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.

Teams Matter: TEN QUESTIONS

Executing strategy successfully requires teams that are created by design not default and work collaboratively and successfully. 

Leading Effective Teams (LET), our upcoming Stanford course, provides a great way to experience new ways of improving team performance and design with fellow students from around the world. A few places are still available for LET at Stanford September 21-23, REGISTER HERE or call 866-802-1152

TEN QUESTIONS to ask as you work to create and lead your teams:

1. Why do you need a team? is the work best done in a team, a committee, within existing structures (such as functions), or individually?
2. What objectives does the team need to meet or exceed?
3. What are the culture, structure, and strategy of the organization the team is part of?   The IPS-Stanford Strategic Execution Framework (SEF) provides an excellent model for approaching this.
   
4. Are the team design, governance, and ways of working based on the organization's culture, structure, and strategy?
5. What leadership structure makes sense for the team? There is no one style; they can vary from very loose to very hierarchical.  Find what works for you and evolve it as the team grows and learns.
6. Has the team had an in-person kick-off meeting before the big work begins? Research shows in-person beginnings ensure future success and ease the way for addressing any issues that inevitably arise?
   
7. If the team is distributed, what specific activities and ways of working are you using so that all can feel part of the larger team, even though not together?
8. Are team meetings designed for optimum use of those on the team? do they have a purpose and clear desired outcomes? Meetings should be productive, energizing, and involve all in full participation, not from the side of the desk.
9. Is the team learning? how do you know? how do you share what is learned so that the entire team and the organization are learning from the team's experiences.  Lessons are not learned if they are not shared.
10. Teams are the crucible for growing and evolving the organization.  What are you doing to ensure that team members leave the team as better people and with excitement for their next piece of teamwork?

Insights on Apple now and in the future

In our Stanford Advanced Project Management Program we are privileged to have on the faculty one of the most astute observers (and researchers) on how work gets done in organizations today, Bob Sutton.  His blog provides an on-going education for all of us seeking to improve how work gets done.  Bob's August 27 post on what to watch for at Apple is worth a full read...and contemplation.  A few gems include:

...Apple's structure, work practices, and beliefs about how to get done are woven together to support a highly centralized model of decision-making, where very talented individuals and small teams are given specific tasks, individuals are held highly accountable for implementation, and extremely strong cultural, interpersonal, and performance pressures are present.

Although I won't to dig into the debate about trade-offs between centralization and decentralization, centralization works best when leaders face a relatively small number of important decisions, when they find ways to reduce the emotional and cognitive load on the relatively small number of people making major decisions, and tight personal, organizational, and cultural controls mean that decisions from on high are implemented quickly and without much question.  At its best, in a centralized system, there is much confidence in leaders, fast communication up and down, and relatively little time spent on dysfunctional politics (as there is no power vacuum, little second guessing, and severe penalties for ignoring or undermining orders from on high).   Although it is mighty hard to know exactly what is going on in Apple, this description seems to fit most stories and other information about the place under the shared leadership of Jobs and Cook.

Bob provides extensive insights into 5 signs to look for that may presage trouble at Apple.  Read and enjoy his lucid post here.

Experience the POWER of culture in real time

In all of our Stanford Advanced Project Management (SAPM) courses we talk about the power of culture in understanding and supporting the execution of strategy.This is a your chance to see a firm whose culture is part of their strategy. You can leanr more and explore their culture at Zappo Insights.

Zappo's is webcasting the Zappos Family All Hands Meeting this Thursday August 11, 2011.

We'll be streaming from the Wynn Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.  One of the Zappos Family Core Values is "Pursue Growth And Learning" and we're excited to feature two guest speakers that will be sharing their revolutionary ideas; Sal Khan, Founder and Executive Director of Khan Academy and Deb Roy, CEO of Bluefin Labs.See their super videos at TED conferences site.

The agenda is also action packed full of Zappos Family speakers with surprises throughout.

 

When:  Thursday August 11, 2011

Time:  1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time

Click the link below to RSVP.

https://zapposinsights.infusionsoft.com/link/187c6c7de0/1ecdbe0