Your company is depending on you to build a solid leadership pipeline; to have people ready to step into future leadership positions as the company grows and as current leaders move on.

A critical step – perhaps the most critical in the company’s pursuit of long-term sustainability – is identifying and developing the group called “emerging leaders.”

Emerging leaders:

• Have a solid track record of exceptional performance
• Show potential to move 2 or 3 positions up on the leadership career ladder within 5 to 10 years
• Are adept at motivating and inspiring teams
• Demonstrate adaptability as the company responds to marketplace changes
• Are globally aware and sensitive to cultural differences

The job to get this group ready is harder now due to the unique conditions in the world economy.  The business environment that emerging leaders will face in 2, 3 or 5 years will present problems that are different and more complex than challenges leaders face today.  Future leaders must be ready with the right mix of experiences, skills and knowledge to ensure they will succeed in future leadership roles.

(Go here to complete the survey and become eligible to receive a report on study findings.)  http://members.corpu.com/se.ashx?s=25113745509BAD9A

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Apple recently leapfrogged Microsoft on the list of the “world’s largest companies” and now stands at the number two spot, a mere $38B behind oil and gas giant ExxonMobil. The New York Times called it “one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history” for a company “that had been given up for dead only a decade earlier.”[1]

Apple’s ascension then prompted Fast Company to share the 10 points it believes are the company’s philosophers’ stone, its magical alchemy that turns aluminum and brushed steel gadgets into gold.[2]

Figure 1: World’s top 20 largest companies ranked by market capitalizations.

The writer, who assembled his theories through interviews with devotees, former employees and partners, describes the ways Apple swims against the tide of business. Contrary to common wisdom in many companies, Apple guards (not benchmarks) its practices with the fervor of those protecting national intelligence; shuns (not shares) the tech industry’s leaning toward open and free software; and ignores (not listens to) the pleas of loyalists about how to improve its stable of products and services. It appears on the surface that Apple disdains some cardinal rules of competition, including the one that says customers are king. On that point, writer Farhad Manjoo suggests that CEO Steve Jobs believes his team can envision a better future than can be described by even the most fervent focus group of early adopters.

But at one point the writer misses a really important point. He shares a conversation with a Mac engineer who describes Jobs as the company’s “filter,” the one whose primary role is to say “no” to ideas for new products and proposed features. He reports that Apple engineers share a common refrain about the speed at which Jobs hits the “delete key” when people pitch anything new. Read more »

Within the last two weeks, I’ve had 3 interesting experiences related to immersive learning simulations. While Second Life was all the rage about 2 years ago, it’s rare to hear people talking about it much these days. However, three people have convinced me that simulations and immersive learning experiences continue to gain traction as increasingly more valuable and more effective methods for driving performance improvement.

First, I met Jessica Trybus, Founder & CEO of Etcetera Edutainment. Jessica studied under Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University professor who died from cancer and famously recorded his Last Lecture. I had not known that Randy’s focus as a computer science professor was on human-computer interaction.

Safety Training in 3D

One feature of Randy’s work at CMU was synthetic interview technology that allows people to interact with video. One example I’m familiar with is a 3D video replica of Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War museum in Harrisburg, PA. Visitors can really feel as though they’re talking with Honest Abe himself as the technology is programmed to answer more than 200 questions.

When Jessica met Randy after having worked at Disney’s Pixar, she was amazed by CMU’s new technologies and enrolled in a Master’s Degree program there. Upon graduation, she founded Etcetera Edutainment to build immersive learning programs. She demonstrated her safety training programs for me to show how learners become aware of the dangers, including death, from missing a step in a procedure or forgetting to check equipment carefully.

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Speed, as we learned through the story of the Cheetah, is not the secret sauce for sustainable business growth. So what is?

New insights are coming through our evolving knowledge of economics. Eric Beinhocker, a senior advisor to McKinsey and Company, Inc. analyzed hundreds of years of history on economics in his book “Origin of Wealth.” His research shows that economists initially borrowed ideas from the world of physics to explain the economy as an equilibrium system – a system at rest. Economists argued that external shocks – like a major drought or a new technology like the steam engine – would significantly shake up the economy for a period of time; until supply would once again meet demand at the right price point, and put everything back to a new state of equilibrium.

After borrowing the physicists’ ideas, Beinhocker says economists stopped paying attention to the other sciences, proposing and defending their own theories to themselves in isolation. Meanwhile, physicists, chemists, and biologists all moved on to discover complex adaptive systems as a new way to explain their worlds. These systems offer us new understanding for how ant colonies work together to build hills and ward off attackers, neurons fire in the brain to create consciousness, and how cities grow from the ground up through the actions of many shopkeepers and supplier networks. A beautiful example of a complex adaptive system is the World Wide Web, which has emerged from the ground up with no central authority guiding its construction, and yet has become a well-organized and highly useful system. Read more »

There are many companies headed to the fate of the Cheetah because they are unable to recognize their own genetic bottlenecks. Outsiders often see the evidence of shrinking gene pools (inability to encourage diversity of thought or to embrace new ideas and ways of doing business) long before Cheetah companies see it themselves. As Noel Tichy writes in The Cycle of Leadership, “The digital, global economy punishes slow, inward-looking dumb-acting organizations.”

Leaders must be prepared to see the signs of cheetah spots like the ones below.

1. Arrogance – The firm believes it own PR (public relations). They perhaps started out as a market leader, and have convinced themselves over time, that their competitive position is impenetrable; they rest on their laurels and believe that if customers defect to “inferior” competitors, it’s more likely they’ve made a decision to fire their customer than that the customer was dissatisfied.

Through their early successes, they often attract very bright people. But because they almost never believe there’s a need for change, they are more likely to appreciate mavericks who work independently and display the kind of hubris that’s characteristic of the company founders. They don’t believe in the wisdom of their own corporate crowd, and usually keep problem-solving and decision-making to a small cadre of senior people at the top of the organization.

2. Feeling No Pain – Some businesses seem to hum along for quite awhile and maintain moderate success and lull themselves into a place of comfort. In time, they seem numb to the concept of striving. Grass roots efforts by employees, who know where to find inefficiencies in their own functions, push for improvements that fall on deaf ears at higher levels. I saw this happen when employees at a major oil company and large tobacco enterprise tried to streamline their functions.
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Genetic diversity is the cornerstone of survival for all living things. It’s through the combining and recombining of differing genetic codes that unique genetic sets are created to survive in new environments. It’s the diversity of attributes and resiliences that help a species thrive in changing environmental circumstances. Companies are no different because they are living, changing, dynamic organisms. Our global marketplace too.

The crisis that has beset our poor cheetahs (introduced in the last blog post) is known in biological circles as a “genetic bottleneck.” When a bottleneck occurs, it’s not long after that the species experiences something called “genetic drift”.

To see what’s happening, picture New York’s cramped Lincoln Tunnel at rush hour, feeding only a single lane of traffic into Manhattan. Imagine that the cars, trucks, buses and SUVs at the mouth of the tunnel represent the Cheetah gene pool a hundred centuries ago. In the original population, all the varieties of vehicles with all their optional gear and all their unique colors could be mixed and matched from generation to generation, creating unique configurations that would be more suited to future conditions.
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“Speed Got Us Here but it Won’t Get Us there.”
(See March 15 blog post)

How can this be true?

Speed is essential to survival for many species, and has been an apt metaphor for successful businesses. “Get there first!” “Be the early leader!” These are the battle cries of business. Leaders are rewarded for the speed at which they make decisions and for delivering immediate results.

We’ve spent the last 20 years getting wired for speed. The dot com decade was like a series of Talladega Nights that left plenty of multi-car wrecks along the sidelines. (“If you ain’t first, your last.” We have the written permission of Ricky Bobby, Inc. to use that trademarked phrase.)

But consider the story of the fastest land animal on earth – the cheetah. These sleek and elegant cats can accelerate faster than race cars, hitting speeds up to 45 miles per hour (mph) within 2 seconds. It’s as though these mammals were custom designed for speed. Their claws, which don’t retract, act like cleats on an athletic shoe, providing traction on rough terrain. Their bones are built to withstand the harsh pounding of a galloping speed. Even their long, slender tails steady their balance as they hit top speeds up to 70 mph.

Yet this near perfect design for speed is facing extinction. Read more »

Omar, a surgeon who’s been working a 24-hour shift, goes to a break room and dials into a machine that checks his concentration, confidence and wakefulness. It’s a new machine that has replaced the magnets he used for neuro-programming in medical school. As Omar enters the operating room, he uses the NIC machine to do a Neuro-Imaging Cycles check to make sure he’s thinking hard and fast enough to do surgery.

Today’s patient is described as a quantifiable selfer who’s done a great job regularly reporting health data to his monitoring service, helping them to catch his problem early. Omar will be implanting bio stents that will shape to the patient’s heart once inside the body. The biostents also can grow new heart material if necessary by reassembling plasma to create new structures. Read more »

Speed has long been held up as the essential competitive ingredient for successful businesses to thrive in a world that seems to be governed by the clock. After all, those who get to market fastest, who carve out a position as an early leader, who invent the next wave of cool, stay ahead of the game for at least some period of time. The idea of speed, in this regard, is one that reaches business leaders at a primal level.

Leader after leader cries about the “need for speed,” and its new role as the single most important condition of future business success. But there is some flawed logic floating around the business community.

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And 4 Quick Ideas To Focus Learning On Core Capabilities To Improve Business Outcomes

Two interesting pieces of information came across my desk today.

The first was research done by McKinsey who found that 60 percent of senior executives said building core capabilities (lean operations, leadership development, merchandising or anything the company does well to drive business results) are among their top 3 priorities. Ninety percent said it’s in their top ten.

New Research From McKinsey

BUT less than a third say their company training programs focus on strengthening the capabilities that add the most value to business performance. Further, only 25 percent said their company’s training programs are “extremely” or “very effective” in preparing employee groups to drive business results. Confidence in corporate training drops further for leaders at lower levels in the hierarchy.

The McKinsey study said that when senior leaders set the training agenda, capability building is linked explicitly to immediate business goals, and learning programs focus more directly on core skills that make a difference to business performance. Additionally, these companies spend a higher percentage of their operating budgets on training compared to companies where HR or business unit leaders set the training agenda.

(We’re compiling these justifications and proof points for building or improving a Leaders As Teachers program in a business case template that will be available at the Leaders As Teachers Institute in the coming weeks.)

Then, in a Fast Company interview, Ford Motors CEO Alan Mullaly talked about the importance of clarity from senior leaders. Shortly before Mullaly assumed the role of CEO, the Ford team stopped production on its popular Taurus model because sales of their latest version, which they said looked like a football, were tanking.

Ford CEO Alan Mullaly

Mullaly said the Taurus was a key reason he took the job, and reminded them how many billions of dollars are invested in developing brand loyalty around a car like the Taurus. Read more »