Let Transparency & Connectivity Rule Your Office Culture

His eyes locked onto mine, his jaws set he said with a steely tone: “You know what would happen if we allowed our employees to freely access Facebook, Twitter and YouTube? Do you!?”

Mr. X, the 50+ year old C-Suite manager of a major MNC, looked at me with the ire normally reserved for recalcitrant youngsters who still dream of unicorns in a ‘real’ world.

How had we come to this seemingly unsolvable gap of opinions between the ‘old’ world and the ‘new’ that left the rest of the management team wallowing in uncomfortable silence?

We had been talking about how total connectivity had changed the rules of the game, how today’s society is global, connected and transparent. These changes had brought the management together to come up with some ‘cool’ values like: trust, ownership and all the usual potboilers some designer would then transform into glitzy posters & coasters to be distributed to the masses to show the team that the company was still up-to-date.

Stop The Printer & Show It Baby

The truth is that people have seen one too many posters with the Olympic sculling team standing in for ‘teamwork’ and the other one with the stern looking American Bald Eagle printed above some platitudes about ‘leadership’. Save the trees and start showing that you truly mean what you say.

Living In A Transparent World: If You Think You Can Hold A Secret… Think Again!

Wikileaks, Groupon and a myriad other companies/organizations have created a hitherto unknown level of transparency. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going to get back into it!! We will need to learn to live in a transparent world. Zappo’s has learned this lesson early on and has created a culture of ownership and transparency.

Instead of wasting energy and resources by playing their cards close to their chest they have turned transparency to their advantage: Zappos invites you to learn what they are doing right, tour their facilities, talk to the team and even buy their latest strategies for a monthly fee of U$ 39.95 at Zappos Insights!

Too much transparency say you? Far from being suicidal, this total transparency strategy creates an immense internal drive for innovation, driven by the team members themselves. The company thrives on openness, and the respect they have for each individual team member to come up with new ideas that can become game changers. In this environment of transparency and trust the values are not on the posters, they are lived by the team day-to-day.

It’s Not About Products – It’s About Team Speed

The winners in the 21^st century will be propelled to success by the speed with which their teams research, ideate, communicate and create new solutions. Far from getting stuck in endless meeting cycles and structural jungles, these flat organizations operate with turnaround times that seem ‘magical’ to the outsider. Case in point: Local Motors is able to launch a brand new car model from initial inception to hitting the road in 18 months, as compared with an average of 4-6 years for major brand car companies.

Team Speed = Trust & Emotional Maturity

The main differentiator between top-heavy management-driven organizations and modern, fast, flexible and flat operations is the emotional maturity of the individual team player.

This emotional maturity of each team player leads to a simple result:

I know that I chose to join this company, I know why I chose to join this company and I am actually interested in what I do within this company. I don’t need a boss to supervise me, when I need advise I will go and look for it. My goal is to contribute, to achieve measurable results. To achieve these measurable results I need to do research to get new ideas.

Unlock The Doors To Information & Creativity

20 hours worth of new videos are being downloaded into Youtube every minute! Facebook is mutating from being a mere social ‘waddayadoing?’ tool to becoming a business communicator and Twitter has become the main source for up-to-date information and the hottest game changers. Locking your team out of using these tools is tantamount to treating them like silly teenagers who need total supervision. It cuts them off from some of the most powerful information gathering, sharing and brainstorming tools available and gets out the message that all the posters you printed about ‘respect’, ‘ownership’ and ‘leadership’ are bulldust.

Will The Mice Play If The Cat’s Away?

Of course the fear in an existing and traditional corporate culture will be:

As soon as we allow the team to surf freely we can wave our productivity good bye…

That may be true for a moment, until the team adjusts and matures into living responsibly with this newfound freedom, here is why.

Charlie In The Chocolate Factory

It is a golden rule for all companies involved in the manufacture of sweets, lollypops, chocolates and other dental cavity creators to allow every employee to eat as much candy as their heart desires. Of course it stands to reason that everyone’s most outlandish childhood dreams will express themselves in an endless scoffing orgy at the conveyor belt, leaving the company with little to sell to the market.

What really happens is: of course every new employee will go through a gorging phase in his/her early days at the company, but the novelty of eating all that free candy wears off quickly and then a mature balance sets in. You will take a candy once in a while, but otherwise you will focus on getting the job done.

Live Freedom – Get Connected

Save the trees, don’t print more posters with ‘cool’ values no one cares about. Open your channels of communication. Allow your teams to surf, watch Youtube, connect on Facebook. Misuse will spike for a few days, the novelty will soon wear off and then the appreciation of the trust you have given the team will rise. The team will find the correct balance between their private social needs and the immeasurable benefits of being connected to a global database of information and cutting edge know-how that will be transmuted into new ideas to keep your company at the cutting edge.

How The Next Generation Is Leapfrogging Gen Xer’s

Flicking through the TV I came across a channel with yet another TV cooking show. The hosts were giving their usual potboiler comments about hard the work done and how all contestants deserved a chance, alas the time had come to make the cut… as the camera swung to the contestants I sat up:

Standing in front of the panel were ten young people, very young people, ranging from 8-11 years old!!

Having seen the age of the contestants I wondered why anyone would want to watch a bunch of pre-teens boiling up a pack of instant noodles, or any such simple dish that I surmised might be within the talent range of these youngsters.

As these thoughts lazily rippled through my mind the camera swung to the winning dishes they had prepared; my jaw dropped! These were not the dishes prepared by some kid. These were dishes of a complexity and visual preparation standard normally reserved for a Michelin rated restaurant.

The program, Australia’s Junior Master Chef, is just a sneak preview of things to come.

The Day Internet Crashed The Education Establishment’s Party

Most of Gen X grew up with one certainty: an education was only attainable through an institution/organization that owned the information you wanted to gain.

In other words: information and education was a monopoly business. Only after rigorous pre-examination would you be allowed into the next inner sanctum of information and how-to, provided you paid a handsome fee for it.

Once you had successfully gone through all the curriculum and paid all the fees you were awarded a certificate, diploma, doctorate, etc. This piece of paper in turn made you into a marketable product. You could now go to the next organization/company and apply for a job that would put coins in your pocket.

Does this mean that everyone with a piece of gold-embossed parchment handed out by an education organization was:

1. Really good at what they had been certified for?
2. Totally interested, passionate and innovative about the subject they were now certified at?

The answer is: NO… generations of people got the cert, found the job, paid the mortgage without an iota of passion for their profession.

The internet has blasted away the walls that once made information, knowledge and learning into a monopoly: we can now self-educate through blogs, communities and, most importantly: YouTube.

The Real Question Is: What Turns You On?

A vast swath of younger Gen Y’s are blazing a new path: they are taking their education into their own hands.

• They do so playfully
• They do so willingly
• They do so in their own time
• They do so to follow their own dreams

And they can do so because they have the amassed knowledge of humankind at their fingertips. This knowledge has been de-mystified, de-academized and presented in totally approachable form as videos, chats and blogs.

The main differentiator between these Gen Yer’s and the generations currently running the show is that the Best & Brightest Gen Y’s are actively seeking solutions, knowledge and advise to become masters at their chosen fields at a previously unimaginably young age and speed.

From Singing To Computing, The Leapfrog Is On

A few examples for this trend:

Justin Bieber is at the vanguard of this development. Deciding that singing was his thing he just started doing it. Singing in front of a video camera he started posting his videos on YouTube. Grainy, shaky and ‘unprofessional’ as they might have seemed to be, the videos still hit their audience. Justin Bieber leapfrogged past the whole old-fashioned star-making machinery right into the market. He created his own market and was able to dictate his own terms to the labels.

Anjelo Baligad is a 6-year old from Hawaii whose nom de guerre is Lil Demon. His dance moves have made him a sensation in the YouTube community and have landed him in the hot dance troupe called LXD. Videos posted on YouTube were his schooling, picking up moves, re-combining them and posting his newest discoveries. This new, collaborative, open source way of picking up knowledge has created an accelerated learning spiral, as TED’s Chris Anderson puts it:

We are evolving in internet time

Australia’s Junior Master Chef : as the name of the program implies this is just the Australian version of this format. It will spread to other countries, and with this spread it will create more and more junior culinary masters globally. These master chefs will learn their tips, tricks and strategies by watching TV and internet videos. By the time they are ready to join the working world they won’t need a cooking cert, their dishes, home-made videos and cooking blogs will be their ticket to the future.

Even the hallowed bastions of computing are under attack: a slew of new ready-to-use modular software coding programs are coming on the market. Google App Inventor and Scratch are just 2 examples. Written to work in Lego-like building blocks these coding programs allow you to create your very own tools and applications, no need to study computer science… The only thing required is your interest and willingness!

The Good News Is…

The good news is that this is the century of total freedom of choice. It is the century that will give us the tools to self-expression, productivity and connectivity that will allow us to learn what we want, create what we desire and share it with likeminded people and even earn a living doing so!

Welcome to the century of the Willing, the Leapfroggers and the Game Changers.

Why being silent in an age of total transparency may be the wrong strategy.
“What is your view on sharks being finned and thrown back into the ocean to die?” my audience looked back at me with a blank expression on their faces. What had that question to do with anything? The top management of the global food giant had called me in to work on a leadership culture transformation project, and here I was lobbing this strange question at them.

As the silence dragged on for a while it became evident that the team of top managers could not make heads or tails of how this question could possibly dovetail with the question of creating a management culture ready to tackle the new market realities of the 21st Century.

Of Blank Spaces & Mass Opinions Or
Why Just Making A Good Product Isn’t Good Enough Anymore
At first glance the connection between a global food giant and the rapid decline of the global shark population seems tenuous… until we take a second look: both are connected to what we eat and that the human race is currently on track to kill the environment with fork and knife. Global food resources are overstretched and over exploited, our food preferences have brought ecological systems to the brink of irreparable damage.

While all the honest, hard working managers in this and other corporations are busy fulfilling KPI’s, achieving sales targets and planning the next killer products their myopic focus on achieving the bottom line has led them into a moral & image cul de sac. Here is an example:

How Mickey & Donald Became Evil – Business Without Inner Value Revealed
What do you, and your company, stand for? What values do you want people in the market to have on the tip of their tongue when they mention your brand?

For example, what emotions and values come up if someone mentions Disney, Mickey Mouse & Donald Duck: carefree fun, friendship, warm memories of childhood.

These are the very values Walt Disney built his entertainment empire on. As the Disney management decided to expand it’s entertainment park business overseas it set it’s eyes on Hong Kong, the doorway to China and the key to untold riches. A good part of Disneyworld’s revenues come from it’s F&B outlets. While building a Disneyworld in Hong Kong it made complete sense to open up a Chinese restaurant, this is where the corporate myopia took over.

The logic went: Hong Kong is culturally Chinese, we will open a Chinese restaurant, Chinese people like sharks fin, thus the Disney restaurant will serve sharks fin, period.

This decision was taken in the very face of a concerted global campaign by the WWF and other NGOs, supported by major Chinese stars like Jackie Chan and Jet Li to stop the horrendous practice of cutting the fins off a live shark for the sake of a bowl of soup.

Disney’s core values of caring, wholesome family fun and lighthearted moments crashed into the cold reality that the corporation behind the clever mouse and the funny duck would contribute to global shark depletion for the sake of a few more bucks based on an outdated premise (Chinese restaurant = shark’s fin soup), instead of bravely making a stand and openly declaring that Disney would not contribute to painfully killing animals.

If You Are Not Accountable Then Someone Will Hold You Accountable
Having forgotten about their core values and followed the linear logic to profits by offering shark fin soup Disney became a major blip on the screen for Sea Shepherd.

Sea Shepherd is the new kind of NGO: business savvy, connected, global and intensively hooked into today’s media-mad society. It creates massive global impact and attention by taking on the giants: the Japanese whaling fleet and Disney in Hong Kong among others

Sea Shepherd’s key business is their mission:
Our mission is to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the world’s oceans in order to conserve and protect ecosystems and species.

Armed with this powerful credo Sea Shepherd took on the Goliath Disney, turning it’s most powerful assets Mickey & Donald into bloodthirsty creeps:

Needless to say that David won the battle, exposing Disney to be a profit driven linear organization play-acting at being fun and family friendly. Disney was forced to do the right thing and took the shark ‘delicacies’ off the menu, not a pleasant spot to be in.

Don’t Be Evil & Succeed
There is a new sunrise coming for business: the values driven corporation that truly means what they say.

Google’s simple motto is: Don’t Be Evil, a credo that focuses the whole company to create positive, supportive and helpful solutions, including the fact that Google invests it’s profits into positive ventures like the Singularity University and funding research into next generation clean power solutions.

While no company is perfect, and we all have our little warts and wrinkles, Google has achieved something remarkable: they have created an enormously positive image, a vision to aspire to, that intangible ‘something’ people want to have and join up for. They have taken a clear position on the world, themselves, what they stand for and what they believe in!

Making The World A Better Place = Making Money
But you don’t necessarily have to be a giant to make a difference. TOMS One For One is the brainchild of Blake Mycoskie who realized that people in the First World spend an inordinate amount of money for footwear, an amount not justified by the real cost of the product.

While the First World pays bizarre amounts of money for the latest Jimmy Choo creation or signs cheques amounting to the GNP of a small nation to get some sports figure to endorse their soles, millions of children in the Third World have yet to own a pair of shoes.

The conclusion, offer a really fair deal. Sell neatly designed, well manufactured shoes to the First World online with a simple promise: for every pair of shoes you buy our company will give a pair of shoes to a poor child in the Third World (One for One).

This bold and caring idea gives you more than just a pair of well designed and crafted shoes by a brand that over-pays some sports celebrity to endorse their creation. This idea sends a clear message: TOMS has a mission that goes beyond counting the chips at the end of the day, TOMS wants to contribute and help all of us to do so.

The result of this bold stand? Over a million children in the Third World have new shoes and TOMS business keeps on spiraling up.

As the midday heat started to give way to a gentle afternoon breeze and the lunchtime conversation with my accountant began to slow down it was time to ask for the bill.

Scanning the restaurant verandah I saw a young, somewhat shy looking, female restaurant attendant. I waved at her and, upon her arrival at our table, informed her that we wanted to pay, would she please bring the bill.

A few minutes later the young lady re-appeared by my side, shyly proffering the bill in a leather folder sponsored by some credit card company. Instead of taking the folder I leveled a steady, slightly stern, gaze at her and asked in a flat tone “Do you think this is the right thing to do?”…

The young lady stared at me blankly. As I steadily looked at her without saying a word her sense of loss and discomfort grew, the hand holding the leather folder started shaking slightly and a little droplet of sweat stated forming on her forehead: she was stuck, her mental process and expectations of what should ‘naturally happen’ at this point (me taking the bill and paying) had been completely derailed.

After allowing her to remain in silence for a minute waiting for me to say something I said “Well, tell you what, go away for 5 minutes, then come back and tell me what you think!”

As the young lady trotted off my accountant shot me a withering look and hissed “How could you! Poor thing, what has she done to you!!”

My accountant was just about to continue her reprimands (after all she is a very proper lady a few years my senior and felt entitled to set me straight) the young lady re-appeared. With jaws set, a menacing look on her face to hide her insecurity, she sternly said: “Here is your bill sir!”, to which I asked “So, is this the right thing to do?” “Yes it is!” she shot back looking as imposingly strong as she could… “Of course it is!” I replied with a big grin and a cheery voice while I whipped out my wallet.

The transformation on the young lady’s face was pure magic, she beamed the biggest smile ever! A smile of newfound confidence: she had smashed through a mental block, she would never be scared of another ‘big bully’ like me, she had learned that just because a guy is bigger and older than her this does not mean she has to go into instant ‘it’s just little old me’ subservient mode. Her initial knee-jerk reaction to my seemingly stern face and the patently absurd question if it was right for her to bring me the bill after I myself had asked for it was the classical product of what we term ‘culture’.

All cultures are nothing else but an agglomeration of stories and rules that are implanted into our subconscious as soon as we trainable in childhood. Break these rules and woe to you, you will be punished. Once you have absorbed all these rules and follow them unquestioningly you have become a ‘good child’.

On the way to becoming that good child you have lost something vital: the will to vigorously enquire why things are supposed to a certain way and not another, thus generating truly fresh and independent insights. On the other hand you have gained something dangerous: a truckload of stories and do/don’t rules that will run your life at knee-jerk speed if you don’t clean up your attic and decide which of these rules makes sense and which keep you hostage to some idiotic and downright harmful mindset.

3 of my all time favorite mind-high-jacking stories that paralyze human behavior are:

The ‘Women Can’t Talk About Their Age’ Story

In many societies it is still absolutely impolite to ask a woman for her age. This is why I make it a point to ask many women that very question. Of course many women blanch and go into their instant ‘how-dare-you’ mode. Once I ask them why it actually is not ok to reveal their age these very same women, who were flirting with coronary failure at the very thought of revealing their tenure on planet earth, stare at me blankly… why it’s not polite? Well… cos’ it just IS, OK?!

Once you point out that the actual reason why a woman should not reveal her age after she turns 25 (or some such arbitrary timeline) is linked to the fact that woman’s value up to a few decades ago was commensurate with hear ability to bear children, meaning: the moment a woman moved past her prime childbearing age it was better to keep quiet about her age because this would ‘devalue’ her it becomes amply apparent that this is actually a really horrible reason: it means you were looked upon as a child bearing object of no real other value!

Being Obedient = Being “Good”

Mind you, I am aware that some societies have made an art form of civil disobedience, making a creative discourse almost impossible. I am not referring to these societies. My invitation goes out to members of societies who have over-codified obedience into creating individuals who are obedient at all costs, especially at the cost of de-activating their own questioning abilities. There was a time when unquestioning followership might get you safely through life, those times are gone. Your value will not be measured in how many nonsensical orders you have faithfully executed but in how many constructive questions you have asked to achieve a better results faster: if that makes you feel queasy at the start, so be it! The faster you re-learn the art of free thinking and enquiry we all had as a child, the faster your value and contribution will rise.

The “I Am Not Qualified” Fallacy

A major mental block that keeps popping up like a Jack-in-the-box and derails many company brainstorms with metronome-like predictability is the “I am not qualified to talk, think, speak about X” mindset. Sure, if I need a triple bypass surgery performed I’d prefer it to be done by a highly specialized individual, short of that let serendipity rule! Disengage from the delusion that just because someone has an official certification to do XYZ it means that he/she is actually good at what they are supposed to now.

90% of all professional economists goof up their forecasts and spend most of the time scrambling to put together workable theories as to why all these ‘unforeseen’ events happened that derailed their last theory.

Success as often belongs to the highly focused specialist as it does to the consummate outsider who has a fresh viewpoint and is not stuck in old paradigms. If you happen not to be a specialist at something rejoice in the fact that you have the gift of ‘fresh eyes’ and the childlike ability to ask two simple questions:

‘Why does it have to be so?”

“How could it be done better?”

Free Your Mind And The Rest Will Follow

Your new anthem shall be the great song by En Vogue: Free Your Mind And The Rest Will Follow!

The first steps to freeing your mind are:

1. Observe every knee-jerk reaction you have towards what people say or do, take a closer look at this knee jerk reaction and analyze how/when this unthinking knee jerk reaction was implanted into your system
2. Be playful: mess with other people’s belief system a bit and see how they react with metronome-like predictability to the buttons you are pushing in them, this will show you how important it is to rid yourself of your own pre-programming and it will lead to great conversations with the people you have just interacted with
3. Enjoy the state of outsider serendipity, the total freedom to observe with clarity and ask simple questions: you are as smart as the rest of them out there, certificate or no certificate.

The Great Certification Hoax

Open up any newspaper or magazine containing a business section, flip through it for a couple of pages and, sure enough, you will find the tertiary education ads.

Brash and alluring these ads will promise you an excellent education followed by a stellar career, provided you acquire their MBA!

Wake Up And Smell The Roses

Many moons ago an MBA was something rare, a way for non-business grads to acquire business know-how, allowing them to become more valuable to their employer. It was a way for an engineer to become more business savvy and thus have a shot at moving up the corporate ladder, past the dead end of just becoming the head of engineering.

As more and more profit oriented education institutions woke up to the fact that the 3 letters M-B-A sounded like a lot of coins to be made off unsuspecting individuals with a true wish for personal betterment, every shack with the name ‘university’ written on it’s entrance started offering their supa-dupa MBA.

The MBA Inflation

This greed by the education institutions led to the current MBA inflation. Far from being a mark of distinction, an MBA has possibly become the biggest money drain for many people with a true desire to enhance their career.

The truth is that the letters MBA on a resume mean little or nothing by now. Most all companies are smart enough to recognize that the education sector is populated by many mercenary education organizations offering nice sounding certificates for the right amount of money, period.

As with all good things in life: you pay for what you get. The discount MBA, that seems so tantalizingly within your budget is exactly that, a discount product with little or no value. The university offering it to you has bought this product (for that is what an MBA is) from another education institution. You will be buying a second hand product with outdated information, taught to you by second class lecturers with no hands on experience. The result: you have bought a product you believe will pave the way for your career only to find out that no one is really interested!

If You Really Want An MBA…

Then do it once and do it right. Globally there are only a handful of recognized MBA providers. These institutions are expensive! And they are so for 3 reasons:

1. They strive to bring in the best and brightest tutors and information, giving you a real cutting edge in the market
2. These institutions know their name is a brand that will give you an edge in the market. Hey, you want to use their name, you pay!
3. It is not what you know, it is who you know: these top end institutions are where you meet and greet today’s and tomorrow’s big players. This gives you the chance to become part of the inside family, to have the right phone numbers in your Blackberry, to kick-start your career.

No Money For A Big MBA? Good! Here Is How You Become A Success!

Of course you may feel despondent if you look at your bank account and figure out that your funds will not allow you to get that blue ribbon MBA. As a matter of fact this may be a blessing in disguise! It will ‘force’ you to use a totally different strategy to success.

Look around yourself at the next meeting in the company. You may be surprised to see how many people around you live in the ‘is-this-enough’? paradigm. Somehow many middle-aged players in the field never made the connection that times have shifted. Afraid of standing out, rocking the boat and making truly innovative decisions these players see their value in their unbending loyalty to the company. Whatever top management decides will be implemented, whether it makes sense to them personally or not.

Loyalty To The Company-> A Commodity That Lost It’s Value

Our father’s generation was brought up on the singular notion that the highest good a man could offer to a company was loyalty. A man who would have 2-3-4 or more jobs in a lifetime was considered a job-hopper, or worse: a guy who was a dissenter who could not fit in!

Hand-in-hand with loyalty to the company you were asked to check in your brain and opinions at the office door. Those times are gone. Technology and society have started moving at a disruptive speed, making continuity of anything impossible. This means that you will only be a hot commodity if you are able to bring in the hottest new ideas, trends and strategies. In fact, you have stopped being a loyal employee and have become an innovation consultant to the company.

Start Your One-Man Think-Tank And Branding Organization

The time of having brilliant ideas in silence is over. Those famous moments of quiet despair when you sat in meetings thinking ‘if only anyone would listen to me I would do it like this’ But I am just an employee, so I better shut up’ are a thing of the past.

In our brave new world of digital media you can now become your own one-man think-tank and an in-house consultant.

Look at it this way: it is possible that you have a brilliant idea to solve problem X. It is also possible that your immediate superiors are too dense, too afraid or too traditional to understand it. Does that mean you have to give up? That would be a grievous mistake.

It would mean that you have again checked your personal intelligence at the office door and remain a grey sheep indistinguishable from the flock.

Think Gen Y: start your own blog, your own in-house one-man consulting operation. Take that really good idea to solve problem X and turn it into a fact driven presentation or article. Send it to top management and see what happens.

Is your intention to create politics? No. Is your intention to offer a specific new solution that will allow the company to grow? Yes!

The result: top management will wonder who this person is who went the extra mile and produced a short, sharp, number-driven document with new ideas. Hmmm, he/she is an interesting individual with fresh ideas’ he/she does not have an MBA, but he/she sure has some sharp ideas’ all the MBAs in the world cannot compete with a person able and willing to deliver fresh ideas.

The future belongs to the individuals willing to think new thoughts, able to create simple, fact-driven, presentations to management and ‘risk’ going up the ladder 2 or 3 steps to present their case. You either create your own brand as a solutions-driven consultant to the company or you stay one of the loyal gray flock of sheep who unthinkingly wait for orders from above.

The 5 Stages Of Achieving Radical Change In Human Consciousness

Leaders are liars, or so it seems. No, I am not talking about many political leaders who glibly manipulate the truth to create fictitious ‘realities’ we are supposed to believe and live in (can you spell Iraq and ‘Mission Accomplished’?).  I am referring to a completely different kind of leader, the kind of leader who is at the bleeding edge of human development and thought consciousness, the leader who sees so far into the future that to the rest of humanity he/she and his/her ideas seem like mere fantasies, delusions or lies, these are the leaders who truly matter.

One such leader is professor Dr. William Rees from the University of British Columbia who in 1992 ideated a term called ‘Ecological Footprint’. Sure, you may ask, where is the leadership in coming up with 2 words that do not seem to belong together. The answer is quite simple:

Taking a close look at my own life I freely admit that in 1992 I was living in a state of semi dormant awareness about our/my impact on the world’s ecology. I was living in a state of denial that said “Oh, come on, it can’t be all that bad now… yes, I do like nature but these ecology guys are taking it a little too far, aren’t they”. As we now are realizing all too clearly ‘these ecology guys’ were taking nothing too far at all: dwindling ice caps, record storms, unheard of rain patterns and geometrical growth in desertification rates speak a very clear language indeed, and all of a sudden the words ‘Ecological Footprint’ make all too chilling sense.

Facing The Firestorm Of Pushback

Much like Dr Rees you ,as a true leader, will often perceive deep truths while most people around you are in dormant denial. You will feel the need, the urge and the necessity to communicate your thoughts, to make an impact, crate change. Quite predictably the result of your initial efforts will be to be thought kooky at best and a liar at worst.

It is at this point that a true leader perseveres, facing his/her own self doubt and the massive pushback from the surrounding lethargic body of prevailing societal paradigms and gets ready for the mud slinging phase of creating a change in human consciousness. Think of society as a single organism, an organism that has a big comfort zone, and this organism likes it’s comfort zone. So if you, as a single person, come up and disturb this comfort zone get ready for the organism to fight back, to claw and scratch and spit, all in an effort to make you and your uncomfortable truths go away.

This is the very moment most give up, the pressure to conform can be like a vicious firestorm and to stand in the heat alone can be overwhelming.
However, the moment the words ‘nuts’, ‘impossible’ and ‘liar’ start popping up in the collective consciousness of society through it’s media channels and political commentators a leader has achieved the tipping point to succeeding. Allow me to elucidate on this using the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi who explained the stages of true leadership breakthrough as:

Phase I. Big Idea

You have a big idea/vision

Phase II. Ignore

This idea/vision is so big/radical unsettling for the currently prevailing vested interest groups (in Gandhi’s time: free India from the British Raj, today: use less oil based products, wind down consumerist behavior, slash carbon emissions) that for the rest of humanity it is best to ignore it and pretend nothing happened in the hope you and your message will just fade away.

Phase III. Ridicule

You have no intention of fading away. You stand by your ‘impossible’ message (we want the mighty British Empire out of India without the force of arms, we have become personally responsible for the future of our planet and every time we turn the ignition on that big SUV we better be aware of that). Now you are becoming uncomfortable to the prevailing collective consciousness (or better unconsciousness) and the collective unconsciousness will start to fight back. The first level of this fight looks like ridicule (to Churchill Gandhi was nothing better than ‘that half naked Fakir’, to the logging lobby of Oregon ecologists looking to preserve the last vestiges of America’s temperate rainforests were nothing better that ‘tree huggers’ and to the entrenched consumerist oil lobby people like professor Rees are ‘bleeding heart liberals’ who do not understand the most basic underpinnings of economy).

Phase IV. Fight

Since you are secure in your knowledge that you are fighting for a worthy cause you will remain steadfast in your course, determined to make that difference. The collective unconsciousness now becomes seriously angry with you: why won’t you just shut up, let go, fade away, things are just fine they way they are and no one needed you to come and spoil the party thank you very much.
This is the moment the collective unconsciousness starts to feel seriously threatened and proceeds to fight back viciously to maintain status quo (here is where the British went from wielding police truncheons to using bullets, when Rush Limbaugh starts calling solid scientists and their findings ‘lies’ and ‘liars’). Yes it will get nasty and personal, you are entering the very phase of maximum pushback from the collective unconscious whose only desire is to remain in status quo.
As the pushback turns into strident tirades about how you and your ideas are totally off the bat, weird, dangerous and threaten the cherished status quo (another way of selling this is to refer to how your ideas are threatening ‘long established values’, the ‘societal moral standards’ or any similar kind of coverall catchphrase) this very crescendo of ever more strident attacks rattles the first individuals out of complacency. These individuals start realizing that someone is going overboard now… that all these attacks on your idea may have gone too far. It is this initially dwindling minority who are now willing to examine your idea, it is this group who discover that you may just be on to something.

This is the tipping point: you have woke up the first evangelists from the common unconsciousness, these evangelists will now start the work of spreading your idea, self propelled by the knowledge that your idea is timely, necessary and unavoidable.

Phase V. Acceptance & Mainstream

Slowly but surely the evangelists chip away at the collective unconsciousness, replacing opinions with facts. These facts start shifting the common unconsciousness into a new level of realization: It is at this moment that you will transcend in the public consciousness from being a ‘liar’ to becoming a visionary who saw the tangible truth all along.

It used to be a long road from tipping point through acceptance and reaching the state of rewiring the consciousness of the mainstream. This time lag is shortening in drastically thanks to the accessibility of information and opinion on the net. Witness the rapid emergence of Skype into the mainstream consciousness. Free telephony, a seemingly unattainable dream just 36 months ago has become a totally real and expected reality in my life.

So has my thought process around Dr. Rees’ Ecological Footprint. From being a faint notion, a theoretical possibility, it has taken over a large part of my day to day consciousness, decision making and planning (recycling, using public transport whenever possible, judiciously monitoring my electricity consumption).Yes, I am living in a reality Dr. Rees foresaw 15 years ago, decided to make a stand and go through the 5 painful phases of leadership-thought-acceptance and become major influencer of human behavior.

These 5 phases may be one of the biggest ‘secrets’ of why so few people persevere on their journey to meaningfulness. It is the ability to keep on track in the shadows of the valley of death during phase IV when the collective unconsciousness is starting to fight back in earnest, hitting you with everything it’s got. Just hang in there, the bigger your idea is the louder the screaming will be. Hang in there, counteract the flailing, fearful ‘beast’ of the common unconscious with calm facts, know that the first individuals are just about to open their eyes and truly examine your idea for the first time and come to their own conclusion: you have reached the tipping point and the world is just about to turn in your favor.

The American Idol Way To Finding The Best
Here is the mother of all corporate questions: how do I find the right people for my organization? Reams of books have been written about how to find that right fit, oodles of tests have been designed and deployed only to come up with so-so results.

Here is the short and skinny to finding the right people:

1. Today everyone can look good on paper, you can download template CVs from the internet that make Einstein look like an apprentice janitor
2. Today many people have become test savvy, outsmarting the cure-all HR testing methods that are supposed to ferret out your darkest-deepest personality secrets
3. Today many candidates have become interview savvy and can dutifully answer all the ‘surprising’ questions HR has in store for them.

So, what works?

Let Them Tell You About Themselves:
Have you ever watched American Idol? What do American Idol and your company have in common? American Idol and your company are looking for talents to fulfill specific goals. To find the ideal talent-goal match American Idol holds auditions in which each hopeful can showcase his/her abilities.

Instead of being asked to fill out endless mindless personality profiling tests that reveal little or nothing about the individual’s true abilities the candidates are simply asked to perform the task they came to fulfill: Sing!

Just by observing the candidate’s actions, behavior patterns and innate talent the panel judges and the audience can make pretty accurate decisions about the individual candidate’s personality (egomaniacal, humble, open, aggressive, etc) as well as gauging their innate talent at the task to be given, in this case: singing…

Have Them Audition – YouTube Your Way To A Great Team
Of course you may say ‘Hey, that’s all fine and dandy, but I am not Simon Cowell and I am not looking for singers, so how does that apply to me?

The answer is: how about you are Joe X and you are looking for really hot salespeople.

You can now throw the market a challenge and put an invitation into cyberspace: ‘We, Company X, are looking to hire hot, talented salespeople who are ready to make excellent money. Send us your personal YouTube video that:

1. Tells us about you
2. Tells us about what makes you special unique (USP)
3. Gives us 3 examples of how you would sell ice to an Eskimo, sand to a Bedouin and saltwater to a sailor

Sit back, relax and enjoy the show. This exercise is the best people filter you will find. Individuals willing to take on the challenge of making their own video have to be entrepreneurial, inventive, imaginative and driven to go the extra mile, doesn’t that sound like a great set of basic characteristics for a new team member?

In An Age Of Self Expression Allow Them To Express
On top of that: allowing people to tell you who they truly are will allow you to uncover some amazing and unexpected individual talents that would have been smothered by run-of-the-mill personality tests.

The Otter & The Oil Spill
Sleepiness & possibly alcohol-induced lack of attention by a captain led to one of the most catastrophic oil spills in history: the Exxon Valdez supertanker was sliced open and spilled 11 million gallons of oil into the ocean.

For weeks the world was treated to the spectacle of oil soaked creatures dying tortuous deaths and thousands of volunteers desperately trying to clean up the gooey mess while highly trained experts & engineers struggled to contain the spill with the best high tech tools at their disposal.

Enter the outsider: Philip McCrory, a hairdresser from Alabama. While watching the TV coverage of the oil spill he noticed that otter fur acted like an oil-magnet. The otters where dying by the score laden with large clumps of oil. The reason for this is simple: otter fur is engineered to retain oil easily, keeping the animal dry and comfy in the cold Pacific surf under normal circumstances.

Enter Curiosity
Piqued by curiosity McCrory swept human hair from his shop floor and stuffed it into a bag and threw it into a water basin filled with water and a gallon of motor oil. After 2 minutes the water had been cleansed of the oil which had been sucked up by the human hair in the bag!

Radically New Results
Further tests by NASA revealed that this new natural method of capturing spilled oil could have soaked up the whole Exxon Valdez oil mess in one week, saving a large chunk of the $2 billion Exxon shelled out to remove only 12% of all the oil spilled!

‘New Eyes’ Are The Name Of The Game
The biggest challenge of today’s companies and employees is the trust and belief in ‘specialist know-how’. If I have not been educated to do X then I am not a certified specialist in this field, which does not allow me to have an opinion about it or even be curious about this field, that is why we have hired specialists to do X in the first place, isn’t it?

While it seems logical to rely on the services and opinion on a highly specialized group of individuals to deliver X, it is also dangerous:

The highly focused X specialists will eventually suffer from over-focusing & group think as much as from a lack of fresh perspective.

This is exactly what happened in the case study above, a total outsider, a ‘naive’ hairdresser who may not have been ‘smart’ enough to make it through top engineering universities had the elegant simplicity of looking at the problem with ‘New Eyes’ and come up with a totally new approach.

P&G: Where Outsiders Are The New Insiders
P&G has caught on to a simple truth: the geometric increase of ideas, technologies and the resulting endless convergence of these into a myriad new products and possibilities are too much to be handled by a single company’s R&D team hired for the purpose of understanding it all and developing new solutions.

On the contrary: the company-hired R&D team will sooner or later fall prey to it’s own group-think and become blind to many of the new ideas and trends.

The solution: P&G has given out a simple directive->50% of all innovations introduced by P&G must have their origins outside P&G! This directive forces the company to stay open, to constantly see the world and themselves with New Eyes and to avoid the ‘we are so smart’ trap.

Celebrate Your New Eyes->They May Just See The Truth
Give yourself permission, go back to your company, look around you, notice all the things that can be improved, from small to big and become a consultant in your own right: write an opportunity cost study on what it would mean to change it and have the guts to present it to top management.

This is the way of the world to be: the heroes of today are not the eternally loyal who patiently wait for their hard earned pension to roll in, the heroes of today are the people who are outsiders and dare to creatively re-invent the world!

Why You Should Get Up And Out When Things Look Rosy!

A strange thing happened on Jake’s journey to management Nirvana: things were looking peachy for years only to end up on a dead track.

Bright, young and engaged Jake was talent spotted at a local office of a global logistics company and found himself posted to the national HQ of the company by age 26. Not bad, the small town boy was going places in his management career. After a few years of patient toiling he was posted to the regional HQ, things were kind of falling into place. If he just worked hard enough at his job Jake’s management career would surely stay on track!

But something funny happened:
Hard as he toiled, managed and delivered predictably consistent results, even in tough times, one year followed the next and Jake still found himself in the same chair located in the same corner of the same office in regional HQ.

Unknowingly Jake had bumped against the invisible Glass Ceiling. He was going nowhere…

Decoding The Invisible Glass Ceiling
Legions of managers are out there today, right at this very moment, ensnared in the seemingly invisible web of the Glass Ceiling. Try as they may, they just can’t figure out what went wrong with their career, why they are not getting past this invisible barrier.

They have worked diligently, cooperated, contributed and delivered and yet, here they are: stuck… their name is not hot property anymore, the promotions pass them by, everyone is nice and friendly enough to them but no one really tells them why they are going nowhere, it’s as if they are stuck in a sensory deprivation chamber watching through a hole in the wall as the world passes them by.

3 Steps To Remove The Glass Ceiling From Your Management Career

Step 1. Statistics Apply->Why People Go From Young Hero To Being Invisible
Think of an old fashioned hierarchical organization as a pyramid. There is plenty of space at the bottom of the pile. Most people who join a company at the bottom of the hierarchy pile have one goal in mind: find a job & pay the bills. Even one ounce more energy & determination than the rest will make you stand out from the crowd… you will be noticed easily and given your first leadership role fairly fast, for in the land of the blind the one-eyed is king.

But don’t be fooled, far from being an ideal pyramid shape a hierarchical organization looks more like a funnel: broad at the bottom suddenly tapering into a thin end. This means: there is much less space at the top and the air gets much thinner much faster than people believe. Your natural good looks, affable charm and ability to deliver predictable results will not get you past this sudden narrowing of the management strata.

Step 2. Don’t Become A Legend In Your Own Mind
Blessed with a few initial management successes and promotions many a young manager gets excited about his/her abilities.

Far from understanding that these initial successes owe as much to their personal ability as to the fact that they achieved easy wins being the one-eyed kings in the land of the blind (it isn’t hard to succeed in an environment populated by individuals who just want to pay the bills) these managers actually start believing in their personal prowess and that they are irreplaceable… WRONG

The moment you become a legend in your own mind: “I am good, what would they do without me, etc” a predictable psychological mechanism sets in:
The egotist mind now has a delusion it needs to defend at all costs: “Only I can do this, they need me, etc…” which starts excluding all other possible realities and opinions. You have trapped yourself in a cycle of having to prove yourself right.

How many times have you sat in a meeting and heard Mr. X or Mrs. Y ramble on and belabor a silly point with only one intention in mind: prove themselves right when everyone perfectly well knew they were wrong…

Get over it: you are not perfect, you cannot know everything and in a world of geometric knowledge & technology expansion wanting to be ‘right’ is a one way ticket to disaster.

Step 3. Move-Move-Move From Company To The Next!
Yes, this does contradict traditional wisdom. Words like loyalty, perseverance, staying power, etc start flooding our minds instantly: “My gosh, what will my CV look like! People will think I am a mercenary!”…

Lets look at this from another angle:

What is it that you really get paid for: results or hard work?

Many long term employees of organizations have got it back to front: loyalty, hard work and obedience to the ‘corporate culture’ of their team characterize their thinking and actions… “I have sacrificed long years of my life in loyal, hard-working service to this company, don’t I deserve some recognition?” well, yes you do… IF you have delivered results…

However, there is a strange correlation between long term loyalty, hard work and playing along with the corporate culture, it’s called inflexibility, lack of imagination and diminishing results because we get bogged down in the corporate politics.

Wake up my loyal, long-suffering, sacrificial friends! No one is interested in your sacrifice! No one is interested in your Siren’s song of hard work and unrewarded loyalty!

Everyone is only interested in: can you bring me a result! Are you fast, efficient, self driven and innovative?

All the qualities of speed, mental agility and willingness to deliver are crucially attached to your ability to change and taking on new challenges, instead of stagnating in an old pond you are like the rushing water of a waterfall: full of fresh oxygen, ideas, zest, power and energy to change things around you. That is what you will be paid for.

Talent search companies are taking a very clear look at CVs, one of the most important criteria is: have you been with a company for a long time (10 years or more)…then you might just have become a pond of stagnant ideas…. Too focused on adeptly sailing the political maze of your company and not innovative/disruptive enough to break old thinking patterns.
Simply put: the employee is dead.

Companies are looking for fresh thoughts, fresh solutions, individuals who are willing to stand up and deliver (and those companies who are not looking for such people won’t be in the game for much longer).

Companies are looking for Co-Creators, emotionally mature individuals who know that there is only one reason to join a team: achieve results, learn, improve processes and take this fresh knowledge to the next position in which they can become a key catalyst for results

Achtung dear fellow leaders! Gen Y is coming your way.
As all things in life Gen Y is basket of mixed blessings. Historically the most educated, wired and connected generation to date, a large minority of this generation have a very specific handicap: lack of hardship experience!

Put another way: there is a large group of Gen Yers who grew up with the proverbial silver spoon firmly lodged in their mouth. Doted on by over-loving parents life has been a smooth sail for them, nice homes, excellent schools, far flung vacations and branded items galore have been an unquestioned part of their existence thus far.

All this has created a sense of entitlement, choice and personal specialness which makes these members of Gen Y behave like a strawberry:  beautiful to behold yet easily bruised when touched too roughly.

The problem is that you, as their manager, might be the first taste of real life they will get.

Filtering The Guys With The ‘Right Stuff’ & Getting Them To Deliver

The arrival of the Strawberry Generation in the corporate world is heralded by frustrated managers who regularly enquire at sessions:

How come we chose this person? He/she looked so good during the interview, has excellent certificates, is well spoken, intelligent… then he/she turned out to be hard to motivate, not driven and willing to leave at the first challenge!

Get Them MOVING -> Use The Commando Reverse Psychology Strategy

Have you ever watched a movie set in the world of elite commandos? There is an interesting scene in many of these movies:

Some young guy wants to join the team. He seems like a nice guy, intelligent, well spoken… yet something is missing, that special ingredient, the OOOMPH factor.

This is when the sergeant steps up. He gets really close up to the potential recruit, eyeballs him closely, nose to nose… then he slowly walks around the potential recruit and says ‘Son, why do you want to join this unit?’ says it and sniffs at the young man’s collar “Son, I smell fear in you! Are you man enough for this challenge? Hmmmm, you see son, we don’t just take anyone who happens to have a little hero dream… so what will it be. Are you ready to sign on with everything you’ve got! Follow orders, play team and when we say ‘jump’ you will shout ‘how high!’… is that clear son?! ”

Make Them WANT IT!

This classic scene plays out a simple psychological mechanism: if you hand an opportunity to a person on a silver platter chances are the person may ignore the opportunity.

Make an opportunity exclusive, hard to get, secret or scarce and something strange happens in the human psyche: our hunting instincts mixed with our fear of scarcity kick in! All of a sudden we want it! Whatever ‘it’ is…

The Strawberry Gens are superbly educated and for the most part are used to getting things served on a silver platter. Ignite their hunting instincts: it’s time you made things a little harder to reach for them…

Have Them Sell Themselves To You!

When interviewing a Strawberry Gener firmly resist the temptation of offering your job opportunity on a silver platter. Create an aura of elitist exclusivity, give them the ‘Right Stuff’ speech:

‘OK Peter, I see you have excellent certs and a good degree. Now tell me a little about yourself and your family, what car do you drive, what hobbies do you have…’

After Peter has tells you about himself it’s time to use reverse psychology:

‘Interesting Peter, so your father is a corporate lawyer and your mother an accountant. You grew up in a nice neighborhood, went on overseas holidays ever since you can remember, have had an all expenses paid education at X University, currently drive a model Y car that you did not pay for and wear a Z brand watch your parents bought you for your birthday…  Now tell me Peter, why should I hire you? Why should I give you this unique opportunity that may be much better suited for a hungry young upstart who has something to fight for in life, who cannot go back to a cozy penthouse when the going gets hard… tell me please why I should give you this opportunity?’

This puts the Strawberry in the back foot! The tables have turned, instead of being welcomed with open arms and acknowledged for all his achievements ,as he is used to, Peter all of a sudden has to justify himself and truly dig in deep to sell his services and understand that his ‘goods’ may be replaceable… that what is truly wanted is commitment.

Test this strategy the next time you are interviewing potential young team members and you will have an excellent new filter to uncover the true personalities and agendas of your interviewees.