The FT (Financial Times) had a great piece recently on how authors are now using the art of dramatic storytelling to enhance the value they add when doing live presentations based on their books. Specifically focusing on Malcolm Gladwell (who seems to be living my dream life) and TED, it’s a great read if you’re interested in writing, speaking, communicating ideas and the art of the dramatic in business life.
Read it online here, or see the extract below.
If you’re interested in the generations, and how intergenerational issues might look in Africa, then here’s a conference you might be interested in. I am not involved, and don’t know the researchers personally, but this looks good.
HSRC Seminar Series in collaboration with the Capacity Development Division
The following seminar will be presented in Pretoria, Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal (See Details below).Is it time to renegotiate an intergenerational ‘contract’? The state of intergenerational relations in South Africa.
Presented by Dr Monde Makiwane Senior Research Specialist, CYFSD, and Ms Christine Jesseman Head: Research Depaertment, South African Human Rights Council.Venues in Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town: see below
Date: Tuesday 28 July 2009
Time: 14H15 for 14h30 – 15H30
Research Works recently released a series of reports from the Partnership for Workplace Mental Health, a program of the American Psychiatric Foundation. Download them here.
Research Works found that about a quarter of all employees are “actively disengaged,” meaning they don’t care about about their jobs at all. These are the people who don’t make much of an effort to help a customer with a problem, or a colleague with an issue. Or do anything beyond the minimum required (or what they can get away with).
Twenty-five per cent! That’s an awful lot of employees just taking up space.
Culling information from a number of studies, the report found that about 20% of employees are “highly engaged” and about 55% are in the middle — meaning they work hard but don’t live and die by going to work every day.
The rest, about 25%, could be toxic to your company’s success.
How engaged are your employees? If you don’t know, it might be costing you money.
It’s not the normal practice on this blog to be show-casing new technology, for the simple reason that it’s kewl. We rather try and focus on the people impact changes have in the areas of technology, values, demographics and institutions. Certainly this post is related to changing how we see things, but I just loved the technology and wanted to post it for those that haven’t seen it.
It’s the new feature that Apple have built into the iPhone in it’s interaction with MobileMe. It’s very kewl. Way kewl. To read the full brief go here.
But a brief summary is:
Now, if you lose your iPhone, MobileMe can help you find it. MobileMe includes a new feature called Find My iPhone. Just enable Find My iPhone in MobileMe settings on your phone.* Then you can log in to me.com from any computer to access Find My iPhone and display your phone’s approximate location on a map.
As I said. Way kewl
Received this via e-mail today. Would anyone care to comment…..?
“It is the month of August, on the shores of the Black Sea. It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town.
He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.
The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.
The Butcher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig grower.
The pig grower takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.
The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town’s prostitute that in these hard times, gave her “services”
on credit.The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.
The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.
At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.
No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government is doing business today and the main reason thatthe rest of the world is now ‘messed’ up!”
PodCast Update – Graeme Codrington interviews Dean van Leeuwen (Director of TomorrowToday UK) around his MBA thesis on collaboration and alliances.
Go for RSS feed
Go here for iTunes Feed
There’s a lot of hype around Twitter. I hear it all the time. And there seem to be two distinct camps. Those rabidly for and those against. The against camp speak of just another fad. I say that they’re possibly correct in their thinking. To be honest though, that’s not the question. The real question is for however long Twitter is with us, will it change something about how we look at the world and each other, and therefore how we connect and interact?
Steven Johnson writes a great piece on Time (online) that gives a small insight into some of how Twitter added a new dimension to at least one conference. I like how it was used, and how it brought in a new channel for communication to add to the dialogue in the room.
The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn’t be taken lightly.
I’m really interested more in the social changes than the platforms themselves. Personally I think whether Twitter stays or goes, it will change our lives in some way going forward.
Michael Rendell, partner and global head of human resource services at PricewaterhouseCoopers recently said the following:
“With the global economic downturn presenting organisations with serious immediate challenges, businesses need to work even harder to balance short-term pressures with long-term objectives. This means acting now to manage the demographic changes that will impact their ability to compete effectively. Eventually, in many parts of the world, fewer younger people will be working to support a significantly larger older population, making people supply a critical factor for business success and potentially changing the power dynamic between employer and employees.”
PWC’s 12th annual CEO survey, published earlier this year, highlighted the issue of Talent attraction and retention as one of the key issues facing CEOs (alongside climate change, growth and dealing with economic downturn).
Here are some highlights from the PWC survey:
Rendell: “The millennials want many of the same things from work as the generations before them so companies do not need to tear up their people strategies to manage the new generation of workers. What is new is younger people’s ability to mobilise into another job if their expectations and ideals are not met. To manage this difference, companies need to think creatively about reward strategies, using metrics and benchmarking to segment their workforce in a similar way to how many companies segment their customer base.
“We think CEOs are struggling with millennials because they need more information about what drives them, and because they need to adapt their traditional approaches to attracting and integrating employees. This means focusing on the things that millennials really want, such as training and development. Articulating employer brand and clearly stating corporate responsibility values will also be critical.
“The millennials’ expectations bring opportunities as well as challenges – those organisations that adapt fastest will be best placed to succeed in good times and bad.”
Source: PWC – quoted in Management section of Director Finance magazine.
This is one of our core focus areas at TomorrowToday. See our presentation on Making the Most of the Millennials.
by Ben Kellard, 27th May 2009
Reposted extract from: Forum for the Future
How can you embed sustainability in a way that motivates employees? It’s a challenge for many leaders faced with the question of how to maintain the momentum of their sustainability strategy, especially in a recession.
The case for using sustainability to motivate employees is compelling. There’s a strong correlation between activities which come under the umbrella of corporate responsibility and employee satisfaction and engagement, according to the latest Sunday Times Best Companies survey.
And research from the Hay Group shows that highly engaged employees can improve business performance by up to 30% and that fully engaged employees are 2.5 times more likely to exceed performance expectations than their “disengaged” colleagues.
…
A good example of this is property company Gentoo, which launched ‘Gentoo Green’, an internal programme to engage employees in its sustainability vision and strategy. The programme was backed by the CEO and was supported by internal communications, champions, training, and opportunities for employees to get involved. This led to over 700 suggestions from employees about how to improve Gentoo’s sustainability performance, and it’s been estimated that the programme has already delivered half a million pounds in savings to the group in its first year.
… Continue Reading
What will human resources look like a decade from now? This is the question asked of HR Execs by Workforce Management magazine. You can read their full report here.
The headlines are fairly unsurprising. I really hope that HR is shaken up more than this in the next ten years. But, they are insightful in describing the current trajectory of thinking by the people in charge of HR at the world’s large companies:
Collaboration will be key. The top-ranked prediction was: “There will be an increased focus on infrastructures — such as social networks and wikis — to support building strong relationships and collaboration.” (This is a topic one of our team members, Dean van Leeuwen, is an expert in, having completed an MBA thesis on learning about alliances from coral reef systems – see his presentation on “A Brave New World” that highlights collaboration is crucial to success in the next decade).I am involved with a project management company called SEDS – Sustainable Energy Design Solution. The focus of this company is to help organisations of all types to save energy, save money and secure our future. They have a very clever four step model for doing this, involving measuring current usage (and establishing targets which are widely communicated), empowering and educating people (with a view to long term, sustained behaviour change), upgrading facilities (with clear returns on investment), and reporting (both compliance reporting, assessments and audits, as well as PR, communication and triple bottom line reporting to all stakeholders).
SEDS is making a real difference – see their website (although maybe wait a few days, as they’re about to do a significant relaunch of this site).
The point of this post is to highlight one of the schools SEDS is connected to. The headmaster of Ashley Church of England Primary School in Surrey, UK is so passionate about climate change and global warming, that he has made it a focus of the school. Using an innovative product, ecoDriver, he displays the energy usage of the school live in the reception area, and encourages the pupils to reduce their usage. So successful is the scheme that the school has reduced costs of energy by half in the past year. The money saved is ploughed back into the school – and students have a say over how it is spent. This is motivational for them, and they’re fully on board with the scheme.
Even better, the whole issue is integrated into the curriculum. The ecoDriver software allows the energy usage data to be pulled onto electronic whiteboards for use in the classroom teaching, as one example.
Last week, the school was awarded the presitigour Ashden Award for Sustainability, by HRH Prince Charles. Read about it here. If you’re interested, read more about the Ashden Awards in the Guardian’s report.
Well done to Ashley CofE Primary. It shows that we CAN make a difference!
This is what the top flight medical journal, The Lancet, says. In the latest edition, an article entitled “Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change” makes this claim. See this article, and other similar ones here. The article is a collaboration between Lancet and University College London Institute for Global Health Commission.
It is a 41 page scholarly article, with a four page Executive summary. So I’m not going to reproduce it here – not even the Executive summary. The bottom line, though, is that we need to be taking this issue a lot more seriously than we are. With the mounting scientific evidence, I cannot understand global warming deniers.
I can sort of understand some of the denialism. It is true that human beings are not the only cause of global warming. It may be true that we are not even the primary cause of it. We’re in a natural warming cycle that has been in operation for millions of years (we have data for about 450,000 years of a oscillating hot and cold cycle). That may be true, but human activity nevertheless is a contributor to global warming. And more importantly, it is the only thing we can control. So, given that we MUST do something about it, we can only do what we can actually do (I know that sounds so simple it isn’t worth saying, but this is part of the problem – not enough people are saying it!).
We must do what we can do.
I also sort of understand the attitude that says “why bother”, especially when looking at India and China and other developing nations.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Zappos, the online shoe and accessories company. They are a “new world” company that interests me immensely. The company just hit a major milestone 10 years in business and $1billion in sales. The CEO Tony Hsieh was interviewed recently about their success, interestingly rather than talk about the financial success of the company he focuses all his answers rather around the culture of the company, its values and its customers. You can read the interview below or visit Zappos’s website and read it there.
Tony Hsieh wants to build Zappos into a Virgin styled company, with Zappos Bank, hotels, airlines etc using ten guiding principles. Have a look at them they are not about financial returns or market share but have to do with the people side of the business…get these right and the financial rewards follow. With $1 billion sales in the bank I think Zappos is doing things right:
I think they do it every other year, and it makes a great cover. TIME magazine at the end of May 2009 was focused on the issue of ‘The Future of Work’. You can read it at TIME’s website, or below.
The article takes the form of ten short insights. The highlights for me are:
One of the most important books I have read in the last year is James Martin’s “The Meaning of the 21st Century” (Buy it at Amazon or Kalahari). The subtitle explains: The Megaproblems of the 21st Century.
You can hear me talking about it on a ClassicFM book review show.
I recently came across the author’s website, and found this excellent summary of his book. From James Martin’s own website:
Keith Coats, director and co-founder of TomorrowToday, is speaking in Sweden soon, at the invitation of the King. His topic is on the Global trends shaping the new world of work.
Keith has been profiled on a number of websites. Check out this profile in the latest Speakers of Note ezine. See his full profile at TomorrowToday’s website.
As you know, TomorrowToday tracks societal trends. We help our clients to understand the implications of shifts and changes in technology, demography, institutions and societal values. Every now and again, we come across people who are doing an excellent job in both tracking and visually communicating the types of information and trends that we think our clients should be tracking.
The best of these are:
What if what we understood about marketing wasn’t true? This is how the article from Fast Company, The Myth of the Rational Buyer: How too much thinking can hurt your brand, begins.
The author Mark Dziersk suggests that companies spend 95% of their time fussing over the 5% that the consumer thinks about when it comes to purchasing behaviour.
And as he points out, the average hypermarket in the US, carries more than 167 000 sku’s (units), compared to 40 000 in that late 1950’s. That’s a lot of product to choose from. And we’re missing what goes into consumer behaviour, then we’d better start doing things differently.
Read the full article here.
Thanks to my friend Bev from SimonSays Communications for this link.
The Sunday Times announced it’s ‘Times Generation Next’ cool brands survey results on 28 May 2009.
5000 tweens, teens and young adults between the ages of 8-22 were polled on their coolest brands, and Coke came out on tops with it’s Brrrr campaign.
Bizcommunity.com covered the results, and one interesting comment relating to the attitude of this segment and the economic downturn according to Jason Levin (MD of HDI Youth Marketeers) was,
“Young South Africans, unshaken by economic downturn, are as brand conscious as ever. Although there were some interesting shifts in the top rankers in some categories, we see growing similarity in votes by region, gender, race and sometimes even age around the coolest brands.”
For the rest of the results read the full article here. Nokia, Samsung, Nike, Puma, Sun City, Edgars, SAA, Mango, D&G, Levis and others all had a mention in achieving top spots or moving down the list from previous years.
Reading Gillian Tett’s excellent book, ‘Fool’s Gold: How unrestrained greed corrupted a dream, shattered global markets and unleashed a catastrophe’ (Little, Brown 2009 – buy it now at Amazon.co.uk or Kalahari.net) reminded me of a memorable saying of the legendary Liverpool Football Club manager, Bill Shankly.
Shanks, commenting on the Beautiful Game once said, “It is a simple game made complicated by those who ought to know better”. I suspect that wisdom reflects much of the corporate jungle that we have created. Beyond the financial practices of murkey credit derivatives there is the complex HR web that is understandable to only a select few. I recall being asked to sit-in on a review process of a large SA blue-chip company as they unveiled their ‘Talent Management Programme’. The programme had been the careful design of a specially designated group and was the culmination of over a year’s endevour. As the graphs, flow charts, spiral graphs and every manner of powerpoint graphic unfolded so the comprehension (amongst the other HR practitioners present) evaporated. It was madness, incomprehensible madness. But of course to question, critique and point out the obvious would have been akin to career suicide. Not being constrained by such concerns, I of course did question, ask and critique. Naturally I have not been invited back.
The point is we continue to make simple things complicated. This is especially true when it comes to the central issue of people within our organisation. Quantum Mechanics teaches us that, when it comes to the very essence, the very construct of our universe, ‘relationships is all there is’. Trust is the foundation, the currency, of all relationships and it was ultimately the breakdown of trust that, according to Gillian Tett led to the current economic crisis we have now. Simple things made complicated. Simple things allowed to be obscured behind elaborate processes, policies, systems and structures. Just who are we kidding? It is time to get back to the ’simple things’. It is time to realise that to make organisations work well, we don’t need the elaborate, the complex…we need to understand and do the simple things well.
I’ve just come across a great article from Fast Company. It’s around hiring new people. And we all know that once the economy turns, and business increases, we’re going to need new people.
This particular article focuses on how we weight interviews in the hiring process. And how we may be making some very large mistakes in the process.
With so little proof that interviews work, why do we rely on them so
much? Because we all think we’re good at it. We are Barbara Walters or
Mike Wallace, taking the measure of the person. Psychologist Richard
Nisbett calls this the “interview illusion” — our certainty that we’re
learning more in an interview than we really are.
Late last year Malcolm Gladwell released his new book ‘Outliers’. It’s a long story to go into on a blog post, but I’m of the opinion, having read the book, that you’d be better off simply choosing candidates born between January and April and ditching the rest. Quicker, cheaper, and some great odds : )
It certainly is going to be interesting to see what we learn once the re-hiring starts up?
I’m not talking about the glib friendships companies try to encourage by inviting their customers to be friends or fans on Facebook, but rather intimate and deep relationships that come from having a vested interest in the people that make their business possible. I recently came across a study by Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson [...]
I spend a large part of my year in conversation with managers working hard to try and understand today’s younger workforce. The pain they’re feeling is palpable. The evidence of change is overwhelming. Making the necessary changes, at times, seems impossible. The hope is that the challenges are being interrogated and slowly but surely acted [...]
Everyone agrees that something must be done about executive pay. One of the major contentious issues emerging out of the financial crisis is the way that senior executives and manager, especially in the financial industries, are remunerated. These days, executive pay often seems to be unrelated to the company’s performance, and in many [...]
For years banks and credit card companies have held a strangle hold over the movement of money and charged exorbitant rates for doing so. Now this is changing and fast.
Michale Ivey the founder of Twitpay has devised a system, using code that PayPal made available to him, that allows people to make payments [...]
Recent Comments