Think twice before blindly using benchmarking data

Could not have said it better---Harvard Business Review post on benchmarking:

Best practices are alluring. If other companies have already determined the best way to do something, why not just do what they did? But before you run off to collect best practices from the leader in your industry, ask these three questions:

• What are the downsides? Implementing a practice that worked elsewhere isn't necessarily a slam dunk. Think through the potential disadvantages and figure out how to mitigate them.
• Is success truly attributable to the benchmark practice? There are many reasons a company succeeds. It is unlikely that emulating one practice of an industry leader will give your company the same success.
• Are the conditions similar at your organization? For best practices to be transferable, businesses need to have key similarities: strategy, business model,
  and workforce.

 I would also suggest looking at the culture and structure of the organization and the countries (and cultures) in which they operate.

Every Program Needs A Theme...can your team articulate it easily?

In a recent HBR Interview, Francis Ford Coppola was asked:

When you get stuck creatively—if you don’t know where a script should go or how a movie should end—how do you get yourself unstuck?

Well, if my intuition and asking what feels better doesn’t give me the answer, I have a little exercise: What is the theme in a word or two? In The Conversation, it was privacy. In The Godfather, it was succession. I encourage my children to do the same, to break it all down: If you have that word, then when you reach an impasse, you just say: “Well, what does the theme tell me? Should it be this or should it be that?” And usually that will suggest to you which way to go and break the roadblock.

I was struck but how important it is that your complex program, project, or initiative has a theme that:

• captures the essence of what you are doing
• "travels well" through internal and external social media
• can be easily articulated by any team member

Winning Management Innovation Ideas to Learn and Apply

The Harvard Business Review-McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation sought practices and disruptive ideas that can make organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring, and accountable. Gary Hamel and team provide an excellent web site for applicable tools and approaches that any leader of large programs will benefits from. Examples of winners include:

The Deliberative Corporation James Fishkin and Bobby Fishkin. The "deliberative polling" approach, which combines deep, in-person discussions with broad-based online contribution, offers a compelling alternative to top-down direction-setting, resolves conflict and eliminates the need for "buy-in."

The Colleague Letter of Understanding: Replacing Jobs with Commitments
(Paul Green) Morning Star is one of the world's leading processors of tomatoes--and one of the most progressive models of a self-managed enterprise. At the heart of this peer-regulated collection of colleagues who determine their own roles and responsibilities is the "Colleague Letter of Understanding" or CLOU.

Nobody's as Smart as Everybody--Unleashing Individual Brilliance and Aligning Collective Genius (Jim Lavoie) Software company Rite-Solutions has developed a state-of-the-art "innovation engine"-- dynamic marketplace for idea generation and development in which all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas.

Entangled Talents: a 21st-century Social Learning System (Frederic Leconte) Leading manufacturer of eyeglass lenses, Essilor, transforms cursory, standardized training into a dynamic, collaborative, peer-driven, Web-enabled platform for sharing knowledge and experience. The LOFT (Learning Organization for Tomorrow) program is a collection of initiatives and tools designed to promote locally-grown insights and practices and to turn shop floor workers into peer coaches (some 810 volunteers at 102 sites in 40 countries). The result: new ideas and transformative practices speed around the world horizontally (rather than top-down) and formerly disengaged employees are energized by the opportunity to contribute and learn from their peers.

Shift Changes the Way Cemex Works (Gilberto Garcia, Miguel Angel Lozano Martinez, and Arturo San Vicente) Global building materials company Cemex embraces the "Collaboration Revolution" with a multi-pronged effort to shift behaviors toward more openness, transparency, meritocracy, and community. To accelerate that transformation, the company launched a social platform (called "Shift") to harvest ideas and inject agility into crucial projects. In just eighteen months, Shift has involved some 20,500 people, generated more than 500 self-organizing communities of interest (on topics from sustainability to health and safety), sparked the rapid-fire launch of new products (including a global brand of ready-mix products), and engaged hundreds of employees around the world in defining strategic priorities for the next century.

Civil Servants Cut through the Red Tape and Share Government Forward (Kim Spinder) Dutch Ministry employee Kim Spinder devised a seemingly simple hack of work with a potentially radical impact: civil servants across the Netherlands are invited to share their workspaces, expertise, and resources via a Web booking system and a set of social tools (www.deelstoel.nl). Deelstoel ("share chair" in Dutch) doesn't just aim to share space but to align civil servants with each other and with the communities they serve. The initiative promotes both flexibility and "presence" where it counts, and generates spontaneous connection and collaboration among co-workers and constituents who were previously invisible to each other.

Winning Management Innovation Ideas to learn and apply!

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The Harvard Business Review-McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation sought practices and disruptive ideas that can make organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring, and accountable. Gary Hamel and team provide an excellent web site for applicable tools and approaches that any leader of large programs will benefits from. Examples of winners include:

The Deliberative Corporation James Fishkin and Bobby Fishkin. The "deliberative polling" approach, which combines deep, in-person discussions with broad-based online contribution, offers a compelling alternative to top-down direction-setting, resolves conflict and eliminates the need for "buy-in."

The Colleague Letter of Understanding: Replacing Jobs with Commitments
(Paul Green) Morning Star is one of the world's leading processors of tomatoes--and one of the most progressive models of a self-managed enterprise. At the heart of this peer-regulated collection of colleagues who determine their own roles and responsibilities is the "Colleague Letter of Understanding" or CLOU.

Nobody's as Smart as Everybody--Unleashing Individual Brilliance and Aligning Collective Genius (Jim Lavoie) Software company Rite-Solutions has developed a state-of-the-art "innovation engine"-- dynamic marketplace for idea generation and development in which all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas.

Entangled Talents: a 21st-century Social Learning System (Frederic Leconte) Leading manufacturer of eyeglass lenses, Essilor, transforms cursory, standardized training into a dynamic, collaborative, peer-driven, Web-enabled platform for sharing knowledge and experience. The LOFT (Learning Organization for Tomorrow) program is a collection of initiatives and tools designed to promote locally-grown insights and practices and to turn shop floor workers into peer coaches (some 810 volunteers at 102 sites in 40 countries). The result: new ideas and transformative practices speed around the world horizontally (rather than top-down) and formerly disengaged employees are energized by the opportunity to contribute and learn from their peers.

Shift Changes the Way Cemex Works (Gilberto Garcia, Miguel Angel Lozano Martinez, and Arturo San Vicente) Global building materials company Cemex embraces the "Collaboration Revolution" with a multi-pronged effort to shift behaviors toward more openness, transparency, meritocracy, and community. To accelerate that transformation, the company launched a social platform (called "Shift") to harvest ideas and inject agility into crucial projects. In just eighteen months, Shift has involved some 20,500 people, generated more than 500 self-organizing communities of interest (on topics from sustainability to health and safety), sparked the rapid-fire launch of new products (including a global brand of ready-mix products), and engaged hundreds of employees around the world in defining strategic priorities for the next century.

Civil Servants Cut through the Red Tape and Share Government Forward (Kim Spinder) Dutch Ministry employee Kim Spinder devised a seemingly simple hack of work with a potentially radical impact: civil servants across the Netherlands are invited to share their workspaces, expertise, and resources via a Web booking system and a set of social tools (www.deelstoel.nl). Deelstoel ("share chair" in Dutch) doesn't just aim to share space but to align civil servants with each other and with the communities they serve. The initiative promotes both flexibility and "presence" where it counts, and generates spontaneous connection and collaboration among co-workers and constituents who were previously invisible to each other.

Common Decision Traps

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In our new Stanford Course, Executing Complex Programs (ECP), we review the criticality of decsions to leading and managing complex programs. Recent Harvard newsletter summarized three of the most common decision traps.

Making decisions is your most critical job as a leader. The more high-stakes a decision is, the more likely you are to get stuck. Here's how to avoid three of the most common traps: Anchoring. Many people give disproportionate weight to the first information they receive. Be sure to pursue other lines of thinking, even if the first one seems right. Status quo. Change can be unsettling and it's easy to favor alternatives that keep things the same. Ask yourself if the status quo truly serves your objectives and downplay the urge to stay in your current state. Confirming evidence. If you find that new information continually validates your existing point of view, ask a respected colleague to argue against your perspective. Also try to avoid working with people who always agree with you.