Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: management

  • Driving change from the top

    Driving change from the top

    One of the hallmarks of the PC era was how  innovations in workplace technology tended to be driven by the middle ranks of organisations.

    The PC itself is an example, it’s adoption in the early 1990s was driven by company accountants, secretaries and salespeople who introduced the machines into their workplaces, usually in the face of management opposition.

    Many of the arguments against introducing PCs at the time are eerily similar to that against the Internet or social media over the next twenty years.

    Sometime in over the last few years that pattern changed and the adoption of new technologies started being driven by boards and executives.

    The turning point was the release of the Apple iPad which was enthusiastically adopted by executives and directors, suddenly, Bring Your Own Device policies were in fashion and the pattern of the c-suite driving change had been established.

    Now a similar problem is at work with social media, the story of David Thodey driving the use of Yammer in Telstra is one example where executives are leading the adoption of services in large companies.

    The lesson for those selling into the business market is to grab the imagination of senior executives and the board, with competitive pressures increasing on companies they may well be a receptive audience.

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  • Re-inventing management with social media

    Re-inventing management with social media

    Yesterday I went along to hear Telstra’s Paul Geason speak at the American Chamber of Commerce lunch in Sydney.

    Geason, who is Group Managing Director for the company’s Enterprise and Government division, was speaking on some of the findings from Telstra’s Clever Australian program along with some of the technology trends he’s encountered in big business and public organisations.

    The bulk of Geason’s presentation I reported in an article for Comms Day, and much of his observations about enterprise technology trends wouldn’t surprise keen observers of the industry or regular readers of this blog.

    What did stand out though were his comments on how social media is changing management behaviour at Telstra where over 25,000 registered users of the company’s Yammer platform have direct access to the company’s CEO, David Thodey.

    Social media is just going crazy. Within Telstra now we have over 25,000 of our staff registered on Yammer. It has been a phenomenon. It’s playing this really interesting role of breaking down the hierarchy in our organisation.

    Which is not just because of the technology but it’s also got something to do with our CEO.

    He is on Yammer just about every single day of the week. There is not an issue that hits that site that he won’t pick up and direct to the right place to get it to the right place and have it dealt with.

    Our people love it, they would never have imagined they could get that level of access and input and intervention from the CEO.

    There’s a certain transparency that has come to our organisation that didn’t exist previously which is really great for the levels of engagement of our people and very challenging for us as leaders in having to deal with that level of visibility that was not there before.

    I think it’s really changing how organistations are operating.

    Paul Geason’s comments are a good example of changing management structures. Not only does it bring accountability to executives, it also means organisations can respond quickly to changing marketplaces – something covered in the Future of Teamwork presentation back in 2010.

    A few years ago, no-one would have thought of Telstra as being an open, collaborative organisation yet today it’s gone quite a way down the path to becoming one.

    The key though to this is having senior management buying into the process. Without that leadership many companies might be facing a tough future.

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  • Google’s simple recipe for management accountability

    Google’s simple recipe for management accountability

    One of the big challenges for larger organisations is giving managers the feedback they need to do their jobs properly. The New York Times interview with senior vice president of people operations at Google, Laszlo Bock, covers some interesting aspects of how accountability in the workplace helps executives.

    Google surveys its staff twice a year on how they think their managers are performing in a Upward Feedback Survey that pulls together between twelve and eighteen different factors which the company then uses to measure how their leaders are performing.

    That bottom-up, data driven approach has proved to be successful as Bock told the New York Times.

    We’ve actually made it harder to be a bad manager. If you go back to somebody and say, “Look, you’re an eighth-percentile people manager at Google. This is what people say.” They might say, “Well, you know, I’m actually better than that.” And then I’ll say, “That’s how you feel. But these are the facts that people are reporting about how they experience you.”

    You don’t actually have to do that much more. Because for most people, just knowing that information causes them to change their conduct. One of the applications of Big Data is giving people the facts, and getting them to understand that their own decision-making is not perfect. And that in itself causes them to change their behavior.

    Accountability matters – who’d have thought?

    The other thing that Bock and Google’s HR team have learned from their measuring management performance is just how effective consistency can be.

    We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.

    Sometimes we make things too complex – and Google’s experience with managers shows that simple accountability and consistency are far more effective than complicated KPIs.

    Image by ulrik at sxc.hu

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  • When Venture Capital meets its own disruption

    When Venture Capital meets its own disruption

    Tech industry veteran Paul Graham always offers challenging thoughts about the Silicon Valley business environment on his Y Combinator blog.

    Last month’s post looks at investment trends and how the venture capital industry itself is being disrupted as startups become cheaper to fund. He also touches on a profound change in the modern business environment.

    Graham’s point is Venture Capital firms are finding their equity stakes eroding as it becomes easier and cheaper for founders to fund their business, as a result VC terms are steadily becoming less demanding.

    An interesting observation from Graham is how the attitude of graduates towards starting up businesses has changed.

    When I graduated from college in 1986, there were essentially two options: get a job or go to grad school. Now there’s a third: start your own company. That’s a big change. In principle it was possible to start your own company in 1986 too, but it didn’t seem like a real possibility. It seemed possible to start a consulting company, or a niche product company, but it didn’t seem possible to start a company that would become big.

    That isn’t true – people like Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were creating companies that were already successes by 1986 – the difference was that startup companies in the 1980s were founded by college dropouts, not graduates of Cornell or Harvard.

    In the current dot com mania, it’s now acceptable for graduates of mainstream universities to look at starting up business. For this we can probably thank Sergey Brin and Larry Page for showing how graduates can create a massive success with Google.

    One wonders though how long this will last, for many of the twenty and early thirty somethings taking a punt on some start ups the option of going back to work for a consulting firm is always there. Get in your late 30s or early 40s and suddenly options start running out if you haven’t hit that big home run and found a greater fool.

    There’s also the risk that the current startup mania will run out of steam, right now it’s sexy but stories like 25 million dollar investments in businesses that are barely past their concept phase do indicate the current dot com boom is approaching its peak, if it isn’t there already.

    Where Graham is spot on though is that the 19th and 20th Century methods of industrial organisation are evolving into something else as technology breaks down silos and conglomerates. This is something that current executives, and those at university hoping to be the next generation of managers, should keep in mind.

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  • Michael Dell’s struggle to transform his business

    Michael Dell’s struggle to transform his business

    Michael Dell continues to press on with his buy out bid for the computer manufacturing giant he created with a presentation to shareholders stating his case why Dell Computers would have a better future as a private company.

    Dell’s assertion is the company has to move from being a PC manufacturer to a Enterprise Solutions and Services business (ESS) as computer manufacturing margins collapse in the face of a changing market and more nimble, low cost, competitors.

    What’s telling in Dell’s presentation is just how fast these changes have happened, here’s some key bullet points from the slide deck.

    • Dell’s transformation from a PC-focused business to an Enterprise Solutions and Services (ESS) -focused business is critical to its future success, especially as the PC market is changing faster than anticipated.
    • The transition to the “New Dell” is highly dependent on challenged “Core Dell”performance.
    • The speed of transformation is critical, yet “Core Dell” operating income is declining faster than the growth of “New Dell” operating income.
    • Dell’s rate of transformation is being outpaced by the rapid market shift to cloud.

    The market is shifting quickly against Dell’s core PC manufacturing and sales business and the company’s founder is under no illusions just how serious the problem is.

    Should Michael Dell succeed, the challenge in transforming his business is going to be immense – Dell Computing was one of the 1990s businesses that reinvented both the PC industry and the vast, precise logistics chain that supports it.

    It was PC companies like Dell and Gateway who showed the dot com industry how to deliver goods quickly and profitably to customers around the world. Businesses like Amazon built their models upon the sophisticated logistics systems and relationships the computer manufacturers created.

    A lesson though for all of those companies that followed Dell and Gateway is that those supply chains may turn around and bite you in the future, as Michael says in his presentation;

    Within the PC market, Dell faces increasingly aggressive competition from low cost competitors around the world and shifts in product demand to segments where Dell has historically been weaker.

    Those low cost competitors were many of Dell’s suppliers as over time the company’s Chinese manufacturers, Filipino call centres and Malaysian assemblers have developed the management skills to compete with the US retailers rather than just be their contractors.

    Something that’s being missed in the debate about globalisation at present is that its not just low value work that can be done offshore – increasingly sales, marketing and legal are moving offshore along with programmers and engineers. Now the same thing is happening with management.

    The same thing is also happening with corporations as Asian giants like Samsung, Huawei, Wipro and others displace US and European incumbents.

    Dell Computing has been a much a victim of that move as it has been of the decline in the PC market which means its more than one battle Michael Dell has to fight.

    It may well be that Dell can survive, but we shouldn’t underestimate just how great the challenge is as the company faces major changes to its markets and the global economy.

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