Tag: leadership

Acknowledging the human costs of disruption

Disruption and change come at a human cost that we need to acknowledge

As we talk of the dramatic changes facing business and society today it’s worthwhile noting a  much greater displacement happened in the Twentieth Century as electricity, the motor car and communications drove the greatest increase in standards of living that humans have ever seen.

Our great-great grandparents lived through a period of change far greater than that we will see as their lives and communities were radically transformed.

Many common jobs in the early 1900s had ceased to exist by the middle of the century as cars replaced horses, mains electricity replaced town gas and refrigeration changed shopping habits. In the second half of the century affordable motor vehicles and television saw our cities reshaped around suburban life, a process now being reversed.

The structural change to economies saw a shift in population and jobs; a hundred years ago thirty percent of the US labor force was employed in agriculture, today it’s around two percent. Despite the shift, jobs were eventually found for those displaced from farms.

Shifting from an agricultural economy to an industrial society didn’t come without costs however,  the price paid by the affected communities and individuals was huge as documented by Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange’s photos.

While it’s unlikely we’ll see the deprivation of The Great Depression repeated in a modern welfare state, it’s important to recognise the real human costs of technological change. For politicians and community leaders it could define how history judges them.

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Politics, business and leadership

Google’s hiring processes raise some important points about leadership.

I’ve covered the New York Times’ interview with Google’s senior vice president of people operations, Laszlo Bock previously in describing what the business has learned from its scientific method of hiring people.

One striking aspect of that story that deserves further discussion is Bock’s thoughts on leadership;

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.

This is something that applies in all walks of life — whether you’re coaching a kids’ football team, running a corporation or leading a nation.

Sadly in many of these fields we’re lacking the consistent leadership Laszlo Bock describes. That could turn out to be one of the greatest challenges for the 21st Century.

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Disruption and leadership

Smartphones and the internet are shifting power between suppliers, companies and customers. The new breed of leaders has a tough task.

As new communications tools appear, the challenge for managers is to deal with the disruptions these technologies bring to their businesses.

Launching Deloitte Digital’s release of Taking Leadership in the Digital Economy last week the Executive Director of Telstra Digital Consumers, Gerd Schenkel, described how business is changing as consumers are being empowered by smartphones.

A good example of this is the taxi industry where applications like GoCatch, InGoGo and Uber give passengers the opportunity to fight back against poor service from protected operators.

Sydney is an attractive market for taxi industry disruptors as the current protected market fails both passengers and drivers. Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, said at the Sydney launch of his service earlier last week that the city is one of the more ‘problematic” markets they’ve entered alongside San Francisco and Paris.

That letting down drivers along with passengers is an also an important point – drivers get 80% of Uber’s charges while InGoGo and GoCatch free operators from poor booking systems that frustrate everybody involved in the industry while making the system as unaccountable as possible.

Similar changes are happening in other industries as technology changes the way suppliers, customers and staff work.

A good example of changing work practices is the adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies in the workplace. A few years ago in most businesses it was unthought of that staff could be allowed to bring their own computers to work. Today it’s common and soon the companies that don’t have a BYOD policy will be exception.

BYOD has happened because of the arrival of cheap consumer devices like smartphones and tablets along with IT departments rolling out web based services.

We’ve seen this before – probably the greatest influences on the shape of modern society had been electricity and the motor car. These, and many other technological changes have shaped today’s workplace.

Many businesses though suffer for those changes as we’re seeing with the drying up of the newspapers’ “rivers of gold”.

For Telstra this is seen in the demise of their phone directory business; Sensis was a true river of gold in the days of printed phone directories, but a number of management mis-steps over the last 15 years meant they totally missed the transition to digital.

The tragedy for Telstra that Sensis’ strength in the local advertising market should have been a positive given Google’s failure to execute on their local search strategy.

On reflecting about the struggle to deal with transitions to new technology, just how many business are like Sensis and Fairfax in having leaders that aren’t equipped to deal with these changes.

The leaders of the 1980s whose business models were based on the assumption of economic growth underpinned by easy credit, cheap energy and demographic growth and now finding those factors are moving against them at the same time technology change is disrupting their industries.

For the upcoming generation of leaders, both in business and government, having the ability to adapt to the changed power relationships between customers, suppliers and workers is going to be essential. For those steeped in last century’s certainties, it’s going to be a tough time.

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ANZAC Day

Remembering the the real bravery on a day of remembrance.

It’s ANZAC Day in Australia where the anniversary of the World War One landings in Gallipoli marks the first national action of the then new nation.

At its heart, ANZAC Day remembers sacrifice and bravery. The men and women who volunteered for the Great War and all those that have followed over the last hundred years were prepared to sacrifice relationships, safe careers and their lives to protect the King or Country from the threats of the Kaiser, Hitler, Japan, Communism or Terrorism.

We should remember though that those politicians saying fine words today and posing for photo opportunities at the landing beaches are the much the same people who started an unnecessary war in 1914 and many of those wars since.

Compare the words of Billy Hughes supporting Australian conscription in 1915 and the words of John Howard or Julia Gillard.

Stripped of spin doctors’ dressing and the words of today’s politicians are the same.  Only the empire has changed.

Today’s politicians know of concepts like sacrifice, patriotism and bravery, exploiting them can prove handy at election time.

Luckily for most of them their political and business careers rarely call for such qualities.

Hopefully our children won’t find themselves in the trenches  – or fall out shelters – to meet the short term gains of an Obama, Cameron or Gillard and their corporate friends.

The real lesson of ANZAC Day, Veterans Day and all the other national days of remembrance around the world for those every nation has lost in battle is that war is the final act and represents a failure by the Kings, Presidents and Prime Ministers who choose to lead us.

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Lest We Forget

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Is the problem in the cockpit?

Who is in control anyway?

In the Daily Reckoning newsletter editor Callum Newman uses Malcolm Gladwell’s description of power relationships to draw a parallel between Korean pilots crashing planes into mountains and the economy, pointing out our politicians are like distracted, doomed aviators ignoring the obvious features they about to collide with.

Is that fair though? In a plane the passengers are strapped in their seats and have to take their the pilots in trust, in real life we have control — all of our actions affect the vehicle that is our economy.

Unlike a plane we can jump out and do our own thing, we can refuse to buy one good or service and we can set up a business for ourselves when we see a market that isn’t being serviced.

Where the analogy does work though is our politicians – and many business leaders – aren’t paying attention to major demographic and economic shifts.

The question is “why?” Most of these people aren’t stupid and they have access to better information than most of us, which is one of the reasons they are in power.

Perhaps it’s because we don’t want to hear the truth; that our assumptions about what the state will provide and how our economy is developing are flawed.

In many ways, particularly in a modern Western democracy, our politician are mirrors of ourselves. They tell is what they think we’d like to hear.

The problem isn’t in the cockpit, it’s back at the boarding gate where we’re more worried whether we’ll get a packet of nuts than whether we should agree to embark on a rough journey to a destination we don’t expect.

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