in the very near future and based on what competition is doing best right now) and exploitative (based on what the near and far future have to offer and based on what competitor might do next).

Obviously, you can’t have much competitive advantage if you are near sighted and internally focused. Look at what’s happening to Levi’s now. Maybe they are still doing a SWOT analysis. Mikhail Gorbachev once said, “If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you have not done much today.”

Author Ben Gilad recommends uncovering competitors’ blinders, instead. “First, it requires a serious intelligence capability. This is not equivalent to having a large information center or one of those “knowledge sharing” projects, the new pet toys of the large Knowledge Management “practices.” It is neither tantamount to nor derived from market research capability; the two disciplines, market research and competitive intelligence, differ widely. For a company to be able to get into its competitors’ blindspots, it needs real intelligence expertise.

“It is not always possible, however, to gain a direct window into competing executives’ mindsets. Sometimes, when the competitors are private companies or small upstarts or just secretive, no published information is available. In these cases, an indirect approach is still available. This approach infers assumptions from observed behavior. The indirect inference method calls for asking a simple question in regard to competitors’ strategic moves: “Why are they doing this?” This question is a gate to a wealth of possible explanations.

“Identifying competitors’ blindspots is a powerful weapon. It allows a company to execute actions with a significantly reduced risk of retaliation. It is especially compelling in identifying opportunities for first-move advantage, before competitors’ can see them. The story of how the famous Xerox’s Park laboratory invented some of the most popular technologies—the mouse, the graphic interface used in Apple’s and later Microsoft’s operating systems, and the desktop home printers—and never realized their potential is a classic example of how blindspots can yield powerful benefits to those who uncover them.”

Gilad further writes, “There are few surprises in life, but there are many blind executives who confuse their own grand visions with reality and then make others pay for their confusion.”

Author Laudicina observes that a vast majority of companies today lack the means to identify and manage external risks and find themselves without bearings in this increasingly complex world. He adds that instead of risking a devastating shipwreck, many captains of industry keep their corporate ships stubbornly docked at shore.

“Executives and companies can—and should—undertake expansion strategies even when external uncertainties and shocks can have as much impact as traditional industry dynamics. With the most promising opportunities located outside home markets and far from familiar territory, hiding from risks is simply not an option. Instead companies must use that telescope, scan distant horizons, and try to make sense of the complicated world. They must bring insights about the external environment into the planning process in order to spot and act on new opportunities and avoid emerging threats—to understand the external world in order to engage it.”

Some of these drivers of change in the external environments are: globalization, demographics, the new customer, natural resources and the environment, regulation and activism. “These drivers sketch a picture of an increasingly complex world in which change is endemic. But they also serve as a framework for understanding and making sense of the changes that matter most.”

Finally, author Peter Block reflects, “Citizenship means that I act as if this larger place were mine to create, while the conventional wisdom is that I cannot have responsibility without authority. That is a tired idea. Let it die in peace. I am responsible for the health of the institution and the community even though I do not control it. I can participate in creating something I do not control.”

“We begin with the costs of asking How? too quickly or too eagerly. When we ask how to do something, it expresses our bias for what is practical, concrete, and immediately useful, often at the expense of our values and idealism. It assumes we don’t know, and this in itself becomes a defense against action. Getting the question right may be the most important thing we can do. We define our dialogue and, in a sense, our future through the questions we choose to address. Asking the wrong question puts us in the philosopher’s dilemma: We became the blind man in a dark room for a black cat that is not there.”

The Future of Competition

2005-07-19T17:57:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM

THE FUTURE OF COMPETITION: Co-creating unique value with customers
By C. K. Prahalad & Venkat Ramaswamy
(Harvard Business School Press)

Coffee, tea or chocolate?
Coffee
Brewed or instant?
Regular or decaf?
Black or with milk?
Sugar, no sugar?

Tea na lang.
Hot or iced?
Black or green?
Ceylon, Chinese or Japanese?
Sugar or honey?
Calamansi or milk?

Chocolate na lang nga!
Tsokolate eh or tsokolate oh
Milk or no milk?
Nuts or no nuts?
Marshmallow?

Plain tap water, please, with plenty of ice.

Authors Pahalad and Ramaswamy writes: A profound, but silent, transformation of our society is afoot. Our industrial system us geerating more goods and services than at any point in history, delivered through an ever-growing number of channels. Superstores, boutiques, online retailers, and discount stores proliferate, offering thousands of distinct products and services. This product variety is overwhelming to consumers. Am I buying the right digital camera? Am I getting the best treatment for my chronic ulcer? Am I signing up for the right service? Simultaneously, thanks to the propagation of cell phones, Web sites, and media channels, consumers have increased access to more information, at greater speed and lower cost, than ever before. But who has the leisure and the proficiency needed to sort through and evaluate all these products and services? The burgeoning complexity of offerings, as well as the associated risks and rewards, confounds and frustrates most time-starved consumers.

Product variety has not necessarily resulted in better consumer experiences. (end of quote)

All you need is a refreshing drink to perk you up on a lazy morning. Why do you need to make so many decisions very early and the day has just started? By the time you get to your office, you must have already made a hundred and one decisions, big and small.

Thus the paradox of the twenty-first-century economy: Consumers have more choices that yield les satisfaction. Top management has more strategic options that yield less value. Are we on the cusp of industrial system with characteristics different from those we now take for granted? These question lies at the heart of the book, The Future of Competition.

The authors theorizes that the most basic change has been a shift in the role of the consumer—from isolated to connected, from unaware to informed, from passive to active. They explained how the impact of the connected, informed, and active consumer is manifest in many ways. They outlined a progression from the co-creation experience to the innovation of experience environments to a personalized co-creation experience.

The same is true in our own company. You, as the HROD professional is confronted with so many human resource and organization development (HROD) programs for benefits, training and development, business excellence, etc. It is becoming difficult to make choices and so we go back to our connected, informed and active consumers—our employees.

There is a need to co-create value with our employees. Before, whatever management or HR says goes resulting in dissatisfaction, low productivity, labor relations problems, etc..

Though this book talks about business in general, a little imagination will help you distill the ideas and apply them to your situation in HROD. Don’t just read pure HROD literature, read this book and see how top management think and intend to do things.

The authors gave the example of eBay: Pierre Omidyar wanted “to give the power of the market back to individuals, not just large corporations.” So he founded e-Bay to alter the exchange process—buying and selling—by creating an open auction. In 2001, eBay intermediated over 170 million exchanges for $9.3 billion worth of goods in more than 18,000 categories, with revenues of over $749 million. In 2002, it generated revenues of $1.5 billion, on commissions up to 5.25 percent on transactions. Clearly, eBay has succeeded in creating a platform on which to build global economic democracy. Unlike traditional exchanges, eBay does not distinguish between buyers and sellers, only between roles of the moment. I can sell my antique chair and buy a digital camera simultaneously.

In the initial stage, the eBay process focused primarily on three elements of the exchange: choice of products and services, a clear price-performance advantage because of the auction process, and ease of transactions through easy-to-use tools and clear rules. However, as people started participating, a community with its own rules gradually evolved. People acting as merchants would with thank-you notes to those acting as consumers. Buyers and sellers started grading each transaction in a “Feedback Forum.” The evolving rules of engagement enabled a unique customer experience.

As HROD practitioners, how could you help your organization compete head on by giving your employees a satisfactorily unique experience transacting with your office?

BOOKSHELF

CAREER BOUNCE-BACK: The professionals in transisiton
By J. Damian Birkel & Stacey J, Miller
(AMACOM)

OUTSOURCING FOR RADICAL CHANGE: A bold approach to enterprise transformation
Foreword by Thomas H. Davenport
(Amacom)

3 Books on Innovation

2005-06-24T18:19:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM
Paradigms & Paradoxes Corporation

EXPERIMENTATION MATTERS: Unlocking the potential of new technologies for innovation
By Stephan H. Thomke
Harvard Business School Press

THE MEDICI EFFECT: Breakthrough insights at the intersection of ideas, concepts & cultures
By Frans Johansson
Harvard Business School Press

THE SEEDS OF INNOVATION: Cultivating the synergy that fosters new ideas
By Elaine Dundon
American Management Association

Bookshelf
INNOVATION AND IMAGINATION AT WORK
Edited by Carolyn Barker
Australian Institute of Management

THE POWER OF STRATEGY INNOVATION: a new way of linking creativity and strategic planning to discover great business opportunities
By Robert E. Johnston, Jr. & J. Douglas Bate
American Management association

My friend Ben Liboro of First Philippine Holdings Corporation just came back from a tour of Europe and the USA and was excited to announce that graduate schools of arts and cultures in both continents are filled to capacity with a long queue for the next terms. The enrollees are all coming from the business sector. Companies are sending their top people to these schools rather than to MBAs. Why combine arts and business?

Excellent business leaders nowadays are looking into the Medici Effect. Author Frans Johansson writes: When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas. This is the Medici Effect, a remarkable burst of creativity in fifteenth-century Italy.

The Medicis were a banking family in Florence who funded creators from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this family and a few others like it, sculptors, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures. They forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicenter of aa creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. The effects of the Medici family can be felt even to this day.

Johansson details how to create the Medici Effect: break down the barriers between fields, randomly combine concepts, ignite and capture the explosion of ideas, execute past your failures and take risks and overcome fear.

Author Elaine Dundon drives home the point and wrote about managing innovation. She emphasizes that innovation is a combination of four key components: creativity (the discovery of new ideas), strategy (determining whether it is a new and useful idea), implementation (putting useful idea into action, and profitability (maximizing the added value from the implementation of this new and useful idea).

Dundon cautions that innovation is not just “new technology;” not sector-specific, not just for the research and development department, special teams or “skunkworks;” not a creative playroom or just a creative training; not a one-off event; and not just applicable to new products.

And, if I may, innovation is definitely for HR leaders, professionals, practioners and enthusiasts.

Similarly, author Stefan Thomke asserts the need for experimentation. Louis Pasteur’s discovery of artificial vaccines is one example. 3M chemist Spencer Silver started a series of experiments aimed at developing polymer-based adhesives. His idea was found hopeless because 3M was focused on finding a stronger glue that formed an unbreakable bond, not a weaker glue that supported only apiece of paper. Until he met choir director and chemist Arthur Fry. Silver recalled: The key to the Post-it adhesive was doing the experiment. If I had sat down and factored it out beforehand, and thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. If I had limited my thinking only to what the literature said, I would have stopped. The literature was full of examples that said that you can’t do this.

As Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

Authors Johnston and Bate relate the story of Moen, makers of faucets: To see things differently, Moen enlisted the assistance of someone whose profession was seeing human behavior in a deeper, more insightful way—a cultural anthropologist. He visited homes and business across the country to observe how people use water and what role it played in their lives. He watched people use water and tracked their moods, happiness levels, and feelings of satisfaction while carrying out such activities. He wrote down how long each action took, and documented how people moved and adjuster their faucet for the needs of particular activities. He rated the importance people placed on water safety, flow and efficiency, as well as the effectiveness and aesthetics of each feature. The fun factor of each activity was rated too. He observed the differences between the habits of men and women in their handling of fixtures.

Director of marketing services Maureen Wenmoth noted:: The results of this insight safari was that people wanted more than just functioning faucets. We thought we knew all about water and faucet needs, and why not? Moen had been in the water business for many decades. But, by never before conducting observational research, we really were missing out on a lot. We were also limiting ourselves by working in self-created boundaries. We were working under the pretense that water is a commodity element—something people want and need. But the reality is that it’s not so cut-and-dried. Water is many different things to different people. Yes, it is something people need. But it’s also something they want to enjoy using and receiving. The information confirmed that we needed to be consumer-driven and think not just about faucets, but how they related to a room, use, or surrounding space. Our future demanded it.

What about you, my HR colleagues? What are ways you can do things differently? Another favorite Einstein wit goes: Insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.

3 Books about Goals, Objectives, Strategy, Results

2005-05-12T17:54:00.000+08:00

Favorite Books
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM

HARDBALL: Are you playing to play or playing to win?
By George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer
(Harvard Business School Press)

MILLION DOLLAR HABITS: Proven power practices to double and triple your income
By Brian Tracy
(Entrepreneur Press)

THE WORKFORCE SCORECARD: managing human capital to execute strategy
By Mark A. Huselid, Brian E. becker and Richard W. bEatty
(Harvard Business School Press)

So your organization has determined what you want to be (visioning) against which you assessed your internal capability and external opportunities. Now is the time to determine your strategy. You have to set your goals and the corresponding objectives to achieve them.

Authors Stalk and Lachenauer explains how winners in business have always played hardball: They engage in the virtual cycle of using every legitimate resource and strategy available to them to gain advantage over their competitors. With this competitive advantage attract more customers, gain market share, boost profits, reward their employees, and weaken their competitor’s position. Then they reinvest their gains in their businesses to improve product quality, expand their offerings and improve their processes, to further strengthen their competitive advantage. After a prolonged period of time, they achieve decisive advantage which gives them the decisive advantage to bring fundamental change to an entire industry, put their competitors in a reactive position, cause their partners and suppliers to make adjustments, and deliver so much value to their customers that their market share grows larger still.

If you want to play hardball and gain decisive advantage, your goals and objectives should focus on some strategies the authors suggest: unleash massive and overwhelming force, exploit anomalies, threaten your competitor’s sanctuaries, take it and make it your own, entice your competitor to retreat and break compromises.

As a strategic partner, how does HR enable your company to play hardball? The book Hardball gives you a glimpse of how people at the top play the business game to win.

Author Brian Tracy recommends that you think like an entrepreneur, i.e. with speed and flexibility. And he recommends this seven step formula for goal and objective setting and taking action. Step one is to decide exactly what you want in a specific area and write it down clearly in detail. Step two, set a deadline for the achievement of the goal. If it is a large goal, break it down into smaller parts and set sub-deadlines.

Step three, set your objectives or make a list of everything that you will have to do to achieve this goal. Four, Prioritize your objectives. Use the 80/20 Rule. Five, identify obstacles and limitations that is holding you back from achieving your goals. Six, take action. Do something immediately to start the process of goal attainment moving forward. Finally, seven, execute your objects and do something everyday that moves you toward your most important goals.

Million Dollar Habits gives you an idea how an entrepreneur thinks which you can very well apply to running your HR business and aligning to your corporate business.

For each goal and objective, you need to determine metrics to show HR’s contribution to the achievement of corporate goals. You can not use the traditional measures e.g. number of training programs conducted, number of new employees hired, number of people with 5, 10, 15, etc, years of service. Huselid, Becker and Beatty advocates for critical measures that really matter or that show the maximization of workforce potential. Examples for Right HR Practices: percent of non-entry-level jobs that have been filled from within in recent and over the last five years; percent regrettable turnover; proportion of absenteeism; retention rate of “A” players in key and non-core positions; percent of employees making suggestions; performance of newly hired applicants; and so forth.

They identified the link between the workforce and HR scorecards and how to collect and interpret workforce scorecard data. They suggest hundreds of measures that tie up to the achievement of the corporate vision. The Workforce Scorecard is a very useful tabletop reference for HR people.

Bookshelf
WHY CAN’T WE GET ANYTHING DONE AROUND HERE?: the smart manager’s guide to executing the work that delivers results.
By Robert E. Lefton and Jerome T. Loeb
(McGraw-Hill)

Books on Complexity, Performance, Competition

2005-04-20T17:35:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM
moje@mydestiny.net

CONQUERING COMPLEXITY IN YOU BUSINESS
By Michael L. George and Stephen A. Wilson
(McGraw-Hill Companies)

THE FOUR PILLARS OF HIGH PERFORMANCE
By Paul C. Light
(McGraw-Hill)

ON COMPETITION
By Michael E. Porter
(Harvard Business School Press)

It is not enough that we know where we want to go (vision, mission, values and strategic goals) to get there. The ever changing world of business forces us to analyze our circumstances and take stock of our resources and processes to get a more focused picture of our business environment and project them into the future—the place where we would implement our strategies.

Authors George and Wilson wrote: Somewhere in your business, there is too much complexity. It erodes profitability, impedes productivity, confuses customers, and adds non-recoverable costs that can kill you in the marketplace. But that’s only half the equation. You may also be losing out by having too little of the complexity where it counts—in the products, services and options you offer to customers. Customers call this value-added complexity “variety,” “options,” or “customization.”

Either way, as you will discover in Conquering Complexity in Your Business, the impact of complexity is enormous in terms of lost profit, and missed growth opportunities. George and Wilson identify two kinds of complexity and conclude that conquering these complexities will give your business the competitive edge.

Deliberate complexity. To respond to growing competition, companies make deliberate decisions to increase complexity, to expand their products and service lines, to constantly modify and redesign existing products/services. The net impact is more and more product/services variations chasing limited resources, which are growing more slowly than the rate of proliferation. Many companies are now choked by the complexity they offer to customers.

Unmanaged proliferation. Much of the complexity in business is unintentional. New products or services are often designed without consideration for what already exists, new activities are added to processes without thought to whether existing activities could be used or adapted; acquisitions are integrated with no thought to the resulting cost of complexity. These happen simply because no one has understood how incremental decisions made in isolation can result in very high complexity-related costs over time.

Therefore, George and Wilson recommend steps to diagnose and prioritize the complexity in your business before developing your strategies. 1) Identify which complexity creates value and which destroy value; 2) Quantify the costs this complexity imposes on your business; 3) Expose the underlying cause of the complexity and; 4. Evaluate whether potential new products/services will be worth the complexity they introduce into the systems.

This holds true for our human resources management. Most times our customer, our employees, feel weighed down by the complexity of HR policies, systems, programs and procedures we implement without a second look at the cost (time, money, space, etc) , results and impact of such programs. Time to analyze our capabilities and to adjust our HR initiatives within the sight of our corporate vision/mission/values and goals.

Other than the social, political and regulatory, economic, and technological factors in our external environment, it is the industry and competition factors that shape our strategy, guide us allocate our limited resources, and impact our business the most. Speaking of which brings to mind Michael Porter’s five forces governing competition in an industry. For the past two decades, Porter’s work has defined our fundamental understanding of competition and competitive strategy.

In the book On Competition, Porter, writing alone or in collaboration with other writers, discussed more in-depth the concepts of competition and strategy, competitiveness of locations and competitive solutions to societal problems.

The five contending forces are:

 The Industry: jockeying for position among current competitors
 Threat of new entrants
 Bargaining power of suppliers
 Bargaining power of customers
 Threat of substitute products or services

Porter writes: The strongest competitive force or forces determine the profitability of an industry and so are of greatest importance in strategy formulation. For example, even a company with a strong position in an industry unthreatened by potential entrants will earn low returns if it faces a superior or a lower cost substitute products. In such a situation, coping with the substitute product becomes the number one strategic priority. Knowledge of these underlying sources of competitive pressure provides the groundwork for a strategic agenda of action.

Porter stresses the need to look beyond product to function in defining a business, beyond national boundaries to potential international competition, and beyond the ranks of one’s competitors today to those that may become competitors tomorrow.

And I say that HR departments face varied competition at every aspect of the HR function. Internally we compete in terms of budget (our training budget is the first to be cut at crunch time), heart and time of our employees and management. Externally, we compete with other companies who offer more satisfying jobs and better opportunities, salaries and perks. It is time to take a close look at the environment, internal and external, where HR operates to determine and manage complexity.

Having explored our past, present and future; and recognized our potential, vulnerability and uncertainty; and crafted our strategy, let’s think of how to improve and maintain high performance to achieve business excellence.

Paul Light writes about The Four Pillars of High Performance, lessons from the Rand Corporation. Light says that a high performing organization is a “robust” organization. Robustness in organizations means the ability of an organization to protect itself against external turbulence, whether by hedging against vulnerabilities or by exploiting opportunities as they arise. It also means achieving extraordinary performance by adapting to changing circumstances. Being robust involves the effort to harden organizations against both environmental turbulence and their own vulnerabilities.

Light names and explains the four pillars of robustness or high performance as:
 Alertness. It is simply paying attention to what’s out there because you are under state-of-the-world uncertainty. You keep getting more and more data and finally you start to see. It resides in a basic commitment to rigorous monitoring of how the organization is doing at any given time.
 Agility. Assume that an organization actually sets a signpost and discovers that a loadbearing assumption is somehow failing and has the warning time to act. Although the knowledge might be interesting as a harbinger of turbulence ahead, it is useless unless the organization can react. Agility is also essential to effective teams. For example, in the Army, it is the ability to do multiple missions effectively and react in a very short period of time, even though they had not planned to do them all.
 Adaptability. It is the ability to rapidly adjust strategies and tactics to meet changes in the environment. Innovation is a form of adaptation, but not all adaptation is innovative. Adaptability requires the organizational capacity to react. It involves more than just preparing for surprise. It involves efforts to stay ahead of the traffic through both continuous and disruptive maneuvering. It is important to emphasize that all of this adaptability has been based on rigorous research and measurement. This leads to understanding how organizations allocate resources to any activity. Should they invest early or late? What are the short-term costs versus long-term costs?
 Alignment. It is one thing to change the planning process or initiate new strategies, introduce massive or targeted change, the organization as a whole must be aligned to vision, mission, values and goals. In a well-aligned system, linkages are clear and understood. It also involves cost control and careful measurement. It is a central consideration in building lean organizations and empowering employees.

Robustness entails investment in all corners of the organization, and potentially disruptive changes in how the organization operates. It requires more than a broad embrace of alertness, agility, adaptability and alignment. It is also necessary to accept the notion that there is no single future out there against which to plan and invest in contingencies that may never come to pass.

HR units and HR professionals can hedge against falling in love with and fiercely defensive of their programs and processes by developing robustness in order to respond more relevantly to the needs of the employees and the organization.

Bookshelf
How Breakthroughs Happen
By Andrew Hargadon
(Harvard Business School Press)

Abolishing Performance Appraisals
By Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc)

Art of Winning Commitment, and, Manager's Guide to Strategy

2005-03-01T09:48:00.000+08:00

book review for the personnel management association of the philippines (pmap) newsletter, march 2005 issue.

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM
Individual member (Paradigms & Paradoxes Corporation)


THE ART OF WINNING COMMITMENT: 10 ways leaders can engage minds, hearts and spirits By Dick Richards (AMACOM)	MANAGER’S GUIDE TO STRATEGY By Roger Formisano (McGraw-Hill Companies)

Bloorview MacMillan Children’s Centre of Ontario, Canada, enables children with disabilities and special needs to achieve their best. The vision is a heart stopper, “Defy Disability.” Dick Richards writes: “That’s all of it: two words. It suggests a world in which disability is met head on and challenged with resolve and dignity. More importantly it suggests that the leaders at Bloorview MacMillan care about something other than themselves. And it implies that the rest of them ought to do the same. The leadership of Bloorview MacMillan has crafted a declaration that is both a vision and a call to action."

‘Defy disability!’ addresses the reasons that leaders at the children center do what they do, and why followers ought to do the same, beyond their self-interest. Heather Roseveare, director of family and community relations at Bloorview MacMillan, said, “Our vision captures the heart of what we do—defy disability—but also how we do it, and why we do it.”

Author Richards continues: “Visions can be placed on a continuum from those that are self-referent at one end to those that are noble at the other. Self-referent visions are about what the organization and its people wish to become. Noble visions are about the contribution the organization’s leaders wish to make to some group of people.”

A vision that is self-referent casts doubt on an organization’s commitment. “For example, if an organization’s leaders state that they are committed to customer service, yet their vision is entirely self-referent, an onlooker might legitimately conclude that the commitment to customer service is merely political. In other words, customer service is not valued in and of itself, but as a means to an end—the organization’s own achievement. This political commitment to service is the likely source of contradictory messages to customers, such as, ‘Your call is important to us. All our representatives are currently busy helping other customers. Your call will be answered in twenty-two minutes.’ If the call truly was important, if the organization’s commitment was truly to customer service rather than to its own achievement, then the call would be answered immediately.“

Richards quotes Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild and Bidwell Training Center CEO Bill Strickland saying that part of a leader’s job is to make sure that the stockholders are cool. “The other part is to improve the planet, make a contribution, raise some decent kids, support your fellow man, help struggling social institutions in your community. You have many jobs, one of which happens to be making money. Strickland says of a noble vision, ‘it opens up the conversation and introduces a much broader agenda of items that are considered as part of our work life. We are going to lose our planet if leadership doesn’t start opening up this conversation to consider more than ‘me first’.”

Along with insight, storytelling and mobilizing, coming up with an inspiring vision is one of ways to win intellectual commitment of human energy. Dick Richards says that leaders can not lead without the commitment of others and understanding commitments in its various forms is central to t heir purposes. The four forms of commitment are political (commitment to something in order to gain something else), intellectual (commitment of the mind to a good idea), emotional (commitment that arises out of strong feelings), and spiritual (commitment to a higher purpose).

In fact all four commitments must be explicit or implicit in your vision in order for it to inspire. As analytical psychology founder Carl Gustav Jung theorized, “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your heart and soul.”

A vision serves as a statement about how a leader intends to create concrete reality out of her insight. Visions that have a noble rather than a self-referent quality are far more likely to win the commitment of others and to provide followers with a noble sense of who they are and who they are becoming.

To start you off on your strategic conversations, Richard suggests these questions.

ü Who, in your life experience, was practiced at vision?
ü To what degree are you practiced at vision?
ü What is it about vision that rings true for your current leadership role?
ü How important is vision to your further development as a leader?

According to leadership expert Burt Nanus, a vision is where tomorrow begins, for it expresses what you and others who share the vision will be working hard to create. Since most people don’t take the time to think systematically about the future, those who do—and who base strategies and actions on their vision—have inordinate power to shape the future.

Writer Elie Wiesel reminds us that “one must wager on the future. To save the life of a single child, no effort is superfluous. To make a tired old man smile is to perform an essential task. To defeat injustice and misfortune, if only for one instant, for a single victim, is to invent a new reason to hope.”

Roger Formisano says a powerful vision requires three things:

ü Goals: long-term objectives that will concentrate the efforts of every person in the company
ü Purpose or Mission statement: a compelling reason for the company to be in business
ü Values: principles that will guide the company as it fulfills its purpose and progresses toward its goals

Author Formisano says much of the negative perception about vision/mission statements revolves around the reality that for many organizations vision statements remain just that: statements, some words on a page. “But successful organizations make their concept of the future of the organization real, by testing every decision against the achievement of the vision goals and creating an environment in which strategy is more clearly understood and implemented throughout the organization.

“In recent studies, firms with formalized, articulated visions earned twice the return on equity as those firms without documented approaches. Such studies imply that there can be real shareholder value in creating structured vision.”

Formisano cited Starbucks’ lofty and bold goal and overriding objective--To establish Starbucks as the most recognized and respected brand in the world-- to explain why Starbucks stores are everywhere and reaping success. “Notice that the company wants to achieve both brand recognition and respect, globally. So Starbucks wants to be known, but more importantly, it wants to be known for a certain set of operating principles that leads to respect.”

“Starbucks vision does not end with its objective, however. The ‘picture’ of the Starbucks organization is clarified by its mission statement and guiding principles:

Mission: Establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles while we grow.

Principles:

1. Provide a great work environment and treat each other with respect and dignity.
2. Embrace diversity as an essential component in the way we do business.
3. Apply the highest standards of excellence to purchasing, roasting, and fresh delivery of our coffee.
4. Develop enthusiastically satisfied customers all of the time.
5. Contribute positively to our communities and our environment.
6. Recognize that profitability is essential to our future success.

Now, Formisano suggest that we look at Starbucks. “Write down the Starbucks vision and then visit a couple of Starbucks stores. Stay a little while and look around. Can you see the vision in action? Do you see a diversity, a commitment to customer satisfaction, and community development? Make notes on each of the components of the vision package and observe what elements of the strategy become apparent. For example, what happens if a customer’s order is prepared incorrectly or takes longer than it should? Is it consistent between stores?

“After your visits, ask yourself what Starbucks management might be doing to implement the strategy to achieve the corporate vision. Try to put yourself in their shoes: it will give you good ideas for implementing your own strategy.”

Do this for your own company. Check your vision/mission/values statement against what you see, hear, think, feel and do; against your policies and procedures; against your leadership styles. Check your postings in your bulleting boards. Check the reactions of your customers to your products and services. Is there congruence there?

The organization’s vision is the collective aspirations of everybody involved in the organization. It starts with individual personal visions. You don’t want to be seventy-year-old later thinking like a thirty-five year old asking, “What happened?” You want to make wonderful things happen, not only for yourself, but for all humanity.

Happy Easter!

Bookshelf:


DOES IT MATTER? Information Technology and the corrosion of competitive advantage By Nicolas Carr (Harvard Business School Press)	PRIMAL LEADERSHIP: Learning to lead with emotional intelligence By Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)

3 Books about Teams

2005-02-18T17:46:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM
Paradigms & Paradoxes Corporation

MAKING TEAMS WORK: 24 lessons for working together successfully
Michael Maginn
(McGraw-Hill)

Harvard Business Review on TEAMS THAT SUCCEED
(Harvard Business School Press)

SELLING IS A TEAM SPORT
Eric Baron
(Prima Publishing)

In the article “Speeding up Team Learning,” authors Amy Edmonson, Richard Bohmer and Gary Pisano write: “Cardiac surgery is one of medicine’s modern miracles. In an operating room no larger than many household kitchens, a patient rendered functionally dead—the heart no longer beating, the lungs no longer breathing—while a surgical team repairs or replaces damaged arteries or valves. A week later, the patient walks out of the hospital.”

“A conventional cardiac operation, which typically lasts two to four hours, unites four professions, and a battery of specialized equipment in a carefully choreographed routine. The surgeon and the surgeon’s assistant are supported by scrub nurse, a cardiac anesthesiologist and a perfusionist—a technician who runs the bypass machine that takes over the functions of the heart and lungs. A team in a typical cardiac surgery department performs hundreds of open-heart operations a year. Consequently, the well-defined sequence of individual tasks that constitute an operation becomes so routine that team members often don’t need works to signal the start of a new stage in the procedure; a mere look is enough.”

Unity in action. Teamwork. The authors found that success in learning came down to the way teams were put together and how they drew on their experience—in other words, on the teams’ design and management. “Teams that learned the new procedure most quickly shared three essential characteristics. They were designed for learning; their leaders framed the challenge in such a way that team members were highly motivated to learn; and the leaders’ behavior created an environment of psychological safety that fostered communication and innovation.”

The other topics in this compilation of research-based articles by various authors from the Harvard Business Review are: The Discipline of Teams, Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups, Why Bad Projects Are So Hard to Kill, What You Don’t Know About Making Decisions, Communities of Practice, How the Right Measures Help Teams Excel, and The Nut Island Effect: When Good Teams Go Wrong.

Likewise, it is often said that every member of an organization is a salesman for that organization. Author Eric Baron writes about “organization-wide selling—a way of doing business in which everyone in the organization participates at some level in the sales process.” “Selling is A Team Sport” is based on the simple idea that the single best differentiator (from your competitor) you can leverage is the people who make up your organization—provided you know how to deploy them effectively as value-adding resources that can knock the socks off your customers.

Eric Baron maintains that most people within every organization touch the customer, directly or indirectly with virtually everyone touching the customer in some way. Everybody in the organization takes responsibility for the customer in everything they do. Everyone, from the executives to workers on the shop floor, must consistently think about what they can do to provide outstanding customer satisfaction.

Imagine if you have an uninvolved surgeon, assistant, scrub nurse or profusionist in a cardiac surgery team. It often happens that a customer is persuaded to buy a product but eventually gets disappointed with value-diminishing after-sales service such as erroneous billing or curt telephone operator or smug executive and the list go on.

Eric Baron talks about making the problem-solving, customer-centered, organization-wide selling a reality by cultivating a customer-driven organization-wide selling culture. He reminds us that cultural change starts at the top and cascades down throughout the organization. Selling requires the whole organization acting together in unison to serve the customer.

Michael Maginn shares 24 lessons for working together successfully in his book, “Making Teams Work.” These are
• forge a clear, common goal
• clarify member skills and responsibilities
• take time for rules
• avoid predictable problems
• use the team constitution
• tell the new folks
• collaborate, collaborate, collaborate
• bring ideas to life
• leap to creativity
• makes solid decisions
• don’t compromise
• discover consensus
• seek a shared view
• practice consensus decision making
• use disagreement
• squash conflict viruses
• actively manage differences
• trust each other
• run good meetings
• regularly size up your team
• lead without dominating
• ask for help
• don’t give up

My favorite is “reward each other.”

Maginn writes: “When a team takes time to recognize individual contributions of team members, it is adding to the self-esteem of these people. It makes people feel good to be valued. It also builds a sense of community and mutually within the team. One way to recognize individual contribution is to send a ‘Love Bomb’ to each member. After a major project is completed or when difficult work has been tiring the team, get the team together to celebrate its members.

“Here is how a love bomb works: Each team member is supplied with a sheet of paper with the name of another team member on the top. The member writes a brief comment about a quality, characteristics, or specific contribution of the person and what that has meant to the writer. After everyone completes their comment, the papers are passed one person to the right. Now the member adds his or her comment to the one already on the page. When completed, the paper is passed again to the right until each team member has comments on each page.

“The leader of the team can read these ‘Love Bombs’ and present them to the team members. When this is followed up with a lunch on the company or a trip to the ballpark, then the feeling of being part of a community which values each member is reinforced.”

Additional ideas that cost nothing are: give team members a choice of assignment for the next project, post pictures of the team in a public setting, say ”thank you” for the work.

BOOK SHELF from Harvard Business School Press:

Harvard Business Review on COMPENSATION

Harvard Business Review on BUSINESS VALUE OF IT

CHANGING MINDS: the art and science of changing our own minds and other people’s minds
By Howard Gardner

3 Books on Action Inquiry by Leaders and Managers

2005-01-18T13:52:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM
Paradigms & Paradoxes Corporation

A Bias for Action: How effective managers harness their willpower, achieve results, and stop wasting time
By Heike Bruch & Sumantra Ghoshal
Harvard Business School Press

Action Inquiry: the secret of timely and transforming leadership
By Bill Torbert and Associates
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Inspire! What great leaders do
By Lance Secretan
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Bruch and Ghoshal recall the origin of the phrase: Crossing the Rubicon:

“On January 11, 49 B.C., Julius Caesar made a crucial decision: to cross the river Rubicon with his army, thereby effectively declaring civil war against Pompey, who held power in Rome. With the words alea iacta est (the die is cast), Caesar resolved to return with his leions to the city. Once he crossed the Rubicon and ventured into the Roman heartland, he knew there was no turning back. Either he and his soldiers would take the city, or Pompey would destroy them.”

The authors aver that Caesar’s decision changed the course of history. “Before he crossed the river, taking Rome had been merely an idea, a wishful desire that he might achieve. After the crossing, it became an unalterable course, with the force of his whole will behind it—which in itself practically ensured success.”

Bruch and Goshal assert that to move from “motivation” to “willpower,” a manager must undergo precisely this decisive shift to total commitment. “Managers who engage the power of their will typically have crossed their own personal Rubicon. Before it, a person experiences desire—the driving force behind often volatile and superficial motivation. At that time, a person can always go back.”

A Bias for Action gives actionable tips for harnessing our willpower to achieve results, distinguishing active nonaction (endless meetings, emails and phone calls) from purposeful action, marshaling energy and focus and, thereby, crossing our own Rubicon. It also advocates cultivating a company of action takers by developing purposeful managers, unleashing organizational energy for collective action and freeing people to act. It gives instructions on how organizations can move from Corrosion, Resignation and Comfort Zones to productive Zone and stay there a long while. The authors remind us that management is the art of doing and getting done.

On the other hand, Bill Torbert bats for Action Inquiry (AI) as a transforming leadership skill to finally make things happen. He asserts that AI is not a set of prescriptions for behavior that, when followed, invariably manipulate situations as we initially wish and yield the success we dreamed of. He says AI is not a process that can be followed in an imitative, mechanical way, learning a few ideas and imagining that parroting them back to others occasionally means we are doing AI.

Torbert claims that AI begins we (any one of us, or any family, or organization) experience some sort of gap between t\what we wish to do and what we are able to do. Ai is simultaneously productive and self-assessing.

Tolbert identifies four parts of speech used in AI:

1. Framing – explicitly stating what the purpose is for the present occasion, what the dilemma is that everyone is at the meeting to resolve, what assumptions are shared or not shared. That is, to put one’s perspective as well as understanding of the others’ perspectives out onto the table for examination.
2. Advocating – explicitly asserting an option, perception, feeling, or strategy for action in relatively abstract terms, e.g. “We’ve got to get shipments out faster.” “Do you have a pen?” is a question which is easily answerable by a no. In contrast, “I need a pen (advocacy). Do you have an extra one (inquiry)?” might yield an answer like, “No, but there’s a whole box in the secretary’s office.”
3. Illustrating – telling a bit of a concrete story that puts meat on the bones of the advocacy and thereby orients and motivates others more clearly. For example, “We’ve got to get shipments out faster (advocacy). Our biggest client has got a rush order of his own, and he needs our parts before the end of the week (illustration).”
4. Inquiring –questioning others in order to learn something from them. In principle, Tolbert reminds, the simplest thing in the world; in practice, one of the most difficult things in the world to do effectively. One reason is that we often inquire rhetorically, as we just did. We don’t give the other the opportunity to respond; or we suggest by our tone that we don’t really want a true answer. “How are you?” we say a dozen times each day not really wanting to know. “You agree, don’t you?” makes it clear what answer we want.

The author also writes that AI is a way of organizing and proceeded with how this is done. Read the book and find out how.

I love quotations and the book Inspire! has lots of them because it deals precisely with inspiring people to act. Author Secretan says motivation is something we “do” to someone; inspiration is something that is the result of a soulful relationship.

This book is a good companion on chilly evenings like we are having nowadays (thanks to the winds from Siberia) and it also helps us plan for the next day. Read the book for tips and how-to’s on many topics of inspiring self and others. Meanwhile, let us meditate on some of the quotations:
• Keep your fears to yourself, but share your inspirations with others (Robert Louis Stevenson)
• Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely. (Karen Kaiser Clark)
• Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. (Mahatma Gandhi)
• Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the pay-it-safers, the creatures of commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. (Sir Cecil Beaton)
• Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. (Albert Einstein)
• I’ve had many problems in my life—most of which never happened. (Mark Twain)
• Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. (Carl Gustav Jung)
• Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their jobs done. (Peter Drucker)
• I don’t dream at night, I dream all day; I dream for a living. (Steven Spielberg)
• Courage is the power to let go of the familiar. (Raymond Lindquist)

Bookshelf

Balanced Scorecard Step-by-Step: Maximizing performance and maintaining results
By Paul R. Niven
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The Strategy Maps: Converting intangible assets into tangible outcomes
By Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton
Harvard Business School Press

101 Ways to Nourish Your Soul

2004-12-23T21:55:00.000+08:00

The Manila Times
Business Times p.B1
Thursday, December 23, 2004
http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2004/dec/23/yehey/business/20041223bus6.html

LEARNING & INNOVATION
By Moje Ramos-Aquino
Nourishing the soul

Dalawang tulog na lang at Pasko na. Let’s put our discussion of the balanced Scorecard at the back burner meantime and concentrate on this very special occasion of the birthday of Jesus.

Let’s take cues from Mitch Finley’s book, 101 Ways to Nourish Your Soul, on how best we could commemorate this Holy day.

• Be generous to the point of extravagance. How much money do you intend to use this season for your “wants”? Why not give it to someone who could use it for “essentials.” Give it to somebody you don’t know and doesn’t know you and don’t tell that person it came from you. I am sure you will be rewarded with wide smile, bright face and unadulterated happiness.

• You could give your time generously. Baby-sit for a neighbor who could not go to Mass because she has little child/children or old-sit for a senior citizen in your neighborhood. You and the children and oldies could delight in rereading the story of Jesus’ birth and childhood. Con todo action y emotion. Or simply spend more time with your spouse and children, instead of attending every party in town.

• Take a walk. Instead of just sitting down there waiting for visitors, move! I had a most peaceful Christmas last year in Batangas. After Mass, we spent the rest of the day and early evening swimming in the clean, clear waters of Anilao and walking barefoot on sand and rocks. Since we were not expecting visitors, we cooked only enough and did not have to eat leftovers the following days.

• Make your own Quesadillas. Here’s a recipe from the Victor-Roldan Family (Marivic, Anna, Patricia and Mommy). Top one piece soft tortilla with chopped tomatoes, garlic and onions; grated or sliced mozzarella cheese; thinly sliced beef or pork or tuna or chicken; another layer of mozzarella; sandwich with another tortilla piece. Cook in greaseless pan or oven toaster on both sides. Cut into four. Serve hot. You can prepare ingredients days ahead and store them in the ref. These could be eaten for snacks or meals.

• Give up bitterness, resentment, whining, blaming and hopelessness. “Life is a mix of good and bad, happy and sad. You have to expect that sometimes life will kick sand in your face. So what? Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back to living. So things didn’t work out the way you hope they would. All the same, you can try something else.”

• Fast. “We have a thing about food. We eat not just for body and soul togetherness. We also eat because we have nothing else to do at the moment. We eat for recreational purposes. We eat food when what we crave most is friendship or simple companionship. We eat when we crave love. We eat when we crave God. Hard to believe, but we do. Whatever you can get a handle on, don’t eat between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., for example. Or make it a full 24 hours. That can be good.” If you have health problems, consult your doctor first.

Here are some Christmas wishes from our friends and readers.

• Vic Navales, past president of Cebu’s Durian Toastmasters Club and president of Navales Foods: May Good Lord give us all the courage and will to surmount problems. May He give us peace and happiness.

• Gigie Peñalosa, president of VCP Trading International: PEACE and PROGRESS—for our country and for ourselves. POLITICAL WILL on the part of our country’s leaders—to weed out graft and corruption at all levels and in all forms. The simple blessings of love, peace, togetherness and good health for my family and friends.

• Abe Pagtama, Filipino and Hollywood actor: for this coming year, more commercial and acting gig.

• Michael Chua, TM District 75 governor: My wish is for Philippine Toastmasters to regain the limelight in the world. What I wish for then is for more toastmaster clubs to be built in the coming weeks. Not only will we go up the rankings—the organization can touch more lives and make them better.

• Nic L. Lim, director for Human Resources at Universal Robina Corp.: For our government to take on our HR Agenda for Nation Building and help us make a call for a united action. For our government to pursue a united approach in addressing our key issues as a nation. For the Filipino people in general to instill discipline and involvement in contributing to making the Philippines a better place to live in. For world peace.

Merry Christmas from Bangkok, Thailand! No translation in Thai language because they don’t celebrate Christmas here like we do.

(Please send your Christmas wishes to moje@mydestiny.net.)

Peacock in the Land of Penguins, Glass Ceiling, Way of Go, Lean Against The Wind

2004-12-18T17:43:00.000+08:00

Favorite Books
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM
Paradigms & Paradoxes Corporation

A Peacock in the Land of Penguins: A fable about creativity and courage
By BJ Gallagher Hateley and Warren H. Schmidt
(Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc)

Dancing on the Glass Ceiling
By Candy Deemer and Nancy Fredericks
(McGraw-Hill Companies)

The Way of Go: 8 ancient strategy secrets for success in business and life
By Troy Anderson
(Simon & Schuster, Inc)

Lean Against the Wind: How to Face the Future
By James McKarns
(St. Pauls Philippines)

These past years have been terrifying and trying times. We encountered many and unsought crises after crises: environmental disasters, economic meltdowns, dreaded diseases, bankruptcies of the mind and pocket, disappearing resources, wanton promiscuity and many others.

So how do we face the future courageously? Let’s take some cues from famous authors.

“Laugh often,” says James McKarns. “Laughter has been called the “sunshine of the soul. It produces warmth, light-heartedness, friendliness and is a pleasant means of sharing with others. Humor and consequent laughter melts away many icy tensions and frustrations which otherwise could grind us to a mental and emotional halt. It has been said that when we have a serious problem, the second best thing to do, next to finding a solution, is to find humor in it. That enables us to be accepting or, at least, more patient until a real solution is discovered.”

McKarns related the story of former “Saturday Review” editor Norman Cousins who suffered the advanced stages of a connective tissues disease and whose chances of recovery were diagnosed as poor. Cousins took on a steady diet of old Marx Brothers movies and some of the Candid Camera shows and laughed his way to enduring good health. “That internal doctor is no joke. We begin the healing process by believing in the God-given curative powers of our own bodies and minds. If we encourage our minds and bodies to heal themselves, they will.”

McKarns strongly advocates a selective mental diet of hope, kindness, gentleness and concern for others to turn us into better people with higher motives and loftier ideals. He observes that the thoughts we think, more than the food we eat, shape us into what we really are.

Likewise, Troy Underson suggests a pro-active and direct approach to the future culled from his studies of the ancient game called Go, also called “game of geniuses.” In this overly competitive world, he shares essential elements of strategy and competition he culled from the game. Playing the game is like participating in the TV reality show of Donald Trump.
• How to make use of limited resources and time to produce the largest gain
• Which initiatives to continue and which to abandon
• When to lead and when to follow your opponent
• How to weigh competing interests among different units
• How to enter a market where the competition is already well established
• How to proceed t o ensure success if the competition enters your market
• How to create a strategic plan when the market changes quickly
• How to go global but think locally

Underson says 27 million people have played the game including Mao Tse Tung, Bill Gates and John Nash (A Beautiful Mind). He includes instructions on how to play the game and how to prepare the board for two players.

I love fables and I love “A Peacock in the Land of the Penguins.” University of California professor Judy Rosener rave review: “I loved it! This is an engaging tale of the challenges and dilemmas faced by those who are different as they struggle for success and fulfillment—as well as the challenges and dilemmas of those who are members of the power elite in today’s organizations, Truly a fable for our times.”

In Part II Tips and Tools for Feathered Friends is a simple test to determine if you are a peacock or other type of exotic bird that goes:

• Do you frequently feel like you don’t fit in—that you are different in some fundamental way?
• Do you get criticized for not being a team player (a euphemism for not conforming to group norms)?
• Do you feel pressured by your boss or others to change in some significant way to fit in?
• Do you feel ostracized, lonely, left out of the loop of information and decision-making?
• Are you unable to identify with anyone as a role model at the top of your organization?
• Do you often feel under- or unappreciated for your talent and skill, while others who are less talented get promoted and rewarded?
• Do you often try to figure out “what’s wrong with me”?
• Do you feel stifled, stuck, frustrated by some unseen “system”?
• Are you frequently ignored, interrupted, or discounted when you make comments or suggestions at meetings?

Now, get the book (Third Edition) to know if you are a peacock, a penguin or a struggler. It is good to know so could play Go cleverly. Take a cue or two on how to unleash your creativity and assert your individualism in the land where conformity is rule.

Speaking of orthodoxy, women generally feel they must and try to fit into the accepted, masculine-driven pattern of business. In Dancing on the Glass Ceiling, authors Candy Deemer and Nancy Fredericks teach women how to utilize the power and effectiveness of playing like a woman.

First, women should accept the fact that they are grandly different from men and “dance on the glass ceiling rather than muscle your way through it..” Deemer and Fredericks writes, “This shift in thinking can have an enormous impact on the outside world. It’s called the ‘butterfly effect.’ Research has shown that a single butterfly fluttering its wings in China has the potential to magnify the resulting airflow throughout the world, even affecting weather in the United States.”

The authors challenges women, thus, if a butterfly can do all that, imagine the power that women have to create results in their own career and in their own company simply by allowing themselves to follow a more natural pathway to success—a feminine pathway.

They observe that women seemed to gravitate instinctively toward certain leadership behaviors that were not even on the radar screens of most men, such as intuitive decision making, the special talent for nurturing subordinates and the automatic ability to interpret both the verbal and nonverbal layers of communication. “Yet neither the women nor their organizations recognized the powerful role these assets play in fueling the companies’ success.”

With these in mind, let us welcome 2005 with all our optimism and confidence! God promised He will bless and keep us always. Let’s make that happen.

Change Without Pain..., and, Don’t Oil the Squeaky Wheel

2004-11-18T17:27:00.000+08:00

MY FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM

Change Without Pain: How managers can overcome initiative overload, organizational chaos and employee burnout
By Eric Abrahamson
(Harvard Business School Press, 2004)

Don’t Oil the Squeaky Wheel: And 19 other contrarian ways to improve your leadership effectiveness
By Wolf J. Rinke, Ph.D.
McGraw-Hill Company, 2004)

What are some of the growing adversities that we experience today in our organization? Initiatives overload that are often start and stop, flavor-of-the-month-with-little-follow-through type programs. Repetitive changes that result in chaos. No change at all or status quo for a long stretch of time.

What are some of the effects of these malaise? General anxiety, cynicism and burnout. Loss of organizational memory. Resistance to and from change. Organizational paralysis and demotivation. Important organizational issues are sidestepped and priorities are misplaced. Organization mired in forming and storming stages of team development.

For example, Eric Abrahamson cited many dysfunctional consequences of downsizing:
• Destruction of employee and customer trust and loyalty
• Loss of personal relationships between employees and customers
• Disruptions of smooth, predictable routines in the firm
• Increase in and formalization of rules, standardization and rigidity
• Decrease in creativity
• Loss of interpersonal interactions over time, leading to decreased cross-unit and cross-level knowledge.
• Less documentation and, therefore, less sharing of information about changes
• Loss of employee productivity
• Loss of common organizational culture
• Loss of innovativeness
• Increased resistance to change
• Decreasing employee moral, commitment and loyalty
• Escalation of politicized special-interest groups and political infighting
• Risk aversion and conservatism in decision making
• Increased costs and redundancies
• Increasing interpersonal conflict
• Negative effects on the personal health of employees, e.g., increases in headaches, stomach problems, and elevated blood pressure, as well as reports of increased drinking and smoking
• Increases in negative psychological symptoms, e.g., anxiety, depression, insomnia, feelings of helplessness, cognitive difficulties
• Loss of self-esteem, loss of self-mastery, dissatisfaction with self, pessimism, powerlessness and rigidity
• Decrease in family cohesion, increases in conflict, decline in spouses’ psychological well-being, increases in domestic arguments, deteriorating family climate and a sevenfold increase in divorce and separation.

What are some ways we can save our organization from these creative destructions?

Eric Abrahamson suggests a range of hands-on tools and techniques in the areas of:
People: how to redeploy rather than downsize talent.
Processes: How to salvage rather than reengineer.
Structure: how to recombine rather than reorganize organizational parts
Culture: How to revive rather than reinvent core values
Social Networks: How to leverage rather than automate human networks.

As leaders, what can you personally do? To increase your leadership effectiveness in times of changes and at all times, Wolf Rinke proposes these: be selfish, don’t manage people, don’t be proud, don’t be tough, don’t play to win,, don’t prove yourself, practice kick in desire, not kick in the ass, don’t have people work for you, don’t focus on bottomline, trust all people all the time, don’t worry about pay, don’t tell people what to do, don’t downsize, don’t respond to the urgent, don’t be committed.

Particularly, Dr. Rinke asserts not to oil the squeaky wheels or those habitual troublemakers, whiners and blamers. Instead, he advises these steps:

• Take complete responsibility. Make formal announcement that as of a certain date the mantra of your organization is: If it’s to be, it’s up to me. Put this mantra on business-card size cards and distribute to all employees. Then consistently take complete responsibility for all your actions and insist that everyone else do the same.
• Reject the word “try.” Don’t accept the word “try.” Try provides for built-in failure before anyone starts. Even a lack of success will meet the requirements employees have set for themselves. After all, they did try. On the other hand, “Will” demonstrates commitment, action and a high probability of success.
• Stamp out blame-game conversations. If necessary, make up posters with the words “blame game” crossed as as in traffic signs. Anytime someone engages in this behavior, point to the poster.
• Remind yourself often. Pay attention to what you are recognizing and rewarding. Always keep in mind that over the long term, whatever you reward is what you will get more of, whatever you ignore will go away, and whatever you punish will not be repeated, at least not while you are around.
• Foster independent actions. When team members bring you their problems—especially those who complain all the time—ask them to bring you one to three options or solutions for every problem. Then ask them to function as the “primary mover” who puts together a cross-functional team that will address the problem.
• Get people to work together. When people are undermining each other, call every one together and ask them what will it take to get them to work together as a team.
• Place people in positions that enable them to build their strengths. Find out what your team members love to do, and do everything in your power to place them in those positions.
• Avoid competition. Have people compete against themselves or against standards. Avoid having people compete against each other within the same organization. Losers becomes demoralized and will pull everyone around them down.
• Do what’s unpopular. Strive to have team members respect you, not like you. When you want everyone to like you, you avoid the tough decisions, you avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, you avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset. Treating everyone equally regardless of contributions will anger your most productive team members.
• As a last resort, resolve conflicts. Serious conflict seldom, if ever, resolves itself.

Making Work Work (Jaeger)

2004-10-15T13:51:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino, FPM
President, Paradigms & Paradoxes Corporation

MAKING WORK WORK for the Highly Sensitive Person
By Barrie Jaeger, Ph.D.
The McGraw-Hill Companies

One of our strong cultural orientation, but definitely not a strength, is our sense of personalism. This attitude makes us sense things through the senses and emotions, feel deeply and connect emphatically with others. The boundaries between individuals and the environment are frequently blurred. This is where a lot of conflict at work begins.

Dr. Jaeger describes a highly sensitive person as having a heightened awareness of the environment, thereby, picking up more subtle details, information, and stimulation with great intensity that impacts one’s perception of self. It means taking things too personally, that you worry so much or give importance to the slightest change in language or gesture.

Dr. Jaeger suggests taking this Workplace Sensitivity Test (developed by Stephanie T. Machell, Psy.D, Catherine Post, CSW and Dr. Jaeger) that covers many areas we are most likely to be highly sensitive at work. As you look at the items, work experiences may come to mind, or not.

The scoring is visual, so you do not have to give yourself an absolute number. Take it at a time of quiet and reflection. There is no perfect answer. This is an opportunity to know yourself and look at the bigger picture of how you experience work as a Sensitive Person. You may want to take this test again at different stages of your life.

Scoring: Low (0), Medium (5) and high (10).

 I often accommodate the needs of others at the expense of my own
 I am often tempted to withdraw or actually do withdraw rather than deal with conflict
 I have been told that I can be overwhelming to others
 I feel out-of-synch with the prevailing cultural norms
 I have been made uncomfortable or even unwell by environmental conditions that don’t seem to affect others
 I have been told I’m too intense
 I have been told I’m too serious
 I continue to process experiences long after they’re over
 At times, I take on more than I can realistically do because everything sounds so interesting.
 I need more sleep than most people
 Having a busy schedule or too many days overwhelms me, even if I enjoy all that I am doing and want to do it
 I can see all sides of an issue, not just the one I prefer/agree with
 I notice small changes in others and my environment
 I become readily absorbed in what I am doing
 If you ask me for 50 different uses for a break I could give 75
 I find it hard to walk away from things
 I have strong attachment to people, places, things
 My mind goes blank when I’m caught on the spot
 I am deeply disturbed by others insensitivities
 I find it hard to do things that don’t interest me
 I cry when I’m angry/overwhelmed more easily than others
 I need time alone
 Sometimes I feel like a raw exposed nerve
 I’m afraid of infringing on other’s rights if I asked for mine
 I am excessively aware of others feelings
 I need work congruent with my values
 I have a bizarre sense of humor
 I am good at calming and pressuring others
 I pick up the feelings others don’t acknowledge having
 Others’ moods—and even their presence—affects me
 I sometimes feel irritable/overwhelmed around others without knowing why

In subsequent chapters, Dr. Jaeger offers Checklists for Drudgery and Craft and suggests ways of dealing with our sensitivity and take time to heal.
• Pay attention to subtle shifts that tell us it is time to bring down the stimulation
• Manage your stress. Don’t ignore your feelings, define them. What do you need to feel a little happy?
• Build and use skills of depth processing, self-awareness, personal discoveries, building long-lasting relationships with others. Stop comparing yourself to others. Stay at the moment and stop trying to keep pace with life.
• Use humor to help you unwind, relax and heal.
• Recognize what isn’t working for you and move toward what does. Find work that stimulates you, where you could learn new skills, poses reasonable challenges and provides a decent income.
• Communicate with others without feeling vulnerable, too open and exposed and let others see you a little more clearly

This is where HR could help their high performing, high potential employees avoid being derailed by their over sensitivity. I also would like to recommend the other books whose covers are on this page.
 How to Work for an Idiot: survive and thrive without killing your boss by John Hoover (Career Press)
 Enlightened Office Politics: understanding, coping with and winning the game—without losing your soul by Michael Dobson and Deborah Dobson (AMACOM)
 Cultural Intelligence: people skills for global business by David Thomas and Kerr Inkson (Berrett-Koehler Publishers)
 Managing Effectively consisting of four handbooks: The New Management Handbook, How to Motivate Every Employee, Leadership When the Heat’s On and Dealing with Difficult People (The McGraw-Hill Companies)

No Scrupples

2004-08-16T17:41:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino

No Scrupples? Managing to be responsible in a turbulent world
General Editor: Roger Cowe
(Spiro Press USA)

At CNBC last Sunday evening, the very young and dapper owner-president of Thai Express declared assertively that one cannot stay long in business if he is in business primarily for money, pride or ego. He said that to stay long in business and compete globally, one must love what he’s doing and must be fair to his employees and customers.

Enron Corporation, Baladjay, Multinational Telephone Investors Corporation (Multitel), Halliburton, Mateo Management Group, Worldcom, ICS Exports, Tyco, Ma. Teresa Santos Trading, Tibayan Group, Ponzi, Power Homes, Patrick Corporation, Marcopper, and many others similarly situated. What do they have in common?

One fantastic read if you are interested in the business of your company and how you could enhance your HR function and help make your company more “fair” to your employees and your customers or if you are thinking of investing your hard-earned money is the book, No Scruples? Managing to be responsible in a turbulent world. edited by Roger Cowe.

Let me share with you this Foreword by Will Hutton, chief executive of The Work Foundation and author.

“The idea that private business organizations are sovereign fiefdoms with no obligation to their workforces or customers, other than the dictates of profit maximization, is in historical terms very curious—even eccentric.

“The act of incorporation in all capitalist societies was originally conceived as winning a license to trade in return for the acceptance of obligations set out by the government of the day. The notion that corporation status somehow conferred absolute privileges, and that society should be grateful for the existence of corporations, would have struck early capitalists as absurd. Society and company were intertwined.

“The same was true throughout the 20th century, at least until the collapse of communism. Companies were mindful that they had a core economic and social purpose that was the reason for their existence, and from the pursuit of which they made profits. Unilever, typically, set out to make the best ‘every day things for every day folk,’ while every American company had founding document setting out its economic rationale and moral purpose. In the competition with communism it was vital that companies sought legitimacy, and they accepted their obligations willingly as part of their license to trade.

It is only over the last 20 years that the doctrine has been born that companies are solely in business to maximize shareholder value, and devil take the hindmost. Yet the businesses and wider societies this doctrine is generating are unlovely and much criticized—even while we, through our pension fund, and insurance companies, own the majority of company equity. We need to remind corporations that they are embedded in society, enjoy its fruits, and must recognize its rules. They are not somehow important that they are above the law—nor should the law be shaped to reflect their sole needs.

“In No Scruples? a range of authors from across the debate examine the current crisis in corporate status and attitudes, and call for a return to our roots.

“We have learned that markets operate better than their alternatives, but that does not mean that they and their corporate actors are above criticism or that they have no wider social obligations. No Scruples? urges the adoption of a different culture and attitude.

“Capitalism is far too valuable a system to be allowed to go feral on us, but that is where it is headed unless we all take more seriously the propositions advanced in this fascinating book.”

Being in business is like living in a fishbowl. Its impact on society will be scrutinized in ever-greater detail and with increasing sophistication. How companies fare and react to such scrutiny will be important to the “development of their reputation, their attractiveness to staff and investors, their relations with governments and their ability to retain consumer loyalty.”

As the teenager sitting next to you would say, “to be fair!” I wonder how many companies could pass such meticulous scrutiny and come out squeaky clean?

And to the HR professional, what will you do if your company is found unscrupulously wanting?

Life is a Series of Presentations... (Jeary w/ Dower and Fishman)

2004-06-20T13:48:00.000+08:00

Personnel Management Association of the Philippines
PMAP NEWSLETTER
May 2004 Issue

Favorite Books
By Moje Ramos-Aquino
President, Paradigms & Paradoxes Corporation

Life Is a Series of Presentations: 8 Ways to Punch Up Your People Skills at Work, at Home, Anytime, Anywhere
By Tony Jeary with Kim Dower and JE Fishman
Simon & Schuster

The possibility “to change the contents of another person’s mind at a particular time and place” is, indeed, boundless. On a daily basis, there are numerous opportunities for us to advance our ideas, values, thoughts and feelings at home, at work, anytime, anywhere and influence the choices of our listeners.

What are common presentation opportunities that we take for granted?
• Talking to a an officemate in our or his/her cubicle
• Talking to a client on the telephone
• Participating in a meeting
• Leading a meeting
• Speaking to thousands of graduating students
• Delivering an after-dinner talk at a Rotary meeting
• Discussing the value of eating vegetable with your kids
• Saying no to your son’s request to use your car
• Convincing your spouse to switch the TV channel to CNBC
• And many others

In other words, every time you open your mouth to speak or to make a thumbs ups sign you are making a presentation.

In this book, author Tony Jeary writes that unless you’re a hermit living on a mountaintop, your life largely consists of your interactions with the people around you. He adds that whether you call them presentation skills or people skills, his eight essential practices will allow you to master any interaction, whether it involves a roomful of colleagues, a small group, or just one other person.

This book is a useful and handy reference for making a point and reaching out to our audience. More a skill than a talent, presenting, Mr. Jeary asserts, requires techniques and tactics. Instead of dominating or manipulating others, presenters should simply pursue desired outcomes with confidence.

One reviewer suggested the mnemonic IPRESENT to easily recall these techniques and tactics.

I – Involve your audience
P – Prepare your audience
R – Research your presentation arsenal
E – Explain why
S – State management: Achieve proper mental states
E – Eliminate unknowns and turn them into knowns
N – kNow your audience
T – Tailor your presentation throughout

Let us zero in on eliminating unknowns and turning them into knowns (Chapter 7, Essential 3: Conquer the Sum of All Fears). Mr. Jeary raised these very important points.

• Nervousness with regard to public speaking derives from what Carl Jung concluded was the hard-wired mother of all fears: fear of the unknown. Developing what-ifs scenarios will help turn these unknowns into known quantities and help us overcome some of our anxieties and uncertainties.
• By reducing that surprise element we can have a significant impact on the smoothness of our delivery. As the famous prayer goes, make sure to control that you can control, try not to bother with those you can not control and have the wisdom to know the difference.
• Plan what to say. The effectiveness of any presentation of any presentation depends greatly upon our confidence in the quality and appropriateness of our presentation’s content. Do your homework.
• You may use the technique of political mapping which is assessing the importance of various stakeholders in a meeting and determining the impact they may have on your desired outcomes. This technique involves considering every individual’s degree of potential influence on a decision or direction while also taking into account his or her existing position on the matter. This is especially valuable when you are dealing with emotional or highly controversial issues and need to anticipate specific positions or concerns in advance of the meeting.
• Take into account the environment (setting and physical set-up) and the context of the situation in which you are presenting. Bulletproof your presentation by determining the answers to the who, what, when, why, how, how much and what else questions of your presentation.
• Practice your presentation at every opportunity. Parrying with a mock audience may help appreciate how advanced your skill level is and instill further confidence
• If you have to make a team presentation, one of the ways to take the “unknown” of your partner’s performance to a “known” for you is by instilling confidence in your co-presenter.

Life, indeed, is a series of presentations. And we have these tips from Mr. Jeary and enough practice in our daily activities to prepare us for those big or career-enhancing presentations we make at work. Enjoy your presentations

Business Process Mapping (Jacka and Keller)

2004-06-14T13:47:00.000+08:00

FAVORITE BOOKS
By Moje Ramos-Aquino
President, Paradigms & Paradoxes Corporation

In her Talk Asia show at CNN, Lorraine Hahn asked Giorgio Armani how he is now ensuring that his very successful Emporio Armani outlives him. Mr. Armani’s immediate reply was by structuring the company esp. the creative, commercial and financial processes and to manage the cash flow. And since he has no children to succeed him, he added that he is preparing many successors, not just one.

Indeed, how do we keep our high-potential and high-productive employees? How do we help employees be motivated? How do we foster a culture of service excellence for internal and external customers? How do we make sure that what we are doing and offering are what our customers want?

Otherwise, our employees will simply follow existing systems, processes and rules without question. How do we encourage learning & innovation at work when we emphasize strict compliance to policies and procedures. How many times do we get frustrated when we a service provider tells us, “sorry, that’s our policy,” instead of doing something to help us?

In the book, Business Process Mapping: Improving Customer Satisfaction, Authors J. Mike Jacka and Paulette J. Keller wrote about process mapping and evaluation as a powerful tool to ensure that true value is being provided to customers, both internal and external.

The authors cleverly used movie making as example to explain the subject of Process Mapping and made reading the book easy and fun. “At its core, the story of Pinocchio is a process. As all good processes do, it as an input (Geppetto carving a puppet and wishing it were a real boy), it has an output (Pinocchio becoming a real boy), and in between it has a series of events—the actions—that achieve that transformation. Disney’s animators documented that process by the use of story boarding.” Process Mapping is to business what storyboarding is to movies.

Having done these, the benefits derived from Process Mapping are:

1. It is a holistic approach that helps explore the interrelationships of processes in the entire organization.
2. It is accomplished in a way that allows all employees—from executives to line personnel, including janitors—to have buy-in to the finished product.
3. It helps employees understand how their work adds value and instill additional pride in their work.
4. It focuses on the customer, both the next process and the final user of the product, and how that person sees the company.

The book contains lots and lots of examples and easy step-by-step instructions. The four major steps are fully explained. The book jacket described them briefly as:

1. Process identification – attaining a full understanding of all the steps of a process.
2. Information gathering – identifying objectives, risks, and key controls in a process.
3. Interviewing and mapping – understanding the point of view of individuals in the process and designing actual maps.
4. Analysis – utilizing tools and approaches to make the process run more effectively and efficiently.

Included in the book are various specialized tools like questionnaires, process analysis worksheets, hierarchy/ownership maps, and the techniques to be used in developing effective process maps.

The challenge is not only to make it stick, but to glue it, as in the words of the authors, “drill it down.” The authors quote Professor Diane Ravitch of Columbia University Teachers College: “The person who knows “how” will always have a job. The person who knows “why” will always be his boss.

The book is a must for HROD people and others in the management level. It is also for all employees who want to take the initiative of improving their jobs, making it worthwhile to understand how their work makes the world a better place.

What is nationalism? (Review on the Filipina Toral's McGraw-Hill book)

2004-05-20T13:45:00.000+08:00

Patricia Evangelista, 19, Mass Communications sophomore of the University of the Philippines recently bested 59 student contestants from 37 countries in the 2004 International Public Speaking competition conducted by the English Speaking Union In London reports Alfred Yuson in the Philippine Star. Our thanks and congratulations to Patricia.

In her speech, Patricia said, "Nationalism isn't bound by time or place. People from other nations migrate to create new nations, yet still remain essentially who they are."

What is nationalism? How do you measure nationalism? How do you behave to show your nationalism?

Previously, candidates for elective positions in government would describe themselves as nationalists, patriots. In these recently concluded elections, I did not hear those words at all. Candidates talked about what they will do for the less fortunate Filipinos and these are mostly palliative solutions. Candidates talked about the burning issues of today—unemployment, oil price increases, corruption in government, rebellion in some areas of the country, possible poll cheatings, and the like, and what they will do in the first 100 days in office. Short-term, not visionary.

In the past, we eagerly await our Independence Day. We prepare or buy flags and adorn our houses with flags, proudly. We go to the Luneta Grandstand to listen to the President’s Independence message and watch the parade all the while gleefully waving our flags. We discuss that experience during family meals for as long as we remember them.

Today, June 12, an important day in the life of our country, is remembered only for its being a regular holiday and an occasion to oversleep or get out of the city.

Nowadays, it is fashionable to bash our own country and find fault in everything we are and everybody in government and business. Deservedly, you might say. In my supervisory class the other day, the participants in their late 20s and early 30s looked lost when I told them about our kundiman when we were discussing Filipino values and worldview. It seems they never heard such beautiful music.

Like Patricia, for me nationalism is giving back to our beloved country what it has so lavishly given us—our identity, our values, our worldview, food, water and a home we could proudly claim our own. Nationalism is valueing our uniqueness as a people. No matter what designer clothes you wear you are bound to hang a rosary in your car’s rearview mirror, smile all the time for no reason at all, cover your mouth when you laugh, like everything imported, think a meal is not a meal without rice, eat more than three times a day.

No matter where you are, you have a high threshold for pain and suffering, can sing and dance on the first note of music, have a high tolerance for corruption and a short, forgiving memory when it comes to history. There’s more in Neni Sta. Romana’s book, “You Know You’re Filipino If.”

For me, then, nationalism is to stop lamenting the sorry state we are right now, but doing something about it. Nationalism is looking forward and dreaming of good things for our country. It is more than applying “band-aid” solutions to the problems of our poor, but really moving towards uplifting our personhood and building our service-orientation capabilities in order for us to compete in a borderless world. Nationalism is appreciating our uniqueness and developing those into our core competencies. It is not only having a slogan, it is having a grand plan and implementing that plan resolutely.

Nationalism is bringing into our country the bests of the outside world and melding these into the fiber of our daily lives. I am likewise proud that Janette Toral is the first Filipina to be published by the very discriminating Mc-Graw-Hill Asia with her book, “Digital E-Commerce Workshop.” Nationalism is getting into the mainstream of globalization and participating actively in the best way we know.

Nationalism is not a simple word, it is an action word. Nationalism should move our duly elected government officials to stop politicking and start working for our country and all the sectors of our society.

Nationalism is not a choice. It is an honor, a duty and responsibility of every body who claims to be a Filipino wherever they are and whatever is their station in life. The poor, the rich, the healthy and hearty, the disabled, the Visayan, the Ilokano, the student, the streetchild, the lawyer, the carpenter, the young, the old—we are all Filipinos, pure and simple. No such thing as half-Filipino and half-this. We are all Filipinos.

What can little boys and girls do, they can start loving and using Filipino products and services. They could start caring for the naturally beautiful environment around us. They could start studying about arts and sciences and forget about getting into showbiz or politics early on. They could start honing their talents that could help our country move into globalization.

What do you intend to do about your being Filipino would measure your nationalism. What we do for our country is what we do for our family and friends. What we do for our country is the single most important legacy we could give our children and our grandchildren. Nationalism also means loyalty.

Do I Want to be a Mom? (Dell, Erem)

2004-04-20T13:42:00.000+08:00

When a woman considers having a boyfriend or getting married, the foremost question in her mind is: Do I want to be a mom? The answer to this question is the answer she usually gives the man. Even in these hi-tech times, many women would still get married with the view of becoming a mother.

When my husband asked me to marry him, I asked myself the same question: Do I want to be a mom? My own mother would bear down on me to get married so that she would have more grandchildren. My youngest brother already had two by then.

And so when Manny and I prepared for our wedding and our wedded life together, we also discussed the number of children we would have, the names for possible sons and daughters, possible ninongs and ninangs, the way we will raise them, the school they will attend, the courses they will take, and many others.

I was blessed to experience uneventful pregnancies, but giving birth were something else. The threatened termination, the long bed rest, the painful but exhilarating birthgiving nothwithstanding, I only remember the joy I experienced twice over when I gave birth to my two sons. Through their growing days and now that they are themselves adults (Ronjie, 26, is a civil engineer at Vibrametrics, Inc., and is enrolled at UP for his Masters in Structural Engineering and Adrian, 24, is a training officer at Citibank and is pursuing his MBA at DLSU), I still derive much joy in being their mother.

For this Mother’s Day, Adrian and his girlfriend brought me to Anilao, Batangas for a relaxing weekend. Ronjie treated us to a sumptuous lunch to also mark his promotion to another level in his professional growth. Looking at them I couldn’t help but be proud to be their mother.

When Ronjie placed second in the 2001 Licensure Examination for Civil Engineers, friends and relatives naturally congratulated me profusely. I would tell them that Ronjie took after his father because if he got my genes he should have been number one.

Adrian is the one who is following my footsteps career-wise and I hope he will eventually took over reins of our HR consulting business. People say that Adrian and I look alike while Ronjie is the spitting image of his dad.

Through the years of being a mother, I only had my natural mother’s instinct, limited literature on the subject and lots and lots of advise from my mother, other family elders and friends on how to raise my children.

I am very glad there is this book entitled Do I Want to Be A Mom? : A Woman's Guide to the Decision of a Lifetime written by Diana L. Dell and Suzan Erem. Would be mothers and those-who-are-afraid-to-be-mothers can learn much from this book about deciding to be a mother and being a mother. A number of mothers and non-mothers shared their insights on the topic of finding the right partner, deciding to be a mom, responsibilities of a mom, being pregnant, health issues, raising children, co-parenting, getting help from friends and neighbors, combining career and having kids, the cost of raising a child, changing one’s mind in the middle of a pregnancy and the usual anxieties of becoming a good mom.

When people praise my sons for good behavior and achievements at school and at work, my mother-in-law, when she was alive, proudly gave me the honors of being the best mom. She adores Adrian and Ronjie and credits me for raising them well.

Looking back, being a mother is a most rewarding thing that happened to me. The next step for me is to let go and simply wait for the time when I will have my own grandchildren.

My only regret is that we should have had ten children, five girls and five boys.

Repacking Your Bags... by Leider & Shapiro

2004-03-31T13:37:00.000+08:00

Book Review for Fully Booked Newsletter
By Moje Ramos-Aquino

Repacking Your Bags: Lighten Your Load for the Rest of Your Life
Richard J. Leider, David A. Shapiro
Paperback - 2ND, June 2002

I was trying to find a book to help me in my reflections for this Lenten season and at times when I feel happy, fulfilled, sad, lonely, lost or overwhelmed. Richard Leider and David Shapiro's book Repacking Your Bags provided me with easy step-by-step manual to reexamine my life, work, love and leisure.

We are filled with questions all throughout our lives. When we are young we asked, "What do I want to be when I grow up?" In our teens, we concentrated on our future work: "What career will I pursue?" "What education would I need?" "What is my perfect job?" and sometimes, "Who is Ms. or Mr. Right?" In our early 20s, the questions "Where do I want to settle down when I am able?" "Who do I want to spend the rest of my life with?" nagged us incessantly. Intermittently in our 30s to 50s, we did experience doubts, resignation and being daring and enterprising. Finally in our 60s upward, "Where do I go from here?" "What could give me immortality?"

Repacking your Bags assists us through a process of examining and repacking a metaphorical bag in this journey called life. The authors seem to know exactly the questions percolating in our minds and provide a path to self-discovery through stories, personal examples, innovative exercises and quotations from other authors.

Some lines from the book that struck me right there are: People pursue happiness as if it is something they can capture and cage. Past patterns weigh us down. Marriage is a long conversation. Regular doses of laughter make you better at feeling. We can use a little subversion in our own lives. The outward signs of success don't make up for the failure we feel inside. We're looking for a way to ensure that we don't end up living somebody else's life. The quest for the good life is the quest for wholeness or integrity. The act of repacking is ultimately spiritual.

Applying the question "Does all these make you happy?" in everything we do and possess will help in the process towards achieving the good life. Well, it is the $64 question that prompted the authors to write their book.

(Repacking Your Bags is available from Fully Booked, Rockwell Power Plant Mall)