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Showing posts with label behaviorchange. Show all posts
Showing posts with label behaviorchange. Show all posts

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Why Personal Development is a must for today’s CEO
By George W. Watts & Jamie Millar


Late one Sunday night, Ron sat in his study ruminating on the upcoming week. The board was meeting on Wednesday, and Ron knew that some directors’ private questions about his leadership were getting louder. Soon the company was to announce a third straight quarter of stagnant earnings. Ron was starting to wonder if he had the right team—and the right strategy—to compete in an intensely competitive industry. Maybe the Peter Principle was real. Had he finally reached his level of incompetence?

To relax, Ron put on his headphones and set his iPhone to shuffle. As he sat back, the gentle opening guitar riff from Stairway to Heaven started to play. This song always brought him back to his youth, when life seemed simpler. Suddenly, Ron’s reminiscing was interrupted by Robert Plant: Yes, there are two paths you can go by/But in the long run/There’s still time to change the road you’re on.

As Ron reflected over his career, he noted that leaders usually achieved the best outcomes when they were temperamentally suited for their role, had earned their colleagues’ and customers’ trust, and worked in an organization—and industry—where their skills were most valued. He pulled out his notebook and began to jot down the themes into a process flow diagram.

 Ron drew some boxes. Each position he had held valued certain personality traits over others. At times in his career, Ron had felt like he was painting with his left foot. But what if he had molded his role to match his innate personality and assigned out tasks he did not enjoy? What if he had more effectively partnered with colleagues holding different strengths; would that have changed his outlook and the outcome? Ron realized that his personal effectiveness was the product of role-personality alignment and perceived trustworthiness. He thought back to the simple trustworthiness equation one of his mentors had taught him many years ago. Trustworthiness = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy)/Self-Orientation. Did he come across as too self-oriented? Perhaps. Did others feel they really knew him? Perhaps not enough.

Ron liked how the model was shaping up: personal effectiveness applied against the right platform would lead to both “hard” and “soft” outcomes. Those include financial results, Ron’s top priority, as well as team cohesion, strategic advantage, and enhanced reputation.

In the flow diagram, Ron sketched a box called “Personal Development,” which drew from both internal and external sources. External sources included colleagues, customers, and high-quality training programs. Ron also valued the nuanced insights he took away from a peer network he attended every quarter. As a voracious reader, Ron regularly sought out provocative ideas that would help him to understand his industry, his role, and himself  better. Ron had not worked with an executive coach in the past but wondered if a coach might help him step back and make sense of these disparate data points. It might be worth a try.

As Ron drew some arrows, he noticed a feedback loop in the diagram. Time spent on personal development had dual benefits, which complemented each other to enhance outcomes. On the one hand, he could use personal development to change his opportunity space. Why were marketing and product development not working well together? Why did the sales team miss the competitive threats in Asia? What might the shift from a pipeline business model to a platform model look like? As CEO, he had the authority to re-shape the organization, something Bill Gates was famous for.

On the other hand, Ron could also draw on personal development to change himself. Was he taking on specific responsibilities just because his predecessor had? They were very different people with different strengths and interests. Why did Ron feel that he had to keep the confines of the position? What might he delegate, and where could he better apply the talents that helped him reach the CEO position?

Ron challenged himself through self-reflection, an internal source of personal development. Did he sometimes dodge a tough question because he didn’t feel comfortable answering it? Did this erode others’ trust in him? Did they perceive his actions as a lack of competence? Perhaps some wondered if he had a hidden agenda. He knew that millennial employees craved authenticity; but then again, he suspected most others did, too.

There was much to consider. As Ron’s schedule became increasingly intense, he had spent more time working on the company and less time working on himself. He switched off the light in his study and headed up to bed, knowing that this had to change. Personal development was not a luxury. It was a necessity. It would make the company better. It would make him better. And that sounded like a winning formula.

Fuente: Chief Executive

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TALLERES DE CAPACITACIÓN IN COMPANY,
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    Consultas al email: msg.latam@gmail.com


    .·. Dr. Miguel Ángel MEDINA CASABELLA, MSM, MBA, MHSA .·.
    Especialista Multicultural Global en Management Estratégico, Conducta Organizacional, Gestión del Cambio e Inversiones, graduado en University of California at Berkeley y The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania)
    Asesor en Ministerio de Cultura y Educación de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
    Miembro del Comité EEUU del Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales
    Representante de The George Washington University para LatAm (2017-1996)
    Ex Director Académico y Profesor de Gestión del Cambio del HSML Program para LatAm en 
    The George Washington University (Washington DC)
    CEO, MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS GROUP LatAm
    Skype: medinacasabella


    MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS GROUP LatAm ©
    es una Consultora Interdisciplinaria cuya Misión es proveer
    soluciones integrales, eficientes y operativas en todas las áreas vinculadas a:

    Estrategias Multiculturales y Transculturales, Organizacionales y Competitivas,
    Management Estratégico,
    Gestión del Cambio,
    Marketing Estratégico,
    Proyectos de Inversión,
    Gestión Educativa,
    Capacitación

    de Latino América (LatAm), para los Sectores:

    a) Industria y Servicios,
    b) Universidades y Centros de Capacitación,
    c) ONGs y Gobiernos.
    Posted by at No comments:
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    Thursday, September 7, 2017

    Disrupt or Be Disrupted: today’s new normal

    by Jennifer Pellet


    Across industries, advances in everything from analytics and artificial intelligence to mobility and social media are changing virtually every aspect of doing business. Welcome to the era of “Transform or be transformed.”

    This new reality—like most large-scale changes—represents both an opportunity and a threat for business leaders, agreed CEOs gathered for Chief Executive’s recent CEO2CEO Summit.

    Recognizing this imperative, business leaders participating in the summit shared their experiences deploying digital strategies to engage more effectively with consumers, streamline internal processes, improve productivity and explore new value propositions. Here are 5 key themes that emerged.

    1. Staying current requires constant vigilance.

    The rapid growth of relative newcomers like Amazon, Uber and Netflix epitomizes the threat of disruption faced by legacy businesses that fail to foresee and adapt to game-changing technology. The consequences of neglecting to adapt to even incremental advances can be just as dire over time, marching a healthy business steadily toward obsolescence.

    Recognizing the need for constant vigilance is key. Even companies that once innovated their way to success become vulnerable to the next big thing once they reach a certain size. 1-800-Flowers—which revolutionized the floral business by embracing telephone sales and, later, e-commerce—guards against being overtaken by aggressively pursuing new technologies as soon as they emerge, reported Jim McCann, founder and executive chairman.

    The company was an early partner with IBM Watson, which led to the creation of a digital concierge. “Gwyn” is a virtual assistant that helps web customers with their gifting needs and will, thanks to machine learning, learn its craft much the way a floral shop employee learns about floral service over time. 1-800-Flowers also is partnering with Uber to speed delivery service, has a chatbot on Amazon Messenger and a partnership with Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, that allows customers to place an order with a voice command.

    2. Digital advances have raised customer expectations across all industries.

    Customers in both the B2C and B2B segments increasingly expect instant gratification—and stockholders are no different, noted Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, who is leading a reorganization aimed in large part at making the company more agile. When the dust settles, Dow will be divided into three entities: one devoted to materials sciences in the packaging, infrastructure solutions and transportation areas; a second concentrating on agricultural science; and a third focused on specialty petrochemicals.

    “The diversified conglomerate model is dying in the public market,” Liveris said, explaining the thinking behind the reorganization. “You have to choose areas of [focus] so that you can scale appropriately within them.”

    The restructuring will allow Dow to continue its journey toward speeding innovation through technology. Already, noted Liveris, investments in bioinformatics and robotics have increased the number of experiments Dow conducts on behalf of its business customers from 20,000 a year a decade ago to 2 million a year.

    Recently, for example, Under Armour approached Dow looking to make its line of athletic shoes bouncier, water-resistant, temperature-resistant and less likely to degrade over time. “Normally, developing a polymer that would support that would take two to three years,” said Liveris. “We did it using chemical engineers, biomatics, robotics and materials science in three weeks.”

    Speed is just as critical in the B2C market, where customers expect to be able not only to find whatever their hearts desire at their fingertips, but to receive it within days—or, in the case of pizza, within minutes. Domino’s, which built a national chain around the promise of speedy delivery, upped the ante on that model in 2015 with a pizza ordering app that not only guarantees easy and fast access to a pie, but lets you track it on your smartphone every step of the way. Today, digital orders account for 35% of the company’s sales and deliver a higher repeat customer rate, higher spending and higher satisfaction.

    3. Artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly inform decision making.

    The unbiased decision making that comes from data being plugged into algorithms can inform rather than replace strategic decision making, asserted David Kenny, general manager of IBM’s Watson Group. “It enables you to see patterns and identify solutions.” For example, Kenny described Watson’s effort to use genomics to help doctors treat a leukemia patient who was failing despite six years of aggressive treatment. “After analyzing her DNA and treatment data, Watson proposed she could actually have two strains at the same time,” he said. “The medical team addressed the second strain and now that patient is perfectly healthy.”

    AI can help management weigh strategic decisions. Kenny predicted a day when almost every large company will have a robot director on its board. “If you are considering making an acquisition, selling the business or making a big capital expenditure, there are implicit models that go into that decision-making process that an AI system can use,” he explained. “Then your other directors will add judgment on top of that. The decisions are better when it is the man and the machine working together. From the boardroom right up to every major decision, AI will become a tool in our lives.”

    4. Collaboration is essential to innovation and effective teamwork.

    Tapping the potential of digital technology often requires assembling multidisciplinary teams—from external as well as internal businesses—who share data and insights. For example, advances in medicine are far more likely to come from collaboration between colleagues or companies than from a lone scientist toiling in a lab, asserted Judith Dunn, global head of clinical development at Roche Innovation.

    “It’s changed how we hire and how we do business,” she said. “I have a theoretical physicist—a math whiz—whose job is to model disease. I pair him with a biologist. Their work helps us understand safety and efficacy more thoroughly.… We’re also finding that more and more therapies are combination drugs where we need to find out how our drug and another company’s drug work together”.

    The need for access to both top talent, academia and potential business partners factored heavily in Roche Innovation’s decision to open a research facility in Manhattan, where the company would be able to engage with medical professionals from the city’s teaching hospitals and medical schools, as well as attract and retain top talent. The new research center is located near the city’s East Side medical corridor in the state-of-the-art Alexandria Center for Life Science building, joining tenants like Eli Lilly and Pfizer.

    5. Companies must look for ways to bridge the digital talent gap.

    One of the biggest challenges to digital transformation is finding the employees with the skills to work with the tools and technologies being adopted by companies, agreed many CEOs attending the summit. “It is no longer blue collar or white collar, it’s ‘new collar,’” quipped Dow’s Liveris, discussing the need to reskill or replace today’s workers. “We have a 19th-century education system turning out a workforce attuned to two ends of the spectrum: higher education and people who don’t make it through high school [educated] for assembly lines. There’s a big piece in the middle—at places like our infrastructure and materials companies—that our education system doesn’t support.”

    Addressing the dearth of technically skilled workers will require changes in the nation’s educational system. However, companies can’t afford to wait for that shift to happen organically, argued Liveris, who leads President Trump’s manufacturing council. “The big opportunity is how to collaborate [and] rebuild the public education system around that new workforce,” he said. In the meantime, Dow is working with community colleges to design curriculums tailored to its needs. “Our ecosystem—we have 50,000 Dow employees but my ecosystem also includes all the high-tech firms in our supply chain—will require more jobs, but of a different skill set,” he said.

    AT&T is also taking a proactive approach to bringing its workforce up to speed. Recognizing that its digital talent gap will only continue to widen, the company worked with educational institutions to design relevant coursework and then focused on incenting its employees to voluntarily re-educate themselves for the jobs of the future.

    “We tried not to inhibit ourselves by looking at what we already had; we said, ‘Five years from now, what will we need?’” explained John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president. “Then we gave every employee a view not only of where they are today but where we expected them to be on the internal path five years from now. We also took a very important step: We allowed them to look at any future [career] they wanted and build a curriculum that would get them there, whether that be 80 hours to meet expectations or 800 hours to go out and become a new person.”

    6. In the digital age, face time is just as critical as ever.

    Even as technology enables us to connect with geographically dispersed colleagues on team endeavors, there’s no substitute for the energy and enthusiasm that a face-to-face, real-time gathering can offer.

    At 1-800-Flowers, McCann fosters an atmosphere of innovation by dining with team members regularly. “I run monthly dinners with 10 to 15 people,” he explained. “I ask core talent folks to invite younger newer people and we ask them to bring ideas, anything they do that is new and creative. We have wonderful dialogues. In fact, being early to Facebook was because of a lady sitting next to me who told me how she used Facebook. The next morning I was there with two cups of tea, saying, “Show me what you do on Facebook.”

    In fact, face time with a CEO time is becoming currency, noted Liveris, who has adopted an “inclusive model” of leadership that involves traveling the globe to engage personally with constituents, customers, owners, employees and partners. “It’s very demanding,” he said, adding that how CEOs allocate their time can be a competitive differentiator. “Your time is the only thing left that is discretionary. Everyone else has everything else you have. I’m away from headquarters 250 days a year; I slept on an airplane 90 nights last year. That’s what modern technology has done”.
    Source: Chief Executive

    Haciendo click en cada uno de los links siguientes, Contenidos de nuestros 
    TALLERES DE CAPACITACIÓN IN COMPANY, "A MEDIDA" 
    de las necesidades de su Organización:








    Consultas al mail: mamc.latam@gmail.com
    ó al TE: +5411.3532.0510


    .·. Miguel Ángel MEDINA CASABELLA, MSM, MBA, MHSA .·.
    Especialista Multicultural Global en Management Estratégico, Conducta Organizacional, Gestión del Cambio e Inversiones, graduado en Haas School of Business (University of California at Berkeley) y The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania)
    Consultor en Dirección General de Cultura y Educación de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
    Miembro del Comité EEUU del Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales
    Representante de The George Washington University para LatAm desde 1996
    Ex Director Académico y Profesor de Gestión del Cambio del HSML Program para LatAm en 
    The George Washington University (Washington DC)
    CEO, MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS GROUP LatAm
    EMail: mamc.latam@gmail.com
    TE Oficina: ( 0054) 11 - 3532 - 0510
    TE Móvil (Local): ( 011 ) 15 - 4420 - 5103
    TE Móvil (Int´l): ( 0054) 911 - 4420 - 5103
    Skype: medinacasabella


    MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS GROUP LatAm ©
    (mamc.latam@gmail.com; +5411.3532.0510)
    es una Consultora Interdisciplinaria cuya Misión es proveer
    soluciones integrales, eficientes y operativas en todas las áreas vinculadas a:

    Estrategias Multiculturales y Transculturales, Organizacionales y Competitivas,
    Management Estratégico,
    Gestión del Cambio,
    Marketing Estratégico,
    Inversiones,
    Gestión Educativa,
    Capacitación

    de Latino América (LatAm), para los Sectores:

    a) Industria y Servicios,
    b) Universidades y Centros de Capacitación,
    c) ONGs y Gobiernos.
    Posted by at No comments:
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    Tuesday, May 2, 2017

    Innovation: 5 ways to Improve your Creative Thinking
     by Rafis Abazov
    Summer is the time for internships and summer jobs for many students, and it is also a great time to work on your creative thinking and innovation skills so you’ll be in good shape to get that dream job after graduation. 

    Everyone says that modern companies – including those which are most popular to work for – highly value innovative thinking and creativity. The problem is, how can you be creative without failing, looking stupid or repeating what others have already suggested a hundred times?

    For last few years I have been talking to various startups and have heard many interesting recipes for innovation. Here are six ways to improve your own creative thinking and innovation skills…

    1. Create your own “Three Ifs”

    Many good innovators take an existing object and ask clever questions to twist the very concept of it and make it new. Steve Jobs didn’t start with the idea of a smartphone. He just took an existing cell phone and asked a very simple question: how can we improve it to make it better – or the best?

    Let’s be clear about this – there are no universal recipes for innovation, and each person should develop her or his own approach depending on specialty, interest, type of thinking, or even the type of team s/he is participating in.

    That said, I usually suggest my students build creative thinking around three “ifs”:
    1. What would happen if I change it (the object/ system/ social relationship, etc)?  
    2. What would I change or improve about this object if I wanted to use it in 10 years? 
    3. What would I do if I had a one-million-dollar investment to improve it?
    These questions can become powerful tools that can help you to think differently. It is important to exercise these skills by repeatedly using the “three ifs” formula (or designing your own set of questions) about all sorts of things. And many new ideas will pop up.

    For example, for several semesters I kept asking my students, let us take a bicycle, think about it and ask the “three if” questions, so we can come up with a new idea. Initially the students strongly resisted and were very skeptical. However, after several rounds of discussions and brainstorming they began to come up with many new creative ideas. We narrowed down those innovations into small course projects and my students’ teams won several cash awards to implement their creative ideas.

    2. Practice dreaming

    The greatest paradox is that creative thinking is not necessarily the product of IQ or enlightenment via the proverbial apple falling on your head. It is a matter of regularly training your imagination, practicing your powers of observation and dreaming, big or small. It sounds so simple, and yet in this era of information overload and highly charged urban life, this important element is often missing from our everyday lives.

    All too often we stay focused on the main task at hand, devoting our mental powers to routine actions (including Twitter and SMS – well, I am sometimes guilty of this too), so that at the end of the day the most creative idea we can come up with is just to finally take a break in front of the TV or computer screen. Sound familiar? 

    Whatever you’re doing – whether it’s work or leisure – practice spending time applying the “three ifs” formula to anything you see or imagine. This will help you get into the habit of making space in your mind for dreaming – essential for creative thinking and innovation.

    3. Make time for cohesive creative thinking

    Every textbook on creativity affirms to the importance of setting aside clearly defined time for creative thinking and innovation. For example, Google asks its teams to allocate at least 20% of their time to creative thinking or new projects.  But often, even if we show up ready to innovate, still something doesn’t work and fresh ideas fail to pop up like popcorn. There are two reasons for this stalemate. The first is that we don’t practice dreaming, and the second is we don’t practice focusing on cohesive ideas.

    Therefore, the next rule of creative thinking is very simple: allocate time – it might be an hour per day or per week – in which to exercise creative thinking about something specific. A colleague told me that when he was a student many years ago he started musing about mobile phones – what they would be in 10 and 20 years’ time. Already at college his essays on this topic won much praise, and after college he got a cool job designing apps for phones to make them much smarter and attractive for “millennials”.

    4. Learn to pitch your ideas (in an elevator)

    There is simple truth in the fact that Steve Jobs of Apple was great at exploring and explaining innovations based on existing products – laptops, cell phones, music players. He didn’t invent those products, but he made them better and he was great at explaining why his version was superior to other competing goods.

    On many occasions I hear from my students, “But I had that idea first” or “I proposed something like that just recently and nobody listened to me.” In this situation I always highlight the bottom line – probably you did have a wonderful idea, but you didn’t express yourself clearly and excitingly enough to grab people’s attention, or help others to grasp the nature of your innovation or project.

    There is an old saying, “If you cannot express your idea in three sentences – you don’t have an idea!” One of the most important innovation skills is the ability to present a very short and clear description of a new idea (two to three sentences – like shouting through the closing door of an elevator) and to make a short presentation (two to three minutes – what is called an “elevator pitch”). Like any other skill, the ability to articulate in this way can only come through much practice.

    5. Bounce ideas off others

    Even a great innovator needs people around her or him to discuss – or “bounce” – new creative ideas and innovations. What do the major innovative ideas of our time have in common, from Microsoft (well, when it was young) to Google? All of them were created by teams of people who stayed together to conceive the idea, plan their innovative projects, take them to investors and the public, and most importantly jointly brainstorm those innovations within the team – bouncing ideas, questions and improvements until the product was perfected to become the next multi-billion dollar “eureka.”

    Therefore, a final important asset to add to your innovation skillset, is the ability to be a valuable team player, capable of bouncing ideas to the next level. For some young people this is very natural, while for others it does not come so easily to be a team player. But it is never too late to train yourself in this mode of interacting.

    Source: Top Universities

    Haciendo click en cada uno de los links siguientes, Contenidos de nuestros 
    TALLERES DE CAPACITACIÓN IN COMPANY, "A MEDIDA" 
    de las necesidades de su Organización:



    Consultas al mail: mamc.latam@gmail.com
    ó al TE: +5411.3532.0510


    .·. Miguel Ángel MEDINA CASABELLA, MSM, MBA, MHSA .·.
    Especialista Multicultural Global en Management Estratégico, Conducta Organizacional, Gestión del Cambio e Inversiones, graduado en Haas School of Business (University of California at Berkeley) y The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania)
    Consultor en Dirección General de Cultura y Educación de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
    Miembro del Comité EEUU del Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales
    Representante de The George Washington University para LatAm desde 1996
    Ex Director Académico y Profesor de Gestión del Cambio del HSML Program para LatAm en GWU School of Medicine & Health Sciences (Washington DC)
    CEO, MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS GROUP LatAm
    EMail: mamc.latam@gmail.com
    TE Oficina: ( 0054) 11 - 3532 - 0510
    TE Móvil (Local): ( 011 ) 15 - 4420 - 5103
    TE Móvil (Int´l): ( 0054) 911 - 4420 - 5103
    Skype: medinacasabella


    MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS GROUP LatAm ©
    (mamc.latam@gmail.com; +5411.3532.0510)
    es una Consultora Interdisciplinaria cuya Misión es proveer
    soluciones integrales, eficientes y operativas en todas las áreas vinculadas a:

    Estrategias Multiculturales y Transculturales, Organizacionales y Competitivas,
    Management Estratégico,
    Gestión del Cambio,
    Marketing Estratégico,
    Inversiones,
    Gestión Educativa,
    Capacitación

    de Latino América (LatAm), para los Sectores:

    a) Industria y Servicios,
    b) Universidades y Centros de Capacitación,
    c) ONGs y Gobiernos.
    Posted by at No comments:
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